DILEMMAS AND DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT DILEMMAS

It is an oddity in recent philosophical discussions of moral dilemmas that some of the examples from an older past recurrently cited in the literature are of persons who, although confronting daunting alternatives, themselves identified no insuperable difficulty in deciding between those alternatives. They, unlike those who now write about them, did not experience their situation as dilemmatic. So it is for instance with Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Sophocles' Antigone. Had we, so recent commentary seems to suggest, been confronted with the alternatives faced by Agamemnon or Antigone, we would have been at a loss in a way in which they were not. And this is perhaps a sign that with us it has become easier than it once was to find oneself in a moral dilemma.

Certainly there has been a striking increase in the philosophical discussion of moral dilemmas. Since E. J. Lemmon published his “Moral Dilemmas” in The Philosophical Review in 1962 over one hundred articles, chapters of books, and books have been published, either directly concerned with or highly relevant to the topic. If one were to publish two volumes, the first containing the entire preceding philosophical literature dealing with this topic, broadly construed, from Plato to W. D. Ross through Gregory, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Sidgwick, and Bradley while the second was devoted to the publications of the last thirty years, the second volume would be by far the larger. What would we be able to learn from that second volume?