It Never Feels Wrong: The Vanishing Moral Dilemma

Following up on Mike's post below, I also thought that this column, "If It Feels Right...," by David Brooks about a study by Christian Smith (Notre Dame) involving the moral sensibilities of young people was interesting.  Some of the findings are roughly consonant with what I have observed anecdotally in my Professional Responsibility classes, a watery libertarianism -- the loose and somewhat quick, but nonetheless entrenched, sense that it is generally inappropriate, or at least bad form, to tell others how to act appropriately -- the 'who-am-I-to-tell-others?' reflex answer, which now elicits my own semi-automatistic 'who-do-you-have to-be?' response.  Part of the reason I enjoy teaching criminal law is the ineradicably interdictory quality of the course: we seem to be able to agree that murder and rape are wrong (though, from the study, it doesn't look like we can agree any longer about the morality of drunk driving, or cheating in various contexts).

But one feature of Brooks's column surprised me:"When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn't answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent an apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot." One would have to read the study itself, as this might have something to do with the subjects not understanding what was meant by a moral dilemma, but I would have thought that the moral dilemma was a fairly hearty perennial.  Yet, if this study is accepted, it seems that people may be losing their sense of what a hard moral choice is, let alone the even harder choice between two conflicting and incompatible moral imperatives.

Traditionally, the moral dilemma has been analyzed as a phenomenon of Greek tragedy and the modern period, with an unfortunate hop-scotch over the medieval period.  Writers and thinkers in the medieval period, it has been assumed, had little to say about moral dilemmas.  But in a new book that I have been greatly enjoying, Moral Dilemmas in Medieval Thought: From Gratian to Aquinas (discussed here), M.V. Dougherty explores the moral dilemma as considered by medieval writers.  Perhaps the most fun and interesting of the chapters is one on the Majorcan Franciscan Raymond Lull, in which Lull, after disputing with himself for days and upon recognizing his inability to escape moral wrongdoing, reacts to the perplexity of the moral dilemma by turning to petitionary prayer. Professor Dougherty writes: "By the time Raymond turns to prayer, he does not expect an epistemic solution to his moral dilemma.  That is, his perplexitas is not going to be solved with more information or the uncovering of some unconsidered alternative that he might pursue on his own accord.  Lull's judgment that he is perplexus leads him to cease searching for ad intra resolutions, and he believes that only ad extra intervention by God will save him from moral wrongdoing."  (98)  The power of the moral dilemma on his mind was so great that Lull thought he could not be saved from it through his own resources.  True or not, that condition of sensing that one could not do right in a particular situation of conflict speaks to the pungency with which the moral dilemma was at one time experienced.  I highly recommend the book.