Ayoung woman lies in a nursing home kept alive solely by a feeding tube.

Her husband advocates for the removal of the feeding tube. It would have been her wish, he argues. Her parents are engaging the courts and the media to prevent such an intervention.

We each face moral dilemmas in our lives. When we confront a moral dilemma, we find ourselves wrestling with seemingly incommensurate values. The intensity of a moral dilemma increases when it moves from a personal, pri­vate decision into the public discourse. A moral dilemma becomes a moral con­flict when, in the public arena, groups of people represent opposing moral values. Thus, the public debate over the decision to remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was one example of this process. The story dominated the media for weeks and was the impetus for Terri’s Law, giving the governor of Florida the authority to override the personal decision of a patient or family member to withdraw a feeding tube. In another case, the public debate over stem cell research took a personal turn when a senator, a proponent of the legislation, was diagnosed with a condition, the treatment for which was enhanced by stem cell research. The decision to teach intelligent design, essentially a religious view of creation, along with the theory of evolution, brought a private religious issue into the public arena. When a person’s moral dilemma is made into a public issue, one’s per­sonal authority or choice of how to act is threatened.

Public moral conflicts, sometimes termed culture wars, ethnic conflicts, ideological conflicts, and intractable conflicts, are created when people publicly take opposing sides of a values-laden issue.

Allegiance to one side or the other often requires individuals to set aside feelings and beliefs that do not fit easily with the official positions and statements asso­ciated with their “side.’!.. The whole system suffers as valid concerns on both sides are belittled and important values are denigrated. (Paraphrased from Becker and others, 1992)

As Pearce and Littlejohn (1997) suggest, “the greatest problem of all is that each side is compelled by its highest and best motives to act in ways that are repugnant to the other” (p. 7). The challenges of our times are first to find a way to bring people representing seemingly irreconcilable differences together and, second, to create a process in which people are both interested and willing to find a path that allows the acknowledgment and expression of the other’s viewpoint.

In this chapter we will describe what constitutes a moral conflict; look at moral conflict through three overlapping theoretical lenses; examine a model and process for engaging productively with parties involved in moral conflicts; and apply that model and process to some recent work on a moral conflict con­ducted by the authors.