Four Forms of Moral Conflict

The most obvious form of moral conflict is when people disagree as to what is right and wrong. For example, some argue that using drones or unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs] to kill individuals is wrong because they kill based on potentially faulty information as to culpability without due legal process and often kill innocent bystanders.

However, if the strategy is to go wherever the enemy is, then the war is geographically and temporally endless. Since terrorists operate in the US itself, it follows logically that the US could use UAVs domestically. The jihadist strategy is to lure the US into an extended conflict that proves its hostility to Islam. The more countries the US attacks, the better for its recruitment efforts. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not moral but that the targets are not vital.

The seemingly endless arguments over right and wrong include abortion, affirmative action, animal rights, campaign finance, campus speech codes, capital punishment, Christmas displays, climate, change, endangered species, euthanasia, government mandated vaccinations, gay marriage, gun control, illegal immigration, legalization of drugs, lying, property rights, public employee unions, reparations for slavery, sexual harassment, stem cell research, taxation, and teaching evolution. Three aspects are lying, torture to interrogate terrorists, and moral failures of the market in allocating goods.

Is it always wrong to lie? There seems little point in telling a hostess that her meal was inedible goop—here, silence is golden and one can thank her for other aspects of the evening. In poker, bluffing is an expected and acceptable part of the game. In 2008, an FBI agent posing as a marina manager told a kidnapper that his catamaran was taking on water, which it was not, luring him from the house where he kept his victim, rescued without the dangers of an assault. A bad judgment or wrong prediction (such as the weatherman wrongly predicting rain) is not a lie but a mistake (Bok 1999).

What about lying to ourselves? Self-deception can actually have benefits. Believing that we are more capable or intelligent than we actually are can motivate us to try harder and achieve more than is expected of us. On the other hand, many people deceive themselves to avoid confronting difficulties. For some, self-deception becomes a habit, spinning out of control (Trivers 2011).

Few excuse contradictory promises, at least one of which must be a lie. During World War I, Britain promised Palestine to the Arabs in the McMahon Letter and to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration, but intended to keep it themselves as later revealed in the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France.

During the Vietnam War, two officers were captured under conditions suggesting an eminent surprise attack. During interrogation, neither officer would talk. One was dragged to a waiting helicopter amidst angry threats. The helicopter ascended and the captive was thrown out. The second officer was dragged to the helicopter amidst similar threats but promptly told the intelligence officers what they needed. In fact, the person thrown from the helicopter was an infiltrator killed in combat the night before who had been dressed in the uniform of the first officer, who was then produced unharmed for all to see. Was this torture?

After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, the US used waterboarding (simulated drowning proven effective in getting information quickly) on three individuals who exposed pending plans for more attacks that were thwarted. Several years later, some members of Congress condemned this as torture. The members condemning it had been informed beforehand, made no objection at the time, and were doing so later purely in hope of political gain in an election year.

Sudden price increases for essential supplies such as bottled water, gasoline, and hotel rooms are common during disasters and even before ones that can be anticipated such as hurricanes. Inevitably, the price increases lead to angry demands for price controls, rationing, and punishment of greedy suppliers. But, increased prices limit hoarding by consumers and motivate suppliers to divert supplies to disaster areas, a vital benefit that critics usually overlook.

We rely on markets, merit, queues, urgency, and chance to allocate goods, services, rewards, and civic duties. Examples, respectively, are sale of consumer goods, college admissions, amusement park rides, treatment of patients in emergency rooms, and jury duty. More and more, markets are crowding out the other methods. One can buy admission to a college or university if a parent makes a sufficient donation, or one can jump the lines at amusement parks with a premium ticket. The main argument for using markets to allocate goods is that they respect freedom of choice for both seller and buyer. Supply and demand seem appropriate to price setting for merchandise and services, but Sandel (2012) has pointed to two moral problems that can arise.

First, the requirements for freedom and fairness are not always met. Markets are not always voluntary. As Anatole France once put it, the rich and the poor have equal rights to sleep under (Parisian) bridges. The classic case today is the poor man who must sell a kidney or a cornea for his family to survive. A market is fair only if we know and have not crossed the point at which income inequalities coerce the disadvantaged.

Second, valuing some things in monetary terms can be corrupting. In South Africa, one can bid on one of five permits annually to shoot one endangered black rhinoceros.⁷ The money goes to the farmers, giving them sufficient incentive to leave large areas in their natural state, in turn allowing the species to have made a comeback in South Africa. But, we can’t decide whether to buy and sell the permits without resolving the moral question about the proper way of valuing rhinos. People disagree as to the answer to this question. The corruption argument objects to degradation of some goods based on their moral character.

When market reasoning is concerned with material goods, these objections don’t loom large. Applied to social issues, it is less plausible to assume that everyone’s preferences are equally worthwhile. If that is the case, then it is unclear why we should satisfy preferences indiscriminately without inquiring into their moral worth. But, the point at which moral considerations become trump is not always clear either. If some people like opera despite its elitism and others like rap despite its degradation of women, do we have the right to give these preferences unequal weight on moral grounds?

In ontological conflicts, everything feasible is forbidden. Sophie's Choice (Styron 1981) is the classic, albeit fictional, example. Arrested by the Nazis, Sophie was told that she could spare either her son or daughter, but that both will be killed if she makes no decision (which in a strict sense is a third choice). Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro likened her vote for a $26 billion spending bill to prevent layoffs of public employees to a real-world Sophie’s Choice because $12 billion of the funding came from cutting the food stamp program (Wall Street Journal 12 August 2010). In another real world example, a Special Forces team encountered three Afghan herders they determined to be Taliban sympathizers, but let them go free because they were unarmed civilians.

Some conflicts, termed epistemic, force a choice between contradictory moral principles that leave a person unsure which one to follow. The resolution of epistemic conflicts lies in determining which principle is trump. Museums display thousands of artifacts from other countries, some obtained under dubious circumstances. Some countries of origin now are demanding their return. The dispute over the Elgin Marbles, which have been in the British Museum since the early nineteenth century, is illustrative. Greece has requested their return, arguing that they are part of an existing monument that occupies a central position in its cultural heritage sold by foreign occupiers. Furthermore, the marbles fall within the UNESCO definition of items that should be returned to the country of origin, and prevent completion of a restoration program for the Acropolis. The British government responded that the removal was proper under international law at the time, and that after two centuries they now are part of the British cultural heritage. Finally, their presence in London protected them from the pollution that has noticeably damaged the pieces remaining on the Acropolis, and they are more widely available in London than in Greece. Finally, returning them would constitute a precedent that would put in question the status of literally millions of objects in museums around the world including many in Greece itself and would lead to endless litigation that no court has clear authority to settle (Cuno 2008).

Legally and morally, psychiatrists must report the intention of a patient to commit a future crime. However, a psychiatrist cannot go running to the police to report every patient who fantasizes harming a perceived persecutor. The difficulty is evaluating the seriousness of the intent, and mistakes are inevitable, as was seen in the 2012 theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado committed by an individual in psychiatric treatment at the time. Priests and lawyers are exempt. The priest believes that ultimately justice will be done. A lawyer may be less certain of that, but his confidentiality ensures the best defense for innocent suspects, forcing the state or plaintiff to prove its case and to protect the client against excessive sentences.

Sometimes, doing right produces a bad and doing wrong produces a better result, creating the final type of moral conflict. The “custom of the sea” allowed killing and eating a shipmate to permit the rest to survive if all agreed and they chose the victim by lot. After weeks in a lifeboat, three survivors of the Mignonette, which sank in 1884, killed and ate a fourth who was dying from drinking seawater and already unconscious—but had not given his consent, nor was the selection made by lot. Britain tried and imprisoned the rescued survivors, then having made clear survival cannibalism no longer was acceptable, paroled them. The 1846 Donner Party, a group of escaped prisoners in Australia in 1822, and a group of Japanese soldiers in New Guinea during World War II are among other examples of survival cannibalism (Hanson).