Summary
Moral conflicts abound. Environmental activists wishing to save an endangered species fight with landowners trying to protect their property rights. Gays struggle with traditionalists over the definition of marriage.
Pro-choice and anti-abortion activists debate when human life begins and whether to frame the dispute as an ethical or medical one. Unions demand all workers pay dues because they benefit from the contracts negotiated; some feel it is unethical to force someone to pay dues to a union in order to hold a job, particularly when those unions use their dues to support causes they oppose.11 Scientists struggle with Christian fundamentalists over teaching evolution in the schools. The US Constitution prohibits any law “respecting establishment of religion, leading to the annual dustups over Christmas decorations on public property but allows each session of Congress to open with a prayer, references to God in the Supreme Court and on many public monuments, and on the coinage. Some religious practices violate laws against animal cruelty.Ending segregation began because of manpower shortages during World War II. This is not seen as admirable by those who judge morality based on intent because the motivation was utilitarian so “impure.” In the opposite view, the consequences were good which is what matters in reaching a judgment.
In moral conflicts, people not only disagree on the issues but on how to approach them. They disagree not just about the facts, but over what is fact and what is opinion. They identify so much with the issue that they resist compromise, resulting in conflicts that become interminable and often violent. Efforts at resolution tend to be frustrating and can create even more division.
Many people intentionally misname things to further an ideology. When the media reports that terrorists have “executed” someone, it legitimates murder.
When the media uses the term “martyr” to describe suicide bombers, it conflates them with individuals persecuted for refusing to recant their faith. During the Cold War, some proclaimed a moral equivalence between the US and USSR that was based on wildly inaccurate characterizations of the two systems. Mary Ann Glendon (1991) analyzed the misuse of “civil rights” by advocacy groups to demonize, blackmail, and delegitimize political opponents and impoverish political discourse by avoiding discussion of policy in terms of necessity, utility, and efficacy. Such distortions of language contort moral meaning and should be loudly proclaimed as such and energetically resisted.Some maintain that morality is mandated by a religious text—their own, of course. Some believe that morality is based on “natural rights,” although just what they are can also become a source of conflict (Chapter 5). Notions of retributive justice shapes punishment, those of restorative justice shape compensation of victims, and those of distributive justice shape economic structure. They often conflict. Examples respectively concern the death penalty, putting monetary value on pain and suffering, and the pay discrepancy between unskilled labor and corporate executives. As discussed earlier (Chapter 2), fairness takes three basic forms and people often are unclear as to which one they and others mean in any given case.
Methods that are normally effective in managing conflicts, such as explaining, persuading, and compromising, often make moral conflicts worse and can drive people further apart (Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997). They are difficult to resolve because the parties lack a reasonable, common basis for settling their disagreements. Solutions modeled on tolerance and debate rarely are sufficient to resolve them (Bohman, 1995). In many cases, the only “solution” seems to be finding a modus vivend i that lasts long enough—sometimes generations—to forget the conflict, often because new ones are more pressing.