Creative Resolution of Moral Dilemmas

In Rushmore Kidder’s 1995 book “How Good People Make Tough Choices”, Mr. Kidder claims that inventiveness and human progress have created ethical issues that never existed before. (ie only a computer age would need to be concerned with unlicensed copying and global pirating of Intellectual Property.) This has brought to the fore the need to understand and deal with a range of new ethical dilemmas.

He points out that the 21st Century is expected to bring to a head six issues, all except the final one already firmly on the radar screen:

- nuclear threat
- environmental degradation
- population explosion
- North-South economic gap between developed and developing worlds
- need for education reform
- breakdown of morality

The surprise entry about morality highlighted that ethics are considered not just a luxury, but central to human and planetary survival. Ethics define how we are engaged and participate in our communities- how we behave in daily interactions with others. How are we to both ‘hold a point of view true to ourselves’ while simultaneously ‘being tolerant of others’ points of view’ without slipping into insipid relativism? Tough question requiring energetic self-reflection, which I can’t say we as a species are terribly good at.

One fascinating distinction to me was that between ‘right and right’ and ‘right and wrong’. Kidder believes that the trickier dilemma of ‘right vs right’ involves one of these four basic core values (his ultimate choice being the one in CAPS) as higher order:

- TRUTH vs. loyalty
- individual vs. COMMUNITY
- Short-term vs. LONG-TERM
- Justice vs. MERCY

He claims that any dilemma falling outside these parameters will be a right vs. wrong and thus an easier choice in relative terms.

Resolutions come when patterns are recognized leading to prior examples in similar patterns, when extraneous details strip the issue to its essence, and when creative new ways are designed that divert from going head-on into the dilemma by finding an acceptable alternative way out. To pull this off, we must remain mindful, a key characteristic of a successful moderation and mediation of our clash of values in the intense, communicative global world of the 21st century.

Guess we need some serious ‘energetic self-reflection’ to let all this sink in and to design effective creative resolutions to sticky ethical dilemmas!

Creative Resolution of Moral Dilemmas