The way "moral dilemmas" are handled in ed psyc classes

This is the second of a series of posts going back over some of my notes from my postgraduate studies in educational psychology in 2018. As a part of our course, we were asked to engage in Online Learning Tasks (OLTs), which generally involved reading one or more particular article/book chapter(s), possibly doing a mini-literature review, and then responding to the material on the course's online forum, often in the form of a "reflection."

One early topic covered in one of my papers was ethical dilemmas, which can easily pop up during professional practice, but are often not so easy to negotiate. We were shown a video by Rush Kidder in which ethical dilemmas are framed as "right vs right" situations. That is, there's a difficult choice between two options, and both options have reasons counting in favour of them.

Our lecturer elaborated by listing various independent domains of ethical considerations, including moral, legal, ethical and professional considerations. We were told that when one such consideration counted against another, there was no reconciling them - all a practitioner could do in such instances was record all such considerations, along with their solution, and hope for the best. From an ethical perspective, I found this approach to be deeply flawed. Surely, at least often, it is perfectly possible to reconcile disparate ethical considerations.

Anyway, here's what I wrote in my OLT reflection:

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I’m trying to work out for myself a consistent way to reconcile ethical dilemmas. [LECTURER] (and Rush Kidder in the lecture notes) framed these as “Right vs Right” scenarios, where from one perspective (e.g., the law) one course of action may be justified, while from another (such as morality) another action may be preferred. I’m not sure I quite agree with this approach, and I did a little thinking and digging to clarify things for myself.

I was reminded of the Euthyphro Dilemma from Plato’s Euthyphro (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html) and gave it a read, along with some commentary including http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/christian-ethics/divine-command-theory/the-euthyphro-dilemma/ and https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/2126/does-the-euthyphro-dilemma-apply-to-secular-ethics . Note, these aren’t academic peer-reviewed journal articles but I found it useful as a first pass as I’m not sure how much of this will actually make it into my assignment! If I dig deeper I’ll add any references later.

Anyway, the (adapted) argument goes like this. What gives some particular law – for example, not to steal – its prescriptive force? In answering this, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Is it wrong to steal because the law says so? Or is it illegal to steal because it is wrong? It cannot be both. Either the law is founded on moral principles (meaning some laws can be immoral, and we shouldn’t follow those laws just because), or whatever the law says is by definition morally right (making law reform pointless). I think it’s pretty clear that option 1 is correct here. There are good moral reasons for having (and abiding by) most laws, but if morality (that is, after all moral considerations are taken into account) says “do it” and the law says “don’t,” you should do it. No real ethical dilemma.

On the other hand, when two or more moral considerations come into conflict with each other, I do think there’s potential for a real dilemma. For instance, maybe there’s a moral argument against cherry-picking which laws we follow too readily, as this could lead to corruption. This is a moral argument, however, and ought to be weighed against other moral considerations in deciding how we conduct ourselves.

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My argument, essentially, was that prescriptions coming from laws and customs ultimately derive their normativity - their prescriptive force - from moral/ethical principals (insofar as those laws are justified at all). Perhaps one might want to separate pragmatic reasons from ethical reasons, but insofar as one is talking about an "ethical dilemma", there's no deep incommensurability here.

I can't help but think the framing of ethical dilemmas provided during classes only served to confuse students. By jettisoning this unhelpful framework, one would be open to discuss useful approaches to reasoning about ethical principles. For instance, where there is an apparent conflict between two considerations, it may be helpful to consider the underlying justifications for the reasons. This might lead one to conclude that one consideration had become divorced from its underlying purpose.