Moral Conflicts and the Application of Ethics

Abstract

Moral codes, like legal codes, are necessary preconditions for civilized interpersonal communications and for harmonious social development. Moral practice may help society realize its best possible state. Indeed, moral codes, in conformity to all people’s interests, reflect people’s basic interests, as viewed from a longterm and holistic rather than short-term and immediate perspective. Those whose behavior is contrary to said codes face systemic or regulatory sanction, public condemnation, or conscience-driven self-castigation. Accordingly, questions such as whether or not public property should be appropriated for private gain do not occasion philosophical debate, for their moral properties are so plain that people may settle them without much need for reflection. What evokes people’s interest in moral philosophy is often another sort of question. For instance, if one accords a pregnant woman and her fetusmore-or-less equal moral standing as living beings, whose life should be saved in the event of the pregnancy encountering dystocia? If a fireman rushed into a burning room and found twin children lying in a bed, but could only save one of them, what decision should he make? Questions such as these indicate that when certain ethical theories (or principles, or codes) are applied to different objects, conflicts may occur due to the ambivalence of the ethical principles that aim to protect human beings’ rights to life. Stephan Sellmaier calls such conflicts “moral paradoxes (moralische dilemmata),” stating that they “arise within a [given] ethical theory.”1 Meanwhile, one might, as an example of a slightly different sort of question, ask whether the introduction of clear criteria for declaring brain death would help to expedite organ transplantation. People hold different ideas onwhether brain death is itself death or merely the beginning of the process of dying: those who consider brain death as marking death may say that since the patient has passed away, the donation of his or her organs not only causes no moral hindrance, but also tremendously benefits the recipient(s) of the donation. On the other hand, those who view brain death as merely the beginning of an irreversible dying process, and not as death itself, argue that since the removal of the patient’s organs causes true death, it is an evil and an infringement upon the patient’s right to life. The former position is distinctly utilitarian insofar as its starting point is the maximization of universal interest; the latter is rigorously deontological in that it privileges the sanctity of individual value. Sellmaier calls such conflicts “ethical differences