Facing Complexity

Abstract

A moral dilemma is a situation from which you cannot escape without doing yourself some moral damage or injury. Human life is fraught with the moral complexity that gives rise to dilemmas. War and other warlike conflicts generate tangles of moral complexity. Leaders in particular face dilemmas when their obligations to their followers conflict with their more general ethical obligations, but anyone trying to stay alive under Stalin’s tyranny had to tell lies, as Nadezhda Mandelstam explains. Machiavelli gives strong reasons for a prince to lie and make false promises, but we must take his advice with caution. Leaders must be trusted, and lying undermines trust. Still, some lies may be justified, and others may be excused; justification and excuse are not the same. This chapter focuses on situations in which it appears that one must tell a lie; it concludes with a discussion of the reasons that count against lying.