Zoe has to choose between Wash and Malcolm in the Firefly episode War Stories.
Moral dilemmas are a great way to create thoughtful and memorable moments in a story. However, with every popular storyteller trying to be more edgy than the last, moral dilemmas have become a bit twisted. Let’s cover what moral dilemmas can accomplish, what they can’t, and how to create one that’s more than pointless provocation.
What Moral Dilemmas Are For
Some people offering storytelling advice insist that heroes have to make hard choices. This isn’t true. A hard choice is only one type of turning point a hero can use to win conflicts (or lose them). And moral dilemmas are only one type of conflict you can use in your story.
Like any conflict, moral dilemmas are useful for raising tension. Since they often force heroes to choose between people they care about, they are particularly good at creating drama. However, what sets them apart is their commentary on morality.
Heroes make moral decisions constantly, but most of those decisions are clear cut. The moral dilemma allows us to acknowledge that morality is not always easy and chart a path to moral decision-making even when it is hard. When you create a moral dilemma, you are sending a message both about what choices are hard and which choices should ultimately prevail.
This means that if you want to stand 100% behind a cause, a moral dilemma is a bad fit. For instance, choosing to support reproductive rights or universal suffrage should not be a hard decision; it should be an easy one. Good moral dilemmas offer insight on situations that make choices difficult, and they do it without tearing down real-world causes that are important.
Creating Hard Choices
Every moral dilemma needs two options. Technically, you can have more than two, but simpler is better. You want something that’s easy for your audience to understand and remember. So even if the situation is complex, consider boiling it down to two choices that represent the whole messy situation. If you want your hero to think up a third option, that can come later.
The choices you create should:
- Have flaws. Each choice should come with a price tag. That price tag could be loss of life, using up resources that will be needed later, general human suffering, or giving up ideals such as freedom. The options can have big upsides as well, but a choice between two perfect utopias won’t create any tension.
- Feel roughly equal. If one choice is obviously the correct one, it’s not a dilemma, no matter how painful that choice is. This is the biggest difference between a real dilemma and pointless edginess.
- Be meaningful. What does each choice represent? If the hero has to choose between their two best friends, one of them could be bent on bringing the villain to justice, while the other wants to give the villain amnesty in exchange for peace.
- Feel natural. If you’re struggling to justify why your hero has to choose one of your options or you discover plot holes that would allow your hero an easy way out, just scrap the dilemma. You have other ways of creating interesting conflicts, and if your audience doesn’t believe a hard choice is necessary, they’ll get really frustrated.
Sometimes storytellers have trouble coming up with roughly equal choices. Instead of starting with typical black-and-white choices and trying to make them gray, look for inspiration from real-world situations where choices are difficult.
- Imagine ransomware has corrupted all the computers in a medical clinic. If the computers aren’t unlocked, medical records people need will be lost. But if you pay the hackers, it only makes them more powerful and more likely to do this in the future. And there’s always the chance they won’t unlock the computers anyway. Do you pay the hackers in this situation?
- Imagine pollution has gotten into the water supply, creating illness in poor populations that can’t pay for clean water. You’re trying to advocate for laws stopping this pollution, but you need allies, and your potential allies want to make a small reduction in the pollution and call it a big victory. Do you take what you can get now or hold out to build towards a bigger victory later?
- Imagine you’ve been offered a job at Do-Be-Evil Corp. Your salary will be high enough that you can donate much of it to charitable causes. Given enough time, you might be able to reform the corporation from the inside or, failing that, blow a big whistle. But until then, your acceptance will endorse Do-Be-Evil Corp, and your work will make it stronger. Do you accept the position?
Whatever options you create, remember to communicate their upsides and downsides to your audience. To appreciate the moral dilemma, they need to understand the implications of each choice.
Giving Your Hero an Answer
Unless your hero is headed for a tragic failure, they’ll come up with a right answer to the moral dilemma. Yes, a right answer. Your hero can question their answer or feel bad about their answer, but you as the storyteller are still making a statement about what choice is a good choice. That’s what makes the resolution of a moral dilemma feel satisfying. If you present two options only to play a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe, it will feel like the cop-out it is.
If you’re planning a tragic resolution, your hero can make the wrong choice and suffer the consequences. But in the process, you will reveal to your audience what the right choice was.
That doesn’t mean you have to assert yourself as the ultimate moral authority in situations where right answers are thin on the ground. It just means that you need to provide a reasonable justification for whatever you choose.
Let’s cover some different ways moral dilemmas can be solved:
- The hero chooses the lesser of two evils. In this case, your hero has to struggle with the choice and ultimately come up with a reason to choose one option over the other. For instance, if they have to choose between saving two people, they might choose whoever is a caregiver or has small children. In this case, the hero earns their victory by pushing themself to make a tough decision and showing good moral judgement.
- The hero sacrifices something else. Instead of accepting the problems with either solution, the hero can find something else to give up. Maybe they trade in their own life to get both hostages released, compromise ideals such as fair play that they held to before, or sell the family lands to raise the funds they need.
- The hero invents a way out. While it’s possible for the hero to avoid giving anything up, their solution has to meet a high bar. Otherwise, the moral dilemma will feel like a cheap trick on the audience instead of a genuine problem. To meet audience expectations, a perfect third option should be unexpected, innovative, and intuitive. In many cases, foreshadowing is required to create the context in which the hero can get a sudden insight at a critical moment. You don’t want a deus ex machina.
You might notice that these solutions look like standard turning points, because that’s what they are. Again, a moral dilemma is a type of conflict that is solved much like other conflicts. This means the hero doesn’t have to adhere to one of the above options as long as they do something to earn good karma.
For example, in the Firefly episode War Stories, the sadistic villain Niska kidnaps Malcolm and Wash. When Zoe brings Niska money to get them back, he offers to release just one of them. That means Zoe has to choose whether to rescue her husband or her captain and longtime comrade. Before Niska’s even finished telling Zoe she must make a choice, Zoe quickly and easily chooses her husband, Wash. Why does this work?
First, it’s easy for viewers to guess why Wash is the more moral choice. He’s a civilian, whereas Malcolm is a soldier. And since Malcolm is the ship’s captain, he bears much more culpability in angering the villain. The reason Zoe gets away with making an easy choice is that not only is it a great subversion, but also in this situation, it actually makes her look more exceptional. The episode established that Wash was jealous because he was worried Zoe cared more about Malcolm than him. Zoe’s easy choice proves that Wash was wrong.
The solution you choose for your moral dilemma can say interesting things about values, morality, and your hero.
What to Avoid
The Voyager episode Tuvix is notorious for its supposed moral dilemma. In the episode, a transporter accident combines the characters Neelix and Tuvok into a single person called Tuvix. This combined person is happy and healthy, and he wants to live. However, the entire crew of Voyager* decides to murder him to bring Neelix and Tuvok back from the dead.
This isn’t so much a moral dilemma as it is an excuse to be edgy. To maximize the shock factor, Tuvix begs everyone for his life, only to watch them all turn away. The dilemma is nothing more than the old trolley problem, and the episode has nothing interesting to say about it. The crew all agree on their answer, creating no worthwhile debate. And the premise that Tuvix must be killed to bring back Neelix and Tuvok is absurd given what happens in other Star Trek episodes. The transporter creates people out of nothing numerous times, including a clone of Commander Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
If the writers just wanted an episode that would generate controversy and make the only female Star Trek captain of the time look bad, they succeeded. But I think the rest of us can aspire to greater things. So here’s what to avoid if you want your dilemma to feel more genuine.
Graywashing Real Issues
Because stories have traditionally been so full of black-and-white morality, many storytellers aren’t used to depicting nuanced issues. So when they want moral choices to be hard, they make a good cause look bad or a bad cause look good.
- Did you sympathize with that leader of the oppressed group fighting for freedom? Well, she bombs buildings and slaughters privileged children!
- Were you trying to stop that child abuser? Didn’t you know he’s abusing children to appease an evil god that will otherwise kill everyone?
Some sources of advice tell writers to do this, supposedly to make story situations less clichéd and more interesting. But graywashing is only a cheap imitation of real nuance. That doesn’t mean good causes can’t come with complications, but it needs to be a natural part of the situation and not a contrived twist.
Giving the Hero Only One Gross Option
At the summit of Mount Edge is a story situation designed to force the hero to do something absolutely awful. This allows storytellers to pat themselves on the back for being provocative, as though we’re small children who smash sandcastles rather than craftspeople who build them.
For instance, if the situation is that the protagonist has to sacrifice an innocent person or the whole city will be destroyed, that’s not a moral dilemma. The choice is obvious, so there’s no dilemma about it. This means that when the hero decides they have to make the sacrifice, it doesn’t offer the audience any meaningful insight or commentary. All it does is get the hero to do something that is repugnant.
Forcing the Dilemma
Audiences get frustrated when heroes ignore obvious solutions or otherwise indulge in unnecessary hardship. This can be a problem for any conflict, but moral dilemmas are more sensitive to it than most. That’s because in many cases, the hero will have to make difficult compromises. Even if they avoid that by finding a way out of the dilemma, the situation must feel genuine to be meaningful and evoke the right emotions.
If your story is in a world where magic or technology is very powerful, there’s a good chance that many of the story’s problems could be solved with technology or magic. For instance, if characters can heal people who are basically dead, it’ll be tough to justify why the hero can’t sacrifice someone to appease an evil god and then just bring that person back.
The audience will apply extra scrutiny to moral dilemmas. So if you can’t create one without filling in lots of justifications, don’t create one. Or at least, tone it down. A moral dilemma that’s about which group the hero should join is under less pressure than a moral dilemma about which person has to die.
When you craft a moral dilemma, there’s always a risk that the audience won’t agree with your choice. While you can reduce your risk by designing your moral dilemma for meaning rather than provocation, it won’t go away entirely – nor should it. Every story says something. If everyone already agrees with your message, why say it?
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The Tuvix episode still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, even after all these years. Unfortunately, it’s far from an isolated incident in Voyager and it’s not even the worst – that particular honour goes to Scorpion.
At least Chakotay voices his disapproval in that one but why are they even discussing an alliance with the Borg in the first place? Committing genocide to get home quicker is so far from being a moral dilemma it’s staggering that anyone felt brave enough to suggest it, let alone turn it into a two-part episode.
They didn’t wanted to commit Genocide, they wanted to protect the galaxy from a threat they perceived to be bigger than the Borg. If the Undine are really this threatening is left up to debate, but they didn’t wanted to massacre them and even gave them knowledge about the Borg tech, so that they cannot be taken advantage of by them.
In fact, that episode where Voyager gives them the knowledge of the Borg tech is the same one where they try (and succeed) to use diplomacy with Species 8462.
Correct, people treat like Janeway and her crew are a bunch of idiots, but they aren’t that callous and even started to oppose the Borg once it was clear that they started it all.
Also Star Trek is about coexistence and not genocide, even the Borg deserve to life and in Star Trek Picard, the Borg got more development than ever before.
Alongside moral dilemmas, we can add deadlines. Maybe in a setting like Star Trek, the protagonist has to rescue one of their friends before the oxygen runs out. Then in a fight with a monster on the station, the monster causes a leak in their dying moment, so the air is running out even faster.
About the Mal-Wash dilemma, IIRC, one reason Zoe chose Wash was that she knew Mal could handle the problem better, had a better chance to escape
As for Tuvix, they should have had Tuvix stick around for two or three episodes, give us a chance to know him, instead of just telling us what he’s like, that the crew liked him, and that he was a person in his own right. Then we might have felt the choice more
Also, Zoe knew from Niska’s reputation that there was no way he’d ever let Malcolm go. If she chose the captain, Niska would simply take the money, claim it wasn’t enough and send her on her way after wasting her only shot to rescue Wash.
Also, the way everyone gets on board with the “Let’s storm da space station to rescue Mal” plan, including Zoe, makes me think she was planning to storm the place anyway ans knew she needed her “absolute genius” of a pilot husband.
– the quotes are citation marks, as I recall, that’s what she called him in mangled Mandarin during their attack
A couple of examples of moral dilemmas don’t really FEEL like moral dilemmas, to be honest.
On example # 3: If I know enough about Do-Be-Evil Corp to know it’s evil ahead of time, all those justifications for accepting the job are just that: justifications. Whistleblowing is next to useless when I, an average bloke, already know the company’s evil. And reform? Please.
Maybe it would be a moral dilemma if I needed to pay someone else’s expenses alongside it. Like a family member’s healthcare or gambling debts or something. But without that, it just feels like justifications.
Example #2 is like this as well. If my allies only want a “small” reduction in pollution that is ACTIVELY HARMING people, then it is crystal clear they don’t actually care about the issue. And probably don’t value human life as much as they should. Getting rid of ALL the pollution is the ONLY acceptable goal.
The first one is the only one that really resonates with me as a moral dilemma, mostly because I could understand someone making either choice. A doctor would probably value saving the medical records at all costs, not caring about anything related to the hackers. Whereas a computer person would be reluctant to give an inch to the hackers, because he doesn’t want to contribute or enable what they see as a huge problem.
I see where you’re coming from, but look at it like this:
#3: the MC might know that Do-Be-Evil is evil, but that doesn’t mean that the public does. If you have a huge corporation, one single person saying ‘they’re evil’ is not going to change things. People do so all the time and nobody beats an eye about it. As long as the MC has no proof that will suffice, they won’t do anyone any good by ‘exposing’ Do-Be-Evil for what they are. If they join, they might be able to change things or at least to find proof that will hold up and bring Do-Be-Evil down.
#2: without your ally, you can’t do a thing about the pollution. You have the choice to accept their plan and reduce pollution a bit (for the time being) or not to accept and have the pollution going on fully until a later date.
The point about hard choices and the ‘lesser evil’ is that another choice might be the moral high ground but do much less than the one the character might be forced to make.
Exposing Do-Be-Evil at that time will do little, because few people will believe you. Working for Do-Be-Evil is the morally worse choice, but will give you the chance to gather proof that will hold up and get Do-Be-Evil destroyed.
A small reduction in pollution for the time being is not the best solution, but at least it’s a little while your character can work on finding a way to get the pollution stopped without that ally.
I never said anything about EXPOSING Do-Be-Evil-more like, don’t join them and have done with it. But you actually raise some good points about these dilemmas.
I came at it from the assumption that the whole PUBLIC knows this company is evil, since how else would someone outside the company know about the company’s misdeeds if it wasn’t public knowledge? Technically public knowledge through news sources, but still. But if it’s more like the misdeeds are complicated and it requires expert knowledge to comprehend that said misdeeds ARE misdeeds, then that makes sense.
If only the PROTAGONIST knows the company is evil, and is joining the company for the purpose of taking it down, that is a decently noble undertaking.
As for #2, though, will the reduction in pollution be enough to help prevent some of the people not get sick, or not? Or at the very least, will it set a legal precedent for laws to bar pollution entirely in the future? If not, then the power of the ally and your relative powerlessness don’t matter. Settling for a small reduction if that reduction doesn’t DO anything is meaningless. At least, in my opinion, it is.
That being said, I can see why in #2, the protagonist would settle for a small reduction if the alternative is continuing at the same rate of pollution until a solution is found.
There’s a big, biiiiiig, huuuugee difference between the public KNOWING about something and CARING enough to do something about it. It’s the basis and purpose of all PR management.
I could spend the whole day listing the injustices and harm being done to people on a daily basis. Injustices which are well known and documented and not only self-evident, but also well-documented with physical evidence and the like.
Yet nobody cares to fix these things for multitudes of psychological reasons and cognitive faults.
But, when a cause celebre comes along, all of a sudden you get protests, organized action, political campaigns and actual change starts to loom over the status quo.
Claiming a company is testing their life-extending drug on kidnapped orphans and offering a plethora of evidence to back up those claims (like the corp employing convicted child traffickers on parole etc) gets you nothing but a libel lawsuit.
Smuggling out HD video of a caged child weeping for their mom as company staff inject them with drugs against their will…horse of a different color altogether.
“Example #2 is like this as well. If my allies only want a “small” reduction in pollution that is ACTIVELY HARMING people, then it is crystal clear they don’t actually care about the issue. And probably don’t value human life as much as they should. Getting rid of ALL the pollution is the ONLY acceptable goal.”
I do environmental remediation for a living, and run into situations where this is the case all the time. This is quite literally the central dilemma in the industry. Pollution actively harms people by definition; how do we clean it up without burning through our staff, often quite literally?
To make this situation realistic in a story, there are a few things to consider:
First, there are only so many people available. That means you can only do so much. If I had a team of ten thousand people that I could take from site to site all they way across the nation, I could probably remediate a good chunk of the National Priority List in a century. I’ve got three people. We’re working as hard as we can, but ultimately we can only accomplish a small reduction because we’ve only got six hands.
Second, you can only take so much–physically, mentally, emotionally. The jobsite is always too hot or too cold, too humid or too dry, too noise, etc. The work involves intense physical labor. That combination alone can kill you. Then you add the fact that we’re dealing with toxic materials–you need down time so that your body can process what gets through your PPE. And putting yourself in danger every day is psychologically taxing. Some jobsites give people PTSD, people have mental breakdowns, families are routinely destroyed because of the stress. (This adds another aspect no one considers–if you’re working 10-14 hour days and have a family, that puts 100% of the responsibility for dealing with family issues on your spouse.)
Third, there are limited resources. There are situations where the stuff needed to neutralize contamination are limited–as in, to clean up one site will require more than we have on Earth. Or the stuff you’re using creates dangers itself, and you need to decide which dangers are the more pressing.
I will also point out that it’s impossible to remove ALL of the pollution. If we had infinite resources we couldn’t do it. This is for a bunch of reasons. Physically speaking analytical equipment can’t tell you the concentration is zero, only that it’s below the machine’s detection limit (and the lab can only report that it’s below their reporting limit, which gets complicated). In some cases, the difference between pollution and naturally-occurring materials is hazy. Take arsenic–there are places with high background levels of arsenic. What do you do there? In practice, you get it down to background levels or below and call it done. A lot of very smart people have worked very hard to create limits to what can be left behind–EPA Preliminary Remedial Goals, for example–and after every remedial action a risk assessment is performed to determine if the remedial action is successful or not. This is based on projected land use–residential areas require lower concentrations than industrial, because toddlers put stuff in their mouths and factory workers are supposed to know better, that sort of thing.
All of this can create interesting drama. To give a real-world example: A few years ago the EPA reduced their allowable limit of lead in drinking water. This led to a situation where a number of cities (not Flint, but a bunch of others) went from having drinking water that was fine to having major problems with their water supply. The cities were told to re-vamp it. This creates interesting dilemmas. On the one hand, yes, we should protect our citizens. On the other, the change was made largely for political reasons, not practical ones, and the water had been fine a month ago. The city now needs to spend millions of dollars on changing their water system–which means increasing taxes (and thus driving people out of the city) or cutting funding to other programs.
For a more immediate, personal touch: At what point can you stop a remedial action? How hard are you required to push yourself? Your statement “Getting rid of ALL the pollution is the ONLY acceptable goal” means that you expect that limit to be infinite. Understandable; you don’t want those people to die. However, I also don’t want to die, and I really don’t want my team members to die (weird quirk of mine–I’m okay being injured, but hate the idea of anyone else being hurt). When you’re digging in a swamp at 100% humidity and 110 degrees F, belt-buckle deep in toxic sludge, this becomes a very immediate concern. And remember, resources are limited–and people are being injured or killed every day this stuff stays in place.
(In the real world, the call is easy to make. This work is governed by OSHA, which places fairly strict limits on work hours, work/rest regimes, available facilities, etc. Doesn’t mean we don’t still run into these issues, it just means that the dilemma has been solved for us.)
I’m late to the conversation, but just want to say that I really appreciate this comment. I’m an environmental science major, and part of what I’m coming to terms with is that you can only do so much. Having a small impact is better than not having an impact at all. And compromise is just about the only way to get things done. There may be some situations where taking the moral high ground and refusing to compromise is appropriate, but in my opinion, not this one.
I’m an environmental activist and we run into this dilemma all the time, too. It is a real one and has been debated for centuries and continues to be (in all forms of activism). Our focus is more about making companies stop the pollution than cleaning up after, but obviously both is important. Heck, which of these you chose to focus your limited time, energy and resources on is a dilemma in itself.
I’m often part of smaller groups who want to, say, shut down all nuclear power plants immediately. I stand behind that, but I also know that bigger organisations with less reasonable (in my eyes) demands that still allow people and nature to continue getting hurt, have far greater reach and power to effect changes. Do we ally with them? When and for how long? Where do we draw the line? How do we balance endlessly splintering our movement to the point of self-defeat against selling out?
I still remember one situation from 10 years ago where we were doing a bike tour to educate ourselves and others about lignite mining/coal power and a big newspaper wanted to interview us. They are right-leaning, populist and frequently peddle fake news. We had the choice to talk to them and let a wide public know what we do or else let them write an article about us while pissed at us and probably smearing our cause. Except we also knew giving them an interview still ran a high danger of them misrepresenting us. Some didn’t even want to consider working with that newspaper and drew a hard line against them, others wanted to use a strategic opportunity but were cautious. We decided against it, partly because of the small group no one felt qualified to give such an interview. But the debate about the why and how and when is still memorable.
What about a situation where you can right a massive injustice, but in doing so, you put everyone in danger? For example, a protection spell was placed centuries ago, around a society separated by magic. Mages are nobility, non-mages are low class and oppressed. Fast forward, turns out the spell was powered by the underclass’s magic, along with that which would have passed to their heirs. The spell can be broken, but then there’s no protection from X danger, which is considerable. Dilemma or just edgy?
However, the entire crew of Voyager* decides to murder him to bring Neelix and Tuvok back from the dead.
Didn’t the Doctor object?
Still, this is definitely one of the (many) things I’d fix if I ever set about to write my epic fix-it fanfic from scratch.
He says he won’t press the button, but largely on technical grounds as it would violate his programming, but he doesn’t actually seem to care much about Tuvix as a person.
He also doesn’t do anything to prevent Janeway or someone else from doing it. If he really objected, he would have tried to save Tuvix’s life.
I see at least one caveat to the “always choose the right answer” thing: there’s a place for stories that are more about raising nuanced questions than providing answers, and as such don’t present the hero’s choices as clearly right or wrong.
The recent film The Northman is a good example. Should Amleth abandon his family to slay the evil king once and for all, or should he stay with them and let the evil king regain his strength? There’s not a clear answer to that question, and I think the filmmakers recognize this. Yes, Amleth does eventually make a decision, but it’s a very spontaneous and personal decision, something the audience will understand but not necessarily agree with. Since it leads to a bittersweet ending, audiences can interpret it as primarily positive, tragic, or something in between.
Does this conflict with the principle of satisfaction? Maybe a little, at least in the way Mythcreants usually defines it. It doesn’t provide a clear message for audiences to take away, and not everyone will think Amleth deserves the ending he gets. But it can inspire people to think back on the film long after it’s over, forming their own opinions that might change their moral views organically. I think this can be at least as valuable as a more straightforward moral message, even if it’s undoubtedly difficult to pull off.
I haven’t seen Northman, but if not everyone thinks Amleth deserves the ending he gets, that suggests the story did have a specific message and not everyone agreed with it. As I said, if you make a statement, some people may not agree, but that’s what it means to say something. So just because the story points in one direction, that doesn’t mean it didn’t raise thoughtful questions or leave people thinking.
So my guess would that this is a case where the story does pick a side, it just doesn’t do so in a way that makes the decision look clean or easy.
However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be ambiguity in the story that allows it to be interpreted in multiple ways. But that’s another topic I didn’t cover in this article, as stories that actually have ambiguous endings are not common. I do have another article that mentions ambiguous endings a bit: https://mythcreants.com/blog/how-to-keep-mysteries-from-looking-like-mistakes/
Thank you for the thoughtful response! I guess that part about not everyone being satisfied is kind of beside my point: my point is basically that a storyteller doesn’t have to morally endorse either side as long as the outcome can be evaluated in more than one way. The Northman does show the practical consequences of Amleth’s actions (for the most part; all of Eggers’ movies have scenes that are a little ambiguous). But it doesn’t really frame them as right or wrong, nor is it clear whether his choice is better than the alternative. Personally, I think he made the wrong choice, but I think I would have been just as satisfied with the ending if I held the opposite opinion. This is largely because the film illustrates both the positive and negative consequences of his choice and lets the audience decide which side outweighs the other. (Also, it’s just consistent with his established character traits and is reasonably satisfying because of that.)
Interesting discussion. You both pose interesting points.
This sounds like the hypothetical scenario given by Jean-Paul Sartre.
[A person feels a sense of duty both to their parent, for whom they are a carer, and to their community, which is at war. Should they stay with their parent and make a big difference to one person, or join the war effort making a smaller contribution impacting a lot of people?]
Sartre says there is no correct answer, until the person decides for themself. The authentic answer is the one that is guided by their values and priorities. As they are the one in the situation, only they can ultimately say what the right moral choice is. (Hypotheticals are by nature simplistic, but it seems to speak to the dilemma The Northman tackles).
So (as long as you’re happy to go along with existentialist theories) you can say Amleth’s choice is not what you’d do, but you couldn’t say that Amleth made an immoral choice.
This suggests that to make a ‘not your choice’ end satisfying, would require demonstrating the decision was guided by previously demonstrated values and priorities. That doesn’t make the choice easy, or the cost seem any more fair.
Sounds like The Northman achieved that. But I can imagine that if you believe there can only be one right choice (the one you would choose) a different outcome would be eminently dissatisfying.
I suspect another source of dissatisfaction might be if the choice is made on stereotyped values and priorities. The choice may be right for the MC, but it may sustain a stereotype. This is a message the storytellers are endorsing whether or not they intended it. Though I may be getting totally off topic now.
Thanks for the opportunity to go on this philosophical ramble!
I have now seen The Northman.
The filmmaker is absolutely endorsing Amleth’s choice. He is not making it because he wants revenge, he makes it purely for selfless reasons. He believes that if his uncle is left alive, he will come hunt down Amleth’s family, and the film gives viewers good reasons to believe he is right. It may come from a vision, but all other details from visions in the movie become true. At the very end, Amleth has a vision validating his choice as the right one.
It’s a stretch to even call this a moral dilemma. It’s fairly typical heroic sacrifice with some edginess and dark gray morality added in.
You can still disagree with his choice, of course, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t endorsed. The storyteller and the audience don’t always agree.
None of these are actual moral dilemmas.
1) Pay someone to do that job.
2) As someone who lives in a very polluted city: take what you can get.
3) Why do you think you’re so important as to see taking a job as an endorsement? You’re there to work and you need to pay your bills. And while being there you can soften the damage and work on creating a better culture. But if you’re too conflicted about it and you don’t need the money, just don’t take the job.
In my opinion, a moral dilemma has to be stronger than this. Heroes must be forced to do something unethical (such as letting someone die so they can save the whole city) or at least something that will make them crack their heads in search for a third solution.
Would a moral dilemma also include how to treat enemies who aren’t evil? For example, the protagonist is with a coalition of star systems who want to remain independent. The antagonist is a large stellar republic that wants to expand and absorb the former. It’s not an oppressive nation, things usually get better for new members in terms of standard of living. OTOH their culture is monotonous and members lose their distinctiveness and local automony. Neither side is evil, but if things come to violence the dilemma can come from whether or not to save republic troops who are about to die when their life support system is damaged or their ship is about to crash.
Before Niska’s even finished telling Zoe she must make a choice, Zoe quickly and easily chooses her husband, Wash.
Also it robs Niska of his exertion of power.
If the writers just wanted an episode that would generate controversy and make the only female Star Trek captain of the time look bad, they succeeded.
I just looked up the Tuvix scene on Youtube and found a comment I think might give you a smile: “That is a tough ethical dilemma. On one hand, you get Tuvok back. On the other, you get Neelix back as well. Boy, I don’t envy Janeway in this situation.”
I’m sure they could have programmed the transporter to extract and materialise Tuvok but leave Tuvix as he is! Win-win ;)
Tuvix is much WORSE than the classic trolley problem. It’s like the footbridge version, but with the addition of Tuvix begging for his life instead of just being killed when he wasn’t expecting it. And also with the addition that they’re not saving any currently living people. So worse all around.
It could have been a real, interesting dilemma if it went like this: When he’s just created, Tuvix is more like two people, and everyone thinks it’s important to find a way to split Tuvix up into Neelix and Tuvok again.
Now imagine if he/they continued to be uncertain. He/they waver between thinking of himself as a new person with both Neelix and Tuvok’s memories, and thinking of themselves as two people tragically trapped in the same body. Sometimes he feels one way, at other times they feel another way.
Now the crew invents the method for splitting Tuvix into Neelix and Tuvok. But should they use it? Say that much of the crew had begun thinking of Tuvix as a new person. The Doctor thinks it’s wrong to split him up, he thinks it would be like murder. But Tuvix himself/themselves still waver. Ultimately, he/they say he/they can’t make the decision himself/themselves! He/they really don’t know what’s what – will splitting constitute murdering him to bring two others back to life, or will it mean curing a weird medical condition, saving Tuvok and Neelix from some weird-ass body-sharing illness? He/they can’t make up his/their mind!
So he/they let Janeway decide. She has come down on the side of the latter, and splits them up. But it’s a tough decision, because she can’t be completely certain that she got this tricky issue of personal identity right.
Btw, I was in a discussion a while ago with Star Trek fans who liked Tuvix and think Janeway did right. Weirdly, they all seemed to have watched something like the show I describe in their heads, not the actual show!
Thanks Chris. I love this topic.
There’s a common turning point in Irish mythical stories, where the MC is subject to competing geis (obligations).
What the obligations are about and what the character choses, says so much about the culture and the character. Usually the forcing of a situation in which the obligations are made to compete, or making the stakes stupid high, is on account of a king (or similar) making a bad judgement. In this setting a king who makes a bad judgement violates ‘the kings truth’ which is what allows them to be king. Bad judgement = lose kingship / or kingdom becomes a wasteland. Grrr to bad kings.
Just wish to point that the first one is *not* a moral dilemma in real life. The hospital staff simply calls the police and tells them their files are encrypted and they have a ransom demand. The police tells them to not pay, and the cyber cops (working with the hospital computer staff) restore the files on top of arresting the hackers. So this falls under “Taking a Third Option” category.
And I say this a civil servant who knows this is the norm for every public service or strategic company, e.g. those actually protected by secret services such as energy companies or the weapons’ industry.
In fact, in a story the only way that first idea could become a moral dilemma is if the police is corrupted and therefore not to be trusted (which works in crapsack worlds), or vastly understaffed / lacking good computer specialists…
I know that the third option you suggested was not an option for some German hospitals a few years back – they had no access to the controls for machines they really needed and the time the cyber cops would have needed to unlock them again would have cost human lives. They had to pay.
About greywashing moral issues: “Some sources of advice tell writers to do this, supposedly to make story situations less clichéd and more interesting.”
I hate this SO much! Not only is it blatant pro-bigotry propaganda (“didn’t you know that all advocates of seemingly good causes are actually evil terrorists?!”) but it is super cliché and has been for ages. Honestly. If you’re doing this, you’re chosing the boring cliché, not saying something fresh and new. Let alone useful.
Yep.