Ethical dilemmas are what philosphers and students of jurisprudence seem to delight in. For the rest of us, ethical and moral dilemmas make us uneasy because normally there seems to be no way that someone would not be hurt, damaged, or injured.
Lawrence Kohlberg is famous in psychology for writing about moral development. He tried to elicit a moral compass from students by giving them a moral story and then asking students to rate whether a person was right or wrong to do so. Here is one of his most famous dilemmas.
In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife.
Of course the question asked is: was Heinz right or wrong to steal the drug?
A place where great ethical questions can be posed is in the interpretation of historical events. The Two Voice Digital Story Telling Aproach, asks students to prepare two stories about two sides of a historical event – normally where there is conflict. Examples might include:
The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war.
The decision to bail out large banks and industries as a consequence of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008.
The decision to legalise the consumption of marijuana, a perviously outlawed drug in many countries.
Two Voice DST is a fantastic way to have students understand how historians are influenced to write about historical events depending on which perspective they are writing about.