follow up discussion

Discussion

A moral dilemma is a decision-making problem between two moral ideas. It is an incident that geared us to question how our responses should be on our beliefs. The decision to choose between right and wrong is ethically based. Take, for instance, the story Kohlberg gave about Heinz, whose wife was sick and did not have money for the drugs and was stuck with the choice of stealing the money to save his wife or allowing her to die (Rachels & Rachels, 2019). Another instance was when my husband had to choose between to stay home with his family and be safe from the pandemic or to volunteer and work more to save lives. And he made the right choice to save lives.

In these situations, honesty, compassion, and courage are the most important. It would take an honest person not to steal when faced with this kind of predicament. Compassion for others is one thing that is not easy, especially this time when some people choose to serve their community instead of self, shows a lot of human compassion.

When we face life treating situation like the story of Heinz, it takes a strong will and self-disciple to be able to portray honesty, compassion, and courage. Virtues are what we practice every day (Andre & Velasquez, 1988).

These virtues should be expressed in our day to day life, with the people we meet, not only to people we know but to everyone. For instance, if the drug seller were compassionate with Heinz and the drugs for his sick wife, the thought of stealing would not come up. Every day of our lives, we are challenged by one situation or the other, but our courage to stand for what is right is what makes us a better person in society.

To be able to apply Aristotle’s golden mean to this dilemma is to find a middle ground between the two extremes, which are “excess and deficiency” (Chamberlain University, 2020). In the case of my husband volunteering to work more this pandemic period, he tried as much as possible to remove the fear of exposing himself and his family to the virus by building up courage.

The dilemma involves the conflict of moral duties, which are professional versus familial duties. In this scenario, where my husband had to choose to work more to assist in reducing the cases of people dying from this virus. Thereby, making me handle all the family duties.

Reference

Rachels, S., & Rachels, J. (2019). The elements of moral philosophy. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.

Andre, C., & Velasquez, M. (1988). Ethics and Virtue. Scu.edu. Retrieved 17 August 2020, from https://www.scu.edu/mcae/publications/iie/v1n3/virtue.html (Links to an external site.).

Chamberlain University. (2020). Unit 7 lesson: Virtuous person and virtuous citizen. https://chamberlain.instructure.com/courses/65313/pages/week-7-lesson-virtuous-person-and-virtuous-citizen?module_item_id=8730672