Moral Choice: A Christian View of Ethics

7. The Process: Steps for Moral Decision Making

163 7 The Process: Steps for Moral Decision Making “Life is the sum of all your choices.” Albert Camus “The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.” Flora Whittemore Introductory Comments Everyone appreciates a checklist to help deal with life’s tasks. Give us an instruction manual for car repair, putting together the fiberboard bookcase from the local Home Depot, or—for the really adventuresome—creating the perfect risotto. The last chapter combined the previous sections under the rubric of conscience, the personal apparatus for decision making. In this chapter , we will discuss the external task of making decisions. Some moral dilemmas have to do with what seems very personal and isolated from effects on others. Such issues as sex before marriage, lying to a spouse about an affair, plagiarizing a college paper from the Web seem to fit 164 Moral Choice this category. Other decisions clearly have a larger scope. They affect more than one’s personal life. They have to do with social issues, the morality of structures, cultural mores. As a being related to others and to the world, every person has a stake in these larger moral dilemmas. They encompass such issues as embryonic stem cell research, how to vote on complex issues, whether people should pay taxes to support wars that they believe to be immoral. In both personal moral dilemmas and those that have social implications , answers become clearer by a thorough process of sorting and deciding . We offer below a clear set of seven steps, questions really, to arrive at good decisions. They outline a method to sort all of the elements within the moral iceberg with the aim to make good decisions. While these questions do not always provide easy answers, they organize the moral decision-making process in such a way that the decision maker can think about them clearly. What Is a Moral Dilemma? A moral dilemma is a situation of moral choice in which there appears to be no one right answer and/or all possibilities have a possible ontic or moral downside . Many decisions are not dilemmas at all, much less moral dilemmas. No one, except perhaps the recalcitrant two-year-old resisting Mommy’s control, frets over whether to get dressed in the morning. The child might consider whether to wear the red shirt or the white one, but such a decision has no particular moral significance. Unless one is intending to go into a ring with raging bulls, red and white are equally appropriate choices. Such decisions are merely a matter of taste and aesthetic concern, not morality. Red or white? The decision likely has no bearing on the question, “What is good for the human person adequately considered?” A moral dilemma arises when there is no road map for the moral path forward , or where there appears to be more than one good route to take. The situation may contain a conflict of values or duty or a lack of clarity as to how to apply rules to a specific situation. Consequences may be unclear or unknown, or they may include some “evil” elements that cannot be avoided. Some would frame such quandaries as making a choice between the lesser of two evils. This framing needs clarification. As noted earlier, Catholic moral thinking distinguishes between premoral or ontic evil and moral evil. It is Chapter 7: The Process: Steps for Moral Decision Making 165 never morally right to choose a moral evil as a lesser evil. One might morally choose a lesser premoral evil as a means to a greater moral good. This is one of the key elements of proportionate reasoning or the Principle of Double Effect. It is never morally right to commit a moral evil, even if it is chosen as a lesser moral evil than other alternatives. If it is always morally wrong to kill an innocent person, it is never morally right to kill one innocent—even to save a group of innocent people. Such a dilemma arose in the final episode of MASH, when a crying baby was smothered to keep the rest of the people from being discovered by the enemy. Hawkeye Pierce was so convinced it was his fault that he repressed the death of the baby by remembering it as a chicken. The cause of a moral dilemma may be a conflict between or among a set of embedded...