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  • The Structure of the Moral Dilemma in Shiloh
  • Claudia Mills (bio)

Children's literature has long had the role of providing moral instruction and shaping moral development.1 Some notable children's books, however, go beyond the task of transmitting and inculcating accepted values to portray children engaged in a process of real moral reflection that can itself transcend and challenge our shared values. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Newbery-winning novel Shiloh is remarkable for its recognition of certain fundamental ambiguities and limitations in the morality we share. The moral dilemma that eleven-year-old Marty Preston faces in the novel is extraordinarily complex, raising challenges both to how we reason about our obligations to members of the moral community and to how we define the scope of that community. The latter may occasion the novel's most significant philosophical triumph in its illumination of how we fail to apply even our most central and unambiguous moral principles to children and to animals.

In "real life," children struggle with sometimes extraordinary seriousness to develop into full-fledged moral agents. In The Moral Life of Children (1968) and The Moral Intelligence of Children (1997), Robert Coles provides moving case studies of children trying to sort through their moral obligations against a background of their parents' beliefs, their religious beliefs, and the transmitted beliefs of their culture. Children also seem to have a natural curiosity about the philosophical dimensions of their lives, as shown by Gareth Matthews's depictions of his successful attempts to engage children in philosophical dialogue (1980). I want to suggest that this capacity for philosophical perplexity, turned toward the moral seriousness of our lives, makes Shiloh a wonderful vehicle for engaging children in sophisticated moral reflection, for the questions Shiloh raises are ones that the professional philosophy literature itself has been struggling to answer. [End Page 185]

The Generation of Moral Dilemmas

Is there always a right answer to the question "What should I do?" Many of us are tempted by the view that even if it may be difficult to determine what we should do in a given situation, there is indeed a correct answer. The task of moral theory, then, is to array the totality of our correct moral judgments into one systematized framework, providing an explanation and justification of how they fit together into one unified whole. The two leading secular moral theories developed since the eighteenth century are consequentialism (identified in its utilitarian form with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) and deontology (identified with Immanuel Kant). According to consequentialism, the right act in any given situation is the act that produces the best consequences, usually understood in terms of the welfare of all those affected by the act. (Important for our purposes is that utilitarian consequentialists such as Bentham historically have defended the extension of moral considerability to all sentient creatures, including nonhuman animals, so that in evaluating actions we must look at their implications for both human and animal welfare.) On deontological (obligation-based) moral theories, the right thing to do is established by invoking moral obligations grounded in some way other than by appeal to consequences. For example, according to Kant, we must act only on maxims (principles) that can be consistently universalized and only with respect for other persons as ends in themselves.

A number of philosophers, however, have asked whether there is indeed always a right answer to the question "What should I do?" They suggest that we may sometimes face real moral dilemmas, which all the resources of moral theory are inadequate to resolve. A moral dilemma is more than merely a difficult moral choice. According to one recent definition, a "moral dilemma is a situation in which an agent S morally ought to do A and morally ought to do B but cannot do both, either because B is just not-doing-A or because some contingent feature of the world prevents doing both" (Gowans 3). Here the world presents us not with a merely difficult choice between a right action and a wrong action but with an impossible choice between two simultaneously required but mutually incompatible right actions, or, viewed otherwise, between two wrong actions, since...

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