Moral dilemmas and ethical decision-making frameworks

moral dilemmas saw Julie at a club and she was with a boy other than her boyfriend John. They were kissing and it was obvious she was cheating on him. I knew better than to say something but John is also my friend and he asked me directly whether or not I saw Julie with Garth at the club. He told me that someone saw them together and wanted to hear a second witness's opinion before confronting Julie. I was stuck, torn between my loyalty to two of my best friends. I had known both since high school.

The way I resolved this moral dilemma would have been described both by Kohlberg and by Gilligan as being postconventional. Demonstrating a mature level of moral reasoning and having already internalized conventional rules-based ethics, I decided to first tell Julie that John was concerned. I waited for Julie to confess to me what she and Garth were doing and to what extend they were pursuing an affair with one another. As it turned out, she and Garth were mainly flirting; they had kissed but had not gone beyond that point. Thus, I alleviated a lot of grief had I put Julie on the defensive by accusing her of having a full-blown romantic affair.

Had I been stuck in Kohlberg's or Gilligan's preconventional stage then I might have sought to win favors from either Julie or John. If I thought John would appreciate my loyalty more than Julie then I might have risked losing my friendship with Julie in order to please John; even if Julie were not having the affair it would have impressed John that I cared enough about him to take that chance. The fact that I had a crush on John to begin with would have underscored my preconventional moral reasoning but my behaviors showed that I had matured far beyond that stage. Similarly, I might have felt like it was my moral duty to help John -- or that it was my moral duty to preserve Julie's privacy. At a conventional stage of moral reasoning, I would still be acting with self-interest only at a more complex level of reasoning. I would have been thinking about social norms and categorical imperatives in Kohlberg's system -- or about the social value of self-sacrifice in Gilligan's.

Instead I made a moral choice that reflects moral maturity: a level of caring that Gilligan would define as postconventional. Whether consciously or not, I was determined to preserve the dignity and promote the well-being of both my friends. I took myself out of the picture. I knew that I was dealing with sensitive emotional issues and bonds of friendship that could be severed with one wrong word. Whether or not Julie and John were having problems was none of my business. I did not pry; I did not ask John what his possible role in Julie's behavior was either.

Kohlberg would claim that I had internalized a set of agreed-upon social values and my actions reflected the norms that underwrite morality in our culture. I would have reasoned that Julie and John each had a right to the Truth and that I was put in the (however awkward) position of delivering that truth.