Mercy for the Man or Martial Law for the Sailor: How genuine moral dilemmas help shape our moral commitments

In “The Universalizability of Moral Judgments,” Peter Winch argues against the universalizability of first-person moral judgments. He does so by appealing to a moral dilemma faced by Captain Vere in Melville’s short story Billy Budd. In this paper, I motivate the possibility of the kind of moral dilemma Winch proposes and show what that possibility reveals about morality’s indeterminacy and our contribution as co-authors of morality’s requirements. Some moral dilemmas arise because agents occupy multiple morally grounded roles—roles that, from the point of view of morality writ large, do not always have a clear priority with respect to one another. Even on a moral theory that rests on one central principle or value, a lot of an agent’s practical life is left underdetermined. Winch’s insight is that persons can discover something important about themselves that bears on what they should do when faced with such a dilemma. By making a judgment about what to do in the face of a dilemma, an agent can create a new moral obligation, and in doing so, develop an aspect of their moral identity.