Ethical dilemma
Definition 1
An ethical dilemma is a situation of moral choice when, when one moral value is realized, another, no less valuable, collapses.
A dilemma is a judgment in which an object has two contradictory characteristics; An ethical dilemma is a difficult choice that must be resolved based on morality and ethics.
Simply put, a dilemma is a choice between two contradictions, and this choice is very difficult. In a normal situation, a person makes a choice based on his own values and interests, or makes a decision that is beneficial for him.
Morals and ethics throughout life regulate the behavior of people in society, they guide a person to make choices that are considered most acceptable, what we should do and what we should not do. Often in life, people are faced with situations when they do not know what to do in a particular situation, which is also complicated by the fact that both cases have their positive and negative sides. In this case, the values that guide us throughout our lives come into conflict.
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A man, all his life, has been guided by the principle “a woman cannot be beaten or insulted,” but suddenly in the evening in a dark entrance he is attacked by a woman who begins beating him with a bat, the only option left is to strike back, but what about the principle?
A train at full speed loses control, there are 4 people tied to one track, you can switch to another track, but one person is also tied there, what choice will the driver make?
Two alleged criminals were taken into custody, the punishment for the crime will be fifteen years in prison, but there is no evidence of involvement in this crime. The police offer them each the opportunity to go free. If both confess to the crime, they will each serve six years in prison. If one denies his involvement and the other provides evidence of his non-involvement, the informant will be released and the other will be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. If both deny the facts, both will remain in prison for a year. How to make a choice?
Finished works on a similar topic
Course work Examples of ethical dilemmas in social work 470 ₽ Essay Examples of ethical dilemmas in social work 270 ₽ Test work Examples of ethical dilemmas in social work 250 ₽
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Classic Examples
Crowded Ship On 13 March 1841, William Brown's ship left Liverpool with 17 crew and 65 passengers, most of whom were Irish and Scottish immigrants. On April 19, the ship collided with an iceberg and began to quickly sink. There were two boats, one large and one small. The captain, eight sailors and passengers boarded a small boat, forty people, including nine passengers, occupied a large boat. There was not enough space on the large boat for passengers, the wind rose and it began to rain heavily. The leader and crew knew that if they wanted to survive, they had to get rid of the excess weight on the boat and in order to do that, some passengers needed to be disembarked. In this sad situation, Alexander Holmes, one of the sailors, along with other crew members, began to throw people into the icy waters of the Atlantic. Upon his arrival in Philadelphia, Alexander Holmes was convicted of manslaughter, but in view of the exceptional situation in which he had to make this choice, he was sentenced to six months in prison and a $20 fine. There was a lot of public sympathy and everyone agreed that Holmes had no personal grudge against any of the passengers who were to be jettisoned, and he did it in the interests of the majority, but many people criticized the sailors for saving their own lives rather than passengers.
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Sophie's Choice William Styron's 1976 novel, Sophie's Choice is also an example of a moral dilemma. In the novel, Polish woman Sophie Zawistowska is told by the Nazis to choose between the life of her son and her daughter. In an impulse, she decides that they can take their daughter, she thought that her son is older and stronger, and will survive. Unfortunately, she will never hear his forgiveness for her choice between children, Sophie commits suicide.
Fat Man in the Cave A group of people are stuck in a cave where the water level is rising. There is only one small exit from the cave, but unfortunately one of their friends, a fat man, gets stuck there. Although they try to push him out, it won't help. If the fat man does not move away from the mouth of the cave, they will all die. One of the participants, who has a stick of dynamite, offers to blow up their friend in order to get out of the cave. This is again the moral dilemma of a situation where someone must be sacrificed so that others can live.
(Please note that the example "The Crowded Ship" is a true story, while the other examples are fictional)
Types of Ethical Dilemmas
Ethical dilemmas can differ in the degree of their specificity.
- An open dilemma arises when the subject who has to resolve the dilemma has not yet made a choice; he still chooses how to act in this situation.
- Closed dilemma - in which the situation has already been resolved, and the person evaluates the other person's decision.
- A hypothetical dilemma is the need to make a choice in a situation that is unlikely to happen in real life.
- A real dilemma is a situation close to a person that can happen in everyday life; usually such dilemmas are less dramatic in nature.
Two definitions
This beautiful and not very clear word has two meanings. One belongs to the realm of logic or philosophy, and the other to psychology or sociology. Let's look at both definitions:
- A combination of two judgments that are opposite in meaning, but without the ability to formulate a third.
- A situation in which you have to choose between two solutions, since they are opposite in meaning and give rise to difficulties of the same scale.
Dilemma
It is the second meaning that is most often implied in book and journalistic speech. Hence the expressions: “unsolvable dilemma”, “dangerous dilemma”, etc. In a certain sense, it is consonant with the well-known expression “there is no third option.” Such situations are not uncommon in everyday life. The simplest example: a person needs to decide whether to stay in a well-paid job, which is a burden to him, or change it to a more pleasant one, but one that brings in significantly less income.
Ethical dilemmas in social work
Ethical dilemmas in social work are different from dilemmas that arise outside of professional activity, but even here a person must make a choice between two equal options.
The source of various value contradictions in the professional activity of a social worker is the need to combine into a single whole the contradictory demands that the profession has placed on him.
The most important contradiction for a social worker is the need to be an instrument of both social change and social control; very often social workers are faced with insoluble situations when the interests of a particular individual and the interests of society are at stake. In such situations you have to find a balance. One of the most common dilemmas facing social work is how to alleviate the hardships of socially deprived groups of the population, but at the same time avoid social dependency.
Definition 2
Deprivation is a reduction or complete deprivation of the opportunity to satisfy one’s basic psychophysiological and social needs.
The key task of social work is the well-being of people, this makes the problem of paternalism particularly relevant.
Note 1
Paternalism is a system of relations in which authorities provide certain needs of citizens in exchange for allowing them to dictate rules of behavior.
In the interests of the client, in order to protect him from himself, adherents of paternalism consider it possible, if necessary, to limit the client’s actions that may cause him harm, to oblige him to accept services against his will or by force; in such situations, the social worker has the right to withhold information or provide misinformation and etc. This practice is perceived ambiguously and causes debate about the limits of admissibility of paternalism:
- on the one hand, social services have a responsibility to protect clients;
- on the other hand, there is a possibility of instilling in the client certain forms of self-destructive behavior.
How to solve
Any solution to a dilemma is a search for the safest option of two or combining them into something like a compromise. To achieve this, a person needs to work internally with himself.
You can follow this algorithm:
1. State what the dilemma is.
2. Collect and analyze known information from all sides.
3. Look for other options besides the two opposite and obvious ones. Check each solution found against:
- correctness (on a personal moral scale);
- utility;
- morality;
- legality.
4. Eliminate completely unacceptable options from the list of solutions.
5. By the method of elimination, leave one thing.
6. Check the selected solution in three ways:
- imagine doing this; what do you feel, do you want to do things differently;
- imagine how the decision you make will affect your family;
- imagine the reaction of your social environment (friends, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances); can you survive this?
8. Provide justification for the decision made (what it will give you or what it will save you from).
9. Analyze the negative consequences that this decision may lead to.
What is a MORAL (Ethical) DILEMMA?
A moral or ethical dilemma is a situation or event that calls into question the morality of a person during a certain period of time. As a rule, in the future, a person can return to his usual moral values, but in a given period of time, he must choose one morality that is superior to another. In simple words, this means that a person is faced with a moral choice between: sticking to his principles or temporarily agreeing with other moral principles.
Is playing with AI worth the trouble?
Even with all the dark spots in the field of AI and questionable use cases discussed above, the clear answer to this question is “Yes!” After all, the introduction of AI makes our lives easier and better every day. And one of the areas that has received a huge boost from the adoption of AI is healthcare. It is AI technologies that help to quickly select more effective treatments, interpret medical images, track patient data from wearable sensors, find new drugs and test vaccines in a shorter time.
In banking, AI helps identify suspicious transactions, review loan applications...AI can write articles, compose music, schedule your haircut, translate menus in foreign countries, and even select the types of wine you are most likely to like.
As technology advances, we will interact with increasingly reliable and intelligent systems, and AI will become an integral part of our daily activities. With more technology leaders today working to use AI responsibly—striving for transparency, privacy, and fairness—we can look forward to implementing ethical practices and privacy protections that put people first. AI is here to stay and will be with us for a long time, so our job is to make the most of it.
— Author: Agnieszka Piechocka, SAS consultant in Poland
Is AI the new big brother watching over us?
The question of the balance between privacy and human surveillance is a constant topic of discussion in the field of information technology. After all, today the collection and storage of data occurs in digital form, and we are increasingly surrounded by various sensors that convert ordinary, “analog” details of our everyday affairs into digital format. As a consequence, our lives automatically become more digital.
Numerous free Internet services keep a huge trail of information behind us, and this is how they make money by using our information trails. But we cannot even imagine how this information about us will be used in the future.
AI technology developers collect, process and use huge amounts of personal data every day. And, more often than not, they do not ask permission from each subject of their research before working with big data. Therefore, the work of AI with large volumes of real records often leads to the disclosure of personal data and creates the risk of compromising personal information.
Fortunately, experts have been working on solving this problem for several years, and proven methods for protecting privacy already exist. Yes, their implementation requires a little more effort and money, but it is possible to create systems that take into account security requirements - with encryption of communications and anonymization of data used for analysis.
The most problematic area in this case remains the issue of application of laws at the level of states and individuals. For example, in the European Union there is a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and in Russia, high requirements are applied to any companies that handle personal information, in accordance with No. 152-FZ “On Personal Data”. Meanwhile, in the United States and China, the level of government intervention in the operation of AI systems appears to be lower. This is probably done to achieve breakthroughs and take advantage of new technologies.
Which approach is actually better? It’s difficult to answer this question, but Gartner analysts are already predicting that by 2024, 60% of all data needed to develop AI applications will be generated synthetically, without creating privacy risks.
Can AI be trusted?
AI systems “learn” to find patterns using existing data sets in order to subsequently suggest useful solutions. At the same time, programmers cannot say which templates the system will use during operation.
On the one hand, if we rely on AI to make critical decisions, this could become a huge problem. How will the system behave when you need to approve or reject a loan, decide who to hire, or determine the path of a car when an accident is inevitable? (remember the “trolley problem”). But on the other hand, AI is already helping us with many decisions - from choosing the next movie on a streaming service to blocking suspicious transactions. The problem here is that the smarter AI gets, the more complex the threats we face become. Attackers are better able to adapt to security systems and more effectively identify their weaknesses.
A good example of when you don’t know whether to trust or not is the technology for creating counterfeits. So-called deepfakes have already become reliable evidence... of the unreliability of any evidence. Nowadays it is easy to falsify a digital image, video or audio recording. And, apparently, it will soon be possible to create fake text, photos or videos of any content from scratch. Detecting deepfakes will only become more difficult in the future. As Gartner notes, in 2023, about 20% of successful account hacks will occur using deepfake technologies and social engineering to force users to share confidential information or transfer money to scammers.
Therefore, maybe we should ban this type of use of AI, because we ourselves cannot yet explain for what purpose it is used. And if we want to create systems that can be trusted, then it is important for us to be able to explain how they work and why.
