Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

The ethical dilemmas of preventing the next pandemic

Could protecting one group of people from disease, and exposing another to it, be the best way to prevent as many deaths as possible and reduce the impact of a future pandemic? A study led by some La Trobe academics says ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

How your brain wrestles with the ethics of eating animals

Most people eat meat and dairy with little thought of the consequences. Yet those consequences are planetary in scale. Raising livestock for meat, eggs and milk accounts for roughly 14% of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions. ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Can an accent influence moral decision-making?

When people are presented with a moral dilemma in their native language but the words are spoken with a foreign accent, it appears that they make more rational decisions. This was revealed in research that Susanne Brouwer ...

page 1 from 8

Dilemma

A dilemma (Greek: δί-λημμα "double proposition") is a problem offering at least two possibilities, neither of which is practically acceptable. One in this position has been traditionally described as "being on the horns of a dilemma", neither horn being comfortable. This is sometimes more colorfully described as "Finding oneself impaled upon the horns of a dilemma", referring to the sharp points of a bull's horns, equally uncomfortable (and dangerous).

The dilemma is sometimes used as a rhetorical device, in the form "you must accept either A, or B"; here A and B would be propositions each leading to some further conclusion. Applied incorrectly, it constitutes a false dichotomy, a fallacy.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA