2024 Dilemma
Last September I wrote a blog in which I reflected on the potential negative effects of hypothetical moral dilemmas on ethical decision-making. I was at that time in the beginning stages of teaching a college course on the history of the Holocaust. As I did, this idea was processing in the back of my mind and surfaced in two quite different modalities. During the class we reflected on the lives of those who intervened or spoke out on behalf of Jews. We considered what it was about these people – their backgrounds, their personalities, their thinking – that enabled them to make that life-giving decision. And we discussed the question of why it is that more people did not do the same. One of the reasons that students often stated, echoed by some of the sources that we read, was that people believed that there were two and only two potential outcomes that were linked to the decision that they made about the Jews. First, they could take a step to save others, perhaps through harboring