The real reason why moral dilemmas are popular
Tommi:
As I was watching TV yesterday I observed that in shows that are scripted and acted there is quite a lot of arguing going on, and the characters typically constantly face many ethical problems. I compared that to my own life and noticed that my daily life contains very few moral problems. With this, I refer to choices in which it is difficult to find out what is right and what is wrong.
Somehow I imagine that I am not exceptional. This naturally raises the question why people want (the content of TV shows pretty much consists of what people, that is, probably you right there, really want) to watch stories in which some phenomenon that is extremely rare in real life is written to be orders of magnitude more common. Moral dilemmas probably give people some kind of pleasure.
The same applies to arguing. During my life I have noticed that some people argue and others don't. Everybody has conflicts of interest, but arguing is actually a very inefficient way of solving them. That's why most people skate through their lives using more mellow and diplomatic means. During my life, arguments have pretty much depended on who I have been dealing with at the time. Observing these people later in other contexts I noticed that they tend to argue with their new acquaintances, or carry grudges, whichever suits them best.
It is certainly possibly to extract resources and get emotional content to your life by arguing. The need for moral problems is more interesting. I believe that a moral problem helps to fuzzify norms of life and stretch them a little to the necessary direction. Ethical dilemmas are not interesting because people want to solve them, but because their uncertainty is hoped to contagiously infect certain obvious and commonsense facts that are considered unpleasant.
Now that I think more about the stream of consciousness that is called my life, it's hard, I mean really hard for me to find any genuine moral dilemmas. It is always easy to tell who is guilty and who is innocent. Usually behind every moral dilemma there has been the fact that me or someone else has had shadowy interests that I have hoped to advance with a little bit of cheating and confusion.
That's how it goes in everyday life. In the public sphere genuine dilemmas seem to exist, especially in prioritization of health care or in international politics. Or are there? Is it just that as a regular everyday person I am more familiar with everyday problems and can see the hollowness of their moral interpretation, but tend to accept equally weak claims in topics that I am less familiar with?
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