In this article, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Lebens asks if there is a right answer to every ethical dilemma and discusses whether there can be an ethical downside to making correct moral decisions.

Jean Paul Sartre was of the opinion that real ethical dilemmas are a fact of life. He presents the case of a pupil of his who sought his advice during the Second World War. The pupil’s older brother had been killed in the German invasion of France. His mother was living alone with him. She was living a miserable life. Her husband was inclined to become a NAZI collaborator, and she felt deeply betrayed by this treason. And, what with the death of her oldest son, Sartre’s pupil was her one consolation in life. This pupil was faced with the choice of going to England to join the Free French Forces or staying with his mother and helping her to live. Sartre paints the contours of the dilemma in the following way:

He fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would have to wait indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or, on arriving in England or in Algiers he might be put into an office to fill up forms. Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous – and it might be frustrated on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. ¹

On Sartre’s view, the ethical life is messy. There wasn’t a perfect choice in this instance, because he would either betray his mother, or his nation. The Christian ethic of choosing the harder path offered no obvious assistance here because it was far from clear which path would have been harder for the pupil in question. The Kantian ethic of treating people as ends, and never as means, offered no obvious help either. If he stayed, he’d be treating his mother as an end, but treating his compatriots as means, as he free-rides on their efforts and sacrifices. But joining the struggle risked neglecting his mother, as an end in herself.

The other extreme, in ethical theory, claims that there can never be real ethical dilemmas. In the situation that Sartre presents there is one best, and mandated choice – even if it isn’t immediately obvious to us what that choice should be. This radical view is most commonly associated with Immanuel Kant, but it receives a very clear expression in these words of John Lemmon (not to be confused with John Lennon):

It may be argued that our being faced with [a situation of moral dilemma] merely reflects an implicit inconsistency in our existing moral code; we are forced, if we are to remain both moral and logical, by the situation to restore consistency to our code by adding exception clauses to our present principles or by giving priority to one principle over another, or by some such device. The situation is as it is in mathematics: there, if an inconsistency is revealed by derivation, we are compelled to modify our axioms; here, if an inconsistency is revealed in application, we are forced to revise our principles. ²

According to Lemmon, if our ethical principles don’t generate a clear winner when we’re faced with a choice of how to act, then our ethical principles need fixing. An ethical theory should operate with all of the clarity and precision of a mathematical theory. If the theory seems to be generating contradictions or conflict, then the fault lies with us, and we have to fix the theory, or our mistake in applying the theory. The ethical life, when properly understood, is not messy at all; it’s pristine. And when it seems to be messy, it’s only because we’re not yet good enough at ethical theory.

ne might be tempted to think that a Jewish ethic is going to come down on the side of Kant (and Lemmon) over Sartre. Jewish law presents us with a very complex algorithm to help us determine what to do when the law seems to be making conflicting demands of us. For instance: saving a life trumps all of the other laws of the Torah, save from three;³ a positive commandment trumps a negative commandment, when the two are in conflict;⁴ a positive public commandment trumps a positive private one;⁵ a Biblical command trumps a rabbinic one. And though ethics and law are not identical concepts, it seems fair to assume that we will never be acting unethically if we stick scrupulously to God’s law – especially that law seems to mandate going beyond the letter of the law wherever feasible.⁶

But this pristine view of the ethical life seems somehow unrealistic. Life is messy, and even if we always do the very best that a person can do, it seems to us as if it isn’t always possible to live one’s life, and to make the tough decisions, without sometimes getting one’s hands a little dirty. Philippa Foot, to my mind, does an excellent job of forging a compromise position between the two extremes – a compromise which I think was preempted by the Midrash, and endorsed by Rashi and Tosfot.

Fundamentally, Foot seems to agree with Kant, against Sartre, than in any given situation, a robust ethical theory – if only we understood it well enough – will tell you which path is indisputably the best path. The ethical life, in that sense, isn’t messy. If, in a certain situation, ethics demands that we reveal a secret that we had promised never to tell, then we shouldn’t feel guilty, since we did nothing wrong. Perhaps the ethical law allowed us to make the promise when we made it, but because of extraordinary circumstances, the ethical law later demanded that we break the promise. If that’s the case, then we did nothing wrong. Guilt would be irrational. Likewise, it would be irrational to feel guilty for missing an appointment with a friend, if you missed it because you had to save somebody’s life instead. You did nothing wrong. And yet, Foot recognises that breaking the promise, or missing the appointment, might leave you feeling somehow tainted. The taint is felt because you refrained from doing something good, albeit because you were obliged to do something better; or you were obliged to do something ugly so as to prevent yourself from doing something worse. The taint isn’t the taint of guilt, but it is a taint nevertheless.

There can’t be ethical dilemmas, but doing the right thing can be somehow ugly:

[T]he situation may be such that no one can emerge with clean hands whatever he does. Perhaps he must either betray his friend’s confidence or let an innocent man be condemned through his silence. Either action seems shabby and what Williams has called the moral “disagreeableness” will not go away, even if there is a clear [ethical] solution and the agent is guided by it… ⁷

The disagreeableness, or the taint, or the dirty hands shouldn’t be called guilt. There was a clear ethical solution, and you abided by it. You did nothing wrong. But you still got your hands dirty. It is the confusion between moral disagreeableness, and guilt, that could lead a person wrongly to conclude, with Sartre, that real ethical dilemmas arise. They do not. In any situation there is always a right thing to do, and doing the right thing can never leave you guilty, even if it can leave you with something of a spiritual taint.

Foot’s view, I think, can be found in Rashi’s commentary to the Torah. In Genesis 15, God tells Abraham not to fear, after his military victory. God consoles him and tells him that ‘I will be your shield, and your reward is great.’ The question is, what was Abraham afraid of? Rashi (op. cit.) claims that Abraham was scared that he would have no reward left over in the afterlife because the miracles that had been wrought for him on earth, especially during the war he fought, would have left him without credit in the bank of rewards. This is why God assured him that his reward will be great. But why does God tell Abraham that he will be his shield? Rashi suggests that God, almost in rebuke, tells Abraham that there was something additional that he should have been fearing, but which he hadn’t thought to fear. According to Rashi, Abraham should have been fearful of punishment for killing people in the act of war. God tells Abraham that he will shield him from this punishment.

Rashi’s view is extremely counter-intuitive. How could there be any punishment due to Abraham for fighting a just war? He had to fight the war. It was the only way to save his nephew. There is never a suggestion that the war wasn’t just. Indeed, God himself helped Abraham to win the war by way of miracle, even according to Rashi. So, why should Abraham fear punishment for doing the right thing? It seems to me that the best way to answer this question is to realise that Divine punishment comes to a person not merely to expiate guilt, but to remove the spiritual taint that the sin leaves on a person’s soul. Abraham didn’t sin. He bears no guilt in this situation. But, just as Foot predicts, it can be possible for a completely ethical action to leave something of a taint.

Relatedly, Bereshit Rabba 76:2 addresses Jacob’s fear of Esau.⁸ Jacob hears that Esau is approaching with a large military force. The Torah relates that he was ‘greatly afraid and distressed’ (Genesis 32:8). Rabbi Yehuda, the son of Ilai, wants to know why Jacob was afraid and distressed. What’s the difference here, between fear and distress? Here is his suggested answer:

[Jacob] was afraid that he would be killed, and distressed that he may have to kill. He said, ‘if he gets the better of me, he will kill me, and, if I get the better of him, I will kill him.’ And thus he was afraid that he would be killed and distressed that he may have to kill.

Jewish law mandates us to kill in self-defence.⁹ If Jacob had to kill Esau to save his own life, then he didn’t merely act ethically, he fulfilled an obligation. Why should Jacob feel distressed at the prospect of doing the right thing? The answer is simple. Doing the right thing may be right, but it’s not always nice. It can be extremely disagreeable. It can leave a taint.

In another Midrash (Tanchuma, Vayetze, 2), Jacob is criticised for not climbing the ladder in his dream, since the ladder led all the way up to heaven. The same Midrash suggests that that ladder was a symbol for political activity. Jacob saw that it wasn’t possible to climb the ladder of political engagement – it wasn’t possible to climb the greasy pole – without getting his hands dirty. And yet Jacob is criticised, in this Midrash, because the fear of getting dirty hands shouldn’t stop us from engaging with our duties. Jacob was right to be distressed to kill in self-defence. But he would have been wrong to let that distress stop him from doing the right thing. Jacob can figure out a way of removing the taint once he’s done his duty. Indeed, Tosafot even suggest that there are times where we have to fast for having done the right thing¹⁰ – not, I imagine, to expiate guilt, since – ex hypothesi – we did the right thing, but to address the taint that doing the right thing can sometimes leave us with.¹¹

The very systematicity of the halakhic system seems to imply that Sartre was wrong. There are no purely ethical dilemmas. But we don’t have to deny that the ethical life can be messy. Even when we do the right thing, our actions can carry some sort of cost – if not in terms of guilt, then in terms of a taint. If you kill a person because you’re obliged to do so, you still have blood on your hands, even if you bear no guilt. My teacher, Rabbi Shmuel Nacham, suggested to me a new reading of the blessing that we make in the Amida, when we bless God, ‘the shield of Abraham’. Perhaps we’re asking God to protect us, as he protected Abraham, from the negative spiritual consequences of doing the right thing.

1. John Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, edited by Stephen Priest (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pg. 33
2. From John Lemmon’s ‘Deontic Logic and the Logic of Imperatives,’ Logique et Analyse, VIII:29 (April 1965): 39-61
3. Tractate Yoma 82a
4. Tractate Beitza, 8b
5. Tractate Moed Katan 14b
6. See Rabbi Lichtentein (זצ”ל)’s classic article, ‘Does Jewish Tradition Recognizes an Ethic Independent of Halakha’, in Modern Jewish Ethics, edited by Marvin Fox (Ohio State University Press, 1975)
7. Philippa Foot, ‘Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma’, The Journal of Philosophy, 80:7 (Jul., 1983), pp. 379-398
8. Rashi’s comment on Genesis 15:1 is motivated by Bereshit Rabba, 45:2. But his reading is slightly revisionary in interesting ways. Bereshit Rabba 76:2 is even more clearly on Rashi’s side.
9. Tractate Sandherin 73a
10. Tractate Taanit 11a, s.v. Amar Shmuel
11. See Chavot Yair 236 for a similar halakhic opinion to Tosafot