Moral Conflicts and the Limits of Moral Theory

This article examines whether moral theory can provide satisfactory guidance to agents facing (resolvable) moral conflicts where mutually exclusive actions are required by significant moral reasons. Employing an exploratory approach, we map the alternatives offered by value-based moral theories, focusing on monism, which grounds moral reasons in a single value like utility, and hierarchical pluralism, which assigns a fixed ranking to multiple intrinsic values. Non-hierarchical pluralism is dismissed as it fails to offer practical guidance beyond subjective prioritisation. We propose two criteria for evaluating these theories: scope of resolution—the range of conflicts a theory can address—and explanatory capacity—the ability to account for ordinary moral experiences regarding moral conflicts, such as moral residue. Monism is criticised for its inability to explain the persistence of moral reasons not acted upon, while hierarchical pluralism faces a dilemma: it is either too narrow in scope or unable to accommodate circumstantial variations in the relative importance of values. Our findings suggest that moral theory’s practical role in resolving moral conflicts is inherently limited. Instead, resolving most moral conflicts requires practical wisdom, as theorised in the Aristotelian tradition, which acknowledges the complexity and context-dependence of moral reasoning.