A situation in which a person must choose between two or more options that each involve an important moral value or duty, so that honouring one means compromising another, and no choice is free of moral cost.
Many ethical problems are not really dilemmas. When the choice is between taking a bribe and refusing it, the right answer is clear; the difficulty is having the will to do it. A true dilemma arises when competing values are both legitimate: telling the truth to a regulator might harm a loyal colleague; strictly enforcing an eviction order protects the law but makes a poor family homeless; releasing information serves transparency but may endanger someone's privacy.
Philosophers have long discussed such conflicts. Greek tragedy, such as Sophocles' "Antigone", turns on a conflict between duty to the state and duty to family. The Mahabharata presents Arjuna's dilemma on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where duty as a warrior conflicts with love for his kin, resolved in the Bhagavad Gita through the idea of action without attachment to results. Modern management writers, such as Rushworth Kidder, described four common "right versus right" paradigms: truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, short-term versus long-term, and justice versus mercy.
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