The 4 Types of Ethical Dilemmas — Which One Are You Facing?
Most hard moral choices are not good versus evil — they are right versus right: two genuine values that cannot both win. Decades of applied ethics keep sorting these clashes into four recurring shapes — truth versus loyalty, the individual versus the community, the short term versus the long term, and justice versus mercy. Naming the type does not solve the dilemma, but it reveals which two goods are actually fighting, and that is usually where people quietly disagree. Each type below comes with a live dilemma you can vote on, and you can watch where the split falls.
Vote on this dilemma
On his deathbed, your father tells you he secretly rewrote his will 20 years ago to give your brother a larger share — your brother was struggling and your father could not bring himself to discuss it. Your brother never knew. Your father asks you to keep it that way. You are the executor of the estate.
Research background
The four-way classification — truth vs loyalty, individual vs community, short-term vs long-term, justice vs mercy — was popularised by ethicist Rushworth Kidder as a way to describe "right vs right" conflicts. SplitVote pairs each type with a real dilemma and live vote data.
SplitVote is for entertainment and aggregate insight, not a scientific test.
Related dilemmas
You discover your closest friend committed a serious financial crime — embezzling from a charity. Do you turn them in?
Vaccines are 99% effective and safe. Should they be legally mandatory for school attendance, even for parents with religious objections?
Your terminally ill parent is dying in another country. You've publicly pledged never to fly again for climate reasons — your 80,000 followers remember. A train would take 4 days and might arrive too late.
Twelve years ago someone broke into your home and held you at gunpoint for 40 minutes. They served their sentence. They now have a family and mentor at-risk youth full-time. A school has called you asking for a character reference — they do not know you are the victim. You are one of very few people in the community who knows about the conviction.
Related topics
No account required. Your vote is anonymous.