Defenders often point to apparent examples while their opponents usually aim to show their existence contradicts very fundamental ethical principles.
Traditionally, philosophers held that it is a requirement for good moral theories to be free from ethical dilemmas.
But this conflict is not a genuine ethical dilemma since it has a clear resolution: jumping into the water to save the child significantly outweighs the importance of making it to the meeting on time.
Also excluded from this definition are cases in which it is merely psychologically difficult for the agent to make a choice, for example, because of personal attachments or because the knowledge of the consequences of the different alternatives is lacking.
For example, it is possible to hold that in cases of ethical dilemmas, the agent is free to choose either course of action, that either alternative is right.
One of the oldest examples is due to Plato, who sketches a situation in which the agent has promised to return a weapon to a friend, who is likely to use it to harm someone since he is not in his right mind.
It is questionable whether this case constitutes a genuine ethical dilemma since the duty to prevent harms seems to clearly outweigh the promise.
[4][1] Another well-known example comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, who describes the situation of one of his students during the German occupation of France.
This student faced the choice of either fighting to liberate his country from the Germans or staying with and caring for his mother, for whom he was the only consolation left after the death of her other son.
[4][9][10] Many decisions in everyday life, from a trivial choice between differently packaged cans of beans in the supermarket to life-altering career-choices, involve this form of uncertainty.
[4] This distinction is sometimes used to argue against the existence of ethical dilemmas by claiming that all apparent examples are in truth epistemic in nature.
But there may be other cases in which the agent is unable to acquire information that would settle the issue, sometimes referred to as stable epistemic ethical dilemmas.
[9][4] The difference between self-imposed and world-imposed ethical dilemmas concerns the source of the conflicting requirements.
[1] The term "problem of dirty hands" refers to another form of ethical dilemmas, which specifically concerns political leaders who find themselves faced with the choice of violating commonly accepted morality in order to bring about some greater overall good.
Opponents of ethical dilemmas often reject this argument based on the claim that the initial intuitions in such cases are misleading.
Some opponents have responded to this difficulty by arguing that all these cases merely constitute epistemic but not genuine dilemmas, i.e. that the conflict merely seems unresolvable because of the agent's lack of knowledge.
According to this interpretation, we mistake our uncertainty about which course of action outweighs the other for the idea that this conflict is not resolvable on the ontological level.
[5] In some cases of moral residue, the agent is responsible herself because she made a bad choice which she regrets afterward.
[4][11] Another counter-argument allows that guilt is the appropriate emotional response but denies that this indicates the existence of an underlying ethical dilemma.
This line of argument can be made plausible by pointing to other examples, e.g. cases in which guilt is appropriate even though no choice whatsoever was involved.
[4] So in cases of conflict, the higher duty would always take precedent over the lower one, for example, that telling the truth is always more important than keeping a promise.
One problem with this approach is that it fails to solve symmetric cases: when two duties of the same type stand in conflict with each other.
[4] This is, for example, W. D. Ross's position, according to which we stand under a number of different duties and have to decide on their relative weight based on the specific situation.
[20] But without a further argument, this line of thought just begs the question against the defender of ethical dilemmas, who may simply deny the claim that all conflicts can be resolved this way.
So these intuitions about the nature of good moral theories indirectly support the claim that there are no ethical dilemmas.