Abstract

The existence of genuine moral dilemmas is a controversial question in moral philosophy, especially for the compromising effects on normative level. In this paper we discuss this problem arguing that moral dilemmas can be considered as a basic philosophical category because they are, first of all, a basic psychological category. We focus our attention on interplay between intuition, judgment and reasoning within the moral domain in order to support the hypothesis that the paradoxical decision of a dilemma is a reflex of an internal conflict between elaboration systems. From this point of view, the analysis of moral dilemmas becomes a case study to reflect on the general question about the relationship between moral philosophy and moral psychology. We argue that only an empirically-constrained philosophical moral research can actively contribute to the debate promoting new inquiring directions.