What’s a dilemma? What does it matter?
March 27th, 2008Sometimes it’s wise and useful to begin at the beginning. What’s a dilemma? The OED, that is, the Online Etymology Dictionary, not the revered but “virtually” inaccessible Oxford English Dictionary, describes dilemma this way:
1523, from L.L. [Late Latin] dilemma, from Gk [Greek - δίλήμμα]. dilemma “double proposition,” a technical term in rhetoric, from di- “two” + lemma “premise, anything taken.”
I interpret this as meaning that dilemma comes from Latin, with roots in ancient Greek.
Early in its development dilemma reflected its origin as a rhetorical device in debate, that is, saddling an opponent with two alternatives either of which resulted in loss of the argument. Thus the genesis of the phrase “on the horns of a dilemma.” Which horn of the bull do you prefer to be impaled upon?
Dilemma eventually escaped the narrow confines of rhetorical to and fro and came to mean facing “a usually undesirable or unpleasant choice.” Fast-forward 500 years. Today the widely used word is more likely to be used in describing, in the words of Merriam-Webster, “a problem involving a difficult choice,” such as the dilemma of “liberty versus order.” Most people want both. But sometimes, in some circumstances, we have to choose.
A quick search of Google News in late March 2008 reveals dilemma being employed in these headlines: “Delegate Dilemma, Solved,” “‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ topic of talk today,” “Dilemma over prices,” “Microsoft’s Dilemma,” “Obama’s Dilemma,” “McCain’s Iraq Dilemma,” and “A moral dilemma.”
The latter was the title of a column by Rob Merrick, a writer for the Liverpool Daily Post. He posed the question to his readers: Which is the greater moral dilemma? “A war which has caused perhaps 1m civilian deaths, or using the outer, empty shell of animal eggs to try to save countless lives?” He was describing the decision of British Secretary of State Robin Cook to resign from the Cabinet following the decision of Prime Minister Tony Blair to take his country to war in Iraq in 2003. Cook resigned as a matter of conscience. The other dilemma was that faced by Labor MPs who objected on religious grounds to key provisions of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill then before Parliament.
One of the provisions concerned animal-human hybrid embryos. Scientists wanted to create these embryos using cow or rabbit eggs in place of scarce human eggs and extract stem cells. The goal was not to create “do experiments of Frankenstein proportions,” as the Catholic bishop of Scotland had claimed in a sermon, nor to give the other Robin Cook, the physician and bestselling novelist, grist for his science fiction blockbuster mill, for his next Coma, Mutation, or Chromosome 6. The goal, Merrick wrote, was “to try to find cures for crippling diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Motor Neurone, cancer and heart disease,” noting that “more than 99% of the animal’s genetic make-up is removed from the egg before human DNA is inserted.”
For Merrick, which situation represented the greater moral dilemma was a no-brainer: “Going back to my earlier question – whether Iraq or embryo research poses greater moral questions – there can be only one answer, surely? It must be going to war.” Not everyone would agree. After all, we humans are accustomed to war. We’ve lived with conflict since our ancestral population emerged in east Africa 50,000 years ago. Most of us have come to terms with war as an unpleasant but apparently inescapable element of organized human behavior. We are not accustomed to experiments in which human DNA is put into eggs other than those of our own species.
That the word dilemma dates to the early 16th century is not surprising. It was the age of the Renaissance, the “rebirth” of ancient learning and its languages, Greek and Latin. The Renaissance was a time of social upheaval and transformation as the world had never seen, what with the flourishing of architecture and the arts, the rise of printing, the discovery of distant lands and establishment of global trade routes, and the challenge to the Roman Church posed the emergence of doctrinal heresies and secular outlooks.
Today, five centuries on, we are entering another period of transformation. This time the prime mover is the accelerating pace of scientific discovery and technological change, particularly in the life sciences. We are beginning a biorenaissance. The dilemmas posed by exploration into the biological unknown will only grow.
Do you agree with Merrick that the dilemma posed by human-animal hybrid research to advance medical science pales in comparison to the dilemma posed by war?
The Stem Cell Dilemma, Leo Furcht MD and William Hoffman