Inspired by this thread which talks about a somewhat ludicrous moral dilemma that nevertheless is the sort that shows up in dramatic works from time to time. But so often, the hero avoids making the choice and instead ends up “saving both”, or there’s writerly intervention to change the whole situation. (Sometimes the difficult averted choice is even made light of after the fact).
Of course there must be some examples where the hard choice was made, and the character had to live with it. “24” was given as one example - Jack shoots his own boss under orders from the president, who does so to prevent terrorists from releasing a deadly virus. This is pretty good example, since it combines the elements of duty and authority in addition to weighing the cost of killing a friend vs. potentially allowing millions of people to die. What are some other examples?
I don’t have the DLC (downloadable content) showing this happening, but the “transition” add-on for the game Mass Effect 2, showing the events leading to Mass Effect 3, does this.
[spoiler]You play a Big Damned Hero of the galaxy, Commander Shepard. You’ve become obsessed with hunting down a massively powerful species of giant machines called the Reapers, who seek to extinguish all organic life in the galaxy, and have the power to do it as well if you can’t manage to prevent their return.
You get a mission to rescue a human scientist being held captive on an alien world. Once you do this and get to an escape ship, she reveals that she was planning to destroy the nearby “mass relay” (kind of a “jump gate” that lets spacecraft warp in and out of this star system) as her team had discovered the Reapers were traveling to this relay to use it to ‘teleport’ around the galaxy. If this relay was destroyed, it could take them years to find and travel to another one, even at faster-than-light speeds. Unfortunately, the exploding relay could possibly destroy the system that it is in.
You study the proof and confirm that this will indeed happen, but (after a bunch of stuff happens that ends up giving you around an hour until the Reapers arrive, so you have no room for finesse/warnings) end up having to fight your way to the mechanism to launch the destruction of the relay. Fail this mission in the game, and the Reapers show up and destroy everything - game over, or resume from your last save. Succeed, and you blow up the relay - and kill a few hundred thousand aliens who lived in that system.
The admiral who sent you on this covert mission says he’d give you a medal for what you did, but considering what happened to the system, you’re going to face charges, and he’ll stand with you at your trial.
And sure enough, Mass Effect 3 will apparently open with you at your trial. Since it’s a video game, you can expect this part won’t last long, but still.[/spoiler]
had to send her own boyfriend to Hell to save the world, even though he’d already turned back into good Angel instead of evil Angelus. Their relationship was never the same again.
Doesn’t the Saw series do this all the time? I’ve only seen the first two, but one of the later ones, part 6 I think, was on last night, and the opening trap was two people trapped in cells opposite one another across a hallway, each connected to some kind of timed death-dealing device. When the traps were triggered, the two people had a limited amount of time to cut off some of their own flesh and dump it down a chute, where a scale weighed it. If you had X number of pounds when time was up, you’d live and the other guy would die.
So, hell of a dilemma. How much are you willing to harm yourself to live, when it means that another person dies?