Sophie Zawistowska Dilemma

Life sometimes presents people with situations that cannot easily be avoided or side-stepped because they create a moral and ethical dilemma. Such dilemmas are those in which the right and wrong choose of action are difficult to determine; individuals faced with such dilemmas experience internal conflicts in the challenge of selecting an outcome from the few options presented, neither of which offers will resolve the issue without compromising some ethical principle. In an ethical dilemma, as the person is forced to take responsibility for their decision, one usually chooses the least worst of the options. This is exactly what occurs in William Styron novel Sophie’s Choice, in which the character Sophie Zawistowska after being brought to an Auschwitz death camp is offered the opportunity to save one of her two children. After her choosing life for one child and death for the other, instead of allowing both to perish, she is haunted forever by that moment, ridden with the guilt of choosing between her children feeling as if she had singlehandedly written away her daughter’s life. Clearly, Sophie was faced
No mother would ever wish to be forced to prevent one child’s death while having to watch the other child dragged towards their death, and some may have remained stagnant and allow both to die rather than place the burden of guilt that would immediately follow such a choice. Some people may take this path, feeling as if they are saving themselves from a guilty conscience of picking a daughter or son to send to die and instead facing sorrow alone instead of saving another’s life. But in reality, allowing the death of two loved one instead of preventing one is really more reason to feel guilt; you are still sending someone to their death because you did not make the decision to save