What about "Sophie's choice", for instance? It is not essentially through any fault of her own that she finds herself confronted with having to choose which of her two children she will save from slaughter by the Nazis. Nor will it do to say that her duty is clear and that she should save one of them even if she cannot save both. For choosing one means attributing greater value to that child's life than to the other's, which is contrary to all conscience, whereas choosing not to choose entails giving them both up to execution. Whatever she does, she does a horrible wrong.
I'm inclined to think this is the wrong way to characterize it. Whatever Sophie does, the Nazis do a horrible wrong; the problem Sophie faces is, on the contrary, the prudential one of how to limit that to the limited extent she can. She herself does nothing wrong unless she chooses an immoral means of doing this. Choosing one child over the other will be a heart-rending decision, but it will not mean "attributing greater value to that child's life than to the other's"; if it did, the choice would still be difficult, but Sophie would just be choosing the one she values most, as she might if the choice were not between her children but between a husband and a stranger, or between her own child and another's child. There is nothing contrary to conscience about such a choice. What makes this choice so difficult is that it is not such a situation at all; the agonizing feature is that she values both equally, because they are both her children, and so she has to make a terrible prudential judgment in which lives are at stake. Sophie's dilemma is arguably not a moral dilemma at all, in the sense we usually use the term; it is an unbearable dilemma, a tragic choice. No matter what path she takes, one can only pity her having to make it, not condemn the choice itself, which is a sign that this is not a moral dilemma of the right sort.
So I think. How about you?
[ADDED LATER: David Corfield has pointed out to me a number of weaknesses in the review that I had overlooked on first reading, so perhaps the weakness here is simply a symptom of a broader failure in the review.]
