Final answer:
Moral experiences encompass our broad interactions with morality, informed by an intuitive moral faculty, whereas moral dilemmas involve specific situations where moral principles conflict. Theories like utilitarianism and deontology provide frameworks for such dilemmas but may not capture the complexity of moral experiences. Moral theories are further informed by perspectives from neuroethics to phenomenology, revealing the complex nature of morality.
Step-by-step explanation:
While moral experiences and moral dilemmas are closely related, they are not identical. Moral experiences encompass the broader range of our experiences with morality, which may include feelings, intuitions, and reactions to everyday moral situations. These experiences are informed by our moral faculty, an intuitive judgment of right and wrong that reflects our evolutionary history as social mammals. On the contrary, moral dilemmas specifically involve situations where there is a conflict between moral principles or where making a decision involves a significant moral trade-off.
Classic moral theories such as utilitarianism and deontology provide frameworks for evaluating moral dilemmas by balancing the outcome of happiness or following absolute moral rules, respectively. However, these theories may oversimplify the complexity of real-life moral experiences and decision-making, as in practice, the best we can often do is make an informed decision with the information we have, navigating the nuances of moral pluralism.
Neuroethics explores how moral decision-making is represented in the brain, while phenomenology looks at the subjective experience of morality. Moral responsibility, free will, the role of divine authority in ethics, and empirical research on moral judgments, such as the Trolley problems, all contribute to the rich tapestry of understanding morality. These differing approaches reveal that morality is not solely a matter of divine authority or self-interest but is complex and multi-dimensional.