The paper is devoted to describing teachers' experiences and their ways of behaviour linked with situations requiring making difficult choices between various possibilities. In the analyses, I attempt to stress what choices are more recommendable and what reasons prompt teachers to their actions at work. I am interested in the ways teachers react in problematic situations, especially those which are connected with their attempts at good deeds. Whereas I am not interested in teachers' actions which could be assessed as good or bad, thus the term I use in the title is “ethical dilemmas” and not “moral dilemmas”. Therefore, by using the word “ethical”, I emphasise teachers' conduct which is linked with attempts to search for and create foundations for respectable wok and respectable life. I intentionally do not use the word “moral”, since morality – if we refer to the etymology of this word – concerns rather the question if some deeds are right or wrong. In other words, morality is a social practice connected with how we utilise particular rules referring to the ideas of the good and the bad. It is one of the forms of social awareness encompassing both a system of values functioning in a certain social group or a society, a system of norms protecting these values, models of human behaviour, and a system of moral assessment and sanctions. Understanding the essence of ethical dilemmas is possible in the context of discovering their sources, especially a conflict of values appearing in situations of ambiguous nature.

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