On the possibility of principled moral compromise

Abstract

Simon May has argued that the notion of a principled compromise is incoherent. Reasons to compromise are always in his view strategic: though we think that the position we defend is still the right one, we compromise on this view in order to avoid the undesirable consequences that might flow from not compromising. I argue against May that there are indeed often principled reasons to compromise, and that these reasons are in fact multiple. First, compromises evince respect for persons that we have reason to think of as our epistemic peers, and acknowledgement of our own finitudes as moral reasoners. Second, compromises are often made morally necessary by the shortfalls that unavoidably separate democratic institutions from democratic ideals. Third, compromises express a desirable form of democratic community. And fourth, compromises are often justified from a consequentialist point of view, in that they allow for the realization of values that would not be realized as well by the failure to compromise.

Keywords:

• compromise
• democracy
• consequentialism
• moral pluralism

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to two anonymous reviewers for this journal. Versions of this paper have been presented to audiences in Boston, Victoria, Hamburg and Frankfurt. Thanks are due to audiences in all of those venues for helpful discussion and criticism. Thanks are due in particular to Simon May, Colin Macleod, and Rainer Forst.

Notes

1. Some of these conditions have been spelled out in the very specific context of international relations in time of war in Margalit (2010).

2. Though this paper defends compromise in a manner different from theirs, it nonetheless bears significant community of spirit with Benjamin (1990) and Bellamy (1999).

3. I am here distinguishing between ‘compromise,’ which I take to refer to the processes that are involved in bringing people to a shared position, and ‘a compromise,’ which denotes the result of that process that bears the characteristics that will be discussed at length in this paper. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having pressed me to make this clearer.

4. Are purely principled compromises immune from the impact of power differentials? In my analysis, they are. That is, the reasons that one may have to compromise for principled reasons differ from the pragmatic reasons that one may have to compromise. Now, real-world compromises are probably both pragmatic and principled. Or to be more precise, they are, when principled, probably also to some degree pragmatic. My intention here, however, is to bring into light the principled reasons one may have to compromise, and not to say anything about the degree to which real-world compromises are purely principled compromises. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having pushed me on this point.

5. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for having pressed this point.

6. One could imagine someone whose ethical or religious perspective required of him that he always compromise with others. As strange as it may sound, such a person would, in compromising, in a sense not really be compromising. The analysis provided here allows us to see why. Such a person would not satisfy condition 1, in that subsequent to confrontation of her views with others he would no longer think that his initial position was the best. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this fanciful example to me.

7. I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for having requested greater clarity on this point.

8. The terminology and the parsing of the arguments presented here differs slightly from that which May himself puts forward in his paper. I believe that my inventory of potential arguments better accounts for the bulk of the putative principled reasons for moral compromise than does May’s. But not much hangs on the difference for the purposes of the present argument.

9. To use a technical term much in debate in recent years, the disagreement of those we consider to be ‘epistemic peers’ provides us with reasons to compromise. For a recent article on the debate surrounding the impact of the disagreement of epistemic peers, see Enoch (2011).

10. For these criticisms and others, see Young (2000, esp. ch. 2).

11. For unsurpassed analyses of the ethical and technical stakes in electoral systems and in electoral reform, see the late Michael Dummett’s two magisterial works on the issue: Voting Procedures (1984) and Principles of Electoral Reform (1997).