Making sense of doing wrong: on the justification of compromise decisions.
| Autor | Cejudo C |
| Cargo | Art |
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Introduction with Some Examples
Under General Franco's dictatorship, the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) struggled against the regime under cover inside the country and openly abroad. Setting aside the degree to which the PCE contributed to the final success of the democratic forces, its leaders actually relinquished some of their most cherished communist ideals in order to facilitate the advent of democracy in Spain (Preston 2001; Tusell 2007). In the end, Communist leaders managed to convince their grassroots membership, to accept a bourgeois democratic system. Indeed, not just the PCE but almost every party and social organization, each in its own way, had to forsake an essential part of its agenda and even some of its most treasured symbols and ideals. Hence the 1978 Spanish Constitution was the result of a compromise between very different political outlooks. Of course, political history is a story of amendments, partial solutions and compromises, not only in this particular case of transition to democracy. Let us recall one of the American Constitution compromises. In 1787, during the Philadelphia Convention, Northern and Southern States reached a compromise to include part of the slave population in the calculations for each state contribution to the federal budget, and its level of representation in the Federal Congress (Lynd 1966; Walton and Smith 2011). Anti-slavery States did not wish to include slave population of the Southern states in the congressional apportionment. Naturally, Southern States wished the opposite. On the other hand, these states were disinclined to take into account the slave population for the purpose of determining their contributions to the federal budget, while the Northern states regarded this as unfair. In the end, Northern and Southern states came up with a compromise under which 60 per cent of the slave population was taken into account; this was named the Three-Fifths Compromise.
Compromising is a pervasive phenomenon, and it is certainly a key question in democratic politics. In fact it is part and parcel of any sort of political activity, because compromising is required wherever there is both cooperation and competition. There is a rather large bibliography regarding compromise in politics, particularly concerning its role in democracy from a liberal point of view (Arnsperger and Picavet 2004; Bellamy 2002; Berlin 1998; Besson 2005; Day 1989; Ferrié and Dupret 2004; Galston 2005; Kagan 1989; Kekes 1993; Stocker 1990). There is also some research addressing compromise as a form of negotiation. Rational choice literature is quite useful here (Arnsperger and Picavet 2004; Aumann 1976; Chun and Thomson 1992; Hirschleifer 1995; Varoufakis 1991; Yu 1973). However, compromise is necessary in many other spheres of social and personal life, involving bread-and-butter issues, family or working life, often calling for far-reaching or painful decisions. But let us go back for a moment to the above-mentioned examples from the political realm. In both examples, the parties to the conflicts pursued political goals of broader scope than just their conflicting interests. The disagreement concerned antagonistic ideals and deep differences on values and beliefs. Therefore it was not only a question of raw interests, and it would be misguided to look upon these compromises as mere examples of bartering. In particular, Spanish politicians had to accept their second or their third best, and the Three-Fifths Compromise involved sacrificing high anti-slavery standards.
It should be noted that specific people are involved in any compromise. In other words, to settle a dispute and reach a compromise, someone has to discuss, negotiate and give way. Santiago Carrillo, then leader of the PCE, or Adolfo Suárez, the moderate right-wing leader at the time, had to sacrifice some of their previous beliefs and betray some of their former commitments. In other words, they made a compromise in order to obtain a reasonable political agreement for the future. Maybe they compromised their integrity, or felt they did so, for the sake of their country. One of the Three-Fifths Compromise negotiators was the Constitutional Convention member Rufus King, strongly opposed to slavery. Like many Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he considered it was better to compromise than to split his country, although this might require putting his moral and religious principles at risk. I shall focus on this aspect of the compromising problem, rather than the process of negotiation that is usually the forerunner to a compromise. Carrillo and King made some decisions in their respective processes. They had to take hard and painful choices so as to eventually arrive at a compromise. Perhaps the decisions they made involved injustice or even getting their hands dirty. In other words, they had to make compromise decisions. I shall come back to this question shortly.
This article is divided into four sections. The first deals with the notion of compromise. Now, in the ordinary use of the word two different basic meanings can be distinguished. According to dictionary definitions, a compromise is an agreement or settlement that is achieved by mutual concessions. However, leaving aside the reference to a kind of agreement, a compromise is also a concession to something that is less than what one desires. In this second meaning, compromises are states or outcomes that are accepted as solutions although they make room for damaging or even derogatory consequences. Therefore, I shall consider that a compromise agreement (CA) is different from a compromise decision (CD), because although a compromise is a kind of agreement it also implies a kind of decision that an individual agent has to take in a negotiation or whenever a clear-cut solution is not possible. Hence, in opposition to the more frequent approach on compromise as negotiation, I shall focus on compromise as decision, and I shall discuss such decisions through analysis of the normative judgments involved. Some CDs can be considered merely as strategic devices in a negotiation, but others involve serious moral problems for decision makers. This is why I distinguish between strategic and moral compromises, and I pay close attention to integrity-compromising decisions, to wit, CDs that jeopardize moral principles or cherished values.
My approach differs from the literature in that it focuses on those predicaments where some compromise is inevitable (this is what I call a compromise situation or CS), and not on the conditions or procedures to find or obtain a, say, "right" compromise solution. My concern is rather with the structural features of compromise situations. I will try to show that in those situations there is a certain loss of value because the decision maker voluntarily accepts postponement of something that is right or otherwise mandatory. Obviously, this is tied in with the problem of the right compromise solution, because not just any CD is justified in a CS despite the fact that any choice entails a loss of value. All the same, since in a CS some compromise is inescapable, it is necessary to establish that a CS exists in order to determine whether a moral agent needs to accept a compromise solution. I shall explain that CSs arise when different norms come into conflict, when complying with agreements, respecting previous commitments, or when faced with incommensurability of choice, dilemmatic situations or lack of information. These are all root causes of CDs.
In the third section I turn to the formal presuppositions of a CD. This issue is linked to a more substantial one: taking for granted that a certain decision should be a compromise, when does it become integrity compromising? To answer this question I shall use some notions suggested by Amartya Sen. The concept of basic judgment will be used to find out when a choice involves a net loss of value according to the compromiser. I hold that if no basic judgment is concerned, then a non integrity-compromising decision is possible in that specific CS. On the other hand, even if a basic judgment is concerned, a CD may be integrity compromising but justified provided that this basic judgment is not a compulsive judgment. In the concluding section, I suggest that normative judgments are not only action-guiding devices. If we look upon CDs in this more comprehensive manner, deep ethical oppositions of the deontology vs. consequentialism sort could be tackled by some reasonable compromise.
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Notion of Compromise
The word compromise means basically two different things, though there is a link between them. First, a compromise is a kind of agreement, and as such is the result of a negotiation. In a compromise everybody loses (more or less) in order to get a collective gain. None of the parties to the deal fully meets its goals, but this is the price that they have to pay to reach an accord. That is why, paradoxically, getting a compromise means making everybody happy while giving them less than what they wanted. In a compromise every party eventually accepts a balance between its desires and its possibilities, and thus the agreement is struck by means of mutual concessions. This is the first sense of the word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. However, the compromise is not only the result of the negotiation (a kind of deal), but also entails a process to reach that deal. This means we might have an unsuccessful give and take which fails to reach a joint agreement in spite of mutual concessions. On the other hand a compromise could be imposed on the parties in the event of their not reaching any agreement (Margalit 2010, pp. 53-54). This is what Golding calls a third-party compromise, in opposition to a directly negotiated compromise. The third party is an arbitrator, and she can seek a compromise in three different ways: adjudication, conciliation and therapeutic integration...
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