Any working ethical system that actually works for human morality will entail trade-off’s. There are cases where different moral values conflict. You will encounter them often. You will have to make choices. What’s interesting is that when talking to most normal people who I’ve worked with, they’re extremely reluctant to discuss or recognize the need to make these kinds of trade-off’s. This may be a more specific case of the general aversion to moral awareness and the need for judgment both of your self and of others that it entails but I think it’s something else. Even when discussing specifically moral subjects on which people are happy to stake out positions, still no one recognizes trade-off’s have to be made.
I wonder why? A few hypothesises:
- Trade-off’s are socially costly/risky to discuss vs applause lights statements like “we should do good thing X we all agree on”
- Trade-off’s require a greater degree of ethical thought/development than simple black/white rules
- Most people either have no coherent moral framework or in some cases are developed enough to have a simple singular conception of the good. Very few get past that stage to the point where they have multiple competing values which they trade-off against each other.
Dissent 