Maureen Kelley University of Alabama at Birmingham "Surviving Moral Compromise"

Abstract: Is moral compromise a reasonable feature of a liberal moral psychology and liberal institutions? How do agents "survive" or live with prior moral compromises? I offer a consequentialist argument for why one ought to compromise under conditions of moral scarcity. These conditions hold, roughly, when not all of one's moral commitments can be realized in a particular context or decision and not compromising will most likely result in none of one's commitments being realized. While this is a fairly ubiquitous requirement of living in a plural society and functioning within liberal institutions, it turns out to be a fairly costly requirement for those with even some moral commitments that do not admit easily of trade-offs. While such persons may be moved by the reasons for compromising, they are often left with residual regret and may be subject to group shame, since they still hold the prior uncompromised commitment or belief to be true. For those who hold even some of these types of commitments are calls for moral compromise, institutional or personal, too demanding? If ought implies can, in what sense can we compromise and survive a moral compromise with our sense of self and social trust relationships intact? To explore this question I turn to psychological studies and historical accounts of individuals who have survived past moral compromises. "Survivors" are those who are able to reconcile with the past compromise in their own minds and to some degree with others. And there is an interesting common feature across these cases. These individuals exhibit varying degrees of moral cognitive dissonance: a separation within moral agency of the self who in some sense believes the uncompromised value to hold true and so believes the compromise to be wrong, regrets it, etc., but also believes the compromise to be necessary and morally justified. As originally formulated (Festinger, 1957), cognitive dissonance is induced when a person holds two contradictory beliefs, or when a belief is incongruent with an action that the person had chosen freely to perform. Moral compromises, I suggest, may fit the latter form in practical morality. The agent doesn't abandon the prior moral belief, but circumstances give her reason to act in a way that is incongruent with the belief (a compromise decision), causing post-decision stress that must be reconciled in some way. The dissonance produces strong feelings of psychological and social discomfort and so the agent must either revise one of the beliefs or behaviors in order to avoid being inconsistent. Cognitive dissonance seems to suggest a mechanism for surviving moral compromise, but is it a pathological survival mechanism, or might it lead to pathological states of dissociation, as in cases of post-traumatic dissociation? More worrisome from a moral point of view, how do we distinguish protective, healthy dissonance from lazy rationalizations of past wrongdoing, or worse, sociopathic dissociation from moral atrocities. If cognitive dissonance in the context of moral psychology is pathological, are some obligations to compromise too demanding? Do some moral requirements to resolve conflict through compromise demand a pathological moral psychology? If so, insofar as norms of compromise are central to the health of democratic institutions but may not be central to the "health" of individuals who have roles in those institutions, we may need to rethink everything from voting, administrative decisions, policy making, as well as more personal decisions like the Jehovah's Witness who is asked to compromise on a blood policy in an urban clinical setting. On the other hand, if certain types of cognitive dissonance are not ideal but are protective, and these institutional structures are, on balance, worth the cost to strict forms of individual moral integrity, perhaps cognitive dissonance is the key to understanding how those with strong moral commitments get on in a liberal society and benefit from the cooperative arrangement.

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