This colloquium talk is planned as an in-person event. Registration is only required for non-CEU members.
ABSTRACT
Is a moral compromise conceivable? Or are moral compromises self-contradictory, a contradiction in adjecto, because there is only a need for a compromise if the disputants do not succeed in finding a common platform on which their interests, their demands, the principles they represent can be reconciled? In that case, a moral compromise would have to be anchored in a theory which is free from a conception of values, principles or a good-evil distinction resting on universality or consensus. And yet it would have to provide an instrument with which justifiable decisions can be made.
For this reason, some authors have concluded that to compromise always implies a strategic and political attitude. According to them a compromise cannot be principle-based, and there can be no moral compromise in the sense of deontic morality.
I will examine the question using the conflict over abortion as a significant example. I will argue that the principle-based nature of a compromise is not sufficient to constitute its morality. Nevertheless, the time limit solution for abortion is socio-politically a pragmatically good solution. In other words, I think it can be morally justified to compromise even where moral values are at stake. However, it seems that the compromise itself in that case is not moral, but political. By this I mean that it is morally right to make compromises which are political in nature.
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