"The concept of compromise is neither at centre stage in philosophical discussion nor even on its back burner. One reason why compromise does not occur as a philosophical topic stems from the philosophical bias in favor of ideal theory." (pg.5) says Prof. Margalit - and right he is. For having dared to state that the philosophical king has no clothes he should be much commended. What makes both personal as well as political life so difficult is not living in accordance with this or that value, but striking compromises between incommensurable values, and struggling with the material context in which our choices are inevitably made.
Having set himself the task of discussing the morality of political compromises, Prof. Margalit argues against "rotten compromises" that should be avoided, come what may (pg. 90). And a rotten compromise is "an agreement to establish or maintain a regime of cruelty and humiliation." (pg. 89) - the critical point being that the likely outcome of the rotten agreement should be perceivable ex ante (pg. 59).
Much of the book is taken up in loose fashion by a discussion of "rotten compromises" that states did in the past - Versailles, Munich, Yalta and more. Contrary to values, which are meta-historical, compromises are inevitably bastard children of context: as our knowledge of past (or present) context is inevitably imperfect, the discussion ends up indeterminate. This is the weakness of the book.
At pg. 54-61 Prof. Margalit tests whether the US Constitution was a "rotten compromise" and concludes that indeed it was - for it encompassed slavery - a "regime of cruelty and humiliation" if there ever was one. He treads gingerly on the subject, arguing that the Founding Fathers mostly expected slavery to wither away - thus absolving them from the crime of having been knowingly silent partners to infamy. Rather he damns them for allowing the importation of slaves for further 20 years - more than "the horizon of a living generation."
Prof. Margalit may be forgiven for not knowing the 'three-fifth rule' that ensured the political dominance of the south in early America
The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860; and the ban on imports, which he praises as a step in the right direction, did nothing toward the emancipation of those held or born in bondage in America. Regrettably, he skips the essential moral question: if (as he argues) the US Constitution was based on a "rotten compromise" - should the Founding Fathers have rejected it? And what should have they done instead? Done nothing? After all, the Articles of Confederation could have remained in force - a rickety structure, but at least one that would have absolved the non-slave states from abetting it (let's forget for a moment their indirect involvement through food and shipping
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World). His later distinction between the consequentialist 'theory of the good' and morality-based 'theory of the right' (pg. 126) seems further to weaken his own 'dogmatic' position. Prof. Margalit's difficulty with coming to grips with this 'rotten compromise' significantly weakens his argument.
Was the collaboration with Beelzebub (aka Stalin) morally acceptable in the joint fight against the Devil (aka Hitler)? Prof. Margalit spends much of the final chapters arguing that Hitler was inherently worse than Stalin - because he undermined morality itself by "dismembering the idea of shared humanity" (pg. 182). The difference being that Stalin's victims were punished for their beliefs, rather than for their ethnicity - one might be able to change one's beliefs, not race. This to me seems rather theoretical: Stalin's and Pol Pot's victims were certainly not given a chance to convert. For the victim (individually if not as a group) the totalitarian experience was (and is) one of wilful destruction of personality and inherent freedom - which to me is 'denial of shared humanity'.
But it also somehow feels wrong. The target of Stalin's terror was an unbound set, ever arbitrarily replenished from the ranks of the whole population as the 'enemies of the people' were disposed of. There was no way Stalin could have ever stopped finding new victims. Hitler's victims were a bound (i.e. predetermined) set - conceivably after a successful bout of ethnic cleansing Hitler could have reverted to moral politics. To put it differently, on a scale of murders a perpetual killing machine would seem to me worse than an extermination campaign. What made Hitler so uniquely evil and politically dangerous was his supremacist view - the 'winner take all' idea that the 'Aryan race' would dominate the world.
In another vein, Prof. Margalit opines in 'comparative statics' - he does not conceive of compromise as (exploratory) process - though in most cases it is one. If extremism is the child of isolation and ignorance, contact with 'the other' will over time change the participants; small compromising steps may lead to familiarity and mutual understanding. This after all was the strategy behind the Oslo Process: a network of small, temporary or technical compromises as prerequisite for the Big Compromise. So what looks at first like a "rotten compromise" turns benign in later iterations.
Placed somewhere between the Scylla of casuistry and the Carybdis of indeterminacy - the rational study of the morally unambiguous compromise is a most difficult undertaking. Yet compromising is what we somehow seem to perform day in and day out. We live by pragmatic (if not moral) compromise, sometimes navigating by heuristics, sometimes by simple intuition, or mere chance. We balance more contradictions on a hairpin than there is room for angels. Rather than speculating of what we ought to do, systematic observation of what we do might yield further insights.
