Compromises

Compromises

You’ve all been in the middle of an argument that you know you cannot win, understanding that your frustration overwhelms all sense of perspective. Spent and shattered, you could remember the old saying: “It is better to bend than to break!” When you are in the heat of conflict, you are in a state of crisis. In times where you experience a crisis, what you yearn for most of all is to feel safe. If you do not feel safe (emotionally or physically), there is no way for you to reach a state of peace. This is when compromises work.

Compromise is a middle of the road solution to problems that create serious underlying difference of opinions among all parties concerned. This can happen in social life, governance and administration, business management and family life. Compromises have settle more disputes and is the chosen pathway to dispute settlement. It need be understood that the other solution is settling problems using force, fight or even war. Obviously compromise seems a much better solution to the problem.

However compromise is seen as a great problem solver, there are occasion where choosing to compromise is not always the best answer. Though the art of compromise, which essentially is the art of settling differences by mutual concessions, is part of social living on any level, we have held the view that there is something wrong in compromise, in cases where moral convictions are involved. The very first reason for distrusting compromises on moral matters refers to the idea of integrity of you as a person with social and moral values. This is understood in the basic sense of ‘standing for something’, especially standing for the values and causes that to some extent confer identity. The second reason points out the objective nature of moral values, which seems to make them immune from negotiation and barter. If one sincerely holds some moral conviction to be true, than compromising on that belief must be a sign of serious confusion. Values like honesty, trustworthiness, being on the right side of the law, abhorring violence etc. These are intrinsically values that make you a good human being, socially acceptable person and a worthy citizen

A better understanding of integrity may seem the best way to understand the need to abhor compromises in moral values. Analysing what is involved in personal integrity and how this relates to moral integrity the argument that the search for moral integrity naturally brings us to the question of how anyone could accept moral compromises. We do see people who make these abject compromises and still pretend to uphold the concepts of moral values and principles. This is a real version of moral pluralism which tries to present the untruth, while committing deeds of unrestrained duplicity.

Compromise is great way of settling disputes, but not when it touches great human values.