Seeking a Unilateral Decision Process When Valid Sets of Moral Norms Conflict

Imagine the case of a pharmaceutical company – call it Ethical Drugs—that is conducting morally permissible research on about half the inhabitants of a village in Africa . The risk to people’s health is minimal, but the time and effort required of them is considerable.  The company’s policy, which we will assume is dictated by valid moral principles, requires it to compensate the subjects monetarily for their time and effort.  The village, however, asks that the compensation be to the village rather than to half the individuals in the village.  The business manager offers to set up a village foundation which could receive the contributions of any participants among the villagers who choose to donate their compensation to the foundation.  The village counters that this arrangement fosters a sort of individualism that undermines its core values, because once individuals have the compensation money in their pocket or bank account, some of them will predictably view the situation from a more individualistic perspective.  The business manager replies that it would be unfair to individuals not to compensate them for their time and trouble. 

             Sometimes decisions in the face of conflicting norms can and ought to be multilateral.  Suggestions for a multilateral decision process might include consensus through legitimating dialogue (on one or another conception of legitimating dialogue), or voting of some sort, or simple compromise, or what James Bohman calls “moral compromise.”  In other cases, however, as a practical matter the decision must be unilateral -- made by an individual or group from one side only.  I would like to focus on cases of this latter sort.  I make the following huge simplifying assumptions. (a) The individual decider has determined to the best of her reasonable belief that both her norms and the host norms are valid. (b) She has determined that the different norms really do issue in conflicting requirements, i.e., that it is not possible in this situation to satisfy the conflicting requirements.  (c) She has done all the consultation that is practical (given the time available to her, etc.) to try to understand the other norms and the point of view of those who hold them, and to see how the host norms give rise to the requirement that she finds problematic. 

Suppose that we believe that we are likely to find ourselves at some point in a situation that is structurally similar to that of the business manager in the case of Ethical Drugs.  Being serious people, we would like to give some advance consideration to which decision process to use if and when we should find ourselves in such a situation.  A reasonable strategy toward that end, I submit, is to canvass all the candidate decision processes that we have read or heard about or that we can generate with the help of others.  Having done that, we can formulate and consider apparent pros and cons for each candidate decision process.

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Ben Wempe

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