Is Compromise Evil?

T he right answer to this question should be obvious. However, we live in a time when language is so abused that things that once seemed obvious are no longer so. But unless we answer this question correctly, we are bound to go wrong, often seriously wrong, in both politics and in our personal lives. For daily and in a hundred different ways, in marriage, parenting, friendship, casual conversations at work or in the grocery store, we face difficult choices where the lines between egotism and integrity can seem blurred. And we are masters of self-deception, prone to calling our comfortable choices “charity” and our uncharitable choices “truth.”

The next election cycle will involve some very challenging and consequential matters, including crime, homelessness, drug addiction, energy, immigration, mental illness, war, gender ideology, religious liberty, school choice, and now with the remarkable reversal of Roe v. Wade, how best to protect unborn children and to provide for vulnerable pregnant women. Missteps may be very costly. So in this relative quiet, before political passions fully heat up, it is very important to get clear on the ethics of compromise.

For although compromise is not likely to inspire our most heroic impulses, it is integral to political life. Like other basic human needs, it is low but necessary, and it will have its revenge on those who abuse it or treat it with contempt and refuse its humble office. That office is to achieve the greatest possible good in circumstances that are less than ideal, without sacrificing truth or integrity. The lowness of this office makes compromise an easy target for demagogues who seek to leverage their own status by sacrificing achievable goods with the intoxicating promise of impossible perfections. We should arm ourselves in advance against such appeals by noticing the underlying reality of compromise in great events we profess to admire.

Consider for example the case of slavery. Assuming that slavery is always a grave wrong, how would you honestly answer the following questions?

1. Would you have supported ratification of the U.S. Constitution, even though it provided protection for the institution of slavery?
2. Would you have supported Abraham Lincoln in 1860, even though he promised not to touch slavery in the states where it already existed?

If you are an American constitutional conservative, you will answer yes to these questions, alongside George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and the other luminaries of the American political tradition.

But how will you justify this answer? Do a thought experiment and substitute “abortion” for slavery. (In fact, the Dobbs decision returns abortion to the same constitutional status as slavery in the original Constitution.) Does your answer change? If so, why? Is it because abortion is a worse evil than slavery? Or does piety for the American Founding somehow give a pass to slavery?

It is worth remembering that there were dissenting voices, especially in the time of Lincoln. For anyone properly sensitive to the magnitude of the evil of slavery it is difficult to resist the abolitionist logic of William Lloyd Garrison, who in his famous speech, “No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery,” said the following:

The abolitionism which I advocate is as absolute as the law of God, and as unyielding as his throne. It admits of no compromise. Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder is a man stealer. By no precedent, no example, no law, no compact, no purchase, no bequest, no inheritance, no combination of circumstances, is slaveholding right or justifiable. While a slave remains in his fetters, the land must have no rest. Whatever sanctions his doom must be pronounced accursed. The law that makes him a chattel is to be trampled underfoot; the compact that is formed at his expense, and cemented with his blood, is null and void; the church that consents to his enslavement is horribly atheistical; the religion that receives to its communion the enslaver is the embodiment of all criminality.

Garrison’s logic led him to burn the U.S. Constitution as a “pact with devil,” and those conservatives who share his uncompromising logic should be prepared to do the same. At the same time, it should be made very clear that whatever else such people are, they are not American constitutional conservatives.

But those Americans who do profess American constitutional conservatism should own the compromising logic of their position. To be consistent, they must acknowledge that it is sometimes morally permissible, even morally required, to support laws and public policies that protect evil precisely in order to achieve the greatest possible good. Willingness to do so does not make one a “RINO.”

But surely RINOs exist? Yes, and their unprincipled compromising often does more harm than do the Compromise Deniers. How can we tell the difference between an ethical compromiser and a RINO counterfeit?

We might distinguish three attitudes toward compromise. Call them Purism, Pragmatism, and Prudence. Garrison is an example of a Purist. The Purist regards all compromise as immoral. He therefore makes the perfect the enemy of the good. In practice this often has the worst results, but for the Purist good intentions are more important than good results. Refusal to ratify the Constitution would not have freed a single slave, whereas ratification provided the occasion for slavery’s abolition.

If Purists overestimate evil, Pragmatists underestimate it. Pragmatists are completely transactional about the good. They are willing to compromise everything in order to diffuse conflict. If Garrison was a Purist on slavery, Stephen Douglas was a Pragmatist. The whole point of Douglas’s popular sovereignty was to remove the deeply controversial topic of slavery from national politics altogether.

But for Pragmatism to work, people must be relatively indifferent to good and evil. Douglas repeatedly declared that he didn’t care “whether slavery is voted up or down,” to which Lincoln aptly replied that this makes perfect sense if there is no difference between slaves and a horse or a hog. In the end Pragmatists are impractical because do not take seriously enough the weighty moral issues that animate most citizens. Like Stephen Douglas, RINOs are Pragmatists who would rather “lead from behind” than disrupt the status quo for the sake of a difficult moral good.

Prudence shares Purism’s commitment to objective principles, but it always seeks ways to promote and protect those principles in imperfect circumstances. It seeks to be as shrewd as a serpent while remaining as innocent as a dove (Matt. 10:16). Prudence depends on a crucial distinction acknowledged by both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas between permitting evil and committing evil. The Pauline Principle (Rom. 3:8) states that we may never do evil to achieve good. God sometimes permits evil for the sake of greater goods, but He never commits evil. Human beings should do the same. The effort to achieve the greatest possible good without committing evil does not make one a consequentialist. It makes one prudent.

Thus Prudence supports ratification of the Constitution, even with its limited protections for slavery, in the reasonable belief that this is the best available means to end slavery. It also approves of a ban on abortion after 15 weeks when a total ban is impossible, as Mississippi did prior to Dobbs. In each case an existing evil is permitted, but is circumscribed by a compromise that is principled, not pragmatic.

Purism would prevent these achievements. Or worse, for although Purism is motivated by a hunger for justice, its inner logic leads to lawlessness. Lincoln made this point in his prescient 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum. There he acknowledged the hunger for justice that animates Purism and the inability of human law to satisfy that hunger. But he warned Americans of the violence and tyranny that result when the passion for justice leads to disregard for the law.

Anyone who has suffered a serious wrong and sought a legal remedy knows what Lincoln is talking about: the tedious and expensive consultation with lawyers, the filing of documents, the investigation, trial, verdict (which may not go your way), appeals process, and, assuming you win, enforcement. Sometimes vindication takes years. Often it never comes. Rarely does it satisfy.

Human law is a compromise for achievable justice, an imperfect accommodation for imperfect people. The point is wonderfully depicted in the film Twelve Angry Men, which dramatizes how the legal process of jury deliberation can help check powerful human passions (anger, apathy, prejudice, impatience, etc.) that interfere with the proper exercise of reason. The process is messy and difficult, the results often flawed. But the Purist denunciation of this imperfect system conceals a satanic presumption with revolutionary and often bloody results. As Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons tells his future son-in-law Roper, who expresses willingness to “cut down every law in England” to get at the devil:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

I do not expect this argument to persuade today’s Purists within the conservative movement. My own bona fides — that I once served as president of the Ohio College Students United for Life, that I was arrested multiple times for peacefully protesting outside abortion clinics, that my wife and I have nine children, that I voted for Donald Trump twice although I regard him as a deeply flawed human being (a vote largely vindicated not only by the inept ideology of the Biden administration, but also by the momentous decisions of the Supreme Court, although I hope and pray I shall never have to vote for Trump again) — will not prevent them from calling me a “RINO.”

But I do hope to forewarn those many people of goodwill, frustrated by years of real RINO damage, to be on their guard against Purist rhetoric and tactics, and to keep their sights on the need for the kind of Prudent statesmen that America desperately needs right now.

In conclusion, to answer my question “Is Compromise Evil?” I suggest that we follow the Angelic Doctor: Distinguo: Pragmatic compromise enables evil by refusing to confront it. Purist enables evil by refusing to compromise with it. Prudential compromise with evil to promote the good is the necessary, difficult, and noble task of law, politics, and human life.