ABSTRACT
Policy decisions usually involve tradeoffs, since the effects of a policy are seldom all bad or all good. When sacred values are at stake, though, people often deny they’re making any tradeoffs at all. Usually this just confuses things and makes it difficult for people taking different positions to communicate with one another. In fact, it’s often the case in political debates and in clashes between different moral cultures that the main source of disagreement is about which of the adversaries’ shared values should be prioritized over others. Different values tend to clash with one another like warring gods. This is also true of many debates about social justice, but if we’re to think more clearly about social justice, we need to be willing to make tradeoffs and to acknowledge what we’re doing.
