A WORKED EXAMPLE
When both sides are real
A worked example – What the axios3 instrument does when two genuine goods collide – and the one thing it refuses to do, which is to spare you the choice.
Most hard decisions are not hard. They feel hard because a lower thing is loudly competing with a higher one – a convenience against a duty, a number against the work it was meant to serve – and the difficulty is mostly the noise of wanting the lower one. The instrument is good at these. It shows which is which, and the hardness mostly goes out of the decision once you have seen it plainly: you knew, and the seeing makes it hard to keep not-knowing.
Then there is the other kind, and it is rarer than it feels. Two things are at stake, and both are real – a loyalty to someone who trusted you, and a duty to the wider thing the two of you both serve; protect the colleague, or surface what has to be surfaced. Neither is the lower thing dressed up. The loyalty is a true good; the duty is a true good; and they cannot both be honoured. This is the situation people most want an instrument for, and it is the situation in which a good instrument tells you what it cannot do.
What it can do is considerable, and worth having. It can stop you cheating. The commonest way out of a real clash is to quietly demote one side – to discover, conveniently, that the loyalty was only fear of conflict, or that the duty was only self-righteousness – so the choice becomes easy and you can tell yourself nothing was lost. The instrument forbids that move. It holds both goods at their real weight and refuses to let you shrink one to fit the decision. It can also clear away the false versions of each, so that what remains is the genuine collision and not the tangle of self-justification around it.
What it cannot do is rank them for you. There is no further measure inside the instrument that resolves a true clash of goods, because the thing you would need – a standard that orders these two, here, for you – is exactly what is not given. You answer, in a life, to more than one whole at once; when two of them ask for incompatible things, no procedure dissolves the conflict, and a procedure that claimed to would be lying. The choice is yours, and it stays yours.
And it leaves a remainder. This is the part the instrument is most concerned to keep honest, because it is the part everything else conspires to hide. When you choose one real good over another, the one you set aside does not stop being real. Something is lost, and the loss does not cancel because the choice was right.
A decision well made in a true clash still leaves a wound, and the mark of having seen clearly is not the absence of that wound but the refusal to pretend it is not there. The anaesthetic on offer everywhere – it was the only choice, there was nothing to lose, the other side was not real anyway – is the one thing the instrument will not supply.
So this is where it stops, and the stopping is not a flaw in it. An instrument that resolved every clash would be telling you, in every case, that nothing was ever truly lost – and that is the most consoling lie there is. The useful question at the edge is not which good wins. It is whether you can choose one and still carry the cost of the other, without dressing it away.
This is one of the moves the programme makes visible – including the move of declining to move. The full account of what it is and how it works is here.