Activity
#4522·Dennis HackethalOP, 5 days agoPodge wrote in the FoR book club:
[A]n institution that forbids action unless unanimity is reached seems not to function coherently. There are two possibilities. If postponement is uncontroversial, then no special rule is needed, since institutions for adjudicating between competing preferences are only operative when there is disagreement. If postponement itself is contested, then it’s not clear how this rule could be applied consistently, because not acting on x is itself a choice about which we are conflicted.
Sometimes postponement is impossible due to external factors, say. But maybe you can create a new option in time.
Even if you can’t create a completely new option, you could create an option saying, ‘in this situation, I have to act, and I’m running out of time to come up with new ideas, so I’m deciding to do X because Y’. And then that option, as I just phrased it, may have no pending criticisms, in which case you can still act on it. So the rule of not acting on problematic ideas remains intact because ideas are discrete and immutable.
The way out of such conundrums as Podge described them is usually (always?) to create new options (see BoI ch. 13).