A Reply to Räikkä’s “When Is It Hard to Compromise?”

Juha Räikkä’s paper (2025) challenges a widely held assumption in the literature on compromise: that compromises involving principles, judgments, or deep values are inherently more difficult to achieve than compromises involving interests, preferences, commitments, or personal values. Against this “traditional” view, the author argues that while conflicts of principles and judgments do differ from conflicts of interests, the greater difficulty of the former is contingent rather than systematic. Räikkä's discussion proceeds by disentangling two issues: (1) whether there are two distinct kinds of compromises, and (2) whether one kind is inherently harder to reach than the other. The author accepts the distinction but rejects the stronger claim that principle-based compromises are systematically more difficult. In my article I focus on (1).