Theme: Deception

NEGOTIATING TACTICS AND MORALITY

In politics, in serious negotiations, when you ask your opposition party to return to its constituency with demands that they are unwilling to suffer, your function is to provide your opposition with the material means of extracting the demand from their constituency.

Those material means, or the threat, must be believable, and sufficient, and the timing must be such that there is no alternative in the time frame. This tactic has been effective throughout history. It is best if your opposition party is unsure whether or not the threat is serious, because this frustrates their ability to project the future, but they must believe the threat is, at least, possible. You must empower your opponents to operate on your behalf.

Depending upon your perspective in the matter, it is doing your opposition a favor. Although, they rarely appreciate it at the time. In retrospect getting such an ask generally improves the ability of all participants from that point forward to work together because it rebalances the playing field so that the participants in the negotiation are weighted as highly as the constituency – if only because the circumstances are no longer predictable. It is far better for your opposition to worry about that which they do not expect, than that which they expect, and which makes them overconfident.

If, regardless of party, we do the right thing for everyone, then the moral constraint remains in place. If we do not do the right thing for everyone, then the moral constraint is off in negotiations. So it is always important to hold the moral high ground, rather than retreat into proceduralism specifically designed to abrogate moral constraints. Because it is moral constraint that binds all negotiations regardless of procedure and law. In the end, all moral codes consist of property rights, albeit different allocations of them.

THE PURPOSE OF RULES AND PROCEDURES IS GENERALLY TO LIE OR STEAL. There is but one rule, and that is property. Property is the moral high ground. Always.

I’m autistic. I write political and ethical theory. This kind of thing is just tedium.