TABOO TRADE-OFFS - REACTIONS TO TRANSACTIONS THAT TRANSGRESS THE SPHERES OF JUSTICE

Taboo trade-offs violate deeply held normative intuitions about the in tegrity, even sanctity, of certain relationships and the moral-politic al values underlying those relationships. For instance, if asked to es timate the monetary worth of one's children of one's loyalty to one's country, or of acts of friendship, people find the questions more than merely confusing or cognitively intractable: they find such questions themselves morally offensive. This article draws on Fiske's relationa l theory and Tetlock's value pluralism model: (a) to identify the cond itions under which people are likely to treat trade-offs as taboo; (b) to describe how people collectively deal with trade-offs that become problematic; (c) to specify the conceptual components of moral outrage and the factors that affect the intensity of reactions to various exp licit trade-offs; (d) to explore the various strategies that decision- makers-required by resource scarcity and institutional roles to confro nt taboo trade-offs-use to deflect the wrath of censorious observers; (e) to offer a method of dispute resolution based on pluralism.