300 J. S. MILL AND THE ART OF COMPROMISE RAFAEL CEJUDO Abstract: The word compromise means a kind of agreement and a concession to something harmful or wrong. I argue that particularly this second sense is quite relevant in the ethics of political action. John Stuart Mill focused upon this issue in his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform 1859. I outline Mill’s doctrine on compromise looking at the external and internal features of an acceptable measure of compromise. These features provide a set of conditions necessary in order for compromise to take place, but they do not guarantee sufficient conditions. In order to assess Mill’s political coherence and to draw a general distinction between strategic and ethical compromises the paper concludes by considering two compromise measures that Mill adopted while he was a Member of Parliament. Keywords: political prudence, consequentialism, progress, compromise, J. S. Mill. Two Meanings of Compromise It is commonly said that politics is the art of compromise. Particularly in a democracy, governments are supposed to satisfy the widest array of demands, though everybody knows that they cannot wholly succeed. In that sense politics means finding the best way to get a solution accepted by all. Quite often that solution is not unanimously valued, but it should be the result of a unanimously accepted agreement. Democratic politics is based on compromise because, as Aumann (1976) said, every party and group “agrees to disagree”. Even in a non- democratic regime, the king or dictator has to make concessions to keep office and gain some legitimacy. Austin (1961) gave a good piece of advice when he recommended that one start by looking up the dictionary. If we do that, we will find that in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a compromise means “the settlement of differences by arbitration or by consent reached by mutual concessions”, or “something intermediate between or blending qualities of two different things”. So a compromise is a kind of agreement that you get through negotiation, and a compromise proposal means that you accept a tradeoff between your longings and your possibilities. Compromising looms large in politics because it brings out the discipline of reality and the conflict between ideas and facts. Since the seventies there has been a growing interest in the issue of compromise, particularly in sociology and political science (Arnsperger and Picavet 2004a; Pennock and Chapman 1979b). The rational choice perspective can be used to clarify compromise proposals, and in this approach they fall under the head of negotiating theory, for compromising is a way of managing conflict (Gauthier 1986; Hirschleifer 1995; Varoufakis 1991). If two or more parties, lobbies or individuals HUMAN AFFAIRS 20, 300–307, 2010 DOI: 10.2478/v10023-010-0032-x