Principle Dissonance Theory: Principles generally don’t live in harmony and conflict with each other when making complex decisions.
One of the biggest impacts of the complexity problem is figuring out how to act based on our principles. The actions we take aren’t as simple as fitting them in neat little boxes. We run into the problem of having to violate our principles to different degrees. Principles can overlap as they tend to be broad and situations are complex. This overlap makes it difficult when we try to make decisions that affects more than one of our principles.
What This Means
It would seem that while defining our principles we must give them weights. This would then contribute to a formula in which it takes into account the weight of each principle. The difficulty would then become how important it is in the decision being made. The result would be to add a weight to how important the principle is to the specific decision. The formula would then multiple both weights to determine the resulting weight for each principle.
An Example
Lets say that you hold these three principles strongly: independence, altruism and discipline. If you have a friend who gets injured and is in the hospital because they were being reckless, should you help out? Would the independence and discipline principles outweigh the principle of altruism? Obviously it’s not this simple, but it brings up the point that we can’t simply identify ourselves as people of principle. We have to understand that situations will cause us to violate certain principles as other principles override them. Using a system of assigning weight to each principle will allow us to make better decisions that align more with who we say we are.
