The examples that come to mind when I try to think about this concretely are political/moral disputes like abortion, torture, or redistribution of wealth. One side thinks (for example) that an abortion is a terrible thing to do to an unborn child and that prohibiting abortions does not pose much of a hardship to women, while another group thinks that aborting a fetus is not that big a deal and that prohibiting abortions would be a large hardship to women. Averaging together turns this dispute between two separate coherent groups into an internal conflict: abortion is a bad thing to do to the baby/fetus but prohibiting abortions would pose a fairly sizable hardship to women.
So averaging increases internal conflict, but some internal conflict might not be so bad, since a lot of the processes that reduce internal conflict and separate people into coherent groups are biases: the affect heuristic, the halo effect, cognitive dissonance, group polarization, affective death spirals, etc.
We would really like to use examples of inconsistent values that have been resolved. We can’t, because we’re unaware of them, because they’ve been resolved.
The examples that come to mind when I try to think about this concretely are political/moral disputes like abortion, torture, or redistribution of wealth. One side thinks (for example) that an abortion is a terrible thing to do to an unborn child and that prohibiting abortions does not pose much of a hardship to women, while another group thinks that aborting a fetus is not that big a deal and that prohibiting abortions would be a large hardship to women. Averaging together turns this dispute between two separate coherent groups into an internal conflict: abortion is a bad thing to do to the baby/fetus but prohibiting abortions would pose a fairly sizable hardship to women.
So averaging increases internal conflict, but some internal conflict might not be so bad, since a lot of the processes that reduce internal conflict and separate people into coherent groups are biases: the affect heuristic, the halo effect, cognitive dissonance, group polarization, affective death spirals, etc.
We would really like to use examples of inconsistent values that have been resolved. We can’t, because we’re unaware of them, because they’ve been resolved.