Choices That Are Not Trade-offs?

Trade-offs, I conclude, are widespread: they characterize much of our choice-making in both our institutional and our personal lives. But there are areas of both in which choice-making does not take this form, or does so at the cost of violating conventions that we hold to be important. There is no good reason for assuming that all our choices are to be understood as trade-offs. To assume this is to subscribe to a dogma which deflects us from paying attention to the ethical and explanatory significance, in personal and institutional life, of choices that are not trade-offs.

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By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time, my attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligation to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don't speak my language and to whom I neither speak or respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this is for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my son, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day. - Jacques Derrida

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