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Ideas / In practice

# Stacked Principles

Several commitments can be genuine. The decision is which one takes precedence here, and why.

I can value the quality of a service and also care about what my spending helps enable. Usually one principle guides the choice. At a particular boundary, another becomes more important.

Stacked Principles gives me a way to explain that change in priority. It is contextual judgment, with reasons attached. The other commitment has not stopped mattering.

The stack is neither a permanent numerical ranking nor a flat list of values. Scale, consequences, available alternatives and the connection between an action and its effects all matter.

My choice for myself is also different from asking everybody else to make the same choice. A public campaign has different stakes and needs a different evidential basis.

## Put it to work

01

### Name the ordinary principle

What would normally guide this decision?

02

### Identify the boundary

What consequence or new evidence makes another commitment decisive?

03

### Give the reason

Why does that priority make sense here, considering scale and alternatives?

04

### Keep the decision revisable

What could change the conclusion, and would you reason similarly in a comparable case?

## Where this comes from

Grounded in JJ's own reasoning and an AI-assisted explanation he endorsed. The practical questions are an editorial operationalization, not verbatim quotations or a fixed constitution.

- [Stacked Principles in JJ's public profile](https://joakim.jardenberg.net/)

Editorial explanation · AI + JJ

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Source: https://jardenberg.com/ideas/stacked-principles

AI + JJ. Original human work and other people’s ideas retain their attribution.

Joakim Jardenberg’s own writing: CC BY 4.0. Credit Joakim Jardenberg and preserve AI + JJ / AI translation attribution. Third-party quotations, recommendations, photographs, screenshots, logos and media retain their own rights and are excluded.
Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/