Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?

The good of the family cannot be achieved without consideration of an individual's important interests. If those interests are urgent and weighty, they must become important interests of the family and can sometimes have priority in case of conflict. Sometimes, members must split their differences in compromise. Over time, yielding to others at some times must be balanced against getting priority for one's interests at other times.

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

For Confucians, we are such thoroughly social beings that individual and social interests are not in the end regarded as fundamentally incompatible. Though there will be conflicts, the central mission of moral and political philosophy is to foster approaches that will render them compatible or if that is not possible in some cases, to keep a reasonable balance so that neither side is consistently sacrificed for the sake of the other.

I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kill a man in a movie by grabbing his head and twisting it until the neck broke. Was that difficult? Could a man do it without a lot of practice?

My own sense as an American is that we have begun to experience the disadvantages of framing virtually all moral issues in terms of individual rights. American history has consisted of swings back and forth between rights talk on the one hand and talk of duties, responsibilities, and the common good on the other hand. Recent decades have seen a big swing toward rights, and conceived in very individualistic terms, which hasn't always been the case even with rights.