Sometimes the only way to avoid a fatal breakdown in a negotiation may be a fudge, in the hope that the issue at stake can be resolved later. If that works, then, retrospectively, the fudge was a good idea. And even if it doesn't work, it may be argued that the situation is no worse than if the issue had never been tackled.
But of course it's not as simple as that. A fudge may simply be ill-judged; a differently worded fudge might work better. Moreover, the long-term effects of a fudge may be more damaging than a breakdown in the original negotiation.
You can take your pick: more than one verdict is possible on the Belfast Agreement fudge on de-commissioning, although for my part I still think it was probably better to have fudged this issue than to have allowed the negotiation to fail.
Nevertheless, it has to be recognised that fudges go down badly with plain-thinking and plain-speaking Northern unionists. Their Protestant tradition tends to reject ambiguities; talking out of both sides of one's face, as they might say. They would prefer that you tell it as it is, and don't try to fool them.
Nationalists are more pragmatic. History taught us to evade questions and dodge issues in order to survive in conditions of external rule. And this lesson may have been reinforced by the Catholic moral theological tradition of fine distinctions, linked to the historic role of canon law in the church.
The fudge issue is not the only one where differences between the moral approaches of the Protestant and Catholic traditions have created problems for those seeking to bring peace to Northern Ireland. The issue of prisoner releases has evoked very different reactions, not just between the two communities within Northern Ireland, but also between North and South.
I found, and still find, repellent the early release of many prisoners who had committed appalling crimes that had no conceivable justification, even in terms of the paramilitaries' own public stances.
But, realistically, I always recognised that, given the evident military stalemate in the North, the only alternative route to ending the nightmare of violence and achieving the objective of peace and stability in Northern Ireland was a policy of minimising support for and tolerance of the IRA among a section of the nationalist community and thus demonstrating that the Armalite-and-ballot-box strategy was not going to work.
FOR those of us engaged throughout the decades on what has appeared to be the only logical course, it has been hard to appreciate that the fundamental premise of our approach - the absolute primacy of achieving peace and stability in Northern Ireland - is not shared by many within that territory.
For many in the unionist community too high a price can be paid for peace: the price of abandoning principles of right and wrong.
They see these principles of morality as incarnated in the law of the land; a law that requires those who deliberately take human life, whether they be nationalists or loyalists, to pay the price of their crimes by serving the sentences imposed on them by the courts.
Indeed some unionists would regard even these sentences as poor substitutes for capital punishment.
There is no point in us railing against those who hold these views, accusing them of being short-sighted and incapable of identifying and pursuing their own interests. That misses the point. They do not see their own interest in peace and stability as an appropriate objective if its achievement would undermine their principles of morality.
We may criticise unionists' morality as deriving more from the Old Testament than the New, and we may have a point. They in turn may feel that we too easily allow pragmatism to override principles of morality deriving from both testaments. But such exchanges are pointless.
The real issue is whether each of us has the capacity to empathise with and understand where the other is coming from, and to do so well enough for all to find common ground. And if we expect unionists to understand our concept of the path to peace, as we do, we cannot refuse to take on board their concerns.
For, to an extent much greater than many in our State realise, the motivation of what often seems like unionist intransigence is a deep-seated moral revulsion at what they see as immoral compromises on issues such as prisoner releases, as well as the fudges about decommissioning and indeed about the Sinn Fein-IRA relationship itself, all of which underlie the Belfast Agreement.
WHAT David Trimble is up against today is, of course, party political gamesmanship by enemies who want to bring him down for their own purposes. But this kind of manoeuvring would have no chance of success if those concerned were not able to play on the moral sensitivities, indeed moral outrage, of many decent unionists at today's meeting.
We should recognise that ever since the Belfast Agreement was announced, David Trimble's problems have been hugely magnified by the fudge offered him at the last moment by Tony Blair in the form of a deliberately ambiguously worded letter about decommissioning.
This letter was hastily devised and offered as a way of persuading David Trimble to accept the agreement despite the last-minute walk-out by Jeffrey Donaldson. Inevitably he grasped at this straw, proclaiming that the British government was guaranteeing decommissioning in advance of the formation of an Executive.
Thus, from the outset, David Trimble was put in a false position. As a result, instead of going out to sell the agreement as a huge achievement he found himself claiming a decommissioning commitment that did not exist in the form he was persuaded to assert.
The credibility among unionists of Tony Blair as a prime mover in the search for peace was also hugely damaged, as he was seen as having tricked David Trimble into making claims about decommissioning which have not stood up. It was not a good fudge, and it was bound to be exposed as such.
The calculation had to be that the damage the fudge would do to Trimble's position would be more than offset by the impact on public opinion of the establishment of an Assembly and an Executive; within which, it was correctly foreseen, all concerned would work amicably and constructively together in the interests of Northern Ireland and its people.
So far as the people of Northern Ireland are concerned, both nationalist and unionist, this calculation has proved well judged. But politicians and their parties have lives of their own and often fail to reflect the feelings of those who vote for them. This has been notably true of unionist parties in Northern Ireland over much of the past 30 years.
By this evening we shall know whether it is true of the UUP today.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie