How preferences are reconciled

Can everyone's preferences be met? Certainly not, because some preferences contradict each-other. Most people prefer to have property and are willing to work to earn it. Some people, on the other hand, prefer to minimise the effort and not work for property but to steal it from others. These two preferences clearly cannot be reconciled with each-other, we had better brace ourselves for conflict.

While everyone prefers to have sex with the person (s)he desires and most people accept a firm refusal from that person, some people prefer to force the person to have sex nonetheless. Fulfilling this preference is commonly called rape. In this case, the preferences of a rapist cannot be reconciled with the preferences of the victim.

As a rule of thumb, moral persons are expected to control and delay their urges, and to satisfy them only in socially acceptable ways.

It would be unreasonable to expect a proposed moral system to reconcile everyone's preferences with everyone else's.

Fine-tuning the definition of preference to mean only reasonable preference may help here, but at the expense of clarity. By stating that a fair and equitable moral system can reconcile everyone's reasonable preferences with everyone else's reasonable preferences, we create confusion about what is reasonable. It is much clearer to say that any proposed moral system can only reconcile morally compatible preferences, and any system that promises more is trying to mislead those involved.