The lawyer for Anders Behring Breivik says that his client, accused of murdering at least 76 people, is “insane.” That word belongs to a vocabulary set that also includes “mentally ill,” “abnormal,” and “unhealthy,” as well as their opposites, “healthy” and “normal.” We have available to us a different vocabulary as well, one composed of words like “evil” and “good,” “immoral” and “moral.” The two sets are not logically exclusive: a person can be described as both insane and evil. But they have different implications for judgment and response. For instance, someone who is mentally ill deserves treatment; someone who is evil deserves punishment.

It seems to me that this choice is one of the great divides in modern and postmodern culture. It doesn’t simply divide us into two groups–the moralists and the psychologists–because many people straddle both camps.

I doubt the choice between the two vocabulary sets rests on empirical evidence, at least not in a straightforward way. These are more like paradigms or conceptual schemes than theories. I suppose some psychologists might claim that their medical-sounding terminology is empirical and scientific, whereas moral judgments are subjective, and that is the difference between the two ways of talking. But I don’t think that distinction will fly. “Insane” and “mentally ill” are loaded with value. They mean abnormal, atypical, and far from the mean–but only in a bad direction. Nobody calls the abnormally good “insane.” By the same token, it is not merely a matter of opinion to say that Breivik was “evil.” I am as sure of that fact as I am that Norway is west of Sweden.

We might reserve the word “insane” for people who are literally delusional or profoundly illogical: individuals who perceive nonexistent objects or connect means and ends irrationally. But Breivik fits neither category. Mark Thompson skillfully analyzes the “cold, appalling logic” of Breivik’s acts, including the way he chose to “to kill off an entire generation of multi-cultural political leaders-to-be in a small country.” Breivik chose the means best calculated to advance his chosen end; alas, his end and means were evil.

The claim that Breivik is evil would be complicated if his evil could be cured–perhaps by some easily administered drug. Then we might be tempted to say that he was sick. Indeed, I would give him the drug and, once cured, he would elicit some sympathy from me–especially if he took responsibility for what his prior self had done. But why should he regret what he did while ill? Being sick is not a choice.

The conclusion of that little fable makes us wonder whether punishment and even regret are unfortunate. Shouldn’t we wish that we could cure him and then forgive him and encourage him to forgive himself? I interpret it in a different way, as evidence that there is no solution or remedy for a heinous act. Punishment, treatment, exile, execution, suicide, remorse–nothing satisfies. I have long believed in “moral luck,” and so it comes as no great surprise to me that someone can be evil for unfortunate reasons, such as sickness. It is still evil.

I am deep into coding focus groups, along with my colleagues at CIRCLE. We have convened working-class, urban youth in several American cities. We listen to audio recordings of their discussions with the software package called NVivo and, in addition to making open-ended notes, we attempt to categorize individuals’ statements into one of several hundred codes that we have constructed.

Often, what you hear is not a belief, a preference, or a principle. It is the sound of someone thinking about and around a topic that he or she may never have considered before. Asked whether voting makes a difference, for example, an individual may give a short monologue that drifts between yes and no and then back again, passing by way of such ideas as “no, but you should do it anyway,” and “yes, but only if other people do it, too.”

This reminds me of Nina Eliasoph’s comments from Avoiding Politics (p. 18):

Research on inner beliefs, ideologies, and values is usually based on surveys, which ask people questions about which they may never have thought, and most likely have never discussed. … The researcher analyzing survey responses must then read political motives and understandings back into the responses, trying to reconstruct the private mental processes the interviewee ‘must have’ undergone to reach a response. That type of research would more aptly be called private opinion research, since it attempts to bypass the social nature of opinions, and tries to wrench the personally embodied, sociable display of opinions away from the opinions themselves. But in everyday life, opinions always come in a form: flippant, ironic, anxious, determined, abstractly distant, earnest, engaged, effortful. And they always come in a context–a bar, a charity group, a family, a picket–that implicitly invites or discourages debate.

That’s why the qualitative research we are doing now is interesting. And yet, there is a different way of thinking about people’s mental states and the relationship to their actions. It turns out (from a study of ethics rather than our topic, politics) that people “have a hard time offering an account of their moral reasoning that contains consistent substantive content.” They are “largely incapable of articulating their moral decision-making process in substantive, propositional terms.” Often, their responses to open-ended questions are rationalizations of what they have done, not reasons that will guide what they do.*

A cynic would conclude that people are just not very reasonable; our principles and reasons do not affect our behavior. But it turns out that individuals answer multiple-choice questions in ways that are consistent with their own responses; distinctive, when compared to other respondents; and strongly predictive of their own behavior. In other words, we are guided by something that’s in our heads, and it differs from person to person, but it is not linguistic or explicit. It is more like an unconscious network of associations. That is why fixed-response or “multiple choice” surveys often predict behavior better than open-ended questions do. They may work better for prediction because an actual decision (such as whether or not to vote) is more like checking a box than explaining a personal philosophy. So answering the forced choices on a survey resembles our ordinary decision-making process.*

Yet I remain interested in people’s explicit, verbalized, public thinking. We ought to give good reasons to justify (or criticize) our own actions. We should be interested in other people’s reasons and their reactions to ours. The act of interpreting the public thoughts of working-class urban youth thus has a moral motivation, even if those reasons are not strongly influential in their own lives. I don’t think that current psychological research precludes the hope that good arguments can change people’s implicit stances or premises, which then affect their behaviors.

In short, we should strive to understand other people’s arguments in case they are right and to decide how to respond effectively if they are not.

*Stephen Vaisey, “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 114, no 6 (may 2009), pp. 1675-1714.

In Coming of Age as a Poet (Harvard, 2003), Helen Vendler interprets the earliest mature verse of four major poets: Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath. She argues that great poets reach maturity when they develop consistent diction and formal styles; favored physical and historical milieux; major symbolic referents; characters or types of characters whom they include in their verse; and some sort of (at least implicit) cosmology. They often retain these combinations to the ends of their careers.

Robert Lowell provides an example (mine, not Vendler’s). From the 1940s until his death, his characteristic milieu is New England–specifically the coastal region from Boston to Nantucket–over the centuries from the Puritan settlement to the present. His diction mimics the diverse voices of that region’s history, from Jonathan Edwards to Irish Catholics, but he brings them into harmony through his own regular rhymes and rhythms. His major symbolic references include gardens, graveyards, wars of aggression, the Book of Revelation, and the cruel ocean. He avoids presenting a literal cosmology, but he describes several worldviews in conflict. Sometimes, the physical and human worlds are cursed or damned and we are estranged from an angry, masculine God. Other times, the world is a garden: organic, fecund, and pervasively feminine. (See my reading of The Indian Killer’s Grave for detail.)

A combination of diction, favored characters, milieux, subjects of interest, value-judgments, and a cosmology could be called a “personality.” I don’t mean that it necessarily results from something internal to the author (a self, soul, or nature-plus-nurture). Personality could be a function of the author’s immediate setting. For instance, if Robert Lowell had been forceably moved from Massachusetts to Mumbai, his verse would have changed. Then again, we often choose our settings or choose not to change them.

A personality is not the same thing as a moral character. We say that people are good or virtuous if they do or say the right things. Their diction and favorite characters seem morally irrelevant. For example, regardless of who was a better poet, Lowell was a better man (in his writing) than T.S. Eliot was, because Eliot’s verse propounded anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice, whereas Lowell’s is full of sympathy and love.

So we might say that moral character is a matter of holding the right general principles and then acting (which includes speaking and writing) consistently with those principles. Lowell’s abstract, general values included pacifism, anti-racism, and some form of Catholic faith. Eliot’s principles included reactionary Anglicanism and anti-Semitism–as well as more defensible views. The ethical question is: Whose abstract principles were right? That matter can be separated from the issue of aesthetic merit.

I resist this way of thinking about virtue because I believe that it’s a prejudice to presume that abstract and general ideas are foundational, and all concrete opinions, interests, and behaviors should follow from them. One kind of mind does treat general principles as primary and puts a heavy emphasis on being able to derive particular judgments from them. Consistency is a central concern (I am tempted to write, a hobgoblin) for this kind of mind. But others do not organize their thoughts that way, and I would defend their refusal to do so. What moral thinking must be is a network of implications that link various principles, judgments, commitments, and interests. There is no reason to assume that the network must look like an organizational flowchart, with every concrete judgment able to report via a chain of command to more general principles. The hierarchy can be flatter.

To return to Lowell, one way of interpreting his personality would be to try to force it into a structure that flows from the most abstract to the most concrete. Perhaps he believed that there is an omnipotent and good deity who founded the Catholic church when He gave the keys of heaven to Peter. Peter’s successors have rightly propounded doctrines of grace and nature that are anathema to Puritans. Puritans massacred medieval Catholics and Native Americans who loved nature and peace. Therefore, Lowell despises Puritans and admires both medieval Catholics and Wampanoags. In his diction, he mocks Puritans and waxes mournful over their victims. His poetic style follows, via a long chain of entailments, from his metaphysics.

But I think not. It is not even clear to me that Lowell, despite his conversion to Catholicism, even believed in a literal deity. (Letter to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 7, 1959: “I feel very Montaigne-like about faith now. It’s true as a possible vision such as War and Peace or Saint Antony–no more though.”) The point is, literal monotheism did not have to be the basis or ground of all his other opinions, such as his love for and interest in Saint Bernard or his deep ambivalence toward Jonathan Edwards. Those opinions could come first and could reasonably persuade him to join the Catholic Church. By mimicking the diction of specific Puritans in poems like “Mr Edwards and the Spider,” Lowell could form and refine opinions of Puritanism that would then imply attitudes toward other issues, from industrial development to monasticism.

Poets are evidently unusual people, more self-conscious and aesthetically-oriented than most of their peers, and more concerned with language and concrete details than some of us are. As a “sample” of human beings, poets would be biased.

But they are a useful sample because they leave evidence of their mental wrestling. Poetry is a relatively free medium; the author is not constrained by historical records, empirical data, or legal frameworks. Poets say what they want to say (although it need not be what they sincerely believe), and they say it with precision.

I think the testimony of poets at least suffices to show that some admirable people begin with concrete admirations and aversions, forms of speech, milieux and referents, and rely much less on abstract generalizations to reach their moral conclusions. Their personalities and their moral characters are one.