I believe that: 1) moral knowledge is irreducibly experiential and particularistic; hence 2) efforts to replace moral judgment with general methods and principles cannot succeed; and thus 3) we need democratic deliberation by people who also have diverse practical experiences.

The particularistic part of this argument (1)  seems an overlooked element in Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Consider vol. 2, book 1, chapter 3 of Democracy in America:

THE deity does not regard the human race collectively. He surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is composed; and he discerns in each man the resemblances that assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences that distinguish him from them. God, therefore, stands in no need of general ideas. …

Such, however, is not the case with man. If the human mind were to attempt to examine and pass a judgment on all the individual cases before it, the immensity of detail would soon lead it astray and it would no longer see anything. [So people are forced to generalize, but …]

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect; for there are in nature no beings exactly alike, no things precisely identical, no rules indiscriminately and alike applicable to several objects at once.

De Tocqueville is not quick to connect particularistic thinking and democracy. Quite the contrary; he presumes that democracy encourages the habit of hasty generalization:

In the ages of equality all men are independent of each other, isolated, and weak. The movements of the multitude are not permanently guided by the will of any individuals; at such times humanity seems always to advance of itself. In order, therefore, to explain what is passing in the world, man is driven to seek for some great causes, which, acting in the same manner on all our fellow creatures, thus induce them all voluntarily to pursue the same track. This again naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas and superinduces a taste for them. … When I repudiate the traditions of rank, professions, and birth …, I am inclined to derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself, and this leads me necessarily, and almost unconsciously, to adopt a great number of very general notions.

His leading example is his own people, the French, who are both egalitarian and prone to quick generalization and abstract thinking. But the Americans are an exception (chap. 4):

This difference between the Americans and the French originates in several causes, but principally in the following one. The Americans are a democratic people who have always directed public affairs themselves. The French are a democratic people who for a long time could only speculate on the best manner of conducting them. The social condition of the French led them to conceive very general ideas on the subject of government, while their political constitution prevented them from correcting those ideas by experiment and from gradually detecting their insufficiency; whereas in America the two things constantly balance and correct each other.

I am not interested in distinctions between French and American people, but in the ideal model that de Tocqueville attributed to the United States of his time. Because Americans made relatively few social distinctions, and great masses of people could vote on legislation, they were in danger of embracing general ideas that would distort reality. Indeed, this has been a recurrent frailty of our political culture. However, because we Americans “direct public affairs ourselves,” we learn to accommodate our general principles to complex reality. Denying Americans the right to participate directly–for instance, by dramatically limiting the role of juries in criminal law or, in general, by over-empowering an expert class–will make Americans worse at thinking and judging.

Here are three ways to color a map of the world:

1. Put dots on all the places (including seas) whose names you happen to like. That will produce a random-looking pattern. If people want to know whether the dots are in the correct locations, or why they are where they are, they must ask you, because the only truth is in your head–it is your set of preferences.

2. Color according to a rule, principle, or algorithm. A simple example would be: color everything above the half-way line. More complicated rules would produce much more complex patterns, even fractals. The colored map might be useful as a visual representation, but if there were any questions about what should be shaded or why, one would consult the rule. The words and/or numbers would be more precise than the map.

3. Color significant areas on the map, such as North America. This region could be described in words (a continent of approximately 25 million square miles wholly situated in the Western and Northern hemispheres. Its eastern littoral is predominantly a plain bordered by a mountain range that parallels the coast. A peninsula descends from the bottom. Etc.). It could also be defined by a kind of rule: any location reachable by land from Chicago, IL, without crossing an isthmus, plus some neighboring islands. Such rules and descriptions can be illuminating, but they only partially describe the truth, which is in the world. The fullest description is a detailed map.

Now imagine that instead of coloring a map of the world, we are looking at a map of all the actual and potential actions (or situations), and our task is to color the good ones (or the right or just ones). Our choice of methods resembles the three above.

1a. If you are a moral subjectivist or relativist, you think that the choice of what to color is a matter of private opinion. Even if people tend to cluster their dots within regular-looking shapes, and even if many people color the map the same way, the truth is in their heads, not on the map.

2a. If you subscribe to one of the classical philosophical schools, such as Kantianism or utilitarianism, you believe that the map should be colored using a rule or set of rules. Indeed, the map is not terribly useful because the rules will give you more accurate and reliable answers. One would check the rule to see if the map were accurate, not vice-versa.

3a. If you are a particularist, you believe that there is an objective difference between right and wrong–like the very important distinction between North America and the Atlantic Ocean. (There may also be some borderline cases and objectively gray areas.) The difference between right and wrong can be described in words, but any combination of words simplifies the reality, which is in the world, not in our heads. The shape of the good is complex because it consists of various institutions, norms, concepts, practices, and ways of life that have evolved over long history without conscious design. You must explore reality to know what is good and bad, but other explorers’ accounts and maps are valuable.

For what it’s worth, I think the reality is a combination of 2a and 3a. Rules mark valid moral distinctions in basic, elemental situations–for instance, is it right to kill?–but in dealing with evolved institutions, the rules no longer mark the important boundaries. In a similar way, part of the border between the United States and Canada is defined by a horizontal line (the distance from the North Pole), but part of the border follows the winding course of rivers and lakes. These bodies of water lie where they are because of the uniform laws of physics, but their evolution is so old and so often influenced by exogenous factors that the laws cannot tell us where we will find them. Note that defining our borders in two ways produces no contradiction. The boundary is straight in some places, winding in others.

Compare Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 18: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

Implications: To know the good, it is helpful to study and critically investigate moral principles, such as those analyzed in philosophy. That method may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. We must also explore and describe reality and form moral judgments of it. That is something that people do in ordinary life, but its academic corollaries are in fields like history, anthropology, and literary criticism. (For an argument that those disciplines should be more explicitly moral, please see my Reforming the Humanities.)

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.