Zone Morality 9783110352610, 9783110351927

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1 Morality and Metaphysics
1.1 Metaphysical assumptions
1.2 Ideology or theory
1.3 Systems
1.4 Causation
1.5 Causal reciprocities and moral codes
1.6 Formation and demise
1.7 Normativity
1.8 Degrees of commitment
1.9 Alternative accounts
1.10 Excessive abstraction
1.11 Other goods
2 Character
2.1 Semantics
2.2 Character’s formation
2.3 Idiosyncrasy
2.4 Oversight
2.5 Initiative and cultivation
2.6 Virtues and skills
2.7 Character or personality
2.8 Autonomous or submissive
2.9 Coherence
3 Moral experience
3.1 Ambiguities
3.2 Social balance, moral health
3.3 Strategies for achieving balance
3.4 Balance qualified
3.5 Moral discord
3.6 Moral compromise
3.7 Moral education
3.8 Judgment
3.9 Competence
4 Regulation
4.1 Who regulates?
4.2 Which matters need regulation?
4.3 Cross-currents
4.4 Obstacles to regulation
4.5 Dissonance
5 Politics
5.1 Two problem-solving alternatives
5.2 Practical politics
5.3 Rational discourse
5.4 Procedural democracy
5.5 Networks and coalitions
5.6 Factionalism
5.7 Negotiation
5.8 An unstable dialectic
5.9 A flawed ontology
5.10 An imperfect balance
6 Justification
6.1 What does justification achieve? How is it achieved?
6.2 Consequentialism
6.3 Well-being
6.4 Transformation or management?
6.5 Moral vulnerabilities
6.6 Moral quandaries and confusions
6.7 All-in-one moral solutions
6.8 Irresolution
Bibliography
Name index

Citation preview

David Weissman Zone Morality

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Herausgegeben von/Edited by Roberto Poli (Trento) Advisory Board John Bell (London, CA) Mark Bickhard (Lehigh) Heinrich Herre (Leipzig) David Weissman (New York)

Volume 5

David Weissman

Zone Morality

ISBN 978-3-11-035192-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-035261-0 ISSN 2198-1868 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

| For Leo

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Rajan Menon for his comments, and to my wife, Katherine, for her patience, critical suggestions, and editorial skill.

Contents Introduction | 1  1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11

Morality and Metaphysics | 4  Metaphysical assumptions | 4  Ideology or theory | 5  Systems | 7  Causation | 9  Causal reciprocities and moral codes | 10  Formation and demise | 13  Normativity | 14  Degrees of commitment | 16  Alternative accounts | 17  Excessive abstraction | 26  Other goods | 27 

2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9

Character | 29  Semantics | 29  Character’s formation | 29  Idiosyncrasy | 30  Oversight | 32  Initiative and cultivation | 35  Virtues and skills | 38  Character or personality | 44  Autonomous or submissive | 44  Coherence | 45 

3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9

Moral experience | 48  Ambiguities | 48  Social balance, moral health | 50  Strategies for achieving balance | 52  Balance qualified | 53  Moral discord | 57  Moral compromise | 60  Moral education | 62  Judgment | 64  Competence | 66 

X | Contents

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Regulation | 69  Who regulates? | 69  Which matters need regulation? | 71  Cross-currents | 71  Obstacles to regulation | 73  Dissonance | 75 

5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10

Politics | 77  Two problem-solving alternatives | 77  Practical politics | 80  Rational discourse | 81  Procedural democracy | 82  Networks and coalitions | 84  Factionalism | 84  Negotiation | 86  An unstable dialectic | 87  A flawed ontology | 91  An imperfect balance | 94 

6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

Justification | 98  What does justification achieve? How is it achieved? | 98  Consequentialism | 107  Well-being | 111  Transformation or management? | 111  Moral vulnerabilities | 113  Moral quandaries and confusions | 115  All-in-one moral solutions | 121  Irresolution | 125 

Bibliography | 127  Name index | 129 

Introduction The zones of this book’s title are the principal sites of moral practice. Making them visible is my first concern. Telling why moral theory ignores them is second. Every zone is a system, an association or organization established when people affiliate for an aim: a family, friendship, business, or school. Distinctive moralities—of loyalty, competition, or care—distinguish zones from one another. Diversity also sets these moral requirements apart from constraints indifferent to the circumstances where they apply: a five dollar bill has specific value, but indeterminate use; traffic imposes the same generic constraints on all drivers—it’s insensitive to their cars and destinations. Compare values diversified by the aims of moral practice: friendship has moral requirements different from those of families, business, or the army. Core systems satisfy elementary needs and interests: families educate their children; organized workers are common to every culture and society because all need the goods and services they produce. Yet systems are ignored by moral theory. One trivial reason may be the ease with which we move from system to system, zone to zone: from family to work or worship. Or the reason is arcane and mostly out of sight: ethical theory emphasizes virtues or principles applicable everywhere because philosophy established thought’s trajectory: from contingency and particularity to the generality of abstract principles or theories. Aristotle described essential qualitative kinds (dog and cat, apple and elm). He encouraged observation, but left us baffled by the diversity of things. Physical sciences didn’t flourish until Descartes simplified physical theory by speculating that every qualitative difference is the variation of an elementary and quantifiable (geometric) form. Ethics has its own motives for abstraction. Plato’s Good was allegedly the zenith of Being, though unknowable in itself. Everything we perceive is tawdry to some degree because less than the Good. Kant’s categorical imperative requires that no maxim (no plan) be enacted if it couldn’t be willed without contradiction by all rational agents. (No one should lie because no one would believe anyone were all to lie.) This logical test is the universalizability requirement in Kant’s ethics; it makes situational details irrelevant to moral calculations. Theory rises within a hierarchy of abstractions: morality is virtuous behavior; ethics theorizes about moral practice; meta-ethics analyzes and appraises the distinctions and coherence of ethical theories. An occasional treatise emphasizes the variety of moral aims and actions; the majority theorize about the concepts and principles of ethical theory. Yet practical experience—morals in-

2 | Introduction

cluded—resists abstractions that ignore the differences of moral zones (parent or child, client or supplier). This essay reverses theory’s preference for abstraction: it considers principal moral values—duty, freedom, and cooperation—as they stabilize friendships, families, businesses, schools, and states. My emphasis on zones is also a challenge to the belief that morality’s principal focus is the character or behavior of single persons: does one treat others better or worse, honorably or not, for their benefit or one’s own? These emphases express the individualist ontology of self-sufficient particulars. Individuals may be atoms, molecules, or material bodies, though here, in the context of morals, they are self-directing agents dominated (for example) by appetite or spleen (Hobbes) or by reason and good intentions (Kant). Individualists acknowledge that people are often organized for shared objectives, but they construe these relationships as aggregates. I allege that individualism (like excessive abstraction) is faulty. There are no social systems without members, but it is systems—not individuals—that are the prime parts, the ballast, of social reality. They are the principal context for thought, action, significance, feeling, and the choice of one’s aims. Zone morality is the morality of these dedicated practical spaces. Each system has roleplayers who accomplish their common or complementary aim by satisfying one another’s expectations. Each person has a moral profile established by the distinctive mosaic of his or her affiliations. Autonomy is qualified because roles, hence duties and permissions, vary from system to system. Interiority is real; it has depth. But its resonances and content are learned in systems that give it substance and identity. There are six chapters. Chapter One, “Metaphysics and Morality,” considers three metaphysical options: individualism, communitarianism/systems theory, and holism. It explains my preference for systems theory. Chapter Two, “Character,” describes the attributes required of systems’ members. Many have little identity apart from their roles. Other people dominate their roles: they prioritize the time and intensity of their efforts in each of their systems. They also appraise their systems, roles, and themselves: is this work I should be doing; am I doing it well enough? "Moral Experience," Chapter Three, describes idealized standards of social coherence, and the less than ideal conflicts provoked when people having roles in two or more core systems are required to behave in contrary ways. “Regulation” is the topic of Chapter Four: how can the many systems pursue their disparate aims without sabotaging one another? Zone morality is conservative. We favor the stability of core systems that satisfy basic needs and interests, but they aren’t viable without space, safety, and resources. Regulation mitigates conflict while enabling systems to go their separate ways. Chapter Five, “Politics,” compares the governance of an idealized Public to the frac-

Introduction | 3

tious politics of systems struggling for authority to subordinate others. Strong governments intimidate contentious systems; a coherent social ethos stifles disruptions. But politics is raw when no authority inhibits systems from vying with one another. Is there a middle ground between governance by systems pursuing their private interests and a Public that presides in the name of the common good? Chapter Six, “Justification,” argues that core systems—families, schools, and businesses—are justified by the needs and interests they satisfy. This justification is empirical and pragmatic; there is no additional transcendental test. Much of ethical theory is arcane. Moral codes embedded in the reciprocities binding systems are close at hand and everywhere apparent. Members know what to do. Social stability is evidence they usually do it.

1 Morality and Metaphysics 1.1 Metaphysical assumptions Individualism and holism are the competing ontologies of Western thought. Individualism emphasizes the singularity of atoms and primary substances (Democritus and Aristotle), souls (Luther), minds (Descartes), or citizens (Locke and Mill). The evidence promoting it is perceptual and practical: people and material things are separable and relatively stable. The evidence for holism is more speculative. Space-time is construed as a static container or as the dynamic generator of difference. Or everything is said to dwell in consciousness or God. Moral theory accommodates both points of view: individualism opposes self-regarding or self-perfecting individuals to one another; holism subordinates individuals to the societal whole by way of moral edicts (the Biblical Commandments, Kant’s categorical imperative) or by way of totalizing plans designed to promote universal well-being (Plato’s Republic, Marx’s classless society). This traditional division ignores a third alternative: many social spaces (families, businesses, and religious communities) are created when people affiliate to achieve an aim. Every such space is a zone; each is a system distinguished by the tissue of duties and permissions—the zone morality—that binds its role-playing members. Ethical theorists ignore zone moralities because metaphysicians have typically given little or no attention to affiliations intermediate between individuals and the whole. This empirical mistake blinds us to the disparate moral codes inherent in human social systems. Sitting in a crowded restaurant, I listen to my companions while ignoring other conversations. Friends want my attention; people at nearby tables would be annoyed or worse if I responded to their intimacies. Philosophy’s neglect of zone moralities has its counterpart in secular history. The Loi le Chapelier, decreed in Paris on June 14, 1791 by the Committee of Public Safety, affirmed that there are no organizations, hence no interests, between the sovereign and its citizens. The law was abrogated in 1864 and 1884, but my concern is its content and implications, not its application. The Loi is significant metaphysically because the two agents acknowledged—individual persons and the state—exemplify contending metaphysical theses: one argues that individuals are the only reality; the other affirms that individuals are deformed when abstracted from the whole. The Loi was cruelly oppositional: the Terror was evidence that each side struggles to subordinate the other.

Ideology or theory | 5

There is more to this history: the Loi was affirmed in response to a threatened butchers’ strike. The Committee of Public Safety, fearing disruption, established its authority by banning every subordinate organization. But its action was ironic: it disempowered systems without eliminating most of them. It couldn’t have done more without destabilizing all of French society.

1.2 Ideology or theory Each of the three social ontologies may be construed as a theory or recipe: each is a hypothesis about a society’s members and their relations (hence true or false) or a design for transforming societies. An accurate theory is descriptive, explanatory, and predictive. An ideology also has those virtues if a society has been altered to the design it prescribes. There are many analogies: wanting a preview of a building under construction, we look at the architect’s design. Three questions are implicit: First, do societies have no essential form until a design is impressed by thought or practice? Second, does a society embody the form of the theory (or recipe) used to create or transform it? Or is a theory true because it accurately signifies the character of a society whose form is independent of and prior to any use of the theory? Third, why is that difference— ideology or theory—relevant to this book? The first question is more difficult than it seems because one never observes societies that are formless: one doesn’t know if they did or didn’t have form before being observed. But is it plausible that mere observation or thinking about a society supplies its form? An anthropologist records what he or she sees or interprets. Biased expectations may distort one’s notes but they don’t create families, friendships, and work-teams from an otherwise formless stew. But what of the natives: their culture gives determinate form to generic variables (determinables) which may be materialized in several or many ways. These variables have specific form—as families differ from friendships—though contingent details differ among societies and cultures. Is there evidence of these ur-forms? We infer their presence when organizations or associations that answer to basic interests or needs (including food, defense, education, fellowship, and governance) are observed in every known society. Elementary functions—raising children, for example—may be satisfied in various ways but every such function requires a degree of bonding and reciprocity within the social ensembles that satisfy it. Efficacy dictates that there also be a degree of distance, hence independence, between or among them: children aren’t nurtured in war camps.

6 | Morality and Metaphysics

One supposes that the three ontological theses are autonomous and mutually exclusive, each a comprehensive and free-standing account of reality. (I have assumed that in the past1 and again, for didactic clarity, in Section 9, this Chapter) But neither individualism nor holism is autonomous or adequate. Each emphasizes a distorted version of the determinable functions and structures described by systems theory. Both acknowledge or ignore phenomena whose reality is indisputable though neither theory can accurately describe them. Religious holism solders families to a pious framework (made in heaven) that ignores their diversity and contingency; individualism construes these and other affiliations as aggregates. So, Mill’s account of liberty applies only to people of maturity; it doesn’t apply to children coming of age and doesn’t explain their socialization in families.2 How do relationships such as these differ from aggregates? What should we call them; how common are they? I call them systems; allege that they are pervasive; and describe their structures below. An answer to the second question presupposes the first. Individualism and holism are true to the degree that they accurately represent aspects of the societies they have been used to make. But each is shallow because if fails to identify the determinable character of the structures and functions—the core systems— essential to all human societies. Those are determinable forms antecedent to ideology’s transforming effects. It shapes our engagements without displacing structures required to satisfy elementary needs: we shall have families and friendships, work and schools however culture, society, or ideology determines their specific features. Think of terrains never quite remade to the designs of scrupulous gardeners: we see their topography through the scrim of seed beds and foliage. Now the third question: why does this opposition—theory or ideology— matter to this book? Because the answer is relevant to the domains in which zone morality applies. Is systems theory merely an ideology? Because if so, zones—systems—and zone morality are irrelevant to societies fashioned to the design of individualism or holism. That isn’t so because neither of those alternatives is the last word about social reality. Each of them is crippled: one ignores the relational structures that satisfy essential human needs; the other denies their modular autonomy. Mill’s third region of liberty falsely implies that every

|| 1 David Weisman, A Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 242-252. 2 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 13.

Systems | 7

affiliation is an ephemeral aggregate;3 holism won’t concede that marriages aren’t divinely sanctioned.

1.3 Systems Systems are created and sustained by the causal reciprocities of their members: each member responds to tasks and demands in ways appropriate to his or her role. Causal reciprocities are constitutive: they establish the members’ duties and expectations. They are also regulative: members welcome some of a partner’s actions, but reject or censure others. Negative feedback is the early warning that a system risks dissolution because of miscommunication or nonfeasance: friends are mutually careless until one or both alter behaviors that exceed the bounds of sustainable reciprocity. There are myriad systems and more or less subtly different moralities appropriate to each. Behaviors they prescribe are learned intuitively (meaning: unreflectively); each of a system’s members knows his or her role and behaviors that would impede the system by interfering with other roles. Stabilizing practices are specific to and different for each system. No friendship or team is exactly like every other. Every person’s roles, rights, and duties vary in the respect that some systems—families, friendships, work, school, and religious communities—are core, while others (regularly exchanging greetings with someone otherwise unknown) are peripheral. Core systems satisfy elementary needs: we want food, clothing, and shelter, friendship, education, and health because everyone is sometimes hungry and cold, lonely, ignorant, or sick. Rarely self-sufficient, we organize core systems to compensate for these vulnerabilities. Universal interests are obscured by cultural diversity, but they persist as objective referents for appraising cultures and societies: granting the variety of possible satisfiers, how well do a culture’s core systems satisfy the need for nurture, education, or meaning? No one doubts that sleep and safety are elemental or that classes in calculus and the accordion are not. But education too is a need when it enables communication and cooperation, and also when it perfects human talents. People nevertheless disagree about its urgency. Some discount it; others miss food and sleep to refine a passion. Talking to a student after auditing his ballet class, I admired his dancing. “Everything hurts,” was his response. He didn’t say he was quitting because it was hard: this regime was core for him. A system’s sta-

|| 3 Ibid., pp. 15-16.

8 | Morality and Metaphysics

tus—peripheral or core—is, nevertheless, an uncertainty that disrupts social relations when people misconstrue its importance to others. One partner thinks a friendship is core; the other is ambivalent. Systems differ generically. Organizations are distinguished by the complementary roles of their members. Pitcher and catcher, buyer and seller: each acquires duties and permissions appropriate to his or her role; each sustains the relationship by acting accordingly. The roles of an association’s members are identical. Each enforces the loyalty of others by mirroring their responses. Partisans at a rally, fans at a game intensify one another’s feelings by cheering for their candidate or team. Systems of both kinds are dynamic: each adjusts to strains that are inherent (members are careless or out of touch) or external because provoked by adverse circumstances or competing systems. Social life is morally conservative because members typically dedicate themselves to preserving core systems. This response is partly an expression of loyalty, partly concern to defend one’s self-perception. For social identity is a function of one’s core systems: they determine how I and others perceive who I am and what I am responsible for doing. One may argue in the spirit of Descartes and Sartre that who and what I am is prior to every affiliation. But this is a philosophic conceit. Identity, including self-perception, is the layered acquisition of roles in core systems, some inherited, many that are chosen. Some people give equal priority to several core systems (work, friends, a club); others have a principal commitment (to a family, job, or religion). Personal identity varies accordingly: I know myself and am known to others as a member of my church or team; or I distance myself from all my systems in the respect that I choose the time and intensity of my participation in each. Every core system, hence its role-players, is affected by its culture. Baseball played in Cuba, Japan, and America is the same game played with inflections characteristic of its locale. Every core system is inflected in ways that reveal a culture’s effects. Schools organized hierarchically contrast with those where titles and status are ignored; meritocratic cultures compare to those where family relations determine prerogatives. The generic structures of core systems are nevertheless visible through the filter of cultural differences: reproduction, education, and friendship have recognizable exigencies and shapes across cultures that organize them differently.

Causation | 9

1.4 Causation My description of systems seems compromised by its emphasis on the causal reciprocity of their members. I suppose that efficient causation is energy exchange (or its inhibition), though Hume described it as constant conjunction: [T]he necessity of a cause to every beginning of existence is not founded on any arguments either demonstrative or intuitive. Such an opinion will not appear strange after the foregoing definitions. If we define a cause to be an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in a like relation of priority and contiguity to these objects, that resemble the latter.4

This characterization reduces systems to members aggregated in space and time. It entails that systems theory is a flamboyant misdescription of those individuals: it implies more than reality can justify. Hume’s argument has two principal assumptions: first, direct inspection of impressions (sense data) is sufficient for a comprehensive theory of causality; second, no contradiction results from supposing that any datum may be coupled in space or time with any other. Neither point, alone or together, justifies Hume's conclusion. Causation is the dynamic relation of things more or less stable and discrete in themselves, not the static relation of impressions. There is no impression of the energy imparted by striking a match; energy exchange is, nevertheless, inferred from its effects when nature is distinguished from our impressions of it. Hume acknowledged the difference between appearance and reality while agreeing with Locke that we know one, but have no access to the other: “[T]he operations of nature are independent of our thought and reasoning” though “this is what we can never observe in them, but must draw the idea of it from what we feel internally in contemplating them.”5 Conceding this difference implies that our understanding of nature may be mistaken, though Hume has foreclosed that possibility by saying that existence is only the force and vivacity of our impressions.6 Having no impression of energy exchange warrants his assertion that efficient causality is nothing more than the constant conjunction of impressions perceived or imagined. Hume’s conclusion is extended by testing complex ideas imagined. For every coupling of impressions or ideas, contradictions apart, may exist as imag-

|| 4 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 172. 5 Ibid., pp. 168-169. 6 Ibid., pp. 1, 189-190.

10 | Morality and Metaphysics

ined: “[W]e may easily conceive,” he writes “that there is no absolute nor metaphysical necessity, that every beginning of existence shou’d be attended with such an object.”7 There is no end to imaginable couplings or decouplings, so reality is the domain described in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The facts in logical space are the world.”8 There are other possible worlds radically different from ours; causal laws and structures are different there. But nature is a subset of all possibilities, not a porridge of every thinkable difference or complexity. Accordingly, Hume’s speculations obscure four of reality’s critical features: the extra-mental reality of alternate possible worlds; the extra-mental reality of systems in our world; the reciprocal causal relations that create and stabilize systems; and causality's basis in energy exchange and inhibition.

1.5 Causal reciprocities and moral codes How are duties born; when, under what authority, do they cease? There may be duties that prevail irrespective of one’s situation or affiliations: revere God or nature, for example. But those, if any there be, are not at issue. The duties relevant here are situational: duties to family, friends, one’s business, school, tribe, or team. Taking a job as motorman or commercial pilot instantly makes one responsible for passengers. The pace is slower in a courtship as each partner comes to know the other: loyalty crystallizes in ways still unknown. Aristotle noticed that duties vary among systems: [T]he duties of parents to children and those of brothers to each other are not the same nor those of comrades and those of fellow-citizens, and so, too, with the others kinds of friendship.9

His individualist ontology (of primary substances) and his dismissive view of relations (as accidents) may have precluded making more of this observation. Duties and expectations founded in a system's reciprocities are its moral code. Codes are learned by immersion. One tests his balance, like riding a bicycle, when feeling a role's competing pressures. Failing to learn its rights and duties entails expulsion from the system or, for want of substitutes, its failure.

|| 7 Ibid., p. 172. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), para. 1.13, p. 7. 9 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1160a1-2, p. 1068.

Causal reciprocities and moral codes | 11

Do partners need a sanction additional to the causal reciprocities that bind spouses, comrades, teammates, or citizens? Attraction, utility, or commitment explains their affiliation; interest, need, and efficacy explain their solidarity. A code construed globally—because applicable to a system’s organization and all its roles—is an assembly of interlocking rights and obligations. The system is a moral space where role-players are enjoined to perform their tasks in ways complementary to the roles of other members. The code has two aspects: each member’s responsibility for tasks specific to his or her role; and virtues grounded in habits or attitudes—reliability, efficiency, and cooperation, for example—that facilitate coordination between or among a system’s members: Some people simplify their moral commitments by restricting themselves to a principal system: a family, religion, or job. Everything else is peripheral. Stress is minimized if one is saved from having to prioritize time and effort. There is less guilt; fewer people are annoyed because one has too little time or energy for their interests. Others are happier moving among several systems: work, friends, or a team. Transitions are harsh when going from home to work or peace to war, yet these people typically move fluently among disparate systems, codes, and roles. There is a Cubist quality to these lives: each person sees several facades at once, each from a different perspective. This flexibility is apparent in cities where complexity is a function of pace and the diversity of one’s commitments. A system’s moral code regulates its operation. Members’ skills, roles, and reciprocities are the principal variables of its mechanics. Human social systems embody feedback, so mechanism includes processes for controlling and appraising a system. Codes have both effects: they routinize actions appropriate to a role, while providing a standard that informs each member of other members’ duties. The first is a demand that obliges role-players to learn relevant skills and habits; the second is a job description that enables members to coordinate their work while appraising the actions of partners and themselves. A role player knows his or her task, knows its constraining limit, and acts accordingly. The information isn’t private, for the task is socialized: others expect me to perform as my role requires; their work and well-being require it. Imagine a team that loses badly despite playing well together: the ball didn’t bounce their way; the other team was stronger. There are no bitter feelings because everyone did his part in a losing cause. Or there is recrimination because the team was careless. Both postures exhibit a system’s moral economy. “No honor,” we say, “among thieves,” but I recall a team of shoplifters tightly controlled by their leader. The morality of their thieving was a point aside. The morality of their interdependence was conspicuous; discipline made them coherent.

12 | Morality and Metaphysics

This idea of morality—duties and permissions—appropriate to a system’s roles will strike some readers as a category mistake. We resist believing that the “inherent morality of mechanical systems” can be other than a solecism. For nothing, we suppose, is moral if mechanical. Systems are morally relevant because of their aims or effects on others, their members, or the environment; activity is moral when coordinated in pursuit of an agreed aim. Yet solidarity requires the loyalty or kindness absent when production-line workers tighten bolts or pluck feathers from dead birds. Why call role-playing moral if desensitized workers cooperate in systems they only tolerate or abhor? A team of field workers harvests a crop while having no interest in the owner or his profit. Solidarity is expressed by their coordination and efficacy; his benefit is incidental. Ideally, the word would signify more: that people work together because committed to an aim they share. Is morality satisfied if one of these conditions fails: there is no voluntary commitment to the activity, no cooperation, or no respect for its aim? We want a categorical answer, though cogent answers are nuanced by circumstances and their complexity. So, morality is the wrong word to use when explaining the efficiency of slaves pulling oars on a Venetian galley. Zone morality is an explanation for the efficacy of the many systems where coordination is voluntary. It is not an explanation for teamwork everywhere: coercion is morality’s surrogate in systems driven to an aim in the absence of voluntary cooperation. There are several degrees of ambiguity between the extremes of commitment and coercion. A system's members often volunteer to work with one another while disliking a system’s aim or while liking its aim but not one another. These variations are commonplace but anomalous in the context of our moralizing categories. For we like clarity and have three mutually exclusive ways of construing it: moral, amoral, or immoral. Never mind that this alternation violates the complexity of systems whose aims, members, and organization may not perfectly cohere. People committed to one another may not be committed to their system’s aims or working conditions. They may be riven by opposed feelings: betray one’s fellows or one’s ideals. How far should loyalty go if the system abuses them, members abuse one another, or its aim is malign. Choice is easy if the system is faulted in all three ways, harder if one or another—the system, its aim, or members—is valued. For then, the system earns a degree of respect: there is still reason to do its work. But should one persist? There is no answer that can’t be controverted. We are caught in the blades of systems where morality is unforgivingly complex. Effects occur when systems perform mechanically in ways prescribed by moral codes that regulate the work of their members. Each can be appraised for the morality of its aims, treatment of its members, or its effects on other people,

Formation and demise | 13

their systems, or the environment. But aligning these variables, giving each its due, eludes most everyone. Stoic, angry, or morose, imagining a better world but unable to create it, we stay because of a modest benefit (or no recourse). Stale but stable reciprocity is the inertia sustaining us. Other members expect us to fill our roles, and we do. Judgment isn’t always ambivalent because systems in many domains are, by and large, morally appropriate. Causal reciprocities establish roles that make them effective; glitches are perceived and corrected. Children are taught; things are made. Systems stabilize until they expire because of contingences—death, climate, or the economy.

1.6 Formation and demise Critics who find this account paradoxical or simplistic should consider the moral basis for any relationship they consider unproblematic: how did it form; what magical glue explains the inception of duties that bind its members? Intimate friends today were mutually unknown some time past. What factor explains the reciprocal expectations and duties they share if not the causal reciprocities that turned strangers into partners? Is, we learn to repeat, doesn’t entail ought, though sometimes it does: your friend is ill; you ought to call. But sometimes one doesn’t call. The friend has been careless; mutual annoyance chills intentions. People sick or bored abandon their duties. Others explain themselves in moral terms: they feel or say that their system is morally deficient. What do they mean; which moral principle or posture over-rides the duties and permissions of roles once avowed? Duties lapse (but for legally enforceable obligations) when systems fail. The oughts of its roles dissolve with the reciprocities that established them (an is now turned to was). How does it happen that something emergent and esteemed disappears with altered circumstances? This is no longer the objection that morality can’t have mechanical origins, but rather a question about systems abandoned because deficient or merely because members were indifferent. High moral principle is respected. Boredom isn’t perceived as an equally valid reason for abandoning partners in systems one voluntarily joined and helped stabilize. Depending on systems for our well-being, we want good reasons for disrupting them. Dentists sometimes cause pain, yet repairing a tooth is the greater good, so pain is an acceptable price for the benefit received. Motives and reasons are pragmatic: what works, what doesn’t; what is worth the cost, what isn’t? The cosmetics of social practice are, nevertheless, more deontological than utilitarian. Duties satisfied at acceptable prices acquire a ritual sanc-

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tion. Their satisfaction becomes “principled.” Parents, firemen, and ships’ captains accept their burdens without calculating personal advantage: everyone knows what they ought to do. Why are they so obliged? Because one acquires particular duties by virtue of one's role in those systems, because the systems have effects we value, and because their stability makes it incumbent that we enforce commitment to their roles. The intensity of this demand varies among systems. Passersby typically establish no reciprocities but those implying safe passage: each avoids running into the other by moving to the right. Greetings exchanged between casual acquaintances are evidence of something more: each acknowledges, by implication, the dignity of the other. The mutual accommodations of family members and workmates are all the more subtle and binding. Each of these graded reciprocities resembles a dance with partners: one moves, others respond in a complementary way. Morality is the expectation that each member will act as his or her role prescribes. We excuse clumsiness as friendships form; we tolerate failures of ambiguity when roles are uncertain (cousin of the groom). We want clarity when roles are core. For core systems are life-sustaining: obligations to them are enforced by the negative feedback that makes us conscious of nonfeasance or failure. Demands may be relaxed as roles are learned, but not in those requiring a minimum facility: surgeons and airline pilots, for example. The justification for a moral code is its efficacy as a set of coordinating duties and permissions. A system’s members satisfy this moral test by working effectively together. Morality is social glue: it stabilizes systems while making them effective in their terms. Justification for a system’s aims and effects is a separate issue: we can admire its discipline while despising its aims. Yet many or most of a society’s systems—its families, friendships, businesses, schools, and governments—are not pernicious. These are the productive engines of civilized life. Their stability is testimony to the moral codes that organize their members. Chapter Six—Justification—considers other respects in which systems are judged: namely, their aims and effects. The current chapter has this narrow focus: is a system effective (given necessary resources) because stabilized by members who satisfy its moral code? Thieves don’t worry that their aims are immoral; they insist that partners be reliable.

1.7 Normativity Why should I do what my systems require of me? What justifies their expectations or demands? These questions seem reasonable, but look again: do family, friendship, school, business, or community need justification beyond the obser-

Normativity | 15

vation that their demands are proportionate (more or less) to our needs. Unable to thrive or survive without the help of others, we join them in systems that sustain and satisfy us; wanting companionship, education, or safety, we engage our systems’ other members in ways appropriate to their moral codes. Each code is calibrated to stabilize its system within certain limits lest it dissolve or implode. Normativity is, therefore, critical to the mechanics of stable systems. Duties, nevertheless, vary in force because ought has degrees of intensity. It sometimes signifies must, other times should. One should remember a friend's birthday; duty to a parent or child is usually stronger. Either way, systems make a demand: acknowledge your role; satisfy its duties. The contingency of moral codes—alternatives are possible, contradictions aren’t generated by negating them—resembles that of physical laws. For normativity is material, not only formal: the solar system would not have formed if gravitation were not intrinsic to the relationship of sun and planets; other worlds are possible. The logical must—negations are contradictions—is just one of normativity’s expressions; physical laws and moral codes are two others. This utilitarian justification for moral norms may seem flimsy if one is disappointed by any vindication less potent than an a priori illumination or transcendental argument. But why do life’s core systems require a superior justification when efficacy and need already explain them? Because the idea of natural normativity—whether social or material—seems perverse in a tradition that defers to Hume: I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of proposition is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.…For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.10

This is commentary on the relation of ideas—is and ought—expressed in “propositions.” It is these ideas that are said to be separable because distinguishable, Hume’s analytic principle, his hammer and saw. Yet he never proves or even argues that nature, including human practice, is an appropriate domain for the application of this conceptual tool. Hume begs that question when he affirms that nature extends no farther than forceful and vivacious impressions. Ideas and impressions they copy are allegedly atomic,11 though nature isn’t fractured

|| 10 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 469. 11 Ibid., p. 1.

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that way. More than an aggregate, its constituents are causally bound and mutually determining. Ought—duty—is a function of one’s systems and roles. Firemen ought to extinguish fires; lifeguards ought to save people drowning. Either can be disciplined for declining to act as their roles require. Hume would object that the idea of having a job (an is) doesn’t entail the idea of how a job holder should behave (an ought). But systems and their roles are states of affairs, not ideas. Oughts are entailed (materially) just because of an is: one’s system and role. Hume would likely respond that I mistake elision for unity. Employees make utilitarian bargains: duties acknowledged for money received. Yet workers often identify with their tasks: firemen risk their lives, while off duty, to extinguish fires they could ignore. Consider, too, the many systems, roles, and duties that that are unremunerated: give no support and your friendships lapse. One may allege that friendship, too, is utilitarian: give help with the expectation of receiving it. But this is not always its motive: the is of friendship is often a commitment, an unqualified ought and would. I am assuming that systems are natural because cooperation in pursuit of common or complementary aims is natural: having needs and interests that aren’t easily or possibly satisfied alone, we create systems to satisfy them. There is a conventional, often a cultural side to morality—don’t drink if you’re under eighteen—but conventions discipline core systems without superseding their natural basis in cooperative social relations. Abandon the prejudice against natural normativity, and we rediscover (as anthropologists already know) the essential core systems common to all or most cultures.

1.8 Degrees of commitment Is commitment relevant to duty: is a woman duty bound to her kidnapper or a slave to his master? Coercion is one extreme in a continuum having voluntary commitment at the other end. My formulation assumes that a system’s members are willing participants, however ambivalent: one plays as best one can despite a quarrel with other team members; people stay married when mutually annoyed. There are two considerations; they have effects that often converge. One is the normativity intrinsic to moral codes: they prescribe duties and permissions to a system’s role-playing members. The other is the practicality that dominates our lives, hence the core systems organized for tasks that are lifesustaining or -enhancing. Allegiance to them expresses a calculation (when emotion and habit aren’t enough to explain it): wanting the benefits of core

Alternative accounts | 17

systems, we suffer their costs. This estimate also explains fidelity to pernicious systems: do what they require whatever their cost to others, because of benefits to oneself. We persistently believe—because justification dominates our thinking—that normativity lapses when systems are known to be evil. But this belief wrongly conflates normativity with unqualified worth: we esteem the Ten Commandments or Kant’s categorical imperative, but not any standard less imperious or more contingent. The normativity of moral codes is the mechanical condition for the creation and stability of systems; it distributes and coordinates a system’s tasks without implying the unqualified worth of a system’s aims and effects. We suffer imperfect jobs, schools, and friendships because they satisfy basic interests and needs to some degree. Could one renounce a system and its benefits because it mistreats members or others or because one doesn’t share its aim? That often happens, though the decision is complicated by habits, emotions, and the effects on other members (the family one supports).

1.9 Alternative accounts Zone morality complicates the simpler stories informed by alternatives that dominate moral discourse. Individualist theories promoting egoism, virtues, sensibility, will, or sentiment express the ontological persuasion that moral agents are fully formed, free-standing particulars: minds, citizens, or souls. Holistic ontologies (of universal sympathy, God, or spacetime) affirm that reality is corporate and unitary. Holism’s political or moral applications—Plato’s Republic, Marx’s society of contending classes—shadow its ontology: individuals are replaced by roles identified by their positions within a matrix of relations (workers or capitalists, communicants or priests). Individualism: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was an experiment: what would remain of thought and culture if one were marooned with no hope of contact with others? Locke expressed this idealization in a different way: “In the beginning, when all the world was America”12 implies a trackless wilderness where neighbors can't impede one’s peace or freedom. He, and later Mill, generalized the idea of atoms in the void to the actions of mature adults responsible for tastes, choices, and themselves. They regarded each person as mostly self-sufficient.

|| 12 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 99, 301.

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Partnerships are sometimes required, but they would likely be temporary because none would be permanently bound to others if each could live alone. Individualists construe society as an array of people constrained by rules that limit their interactions. Figure 1 represents this idea: Nietzsche and the materialists are the signal individualists of our time: Nietzsche because he emphasized the idiosyncrasy and genius of artists and because our entrepreneurs often believe that they, too, are artists; materialists because they say that mind is the activity of free-standing animal bodies. Both agree that initiative and action—efficacy—are principal human virtues.

Figure 1: Individuals and aggregates with lines representing laws that regulate movement or transactions. Individualism is aggregative: there is no principled qualification of the demand for personal autonomy. But how can we encourage initiative and free expression while protecting people from the effects of complexity, scarcity, and crowding? We do it by using principles, laws, and penalties to regulate social flow: Mill’s no-harm principle (act freely up to the point of harming others)13 is one example; Kant’s categorical imperative (do nothing that all could not do without contradiction)14 is another.

|| 13 Mill, On Liberty, pp. 13, 30, 77. 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London: Longman’s, 1963), pp. 31, 33.

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Holism: Holism emphasizes corporate properties and achievements. There is, for example, Bentham15 and Mill’s distribution principle,16 the greatest good for the greatest number: let each enjoy some degree of well-being when resources are shared. Why should distribution be equitable? Because of sympathy and respect for others and because most goods have many creators. This attitude displaces the holism that exalted a human community created by God: let each person make him- or herself responsible for the well-being of others, given that all are created in the image of God. Plato’s Republic is the secular point of reference for this idea. A survivalist community of some 5,000 persons is to organize itself for optimal efficiency by rationalizing the work to be done, then by breeding and educating its members for roles appropriate to these needs and their talents.17 The Republic was the inspiration for Marx’s phrase, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”18 Where the well-being of each depends on the work and well-being of all, it is the good of all—the corporate good—we seek. Similar ideas infuse every tribal morality: we fail or prevail as one. Holism defines individuals relationally: personal idiosyncrasy is incidental because each person is defined by his or her place or role within the whole: first baseman or shortstop; husband or wife:

Figure 2: Holism, with individuals differentiated by their relative positions within a grid. Social stability is construed as a function of holistic design and a consequence of social discipline. So, a monarchy is weak or strong for a variety of reasons (including the strength of its incumbent), though its social structure and identity may be stable, given its design. || 15 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Dover, 2007), p. 5. 16 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, In.: Hackett, 2001), p. 7. 17 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis McDonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 367e-502c, pp. 53-203. 18 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press, 2008), p. 27.

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Holistic regimes are, nevertheless, vulnerable because stability depends on the acquiescence or passivity of people whose rights derive from their roles. Is care taken that all may benefit from their contributions to the welfare of the whole, or is there a totalizing devotion to the corporate state whatever the cost to individuals? “Todo por la patria” was inscribed over the front doors of police stations in Franco’s Spain, but similar phrases justify businesses, governments, and churches that act for their corporate benefit without regard for employees, citizens, or congregants. Yet, opposition is often inarticulate. Reactions— malaise, disappointment, or frustration—are primitive because people having no posture or perspective independent of their roles are slow to reject their holistic regime. Communitarianism/systems theory: Philosophy is usually satisfied by its offsetting alternatives—individualism and holism—though a third position is close at hand. This alternative has a perspective of its own, though it accommodates both of the other two. Six figures—Figures 3 to 9—clarify its exposition. A first advantage is conspicuous in this representation of individuals:

Figure 3: A member of several systems. This figure signifies that each person is implicated in the lives of several or many others by virtue of roles that make him or her a participant in systems— families, friendships, business, schools, or teams—that also engage them. There are occasional hermits—people living resolutely alone—but not many of them. The moral profiles of individuals—the inventories or maps of their roles (past or present), duties, and permissions—are mostly unconscious. They may be sampled or surveyed, though typically they are not because of their obscurity and complexity and because stable habits facilitate transitions among one’s roles. We nevertheless are or can be aware of these transitions: members of special police or military units don’t willingly tell their children about their duties. How are disparate codes reconciled? We take care to participate in sys-

Alternative accounts | 21

tems that are roughly comparable in their moral demands. We rationalize and excuse their disparities or we find ways to repress awareness of our situational conflicts. Systems are modules: each has an inside and an outside. The inside is established by reciprocal causal relations that bind a system’s parts; the outside is a membrane that filters inputs. Each part—each member—relates to others by way of feedback relations that control the flow of information, energy, materials, and work. Figure 4 represents a simple system of two members:

Figure 4: A system—a module—having two members. A module is porous, but selective: it accepts and incorporates information and materiel pertinent to its task, but rejects the rest: friends ignore the gossips who talk about them. Each system has an economy prescribed by its moral code and tailored (more or less efficiently) to its aims. Needs and behaviors are generic: every friendship, every marriage is a system regulated by the feedback, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, of partners’ feelings, beliefs, and intentions. Yet every friendship or marriage varies to some degree from every other. The system endures as long as its distinctive collaboration is sustained or until a partner changes in ways that disrupt it. The other member or members adjust—a new equilibrium is established—or the system dissolves. Modules are the focus, the sites, of zone morality. Morality within each module is a function of four variables: i. an objective to be achieved by coordinating the actions of the system’s members; ii. an organization qualified to achieve this aim given each member’s role and relations to others; iii. each member’s response to acts, materials, or provocations that are acknowledged or ignored because pertinent or not to his or her role; and iv. a condition appropriate to all systems irrespective of their aims: respect for each member’s dignity. The first three of these variables define the moral posture of a system’s members given its aim and their duties. Their effort and virtues are not so much high-minded as pragmatic and mechanical. For the system is organized for an objective prized by one or more of its members and sustained by the needs of others. A critic may suppose that the moral value of its coordinated roles is a function of its aim: a malign objective disqualifies its means. But this persua-

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sion ignores the various people and interests served, including members (the boss and employees) or others (clients or suppliers). Work continues, despite imperfections and reservations, when enough of a system’s members find it useful. Are they cynical? They are if one supposes that morality has uncompromisable standards, but not if one believes that a system’s moral code is only a design for sustaining it. Ambiguity, disappointment, even abuse, may be insufficient to alienate members who could leave but don’t because staying is marginally advantageous. Recognition of another's dignity is a moral value specific in its expressions though blind to the character and aims of particular transactions (the fourth point above). This demand often goes unspoken, though it lubricates a system’s other relations. A taxi stops for a passenger who badgers the competent driver, criticizing his every move. The driver stops the car, recounts his accident-free history, and asks if the passenger wishes to stay or go. The local taxi and limousine commission prescribes minimal standards for the conduct of drivers and passengers. This driver has satisfied the moral code binding him to his passenger, hence those rules. His passenger has violated two duties: first to the moral code relating him or her to the driver, second to the requirement that we respect the dignity of those we engage. What explains this duty? We acknowledge in others the self-regard familiar in ourselves; we suppose that they need and want respect for whatever is singular, decent, or competent in themselves. Perceiving their depths, acknowledging their vulnerability, we take care not to violate or intrude on them. This response expresses an attitude, not a demonstrable principle, one sustained until we are disabused by persons themselves. Here, too, justification is partly pragmatic. Modules are tight; there is little space for people who share no mutual respect. We typically behave better—cooperating with or deferring to others— when their respect is perceived. Anything less disrupts coordination. Figure 5 represents overlap:

Figure 5: Overlapping systems. Those having roles in overlapping systems are subject to conflicts arising from differences in the moral codes of those systems: authority here, submissiveness there. This was Marx’s point of reference when arguing that the proletarian

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family is corrupted when a husband compensates for humiliation at work by tyrannizing his wife and children.19 Networks form when systems have common or complementary interests: lawyers and clients; families, schools, and shops. There are two versions. In one, systems are mutually bound without overlap (no member of one is also a member of the other). Teams joined in an athletic league are one such network.

Figure 6: A network: chaining without overlap. Systems in networks of the other kind service one another or their members because one or more persons participate in two or more of the network’s systems: a family member owns stock in the bank that grants his favorable mortgage; his business pays the monthly charge. Hierarchy adds an additional complexity because the moral codes of higherorder systems may subordinate or subvert the moral demands of subaltern systems: federal law bars the production of marijuana; some state governments permit it. People and systems caught between the two are reasonably confused. Figure 7 represents a hierarchy of systems:

Figure 7: Systems related hierarchically. Core and other systems are usually embedded in complex arrays of hierarchy and overlap. These arrays are often mutually independent (apart from gravitational relations consequent on their presence in spacetime):

|| 19 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1954), pp. 48-49.

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Figure 8: Ensembles of systems related by overlap or hierarchy. The disparity of moral codes is an experiential commonplace. Everyone moves easily in and out of systems that differ considerably in their moral permissions or demands: from work to friendship, for example. Or transitions are fraught because codes of a lower order are countermanded by those of a higher order: my church requires conduct proscribed by the state. Accordingly, each person’s moral posture is an ensemble of expectations and inhibitions keyed to disparate roles and contexts, one that registers the history of his or her engagements. Behaviors beyond some horizon are intolerable: working in kitchens requires that I cut up dead chickens; I don’t mutilate live ones. This complexity somewhat resembles the strata of rocks laid down long ago: there are unexpected ruptures and discontinuities: things one will or won’t do for elusive reasons. Domains are the arenas in which persons, systems, or networks cooperate or compete: social clubs, markets, or playing fields, for example. A plausible figure resembles Figure 1, except that the arrows attached to individuals (here: persons, systems, or networks) point toward a cooperator or competitor:

Figure 9: Domains: the interplay of cooperating or competing individuals, systems, or networks. The foregoing seven figures exhibit the complexity of systems theory /communitarianism. They explain phenomena cited in defense of individualism and holism while covering matters for which those accounts have no explanation. So, this hypothesis acknowledges the autonomy of individuals who prioritize their

Alternative accounts | 25

commitments to the various systems in which they participate, but also the corporate ethos in which members accommodate to their systems: Swedes learn and observe Swedish law; Singapore’s citizens are formed by and responsible to laws and rhythms of a different sort. Systems theory also succeeds in this other way: it locates human systems among the material complexes created by causal reciprocities in nature. Moral codes have their inception in a mechanism pervasive there. Figure 10 represents the emergence of successive higher-order systems from their reciprocally related constituents: 109 8 7-7 6 5 4 3-3 2 1 Figure 10: The great chain of being: successive emergent orders. 1, 2, and 3 signify quarks, atoms, and molecules; 4, 5, 6, and 7 signify cells, tissues, organs, and living animal (human) bodies; 8, 9, and 10 signify core systems, tribes, and cities or states. 3, 7, and 10 are stable; a complex system has, in each case, sufficient organization and energy to sustain itself. Systems stabilize at one of these three points or they fall back to the next lower stability (to 1, 3, or 7). Levels 8, 9, and 10 are critical here because we could have hypothesized in ignorance, but now confirm, that humans organize systems (families, friendships, schools) that are hard to sustain in isolation, though they are better stabilized when supplied and defended within large social units: tribes, cities, or states. So, families are more or less robust entities formed at level 8; they consolidate in neighborhoods or tribes at level 9, then stabilize in cities or states at level 10. Anarchy reduces states to individual bodies, as death reduces bodies to molecules. Causal reciprocity is, at each level, the engine of integration and stability. Hence the conservatism of moral codes: each prescribes obligations to a system’s members: sustain the system by filling your role. Molecules (3) and animal

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bodies (7) don’t need instruction; their formation is out of conscious control. Some systems (8) are sustained because inherited; others stabilize because the energy required to remake or leave them is greater than the energy sustaining them. Conservation is often a recipe for stasis but innovation is disruptive: we find reasons and excuses for being as we have been. Initiatives (at 8, 9. or 10) are vitalizing though they sometimes bring established systems to the edge of instability.20

1.10 Excessive abstraction There are no words sufficiently specific for many systems, their roles, or the qualities of their members, so appraisals are often generic and pragmatic: we emphasize members’ virtues—“reliable,” “competent,” or “effective”—or we use moral talk that abstracts from the particularities of roles and actions, saying, for example, that one is “caring” or “responsible.” A simple analogy clarifies the status of these virtues by construing them as principles or rules. Veracity is expressed by the rule tell the truth; responsibility by the rule do your duty. These principles resemble grammatical rules in two respects. Grammar proscribes solecisms; principles of virtue proscribe immoral behavior; neither implies the content of the sentences or situations to which it applies because both are regulative, not constitutive. Saying that there are no grammatical errors in either of two books, discerning virtue in either of two actions, tells us nothing about the content of either: a legal brief isn’t a poem; a friendship isn’t a business. Sometimes abstractions fail because they’re vague. Remarking a breach of moral principle is a way of diagnosing a particular systemic failure, but, like a weather report—“broken clouds, occasional showers”—it lacks specificity. Other times, abstractions fail because of excessive generality. We laud virtue in all contexts where some are affected by another’s actions. But this abstraction— virtue without regard for context—is shallow. Truthfulness, responsibility, dedication, and care are prized because they promote reciprocities that make systems effective, irrespective of their different styles and aims. Yet qualities considered virtuous in most contexts aren’t universalized without limit. Cooperation is usually esteemed, though telling truth to power—whistle-blowing—is desirable because disruptive. Compare the moral content generated by the

|| 20 Stuart Kaufman, The Origins of Order: Self-organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 255-277.

Other goods | 27

roles, reciprocities, and aims that constitute, stabilize, and direct particular social systems: what are a system’s aims and methods; how are its roles calibrated; how are a member’s expectations satisfied or frustrated? Like shoemakers fixing one shoe at a time, we want particular values for the variables of a system’s moral economy. Principles formulated as rules or criteria are abstract; these judgments are specific and concrete. John Dewey and Joseph Fletcher might have liked this analogy. They agreed that moral judgments should closely track actions and intentions; judgment shouldn’t reduce to the a priori determination that rules are satisfied irrespective of actions, aims, or circumstances. Fletcher’s Situation Ethics21 is an abomination to the formalist style of moral judgment, because his regard for content and context precludes facile legislation or judgment. Was he mistaken? Kant abstracted from every situation when averring that lying is always wrong. Like Fletcher and Dewey, we respond by citing zones where lying defends an innocent stranger. We don’t say that lying is always a good thing or that some systems and activities (traffic and contracts, for example) aren’t better served for having rules.

1.11 Other goods Zone morality stabilizes the core and other systems that supply our material means; we create, discover, and enjoy many things because of the fellowship and education they supply. But the goodness of systems is instrumental: it promotes the well-being of individual persons and whatever corporate goods systems create. Orchestras, schools, families, and states are corporate goods: they are systems good for their members and valuable to others. Systems theory accounts for these goods by describing the social conditions for their generation. Yet its alternatives, individualism and holism, are not pointless. For there are three entities—individuals, systems, and wholes—neither reducible to the other two. There are no systems without individuals and no societies without both; the three are entwined in ways that make them distinguishable, but not separable. This is consequential materially because it implies social complexity and the likelihood of conflict when the three have interests that collide. Which is or ought to be dominant; are there times when one or another subordinates itself to the others? Whose interest is served: individuals, systems, or the whole? Are decisions reserved to naked power or do we inhibit force in

|| 21 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966).

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the name of oversight and the common good? The process is political. It isn’t dispassionate because the participants are systems contending for authority to regulate in their interest. Later chapters consider these issues: first regulation, then politics and justification.

2 Character Emphasizing systems provokes questions about their members. Is personal identity just the amalgam of one’s roles? Or is it true instead that people dominate their roles?

2.1 Semantics Character may be construed as form appropriate to a task in the manner that knives and forks have shapes matched to their use. Or the word may signify properties (character of a vintage) character as type (character actors), or style (the character of a painting distinguished as representational or abstract). These uses are incidental to this chapter. Character of the relevant sort is an evolving structure founded in human dispositions, attitudes, and circumstances: it determines one’s intellectual, practical, emotional, or moral response to opportunities, people, situations, or tasks. Character, as used here, signifies autonomy and integrity; it implies that members stand apart from their systems while working more or less effectively within them. Abilities are critical for one’s roles, but they are distinct from character: Dr. Mengele’s skills didn’t distinguish him from other students at his medical school; it was character that set him apart.

2.2 Character’s formation No one is a blank slate or chameleon formed only by his or her roles. Neither is it true that character’s formation is unaffected by them. For character is the effect of three variables: inherited tendencies (deliberate or impulsive), roles in systems chosen or inherited, and one’s developmental history. Character is first an array of tendencies where none may dominate. It acquires bulk and articulation when some are tuned by successive roles. Most people participate from early childhood in several zones (mother and child; father and child), hence the need to accommodate different, sometimes opposed opportunities or demands. Character alters as roles are reconciled, or it breaks down because demands are schismatic. This vulnerability persists throughout life. A nervous but trusting child overcomes anxiety because of sensitive caretaking; an active child turns sullen because caretakers are too punitive or distracted to notice his rhythms or needs. Adults share this dilem-

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ma: the hermit maintains equanimity by reducing his or her social encounters to zero; city dwellers—exposed to or responsible for myriad systems (most ephemeral)—are close to the limit for tolerating diversity. Visitors flee when baffled by a resident’s ease or they stay but struggle to reduce their exposure. This difference—participation in many systems or few—is morally consequential. People living in small towns encounter family members and friends in circumstances where city residents meet strangers. Relating to the same people at home and work intensifies moral bonds; core attachments are less intense if the standard for affiliation is the superficiality of most daily contacts. Moral sensibility is degraded in the respect that character is indifferent to the many situations one ignores. We become, in Simmel’s phrase, blasé.1

2.3 Idiosyncrasy Character has a stalwart ring: it implies idiosyncrasy and persistence. People move in directions of their own for reasons of their own, yet we ask that they be predictable: disguise idiosyncrasy: make thought, feeling, and intention communicable by subjecting them to public standards. Let individuality reduce to a singular face and mannerisms when all are socialized. Hence these contrary interests: preserve autonomy and difference while making people intelligible to one another for choices that are socially comprehensible and (mostly) approved. We don’t ask poets to chant the same verses, though uniformity is essential to communication, predictability, and safety (all of them critical to social stability). Language is often cited as the principal instrument of the mental uniformity provoked by socialization, though we have it from William James and W. V. O. Quine that beliefs expressed linguistically disguise the idiosyncratic tangle of personal associations: All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for every one. Hence, we must talk consistently just as we must think consistently….True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stabil-

|| 1 Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Form, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 329.

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ity and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking.2 [T]heory is composed of sentences associated with one another in multifarious ways not easily reconstructed even in conjecture. There are so-called logical connections, and there are so-called causal ones, but any such interconnections of sentences must finally be due to the conditioning of sentences as responses to sentences as stimuli. If some of the connections count more particularly as logical or as causal, they do so only by reference to socalled logical or causal laws which in turn are sentences within the theory.3 Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.4

These passages are reminiscent of Hume’s remarks about the singularity of experience: every new datum alters its orientation when coupled to data remembered or imagined.5 Each of us has a different history; your inferences differ from mine because each is the effect of a different mass of data and distinctive trains of association. Language and style are disciplines that make the singular thinker socially comprehensible (speakers require one, artists the other). Logical form sanitizes our arguments; a public language or style makes us mutually intelligible. For people, like free-radicals, anticipate affiliation. We are made—by need, emotion, and cognition—for participation in systems that supply both our animal needs and our desire for social identity. Character and capacity, initiative and difference are subordinate to cooperation and coordination. Yet systems theory can’t explain the energy and intelligence of social life if reflection and initiative are ignored. Coordination is often routinizing, but collaboration doesn’t nullify the autonomy of intellect, attitude, feeling, and volition. This tension—idiosyncrasy or efficient uniformity—drives social anxiety: communication is imperfect because private associations and meanings are inaccessible to others. Hegel obliterates the evidence of difference when every mind achieves the clarity of reason.6 Wittgenstein’s dictum—meaning requires a

|| 2 William James, The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 435. 3 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 11. 4 Ibid., p. 13. 5 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 10-13. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 787-808.

32 | Character public criterion—is a reformulation of that idea.7 Nietzsche demurred: uniformity reduces the herd to the moral and intellectual equivalent of entropy. Idiosyncrasy is critical to social life because it (like genetic drift) generates difference. Innovators of all sorts—in art or industry—revitalize social life because they see and seize opportunities invisible to others.8 Arguments against the possibility of private languages are disguised reproaches to the alleged autonomy and isolation of Cartesian minds. Feelings overflow as words; we coordinate practical tasks by talking to partners. Yet duties and perspectives are particular and distinct. Responsibility for choosing and performing one’s roles guarantees that each person speaks with nuances particular to his or her experience. I don’t understand myself or my circumstances in generic terms appropriate to all. Nor do others hear my justifications or descriptions exactly as I intend them. The best actors, quarterbacks, and cooks work distinctively, though each fills a role that limits and shapes his or her behavior. Many activities aren’t easily characterized, even by people who do them well: try describing the sequence of moving feet and legs when walking or dancing. Multiply this incapacity by numbering one’s many roles and activities, then consider that learning to formulate accurate descriptions—true propositions—can’t be the way we learn to participate in any system where knowing how is prior to knowing that. We learn by immersion: one practices fielding ground balls before playing shortstop. Propositional instruction may be helpful—in recipe books or directives for raising children—but it is not so useful as doing the work. The many confirming examples intimate a kind of learning that Dewey stressed, though it is still largely ignored by our reverence for Cartesian-inspired theories of knowledge. We emphasize propositional truths, not social competence, though practical facility is the condition for the reciprocities binding most systems. (Abstract conversations at academic meetings are an exception.)

2.4 Oversight Do we perceive ourselves as centers of choice and control or as unwilling victims of systems and roles inherited or imposed? Figure 3 is misleading if con-

|| 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1966), paras. 269-272, pp. 94-95. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 86-87.

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strued to imply that each person is the socialized aggregate of skills or attitudes appropriate to his or her roles. This would imply that character—a cipher in itself—takes the shape and color of every current role. That isn’t so: healthy character is a power for oversight and control. We choose or accept disparate roles while determining the degree of time and effort allotted to each. The effect is an array of commitments shaped and integrated in ways that suit us. Or we live with rage or defeat because of having little choice. Figure 11b corrects a likely reading of Figures 3 and 11a :

a.

b.

Figure 11: Figure 3 (11a) and its emendation, 11b. Some cultures prescribe core roles and prepare members to accept them: arranged marriage, for example. Participants count themselves happy; life has a rhythm little altered over generations. (Figure 11a) Other cultures acknowledge systems that satisfy core interests—family, friendship, school, work, and marriage—but expect individuals to choose their vocations while ranking the time and effort devoted to each (Figure 11b). These alternatives may have similar effects: women obliged to stay home with their children are similarly situated to those who choose it; a farmer by choice has tasks similar to those of people who inherit the role while having no alternatives. Both outcomes may be effective, but there is a difference between acceptance (or resignation) and choice. One is acquiescent, the other self-affirming. These are the attitudes of distinct psychic postures. One is the personality of accommodation: destiny—convenience, force, or inheritance—is accepted for better or worse. Character of the other sort is a power for assembling resources in pursuit of an aim. People free to choose are sometimes reckless: they gamble

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with little understanding or control of significant variables. Others are prudent: risk is tolerable, though one tries to minimize it. These cognitive-affective postures are controlled by one or the other of their named constituents: thought or feeling. Emotional control is unreliable if feelings change unpredictably: myriad people going different ways defeat coordination. Cognition anticipates this risk by checking emotions while measuring risks against advantages. Systems theory favors rational control because people agreeing to an aim and plan are more likely to stabilize a system by coordinating their roles. Early Americans distinguished themselves from Old World traditions in similar terms: Europeans were stale because captive to established systems; America was the blank slate on which ambition and innovation would inscribe a better future. Emotion can energize us if thought prescribes the means after appraising the ends. Napoleon—perceptive and decisive, not merely impulsive—was the European exception: Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as before natural events.9

Emerson credited the success of Napoleon’s battlefield initiatives to courage, decisiveness, and his accurate perception of shifting forces. Passion was steady, but controlled; intellect was its master. The two postures represented by Figure 11 are distinguished by contrary demands on cognition. The posture dominated by roles inherited or imposed is slavishly empirical: learn the established ways of one’s people by seeing what others do: learn a dance by doing it with those who know it already. The alternate style gives priority to deliberation and initiative: know your circumstances, interests, and needs, recognize your opportunities. This was Nietzsche’s preferred style; it favors perception, imagination, and will. Emerson—Nietzsche’s favorite nineteenth-century philosopher—characterized this posture as “idealism as it appears [in America] in 1842.”10 Americans believed that Europe was a plenum where the instinct for innovation was moribund because every conceptual space was filled. America was a tabula rasa; one could do or build whatever imagination and initiative could produce, espe|| 9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Napoleon; or, the Man of the World” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), pp. 451-452. 10 Emerson, “The Transcendentalists,” in Essential Writings, p. 81.

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cially the structures of a new society. Hence this commandment from Emerson’s “The American Scholar”: put aside old books; learn what you need to know in order to build as you wish. Architecture is paradigmatic because architects usually build vertically in empty space. American society could have whichever social and political structures experiment and good sense would commend. The work would be done by individuals astride their talents. And similarly, tradition can’t suppress us if will and initiative create roles appropriate to our interests and opportunities; no longer dispersed among roles created by others, we dominate roles of our making.

2.5 Initiative and cultivation Every feature of civilized life is the achievement of someone whose cultivation in thought, style, or technique enabled him or her to create or improve it. Successors find ways to use the discoveries these others made. Their sensibility may have been unappreciated. Now better perceived, we exploit its effects. Innovation is a decisive reproof to all who believe that socialization suffocates individuality. People comfortable in the work of their systems don’t seize opportunities to start new ones; artists pacified by the work of others don’t struggle to alter a dominant style. The rhythms of personal and social life favor continuity when systems are effective to an acceptable degree. Yet people everywhere are alive to the possibility that there are other ways to proceed. These are sometimes the ideas of outsiders unfamiliar with a current practice, though more often they come from insiders who know the inefficiencies of standard routines. Changes initiated by insiders are quickly appraised. The test is efficacy: an idea that works is often copied. Outsiders have a more difficult challenge: get attention by proving (with competence, reputation or profitability) that their participation is legitimate. Artists, too, may be insiders by virtue of working within a style. Good artists find admirable ways to exemplify it; better ones explore its elementary forms, as Bach exposed the music of his time. Artists qualifying as outsiders disrupt rather than amend established ideas. Dissonance was unwelcome in all the arts until it revealed unknown possibilities. Now we want rough edges and distrust smooth surfaces. Nietzsche described artistic creation, rejection, and appropriation in ways anticipated by Hegel’s dialectic. Core systems have their routines; accepted artistic styles change incrementally. Initiative and creativity are disruptive: they sabotage continuity and divert apparent trajectories. There may be many radical options lurking among a style’s practitioners—like meteors spinning unnoticed around a planet—but few come to the attention of other artists and critics. Out-

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liers they know are judged with suspicion. The public stands back because annoyed or confused: familiar with an established style, disliking innovations, it wants predictability, not subversion. For we can’t have social stability or intelligible art if every system or style is perpetually disputed. This is the dialectical moment of appropriation and synthesis: the unexamined life is often worth living, but not everywhere or always. Routine makes us sluggish: we don’t consider what we do or why we do it because things seem to go well enough (Peirce’s method of tenacity11). Yet there is sometimes a selfwilled call to attention: be judicious, but don’t reject innovation without first looking or listening. What does it say; where does it go? How do thought and emotion read its form, complexity, and resolution? Artistic character—stubborn, inventive, but fragile—challenges our loyalty to formulaic ideas by creating new ones. Yet old and new are not unassimilable. The artist isn’t a creature out of space and time; his or her talent was refined by learning the craft and styles of a tradition, whether local or cosmopolitan. Yet the new has to be explained and learned. Progress happens because stubborn personalities discover options that others can’t forever resist. Obstacles dissolve because artists see through them. Their autonomy is more than free choice: it requires the educated sensibility— the cultivated interiority—that controls impulse and disciplines imagination. It dominates matter in ways that others come to see and praise. We discover that a traditional style was only superficially coherent; it obscured faults and fissures that go in unexpected directions when exposed and exploited. Understanding is often resisted; there is usually a generational gap, though the old haven’t the strength to arrest innovations that survive them. Cultivated sensibility is often regarded as the effect of a development that is essentially private, but here—in core systems—the training is social. Everyone learns some degree of social competence: we adjust our perceptions and skills to the roles, rules, laws, and styles that shape actions and choices. Sensibility forms as one looks two ways: to distinctive roles and their problematic circumstances, and to one’s own resonances and discriminations. A good fit makes us happy and effective, but probably uninspired. A bad fit is constructive if we’re challenged to change it. A perfect fit risks conflating character with roles: one becomes their willing creature: I like my job; I’m easily entertained.12 Nietzsche emphasized the pressure on selves caught between the requirements of autonomy and socialization, the artist versus members of the herd.

|| 11 C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. i-vi. eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934, 1935), vol. v., para. 5.378, p. 235. 12 Ideas clarified by Jacob Pessin.

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This tension punishes every child and most adults, though the dilemma is productive if interiority is deepened and enlarged because socialization is both challenge and choice. This is an advantage mostly denied to those who suffer passively as roles change, with little or no freedom to alter the terms of their duties (Figure 11a). It enriches people whose varied engagements satisfy Freud’s formula for well-being: love in relations of mutual support and esteem; work that energizes and expresses one’s talents (Figure 11b).13 Interiority is a vault: airless and compressed, or ample but guarded. Why is self-development—cultivation—a moral virtue? To some large degree, it isn’t: participation in core systems (family, schools, and work) is sufficient to turn infants into adults. Self-development has moral value when the aim is self-realization and the process is self-directed. Go to effective schools; be an effective carpenter, pilot, or friend. These are significant achievements, yet one may feel that focus and discipline were contributions to a process others managed. Virtue is self-enhancing when achievements are the effects of one’s choice and self-discipline. This is a moral virtue because refining sensibility— the discrimination, skill, and intentions required for thinking, doing, or making—amplifies the pleasure and power of human activity and experience. Selfperfection is an appetite, one that may be more or less intense. Discovering a taste or talent, cultivating it, is gardening in the most intimate place. It satisfies an obligation to oneself. Rising out of life’s everyday affairs, one pursues a private aim, one that intensifies experience while articulating the self. This is dedication beyond the call of mechanical proficiency and social duty: one does more because more can be done.

|| 13 This phrase is ascribed to Sigmund Freud, though there seems to be no printed record of his having used it.

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Figure 12: Two trajectories: one, the course of everyday life; the other, its idealized aims. Cultivation seems prissy: people plain and honest shouldn’t need it. But cultivation liberates us from routines that are mechanical because familiar and unrelieved. Knowing cricket and rounders informs one’s understanding of baseball; knowing the design of lawnmowers clarifies the finicky jerks and grinds in the one at hand. Cultivation—discrimination and skill—is power. The prejudice against it is often distaste for refinement in music, art, literature, or dance. There is less derision for those who know fine wine or the infield fly rule. Yet knowing more, having more control of one’s talents and tastes, seems unqualifiedly better than knowing or controlling less. This is a power, but is it a virtue and, more specifically, a moral virtue? Yes, because morality is specific to the conditions for well-being, especially human well-being. Education that enhances well-being by enlarging sensibility and self-control is specific to that part of morality that is self-regarding. This is virtue as a self-willed call to attention: could I satisfy myself and my duties to others without deceiving them or myself? The psychic power it deploys is concentrated and centered or diffuse. It answers to two questions. Who or what controls me: do I choose my core systems (granted the effects of my culture and development) or are they chosen for me? Sartre, like Hegel, supposed that everyone capitulating to authority knows his weakness, but this is surely false of people terrified and those never free to choose their core systems. They settle, adapt, and hope for the best.

2.6 Virtues and skills Successful participation in core and other systems requires both habits and responses praised as virtues and skills. Every system requires skills appropriate to its roles. They may be elementary (saying “Hello”) or numerous and subtle (running a business, raising chil-

Virtues and skills | 39

dren). Schools teach some; others require experience and practice. One might say that a capacity for each of the Thirrteen virtues is also a skill. Yet these virtues are required of role- players in any system, while skills are specific to roles: short-order cook, bus driver. Some skills—boiling water—are fully acquired; one never boils water better than the first time. Others—being a student—are variable in two ways: because they evolve with practice and because people acquiring them go divergent ways: student of Sanskrit, student of hang-gliding. Both know how to learn, though neither retraces the other’s path because each has passed successive gates unknown to the other. Is there a morality to skills in themselves, a moral value distinct from the roles exploiting them? A goaltender’s skills have no moral value apart from the moral code that assembles a soccer team’s members. A facility for playing the violin does have value apart from quartets and orchestras because of music for the solo instrument. But this practical ability—like tying one’s shoes—isn’t a moral value. For skills in themselves are amoral. They acquire moral value by virtue of their use. One may dispute this conclusion, given that many skills (cat burglar, contract killer) seem inherently misbegotten. Yet one imagines scenarios in which skills used abusively are used morally. We indict intentions and uses, not skills themselves. Virtues appropriate to all one’s roles are acquired as one participates in systems: they carry over from one system to another, however different their respective tasks, organizations, and aims. Thirteen are conspicuous: i. efficient; ii. reliable; iii.. cooperative; iv. communicative; v. honest; vi. trusting; vii. loyal; viii. flexible; ix. tolerant; x. prudent; xi. self-critical; xii. courageous; and xiii. responsible. Each virtue is important to the degree that reciprocities of all sorts are impaired if it fails. i. Efficient: One must do a role’s work well enough and in ways making it accessible to partners. Well enough is the significant qualifier: efficiency is graded by reference to a system’s aim and those of its members: the school pianist plays well enough for its chorus, but not for the local concert hall. Members need to know the degree of efficacy required to achieve their system’s objective. Who should try out for the team? What are its standards? Efficiency has the two measures intimated above: efficacy in a role and the skill for making one’s work intelligible or available to those in complementary roles. The shortstop fields a ground ball and throws it to the first baseman. His target turns to escape a ball thrown at a velocity too high to be caught with a gloved hand; the shortstop is efficient to a degree, but his work isn’t viable.

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ii. Reliable: A system’s other members need the security of knowing that partners do their work. This is reassurance that their system is well organized and evidence that there is progress in tasks essential to the success of one’s own work. But back-sliding is familiar; circumstances or personal failures make us unreliable. Other members may compensate, though limited skills and responsibilities for other roles limit their ability to substitute for role-players who are missing or impaired: a ship’s cook can’t usually replace its navigator. Wholesale unreliability is demoralizing; a system disintegrates if a sensitive fraction of its members doesn’t work well or at all. Failures of skill or efficiency are mostly the effects of insufficient practice or education. Unreliability is a failure of a different sort. Someone having the relevant skill fails to satisfy a role that requires it: is this is the effect of illness or fatigue; or is it the character flaw of making commitments to systems that founder when role-players fail to perform? Reliability assumes that members use requisite skills as their system requires. iii. Cooperative: Each of these virtues is a personal qualification; each has a history rooted in one’s personal development. Cooperation, too, is learned but it stands apart because of being inherently social. Systems are collaborative: created by the reciprocities of their members, they dissolve if members are cantankerous in ways that preclude coordination. Some systems require that one know how to work with others on arriving. Players on a team have assigned positions; they know what others expect of them and perform accordingly. Marriage and friendship aren’t so rigid: one chooses partners who seem complementary, though the relationship isn’t stabilized until partners have adapted to one another in situations that are ordinary or unforeseeable. Every society and culture values cooperation, but some care more than others. Is it emphasized or merely approved? Which paradigms of social behavior are presented in popular games, entertainment, or mythology? Folk heroes are typically singular—Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Thomas Edison. Most of us don’t know the names of their partners. iv. Communicative: Communication is necessary for the cooperation that makes systems effective; other members need timely information that a partner has done his or her work. Communication may be verbal, but that isn’t always necessary or appropriate. Musicians signal one another using eye contact or gestures learned when they practice together. Imagine people who are cooperative, but not communicative: students complete their assignments but fail to submit

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them; doctors confirm that conditions are benign but don’t inform their patients. Poor communicators, we say. v. Honest: The exchange of information among a system’s members is a necessary condition for achieving their corporate aim and for the over-sight required to manage their system. Members assume the honesty of their partners until there is reason to think otherwise, for none can be efficient, reliable, or cooperative if dishonest. vi. Trusting: Trust is a blank check. Inheriting or accepting roles, we expect cooperation and respond with annoyance—negative feedback—if disappointed. But people often cooperate, so trust is easier because so often justified. This link is a moment of transition, from reliability to trust to loyalty. Each marks an intensification of the psychic bonding expressed when cooperation is efficient. One sees the contrary affect in children treated arbitrarily: they are less trusting, less than sure that cooperation is possible. vii. Loyal: Loyalty is (usually) the complement to reliability: one isn’t reliable if disloyal (though part of being a successful spy may require that one be zealously reliable while disloyal). Loyalty is commitment to a system, its aim, one’s role, or partners. It may be intellectual (I approve this aim for specifiable reasons) or passionate (patriotism without justifying reasons). Core systems often evoke loyalty for both reasons: one is emotionally attached to their members while needing them to satisfy core needs and interests. Loyalty is often judicious rather than blind: one is stalwart while seeing faults in a system’s aims, organization, or the work of its members. And sometimes a member shows his or her loyalty by declaring that one or another of the three goods—persons, systems, or the whole—is violated in the name of one or both of the other two. Tolerance for dissent is one test of a system’s strength: is negative feedback so well established that a system can reform itself? Loyalty to core systems is straightforward: we need them. Loyalty to peripheral systems (any that are not core) is harder to explain. Why greet people encountered regularly, though one doesn’t otherwise know them? Perhaps because the response to members of core systems is an expectation and habit generalized across the domain of those encountered. People in a small community greet one another when passing, whether or not they are mutually known. But then tourists arrive. Most are unresponsive; they avoid eye contact, so this generalized response—a greeting—is inhibited. These visiters remind us that morality is native to core systems and that people may want exemption from manners or duties when elsewhere.

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viii. Flexible: Most of us participate in myriad systems, sometimes concurrently: duties and permissions are different when speaking with one’s wife, children, or a neighbor. Immersion teaches flexibility without our being able to tell exactly what was learned or how. The marvel in this is our ability to learn the moral code appropriate to each of these encounters, usually without verbal instructions or formal training. People devoted to one or a few core systems—family or a religion—have more limited roles than those who regularly move in and out of several core systems, but even cloistered people learn to proceed when thwarted by circumstances. This is the effective but inarticulate style of woodsmen, cooks, and parents. Is a plan disrupted by conditions unforeseen? Find a different solution. Obstacles make us supple. ix. Tolerant: Cooperation requires the flexibility that enables a system’s members to compensate when partners make mistakes. Tolerance requires that failures be discounted, until or unless they are evidence of incompetence (insufficient skill) or unreliability. One supposes that tolerance is an expression of generosity, but that isn’t so when speaking of a system’s members. For there, the degree of tolerance is a function of one’s system and role. It expresses a calculation: what is the risk that mistakes menace a system’s aim? Mistakes are acceptable when learning a musical instrument; teachers expect them. The school orchestra director is less accepting; the symphony conductor is rarely tolerant. His musicians are professionals. Their playing is judged for its discipline and aesthetic qualifies; competence shouldn’t be an issue. x. Prudent: Take care to do your tasks as your systems require because they need your contribution or because you want and need their support. Time and energy are limited, so devotion to favored systems will surely diminish support for others. But think again before reducing time or effort below a level consistent with the well-being of systems one needs or respects. Withdraw before being challenged or asked to go if their demands exceed your interest or resources. There is a hair-trigger quality to participation in high-pressure systems, especially paid employment. One is reliable, efficient, and cooperative because the price of failure is unacceptable. Don’t take the half-hour or vacation already allotted because the work won’t be done if you go. Don’t leave because of your other roles and duties, though those systems also have aims one prizes and member one respects. Alienating them would also be costly. Conflict in two or

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more systems making contrary demands is wrenching because one can’t be prudent: loyalty to one subverts the other. xi. Self-critical: One imagines that self-criticism is mostly positive: we monitor ourselves while aiming to do more or better. Yet this virtue cuts two ways. Partners are likely to feel discomfort if our standards are higher or lower than theirs; they press us to lower or raise the quality or intensity of our work. This is negative feedback—homogenizing socialization—as it levels performance throughout a system. People with lower standards, defeated and confused, fall away; those with stubbornly higher standards may resign. One is fortunate if local society supports systems requiring different levels of achievement: major- and minor-league baseball, amateurs and professionals. xii. Courageous: Life as a parent, in business, or at war is often harsh. Aims seem unachievable; partners are difficult or lax; capacity flags. One is stalwart because of habit or conviction. Courage is persistence: standing one’s ground at cost to oneself because of knowing one’s value to others. It matters, too, that one fears being shamed, if only in one’s own eyes. Systems prize consensus, so the critic, too, is courageous. One sees prospects as they are and tells partners that a system isn’t working, or that its aim is doubtful or malign. The situation may be apparent to some or all of a system’s members, but there is often resistance to acknowledging things as they are. How does one declare such judgments for all to hear when a difference of perspectives is the only barrier distinguishing the respected critic from a pariah. Those who dare be one need courage for the moment when they become the other. xiii. Responsible: One shows responsibility by exhibiting all the foregoing virtues. Some people love their work or adore their friends: there is no ambiguity in their devotion. Most are equivocal about work and other core systems; they perform as their roles require, expect others to do likewise, and think little more about it. They don’t have time for deeper reflection because other systems, other roles demand attention. Everything is done as it should be, but often without passion. Responsibility, with all its constituent virtues, is sometimes little more than habit and the pressure of expectation: we behave as others expect. No magic transports us into the dream worlds of royalty or lottery winners: we cope. But sometimes, there are choices for people who sustain their roles while rejecting alternatives. Responsibility in them is a passion: knowing what they do, nurses,

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parents, students want the effects of doing it. Everyone would be happier if all enjoyed at least one system worthy of devotion.

2.7 Character or personality Character is dense because of its Thirteen virtues and adjunct skills. Habits embody them; behavior expresses them. Yet people having the same virtues may present themselves differently: one is amiable, the other dour. This is personality. Character affects it, though the two are sometimes oddly independent. People having disparate personalities are often little altered after similar advantages or disasters: one who was exuberant or pessimistic before is much the same after. Character has a developmental history, one consolidated as people inherit or choose a succession of systems and roles. The personality seen in small children is more constant as they age. Disappointment or success may change it, yet changes are often superficial: the shy child is disguised as a blustering adult. Hormonal changes may affect it more than character’s successes and failures. People are often selected for roles on the basis of personality—a pleasant demeanor is admired in receptionists, not so much in plumbers or surgeons— though it is incidental to the work at hand and an unreliable gauge of character.

2.8 Autonomous or submissive Paying for a newspaper and receiving the correct change are two sides of the reciprocity common to systems that join buyers and sellers; this is a difference in their complementary roles. Difference is commonplace and tolerable; incoherence is more than difference. Incoherence signifies that the moral codes of disparate systems are different to the point of contrariety: one is disoriented or humiliated because of sharing control in some core systems while forcibly passive or submissive in others. City people are blasé in part because so many of the systems engaging them are inconsequentially different: one is accustomed to tasks that change as one turns left or right. Yet some differences feel like violations: one is obliged to do here what one couldn’t do there. This is the contrariety—the incoherence—chronic in people who cannot choose all their systems or achieve parity of control in all or most systems important to them. The character others ascribe to us is likely to have a rounded shape: we routinely do this, but not that. Yet everyone occasionally finds him or herself in circumstances where responses are “out of character.” This is sometimes a re-

Coherence | 45

sponse to situations beyond the extreme where controlled responses are possible. Other times it exposes the struggle for moral coherence: I feel obliged to do what I never want to do. Not everyone struggles; some are insensible to the desire for moral consistency. Others suffer. They reduce feelings of incoherence by paralyzing sensibility. That suppresses the pain of humiliation, though it also reduces the desire for coherence and control: let partners and the social ethos prescribe my attitudes and behavior. Control is no blessing if the need for consistency makes us grandiose. That happens when people generalize and project the moral quality of a preferred core system, be it loyalty, care, or aggression. For experience in favored systems (typically one or a few) encourages the belief that one’s preferred attitude is appropriate everywhere because effective somewhere: let that quality be the moral standard in every domain. Why generalize a code that is inappropriate to systems and situations beyond its immediate circle? Because familiarity and comfort make it seem viable and ideal. We like the mastery it confers. The codes and values generalized vary with experience: let everyone nurture others is one conclusion; empower yourself in a competitive practice— business, sport, or marriage—is another. This is self-conviction presenting itself as robust. For having control implies a degree of safety when the contrary implies vulnerability. People lacking force and self-conviction are likely demoralized or terrified, hence the inclination to generalize from systems where agency is confirmed to those where it is threatened or uncertain: let me have everywhere the attitudes appropriate to a system or systems I control. Grandiosity is disruptive when it subverts discourse and cooperation, but the inclination is empowering when the sensibilities affected are those of artists inhabiting their private imaginary spaces. Artists aren’t free of context when they learn a traditional style or craft. Yet they often work without feedback because, as they see it, criticism is uninformed. Having no assured audience, they project their fantasies and imagine the startled responses their work will provoke. Recognition will come in its time: a public will coalesce.

2.9 Coherence Moral coherence would enhance equanimity; it would be achieved if one could formulate a set of virtues, then struggle to satisfy them, whatever the context, in all one’s valued systems and roles. That strategy is challenged in three ways: moral compromises we anticipate; those currently accepted; and the self-repair required after parting from accommodations we regret. Interest, need, and lack

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of foresight all but guarantee we shall engage other people in ways that violate our moral ideals, however we struggle. How might coherence be achieved? Aristotle and Freud described the elements to a solution: habits and the mean;14 Ego as the mediator between Superego and Id.15 Passions—Id—are an obstacle to virtue if they violate an idealized sense of self, but socialization—Super-ego—is also inimical if public morality encourages avarice or cruelty. Aristotle’s emphasis on the mean—courage rather than cowardice or bravado—is sensitive to the variability of situations and one’s abilities. Its emphasis on oversight and self-control resembles the effect achieved by Freudian ego. Reality-testing in both is pragmatic and principled, but also a measure of one’s interests, abilities, and self-control. We are usually spared from making judgments about myriad systems that quickly form and dissolve (buying a newspaper, holding the door for someone unknown) because habit (the mean), circumstances, and socially sanctioned behaviors (Super-ego) carry the day. There are, however, core systems of three kinds critical to one’s well-being: with partners, at work, and in affiliations that are meaningful (significant) because based, for example, on ethnicity or culture. Each of their essential values—love, work, meaning, and identity—is a focus for character. Integrating the roles that satisfy these values is a critical test of moral coherence. What is my moral profile if my systems and roles preclude one or another: love, work, or meaning? There are many strategies for reducing disparities. The Financial Times once described women obliged to walk without treading on the shadows of husbands described by their wives as “that old bag of garbage.” This is anger compensating for the schism between the moral demands of one’s system, and an idealized sense of self. Or incoherence is the evidence that self-perception is brutalized. Think of associations devoted to defending an ethnicity, race, or religion. Each is a muscular response to humiliation, and the admission that character is mutilated by the gap between self-perception and denigrating others. Character wants an equilibrium founded on the roughly equal weight of two values. We are self-valuing while wanting the respect of others for roughly the attributes we prize in ourselves; let others appraise me as I perceive myself. This equation is complicated by a disproportion: self-perception is typically out of scale with one’s powers and contribution to valued systems; we seem and feel bigger and more powerful than we are. The effect is gratuitous and unearned (fans of a winning team), or we hear the ravings of coaches or conductors who

|| 14 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1105b-1107a, pp. 956-959. 15 Sigmund Feud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1947).

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get exceptional playing from brutalized athletes or musicians. Should players suppress their distress in the name of the result? That would be similar to approving slavery for the efficiencies of plantation life. We want corporate activities—systems—managed in ways that have three effects: they do little or no harm to others (or harm offset by benefits to those harmed); they achieve valid aims; and enhance the self-regard of their members. Coherence isn’t static. Character is stolid when there is no relief from the inflexibility of one’s situation; it is dialectical—an argument with oneself—when discrepancy and frustration challenge resolution.

3 Moral experience Individuals are critical to this chapter because systems and the whole have individual members as their only human content. Moral experience is their experience. Its effects are complicated because each person is responsive to the three mutually independent values of social life—self, systems, and the whole. A coach decides a game’s roster but only the players named take the field. Their choices satisfy either (or all) of the three variables: personal concern (performing well with a sore ankle), a system’s aim (winning), or the whole (the rules of the game). This plurality of values has costs and benefits. The principal costs are compromises required when concurrent satisfaction is precluded because the satisfiers conflict: duty to one’s family or duty to a job; duty to others or duty to oneself. The principal benefit is a complex condition described below as social balance or moral health. Balance requires satisfaction of all three interests in a dynamic and mutually supportive relation; moral health is the communal wellbeing that balance achieves. These aims are elusive because need or authority shortens the time when reflection might find ways to resolve moral dilemmas.

3.1 Ambiguities Moral experience is hard to isolate until three ambiguities are clarified. The first is clarified by responses to Mill’s “no-harm” principle (do as you like up to the point of harming other people): we distinguish harm from offense. Moral experience is confused with other varieties when someone who thinks himself morally wronged has mistaken a fault in manners or mores for a moral breach. Responses to all three—mores, manners, and morals—may be intense; each has expressions that may be construed as good or bad, right or wrong. They nevertheless differ in respect to the gravity of the offenses. Women wear pants in some cultures, but skirts in others; men do the reverse. Offending against a culture’s fixed standard—no women in pants—is scandalous until mores change, then it seems banal. Manners for formal dinners were once tightly controlled. Anyone likely to be invited knew the proper order for using forks and spoons; the ignorant were scorned. But there is less cutlery now; fewer diners know the old ways. Mores and manners are rule-driven; offenses are annoying to people who observe the rules, but there are no deeper effects. Morality’s effects are more consequential for the well-being of people affected:

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parents are approved for the health and security of their children, or blamed for their neglect. A second ambiguity is the difference between experiential content— perceptual data, attitudes, judgments, feelings, and desires—and the activity of experiencing the other people or things encountered. A detached observer surveys the contents of his experience as though seeing it from across the street. He looks and listens as though disengaged, even surprised. The perspective of people immersed in practice and the near-world of people and things is different because attention is selective and focused. Purpose is the driver. The task at hand is foreground; other role-players are one’s context. The rest is backdrop. Subjective idealists demur. They argue that the idea of engaging other things is an inference from phenomenal experience: reality may reduce to mind and its content. Zone morality reverses this order. The content of experience is the effect of satisfying the duties or enjoying the permissions of one’s roles in core or other systems: teachers, nurses, and cooks have it when ministering to other people in the styles of their vocations. Experiences of this sort are vulnerable to all sorts of frustration: teammates argue; things don’t work. Add that practical experience is victim to moral tensions and misunderstandings provoked by conflicted duties. Time, effort, and satisfaction here at cost to loyalty there. The third ambiguity is more complex because human societies are malleable; ideologies take precedence over theories when dissatisfied visionaries alter societies to their design. Individualism and holism are the principal social recipes. Neither is sufficient as a social theory, though both are applicable in societies remade to their specifications. Their primary moral values are, respectively, oneself or the whole (construed as a state or a church); everything else is a means to that end. Jonathan Edwards spoke for individualism in 1722: Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor and vehemence yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of.1

And, from the holist side:

|| 1 Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions: and Advice to Young Converts (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P& R Publishing, 2001), p. 19.

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Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!2

Systems theory/communitarianism doesn’t prescribe a single focus for intention or loyalty because it acknowledges that every society comprises an array of systems, each with a moral experience peculiar to itself, and because it acknowledges three moral vectors: self, society, and the whole. The remarks that follow consider the structure and character of moral experience from the perspective of a society’s core and other systems, not from the perspective of societies organized to satisfy the formulas of individualism or holism.

3.2 Social balance, moral health Imagine vocations that satisfy each of three conditions; people do justice to their systems, the whole, and themselves. Parents are good neighbors who care for their children and themselves while paying their taxes; team members play their positions while responsive to mates and the rules of their game. This is social balance, the equilibriating condition for moral health. Its absence makes us vulnerable and provokes anxiety; having it secures mutual support, hence the well-being experienced as happiness. Balance is often encumbered by offsetting worries or costs (because of disjointed or competing core systems, for example), but I discount them to emphasize its bare structure. Balance in the context of morality is often construed as the demand for justice—reward or punishment for acts that are right or wrong—though balance of the sort relevant here is a coordination problem: how to coordinate tasks and roles in ways that maximize the likelihood that a person or system will achieve an aim. And equally, how to coordinate the interests and tasks of individuals, their systems, and the whole? Balance is elusive because one is better or worse at choosing systems appropriate to one’s talent and temperament, then better or worse at meeting one’s obligations to those chosen; the organization of the whole is better or worse as a climate appropriate to a company’s aim. Balance is ideally the optimal performance of each factor in its complementarity to relevant others, though we accept stability as a substitute when good enough is the best we can ask in complex environments where, for example, people struggle

|| 2 Ascribed to Stephen Decatur.

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to optimize myriad duties. Social balance of this lesser degree is so common that we forget the ideal. The moral health promoted by social balance is the goodness achieved when individuals collaborate while satisfying their system and the whole. We have a decent team, not the best. We win more games than we lose because each of us refines his skills when we practice together. This is the balance gratifying to us; we enjoy one another, our game, and ourselves. But is this good enough: does moral health require optimal values for all three variables or merely those good enough to sustain stability? It is sufficient, even ideal, if the three values are mutually confirming: our amateur league, its teams, and we, their players, flourish. This is the self-stabilizing normative social condition to which we aspire. The call to moral health is less obscure when systems theory goes by its other name: communitarianism. It signifies that each person’s character, relations, and aspirations are founded in an array of overlapping, hierarchically ordered systems. This is the proportion described as justice in the Republic, the mutually conditioning relations of self, system, and the whole. Plato argues that there is no social productivity or stability without educated productive citizens and no proper nurture for them if the state is disorganized or despotic. There is no justice in the state without justice in the souls of its members and, conversely, no justice in the soul without justice in the state. Justice writ small is the moral health of individual persons. It requires that their talents be identified and educated, then employed in desired systems for their advantage and the benefit of the whole (be it a state, a school, or a family). People denied these formative supports are enfeebled, angry, or demoralized. People enjoying them are fulfilled and happy. There is, accordingly, nothing preachy about the idea of moral health. It isn’t remote from the perception that a car runs best when each of its active parts is least impaired by friction or failure within a module essential to the working of the whole. I emphasize the complex social conditions for balance, but there is no accord that this communitarian idea is the only or best way of characterizing moral health. Individualists don’t regard self-concern as a pathology; holists idealize life within a seamless vocation (as priest or parishioner, for example). Why is the balance of self, system, and the whole a better outcome? Because these are essential features of the social context where character develops, vocations are acquired, and life is sustained. Individualism ignores these relationships or describes them in ways too sketchy and superficial to do them justice (Mill’s third region of liberty, for example). Holism cossets us within a plenum that ignores indeterminacy and suffocates contingency.

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There are people living as each of the three theories describe because theories can be used as recipes for organizing social life. Societies modeled after them are laboratories for testing their respective experiential effects. How do people respond when obliged to behave as they prescribe? The individualist is determined but rightly anxious that his best efforts may be inadequate to secure or satisfy him. Relations to other people are fraught because self-concern dominates them as it does him. Having no natural allies, he risks drowning in contingencies. The holist is less exposed to contingency and failure if her trust in the company, church, or state is well-founded. Opportunities for choice and development are strangled by relations that determine her every thought or action. She is nevertheless content because satisfied by a structure and actions determined elsewhere. The individuals described by systems theory aren’t appeased by either alternative. They use their affiliations as leverage for choices of their own. Pianists inherit classical scores; what they play and how they play it depends on skills and tastes learned when responding to their teachers. The scores they choose intimate the whole: music played in deference to its history and standards.

3.3 Strategies for achieving balance Many people enjoy personal health. We might expect that social balance and moral health would also be commonplace. They aren’t because each of the three vectors is a variable whose values have complex often mutually independent conditions. Individuals are ineffective if unskilled (because uneducated) and unfocused (because distracted by needs or other interests). Systems aren’t effective if poorly organized, staffed by unqualified members, impoverished, or overwhelmed by competitors. A chaotic whole perverts all its constituent systems because none are stable or safe. Balance, like personal health or a fullemployment economy, eludes us. One technique for achieving it has two steps: identify the more stable of the three vectors in every relationship; make the one or two others depend on it or them. If patriotism is the stronger tie (one’s identification with the whole), then make participation in subaltern systems and one’s own well-being conditional on it. If a personal skill is determining, make membership in systems and loyalty to the whole conditional on its use or recognition. Balance is different in each example because each variable is a different fulcrum supporting values for the others. This strategy works occasionally but fails more often because a random base in one variable supplies no leverage in them. Reading Danish sagas satis-

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fies me while doing nothing for any system in which I participate, and nothing for the whole. Mutual independence (or irrelevance) is consequential because values for any of the three variables are subject to disruption when unsupported by values for the other two. Isolated friendships may not survive a severe quarrel, though marriages survive them better because of mutual loyalty, children, financial interests, or commitment to an extended family. This strategy’s failures suggest a radical alternative. It commends isolation. Expect that other aims or interests will distract you. Be single minded in defense of a personal habit, a friendship, job, or the whole. Separate interests in your person, system, or the whole from one another and, to the extent possible, from collateral interests or goods. Anticipate contingencies; build defensive walls. Athletes, dancers, musicians, and writers often practice this strategy; friends, even businesses, sometimes isolate themselves from disruptive others. This strategy is often effective for individuals who practice it. It is socially beneficial when the productive isolate returns to partners, systems, or the whole. But this technique is costly if generalized. It fractures society when defense of an interest or aim justifies terminating relations that would make the interest vulnerable. We isolate pernicious aims to damage them (cigarette companies bankrupted when everyone stops smoking); we don’t commend isolation when promoting the mutual support required by most productive activities. Autonomy—vaunted as “independence”—is, however, the condition that individualism promotes: it would have every person or system stand apart while minimizing vulnerability to other people or systems. Autonomy is anodyne because used for contrast to the undesirable state of passivity and dependence. Aversion to that dismal state seems enough to justify the word’s atomizing implications. For individualism implies the myriad shards of a social world where self-defense and initiative trump reciprocity. Locke’s remark is this posture’s signature fantasy: “In the beginning when all the world was America.”3 Life was crude, there was little or no mutual support, but every pioneer could enjoy his freedom.

3.4 Balance qualified Social balance and moral health are often achieved in smaller states, more rarely in large ones. Achievement is easier when their aims are simplified. || 3 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 99, 301.

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A first qualification challenges the demand that balance and moral health implicate all three vectors: self, a system (usually core), and the whole. Balance is simpler if achieving it requires no more complexity than the harmonious relations of a system and its members. The whole may be incidental, as Berlin is incidental on most occasions when its families sit down to dinner. One response explains that a whole comprising its parts—systems or their members—is affected by everything affecting them. But this rationale fails to invoke the whole qua whole. We satisfy this demand by remarking that families and friendships are created and stabilized within the network of forms acknowledged or sanctioned by the whole. The family (construed as our cultural understands it) originates in a marriage or partnership approved by the state. But friendship is usually too informal and incidental to draw a state’s attention. Balance there is common. Suppose that friendships are a limiting case: they are systems that carry no holist sanction. This limits the requirements for social balance to a system and its self-affirming members. This smaller focus confirms the utility of social balance because it clarifies the communal basis for individual well-being: each of the partners flourishes because reliably bound to the other. This, too, is moral health: well-being and happiness are consequent on reciprocities that engage partners to one another in mutual generosity and care. Yet each of the partners participates in other systems, each with its duties. Friendship is vulnerable because of these additional loyalties and responsibilities. Is there any better defense of moral health? We qualify social balance a second time by embroidering the idea of isolation. Mill is more sober than Locke implied by his remark about primitive America, but his first two regions of liberty favor Cartesian autonomy: we are free to think as we like, then to pursue such tastes and pursuits as thought commends. We could do all this ideally if alone, though Mill acknowledges in his third region of liberty that satisfying needs or interests may require the cooperation of like-minded others. He doesn’t suppose that social balance—the three vectors coordinated—is a condition for personal satisfaction. Why not? Perhaps because single-minded people are sabotaged by the intrusions of others; isolation defends self-realization from distractions. This may seem reminiscent of Aristotle’s notion of self-perfection—“What is most choice worthy for each individual is always the highest it is possible for him to attain.”4—but there is a difference. Aristotle’s didn’t suppose that self-realization requires isolation: he emphasized that humans are social animals who thrive within communities where talent is || 4 Aristotle, Politics, in Basic Works, 1333129-30, p. 1298.

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recognized, developed, and rewarded. Distance from others—reading, writing, or practicing to perfect a skill—is justified when it prepares us for greater competence when filling a system’s role. His view of isolates is harsh: He is like the “Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” whom Homer denounces—the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.5 [T]he state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part….The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not selfsufficing and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms, meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends.6

Aristotle’s understanding of self-realization anticipates Newton’s modesty: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”7 This is the gloss of a communitarian solution. One knows better what to do given what others have done; we retreat for thought or practice within a community that has established performance standards. Pilots practice on simulators; novices hit tennis balls against walls. Practice is often solitary; the roles for which it prepares us are social. This isn’t the last word about isolation and moral health because talent’s social expressions are not its entire rationale. Some realizations are perpetually solitary if one’s society has no eyes or ears for the talent perfected. Nietzsche supposed that artists of all sorts resemble unknown meteors circling Earth. Those of the greatest imaginative powers may be unintelligible to their home societies.8 Anonymity is the price of their integrity. Lowering their standards, catering to popular taste would stimulate popular taste, but it would likely require making their work accessible. That would debase their talent while making the artists morally ill.

|| 5 Ibid., 1253a, p. 1129. 6 Ibid., 1253a 25-35, p. 1130. 7 Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, 15 February, 1676. 8 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, pp. 115-116.

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A third basis for isolation and moral health is also anomalous with the idea of social balance, though these isolates are social critics, not artists. Moral health of this sort is often a solitary reaction to societies unable to promote moral health because of corruption and low standards. The only admirable moral posture falls to those who tell truth to power, but they, like artists, are unintelligible to societies they resist. One thinks of them while remembering Plato’s description of the just man. Perceived by others as maximally unjust he suffers every indignity but will not compromise.9 The distance from social balance has one more step to go. The athlete’s isolation is temporary; the artist and social critic are self-convinced. Consider, by comparison, someone trapped in a web of over-lapping systems and ravaged by their demands. He or she is the parent of young children in an abusive marriage, dreadful housing, and a punishing low-paid job. This is socialized isolation: anonymity in the midst of people who notice your absence but don’t know your name. A rough guess suggests that there are many more people in this situation than there are athletes, writers, practicing musicians, artists, or conscientious objectors. Why are their circumstances so often invisible? Half the answer is historical. The Enlightenment liberated us from thinking that holism is natural. Each person could affirm his or her own existence while doubting that churches and kings have the authority to prescribe one’s thoughts or actions. Dignity, integrity, and autonomy were claimed as birthrights. Individualism became the esteemed social ontology. The promise of liberation made it the natural contrary to despotic holism. Systems theory was overlooked. The Loi le Chapelier is exemplary because remarkable for its gall: assert that there are no entities intermediate between the sovereign and its citizens, then expect them to disappear. But they didn’t and don’t. People having roles in one or several organizations or associations are no less subject than before to their demands Their unqualified freedom is an illusion, hence Rousseau’s afterthought: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”10 This is the material half of an answer to the question above: why is it that people captured by a role are often its victims. People trapped in several roles barely complete a day before having to face another. This is the discipline of a social world where the virtues of overlapping, hierarchically organized systems || 9 Plato, Republic, 360b-361d, pp. 45-46. 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 351.

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are ambiguous. At its best, this array is supportive and liberating. Talented people enjoying life in prosperous cosmopolitan centers are one end of a continuum whose other terminus is an economic and social prison occupied by those who suffer every indignity while having no power to retaliate and no hope of saving themselves.11 This is systems theory as it acknowledges a quandary no less paralyzing than that of despotic holism. Marxists have recognized and described it well, none more cogently than Friedrich Engels when he wrote of life in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester and other English mill towns: But far more demoralizing than his poverty in its influence upon the English working man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him. The smaller peasants in Germany are usually poor, and often suffer want, but they are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something secure. The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being. The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live; each has at worst a guarantee for life itself. But the proletarian must depend upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so applying his abilities as to be able to rely on upon them. Everything that the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean compared with the floods of varying changes to which he is exposed, over which he has not the slightest control.12

We are now some distance from the conditions for social balance and moral health. Engels ascribed that failure to economic disparities and the working conditions in industrial towns. The next section has a different explanation: it cites contrarieties and compromises entailed by the complexity of overlapping hierarchically organized systems.

3.5 Moral discord Social balance requires co-ordination of the three variables—self, system, and the whole—though each sometimes goes its way when co-satisfaction is frustrated by conflict and their relative independence. For systems may be antago|| 11 David Weissman, Cities, Real and Ideal (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010), pp. 191-221. 12 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York: Oxford, 2009), p. 127.

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nistic; self-control is imperfect. The whole is often clumsy, unintelligible, or remote; we give it its due—taxes or token respect—and hope not to cross its enforcers. One understands that vulnerable people resist obligations to core systems and the state, but also that the state and those core systems withhold benefits from members who ignore their duties. Discord and frustration are as likely as balance and moral health. We need clarity about the reasons for this outcome: i. Which vulnerabilities provoke it? ii. Why do we blame one another (exempting ourselves) when balance fails while convinced that our judgments are valid though contrary? We could all be wrong; we can’t all be right. iii. What are the moral implications of these failures? i. Which vulnerabilities provoke dissonance or discord? We are susceptible, principally, to disrupters of three kinds. Each class is large and diverse: a. Selves, systems, and the whole are unsyncronized. A snap election is badly prepared. Prudent choices aren’t made because people don’t know the issues; political parties haven’t chosen their candidates; the government hasn’t fixed a date. b. Each of the three has divergent or mutually inimical interests. Customers want cake from a baker who only makes bread. c. Contingencies disrupt each of the three or their relations: an electrical blackout stops business and the trains just after relatives arrive unexpectedly. Each of the three variables has expressions that maintain themselves on a narrow dynamic summit where malign contingencies are off-set by benign but fragile stabilizers: one has, for example, a vulnerable job that pays one’s bills. Systems stabilized are evidence of congenial circumstances and our control of them and ourselves. But we don’t control every significant variable or the many contingencies to which we’re vulnerable, hence the failure to achieve social balance. Some failures are evidence that we didn’t understand the structures or economies of complexes we assembled: failed businesses or marriages, for example. Or we did know enough, but couldn’t foresee illness or disruptions. Change, accommodation, and reformation are routine. Like a musical instrument repeatedly tuned then needing to be tuned again, we come close to achieving balance or achieve it briefly, only to have it fall away. Failure is demoralizing if we despair of knowing how to achieve even the modest balance of personal comfort in core systems. This prospect is less severe in societies transformed by the ideologies of individualism or holism because their aim—self-affirmation or devotion to an embracing whole—is always clear. Failure’s prospect is keen, however, amidst the array of systems that pull an earnest member in several contrary directions at once. So, friendship is hard to sustain if every day is a tangle of inescapable demands. Lost in the thicket of

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our systems, we satisfy them as best we can while holding ourselves together. The idealized balance of systems and their members, or selves, systems, and the whole seems more fairy tale than aim. ii. Why do we blame one another for failures of balance while all are convinced that their judgments are valid though contrary? Error is flagrant if someone drops the baby or throws a burning match into dry grass. But systems guarantee that even simple actions may have complex conditions. Think of the game that requires tossing a hot potato around the circle of players. No one holds it long, so the potato moves quickly from one to another until the allotted time is past and the last one to hold it is the loser. Blame in a system is often like that: all are complicit but one is blamed. Or no one ends up holding the potato, so blame is unsettled. What is there to do? Each can purge his or her responsibility by blaming one or more others, but then all may be blame-worthy because each may be blamed from the perspective of another. Yet each disclaims responsibility, hence the contrariety of the several judgments: each is blamed by one or more others, but none acknowledges guilt. Balance fails for any or all the reasons cited above. Many are no one’s fault or not the fault of those who suffer their effects. But we typically look to one another to explain a failure, and, often, we fear or suspect that the others will explain the failure as a fault of ours. We respond in kind, so trading blame is a generalized defense. People who have never heard of social balance or moral health nevertheless know in some unconsidered way that failed coordination is a social failure, a lapsed opportunity for a collaboration that would have confirmed the virtues and solidarity of the participants. There is also this third, epistemological, response to social failure: each participant disclaims responsibility because it seems from his or her perspective that someone else failed to perform appropriately. There, in the midst of swirling fog, every driver only sees others as fenders crunch and glass splinters: none can say who or why it happened but each is sure, from his or perspective, that another driver was responsible for the collision. These mutually exclusive perspectives are the inverse of social balance and moral health. Calling it epistemic alienation suggests each party’s inability to assume the perspective of those with whom he shares failure. Nor is it irrelevant that the desire to ascribe failure to others may be misplaced for this other reason. There may have been no one at fault: fog is disorienting; a wet road explains the rest. iii. What are the moral implications when systems fail to achieve a desired effect? First are several questions: is the failure the result of inadequate skill on the part of role-players, the effect of distraction (role-players have other duties or

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desires), a failure of organization, the result of too ambitious a plan or inadequate resources, or the effect of unforeseeable contingencies (weather or another system interferes)? Unforeseeable consequences exonerate everyone, but each of the other causes is equally extenuating under specifiable circumstances: they didn’t tell me how much skill the work demands; duties to my children required that I leave work to care for them. These plausible extenuators—the possibilities are endless—invoke all the grays between white and black. They imply that guilt (hard to assign in complex situations) is distinct from blame (often quickly assigned). A failure must be egregious to incur an indictment: the engineer who drives a train at eighty miles an hour in a twenty mile zone while texting; the captain who entertains a friend at dinner while his ship goes aground. These are situations where moral fault is easily assigned because each fastens on a role player guilty of ignoring his duty at cost to the lives of a system’s other members. Mere blame in the absence of certifiable guilt is ever less credible when we discover that failure and blame have been construed from a favored perspective. An authority declares someone’s guilt without acknowledging that allegations of fault in complex social circumstances are legitimately off-set when construed from other perspectives (like responsibility for collisions in fog). Blame and guilt are slippery because every such event has diverse conditions. This is morally significant because the complexity of over-lapping, hierarchically organized systems deprives moral judgment of easy targets. We struggle to control our moral outrage when failures have deplorable effects. We expect to find and prosecute their causes. We don’t want to hear that responsibility is disseminated through networks of conditions before coming to fruition in particular acts and agents. The idea of distributed responsibility (for good or bad) is odious to those who believe that Harry Truman’s dictum—“The buck stops here”—was an essential truth about accountability, not merely the recognition of a constitutional duty. We respect his audacity: we resist hearing that this honorable man wrongly conflated blame with responsibility and guilt.

3.6 Moral compromise Moral compromise is the effect of having duties in systems that make anomalous demands. (See the logic of this point in the geometry of Figures 4 through 8 above.) One can’t be in two places at once. Someone having uncompromisable interests—children and a job—cannot do justice to both in the terms that each would ideally require. Moral experience is often fraught because of having these

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dismaying aspects: anomalous duties on one hand; anxiety and guilt on the other. Anxiety is intensified because perspective is also relevant. An employer needs workers for the tasks at hand; knowing little or nothing about the private lives of his employees, unable to accommodate their desire for greater flexibility when fixing work schedules, he doesn’t want to hear about tasks and duties other than those of his business. Governments sometimes intervene to require flexible work schedules, but flex-time isn’t feasible in every trade. What should a government do if an employer shows that he has no margin: chunks of workers’ hours distributed across a day or week would make his business inefficient; paying workers the same salary for fewer hours would bankrupt him. People beset by rigidity in one set of relations look for flexibility in others: I won’t be as dedicated a parent or as loyal an employee as I hoped to be. Other people will be recruited to help raise my children; fellow workers will be more quickly promoted because they are conspicuously more devoted to the firm. Everyone committed to several systems compromises in some that engage him: as much as one can here, as much as remains over there. These are moral and psychic costs unacknowledged in the moralities of individualism and holism. Socrates had a simple solution to moral dilemmas: [T]he other four went off to Salamis and arrested Leon, and I went home.13

This isn’t helpful advice for the government whistle-blower or the working parent: they can’t withdraw from systems that have come to define them. Kant had a different solution: don’t do anything that all couldn’t do without contradiction When the maxim which I am disposed to follow in giving testimony is tested by the practical reason, I always consider what it would be if it were to hold as a universal law of nature.14

The result of following this counsel is a pure will and a good conscience; but this solution, too, requires that one be abstracted from situations where conflict is essential to duties which can’t be renounced. Don’t leave your children alone, unless all could do it without consequences that would preclude the original choice; don’t leave work earlier than others unless all could go without bankrupting the firm on which all depend for a salary. Kant is no help to people who

|| 13 Plato, Apology, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Hugh Tredennick, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 32d5, p. 18. 14 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 133.

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can’t do either, let alone both. Hume seems helpful: feel sympathy for everyone in situations like these; feel it too for their children and employers. Thank you, they say; but what should we do? Hume doesn’t tell them.15 Mill would have us do whatever is best for the greatest number. But which class is our point of reference: children or employers? How much weight is assigned to pertinent but disparate effects: those proximate and clear or others remote and obscure? The moral dilemmas generated by duties in several or many systems do not have clean solutions. Moral compromise—something here, something there, both in some proportion—is the best we can do. None of our options justifies the hope that we shall escape recrimination. For the policy adopted by most people is roughly the same: we allocate time and effort as best we can in situations where no perfect solution is available. And yes, we don’t feel good about it. A very few people avoid this trap. Who are they? Those who cleave to the simplest expressions of an individualist or holist ideal. Always committed to self or a cause (a church or state), they act whole-heartedly in its behalf. The question is never their ardor, only the possibility that the action or policy chosen may be less fruitful than those discounted. Conscience is always clear, for this is uncertainty about means, never a conflict about ends.

3.7 Moral education How are people trained to make moral judgments given the conflicts of anomalous duties and the absence of moral algorithms? One response will be that I misstate the problem. Rules—traffic laws and the Ten Commandments—are taught and learned: always keep to your side of the road; signal your turns; observe the speed limit; don’t follow too closely. Do all that, and your success as a driver is mostly assured. Yet none of this is helpful when deciding between obligations to work and family or conscience and the state because there are no pertinent rules. Kant’s categorical imperative tells us what none could do short of self-subverting contradiction, but the conflicted options of daily life are not like that: doing one is objectionable only because contraries are mutually negating. How do children learn moral behavior? The answer is significant because their accomplishment is basically the morality of the adults they become. Children learn a few rules: don’t lie, steal, or torture cats. Driving schools are a || 15 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 458-476.

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plausible model for their moral learning: cars are lethal, though these schools teach relevant skills and judgment in controlled situations by putting students behind the wheel. One is told a few rules (drive on the right, stop at red lights), but a cautious and perceptive learner could infer them (as children do) from the behavior of other drivers. For rules are taught in the context of particular actions: don’t tell this lie because doing it will have that effect. We teach attitudes and styles of action to children who know, thereby, our values. They know, for example, the way their caretakers behave when faced with conflict. Who or what do we favor when time and money are limited? The attitudes of a parent who buys himself a splendid car and clothes while skimping at home are clear enough to children who experience the collateral effects. Rules and justifications come later or not at all because they are heard as cosmetic justifications for the practices observed and attitudes inferred. Why tell me to do what I never see you doing? Immersion teaches more and teaches it better than classes that cite schematic examples when teaching principles. It’s uncertain, for example, that anyone usefully employs the scholastic lessons of an ethics class without having experienced moral tension in situations where they would apply. Reading Kant may provoke reflection on habits that violate the categorical imperative but is anyone stopped from behaving viciously, occasionally or often, because of knowing the imperative? For if so, how is possible that whole nations do ghastly things while celebrating Kant’s ethics? It happens because ethical principles are abstractions; morality—rather than talk about morals—hardly rises above the attitudes and habits learned early and expressed every day: what works, what doesn’t; what are the effects on others and myself when I do this or that? Moral teaching—these effects are better, those are worse—requires that children learn something more than moral precepts. For they can’t know what’s good or bad without having information about action and its effects. How do people or their systems respond to specific actions? One will be held responsible for their effects; it’s expected that one will have known what they would be. This information and one’s intention when using it are critical to this collateral issue: how are attitudes and habits altered when early exposure to a community’s values promotes behavior that the community or some of its members come to censure? Did you know the effects of your actions? If not, why not; if so, why did you continue doing them? If early learning has consolidated inclinations perceived as morally undesirable, there seem to be two options: i. reeducation of a kind that differs from early learning; and ii. punishment that deters for those who regress.

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i. Before, when immersion was the style, there was little explanation. Now one relearns morality in the way that adults learn a second language. Here, too, there is a vocabulary of signifiers (disparate attitudes keyed to circumstances) and grammar (moral rules). Learning the new practices, like learning a second language, seemed forced, but one goes along perhaps never quite believing in the new moral regime. The new rules are internalized more easily if one comes to see that they are generalized from reflection on everyday experience in circumstances that are relatively stable and benign. The greatest good for the greatest number (Bentham and Mill’s distribution principle) and Live and let live (Dum vivimus, vivamus, a saying from the Roman Empire) are principles having that likely pragmatic origin. The categorical imperative, too, is the extrapolation from ordinary prudence to a principle calculated to avert chaotic outcomes: given what I want to do, what adverse effects would it have. But critically, none of these principles, however well-learned, supplies sufficient direction when one must choose between or among equally valued contraries. These candidates for reform learn that principles give direction without generating solutions. Decision requires three things more: first an ability to inhibit impulsive responses, then a judgment that chooses between or among alternatives, finally a decision that loads a sequence of actions. We distinguish circumstances and likely consequences relevant to an aim; we search for and choose a preponderant good, then act. ii. Some people schooled in the old ways won’t gladly learn new attitudes and behaviors. They can be stopped from doing as they’ve done. Or their attitudes abide but their behavior alters. That change is good enough if they are prevented from reproducing old attitudes and habits in their children.

3.8 Judgment Disliking the ambiguity and indecision of moral judgment, we imagine, a rational calculus that identifies an incontrovertible policy or plan: don’t do what no one should do (the maxim for doing it is contradictory because self-defeating if applied); do only such things that all could do without contradiction. This is Kant’s proposal. It dominates current moral thinking because his a priori imperative seems to provide a quick purge of contingent conflicts. Yet the categorical imperative doesn’t settle moral conflicts if each side’s proposal could be universalized, though not at once in circumstances like those at hand. It doesn’t help when the choices are calling or not calling a parent or friend: everyone could do either without contradiction, but not concurrently. Finding universalizable

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maxims that satisfy contending sides without violating the imperative is hard indeed for every maxim more ambitious than banalities that ignore the issue between them: Let everyone breathe, for example. Moral uncertainty didn’t surprise Aristotle: [P]recision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts….We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premises of the same kind to reach conclusions that are not better.16

Aristotle’s perception of morality is confirmed by his understanding of practical life. Raise children, he advises, in a well-ordered state where prosperity enables people and their government to make supportive social arrangements. But don’t expect utopia: know that global policy-making exceeds our understanding of large populations, markets, technology, and governance. We shall never create social circumstances where no one is forced to choose between morally significant contraries: loyalty to one or another of quarreling friends; sacrificing an organ for a sick child or guarding one’s own fragile health. Be prudent, therefore: avoid the social and economic predicaments of people obliged to betray one good in order to serve another. What do we do when no rule directs us? We rely on a faculty—judgment— that operates with directives (heuristics) attuned experientially to practices that may be better, though they aren’t necessarily best. Not knowing a priori what is best, we rely on estimates and tentative probes. Considering their effects, we recalibrate and probe again. Tribal practice is handed down, tested and refined. Children learn it from their elders, apply, then revise it as circumstances warrant. Judgment is tempered because pragmatically informed; its conclusions are always revisable because knowledge of our circumstances—what they are and how they change—is imperfect. Dogma would be silly given their complexity: it would make us vulnerable because inflexible. What do we do if situations require that we choose and act to satisfy one or another of equally compelling contraries? We ask if there is some previously unconsidered merit or demerit that weighs on one side or the other. Somewhat like a physician probing for the collateral effects of a condition, we look for the short-, middle-, and long-term consequences of choosing one of the options. Which of them weighs most heavily in the present situation; what is the cost || 16 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b 15-25, p. 936.

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down the road if the other two are sacrificed to it? We estimate and choose. It may appear that we survey the evidence quickly before choosing, but no one chooses impulsively if conscious of a judgment’s force. But judgments are tentative and prone to error; choices they warrant often misfire. Philosophy dislikes these fumbling initiatives. It wants the security of judgments that can’t be contravened by mere contingencies. Let judicial decisions be our paradigm. Judges declare a defendant innocent or guilty given uncontested evidence and a plainly written statute. But this rubric—either-or—is the wrong pattern for judgments required in circumstances where the rubrics appropriate to contrariety are both-and or neither-nor. (How is both-and a possible format for choosing among contraries? They can’t be true concurrently if construed as propositions, though all could be false. The answer is that these are possible courses of action, not propositions. Two or more can be pursued at once if care is taken so that neither precludes the other. Many people do no less; results are mixed.) I’ve been supposing that habit is pilot enough in familiar situations, but that judgment supplies the oversight required to direct activity in problematic situations. This ignores the possibility that judgment is instead an appraising reflection—an aesthetic rumination—on what has been or might yet be done? It is both; we more or less perpetually look forward and back while engaged by a current interest or need. Habit saves us from deliberation when the domains of judgment and action are familiar; people having roles in several systems are likely to have habits tailored to each. But habit makes us careless. We may not notice that the habits and practices of one domain conflict with those of another: nice to my children, I’m impatient with others; straight-talking to friends, I prevaricate with competitors. How does one keep track of these inconsistencies? Who surveys enough of his behavior to notice them? How could one survey all of it? Moral inconsistencies are appropriate material for reflection and corrective judgments. But moral experience is a hive of conflicts. Preoccupied with a current task, we forget or defer those left unresolved in the one before.

3.9 Competence Some people are morally competent. They reliably make good choices in circumstances that seem morally uncertain. Several considerations explain their mastery: i. Such people don’t confuse private business with the task at hand. Where the two are melded, they withdraw from public discussion to manage the private interest. ii. They are deliberate rather than impulsive. Issues are considered; information is acquired before judgments are made. iii. Their judgments

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are informed by local knowledge; they don’t speculate about domains in which they are uninformed. iv. They are sensitive to the balance of relevant values: in this case self, systems, and the whole. v. Tolerant rather than dogmatic, they know that most problems have several solutions and that flexibility and attention to detail may be sufficient to justify two or more. vi. Their personal lives are stable; they are rarely distracted by unexpected personal dramas. vii. Other people trust them for the good reason that they have good judgment. Competence explains one side of the attitudes expressed in this passage from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man.”17 The happy man knows his systems, partners, and circumstances. He is confident but not cocky; his skill, information, and preparation give him reason to believe that his interventions will succeed. Some initiatives don’t succeed but he learns from mistakes, tries again, and often prevails. His counterpart doesn’t see opportunities and distrusts himself; impelled by need, he lacks insight or finesse. Always frustrated, a partner in systems that don’t work, he despairs. This reading construes Wittgenstein’s remark as a summary way of signifying both senses of experience mentioned at the start of this chapter: experience as perceptual and affective content versus experience as the activity of encountering other people or things. One man is unhappy because his encounters seem doomed; action seems foolhardy or pointless because the world, as he sees it, ridicules his every project and plan. The other is happy because other people and things so often welcome his initiatives. He discounts failures as mistakes of reckoning, never as evidence that previous successes were lucky and that luck has turned against him. My interpretation is, however, false to the Tractatus. For as it seems to me, Wittgenstein construed experience narrowly as content without engagement. “The world,” he says, “is independent of my will.”18 He assumes that no one makes a difference to matters that lie beyond the scrim generated by attitude and perception, though his pessimism is challenged by our experience in core systems. That experience—focused, immersed, effective—belies the persuasion that we look out upon, or merely in the direction of an indifferent world. Systems make a difference if we, their members, make a difference. Suppose, to the contrary, that action, like will, makes no difference: is the happy man deluded? Is his ebullience stupid because he imagines being able to || 17 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, para. 6.43, p. 147. 18 Ibid., para. 6,373, p. 143.

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do what no one can do? Are there no families where children are bred and taught, no schools where anyone learns, no businesses where things are made and sold? This is Weltschmerz at the zenith of excess. Its contrary is effective practice of the kind familiar to everyone who works efficiently with other people in pursuit of an aim. Those engagements heal the breach between the two notions of experience: experience as conscious content and experience as the activity of working with or upon other people or things. For these are two aspects of a single though complex state of affairs: reality has a certain look and handle; we, its competent readers, know how and where to engage it. This isn’t obscure. Think of any conversation: you speak, I hear what you say, and respond. You reply that my answer isn’t cogent, so I try again, this time more successfully. Each of us is affected by the other (content) before acting in ways calculated to satisfy the other’s standard of relevance. The world is independent of my will; it isn’t unresponsive when effectively engaged.

4 Regulation Regulation is managerial or transformative: one administers systems for greater efficiency; the other alters structures after rethinking their aims. Wedding ceremonies are managerial; gay marriage is transformational. Management cures an array of deficiencies, including clarified aims, poor coordination, conflict, and damage to people, other systems, or the environment. Its regulations are experimental rather than doctrinaire, because complexity and changing circumstances guarantee mitigated success. Transformation is a different aspiration. It pervades moral theories that derive from Plato: they condemn everyday life from the standpoint of idealized duties, virtues, aims, and behaviors. Belief in our essential moral corruption—man born in sin—may have been a motive for Hume’s argument that ought can’t derive from is: reshuffling the behaviors and relations at hand—management—doesn’t repair our degraded moral being. This chapter’s aim is principally managerial because the needs satisfied by core systems and the ways of satisfying them are usually stable.

4.1 Who regulates? Regulation occurs at three levels of complexity: individuals, systems, and the whole. Individuals and systems are self-regulating: individuals because of habits and self-control; systems by way of the reciprocities binding their members. Both are expressions of negative feedback: dissatisfied by low sales, a bakery hires a pastry chef; disliking responses to my behavior, I change it. Holistic regulation is achieved with prescriptive and proscriptive laws: individuals and systems observe laws of contract; they don’t stab their neighbors. The regulator is government, a system formed (according to democratic understanding) when people organize to regulate themselves. We may believe that holistic regulation is responsible for the order apparent in social life, though most of it is the result of self-control and the reciprocal relations that stabilize systems. Revolutionary French society was defenseless against statist violence, because (in part) the Loi le Chapelier had enfeebled the web of overlapping and hierarchically arrayed social systems; it wouldn’t acknowledge their existence, let alone their authority to regulate themselves. Paralysis or passivity—inability to organize for social goods—is apparent, too, when a nominally democratic regime displaces an autocracy. Democracy requires that individuals and systems be able to formulate and represent their views about critical interests. But neither deliberates effectively if those capaci-

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ties atrophied when thought and organization were suppressed. This has a familiar effect: pro-forma elections are organized, but democracy doesn’t form because elected officials think themselves free of the obligation to consult citizens who never learned autonomy. People enjoying fine weather in a city park go their separate ways: baseball diamonds, volleyball or tennis courts, shaded grass for picnics, benches for couples resting after a walk. There is usually little or no friction; people are mutually tolerant, even cordial. But city life is complicated: hostility accrues because overlapping or abutting systems compete for members or resources. Alternate policies for curing social ailments—the following three pairs, for example—aren’t mysterious, but they are disputed: i. Allocate resources to those in need (public housing and food stamps), or make distribution a function of pricing and wealth (resources available to those who can pay for them); ii. Make laws that specify procedures appropriate to fair competition (anti-monopoly legislation and traffic laws), or acknowledge that the market is an unregulated free-for-all; iii. Identify practices banned because of their effects on individuals, systems, society at large, or the environment. Or do nothing until conflict or stasis requires intervention, then untangle the situation by considering the aims and effects of the systems engaged. The latter half of these alternations is usually ignored, because we acknowledge that human society isn’t the state of nature. We enable viable systems to acquire space and resources appropriate to benign aims while alleviating their effects on one another. Intervention is more effective if oversight—by individuals, systems, and the state—has identified the sectors or conduct most efficiently managed at each level. Government doesn’t regulate friendship; the reciprocities of family and school are too informal to regulate banking. Individuals and systems defer to statist authority when paying taxes, but statist direction subverts efficacy and harmony when it intrudes everywhere. Contemporary societies are too large and complex for comprehensive central management. Equilibrium is more secure when control is distributed among a society’s persons and systems. They know the conditions for regulating themselves; like Hayek, they know or suspect that bureaucratic inefficiency reduces the advantages of holistic (statist) regulation.1

|| 1 Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), pp. 4849.

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4.2 Which matters need regulation? Systems require regulation whether they function appropriately or destructively: pitcher and catcher modulate one another; a duet misfires if the singers don’t coordinate their timing. But regulation is not only enjoined to make systems more effective: governments intervene if profitable systems have antisocial aims (they distribute drugs) or because they mistreat their members. Statist intervention is, nevertheless, infrequent relative to the variety of systems and the complexity of their aims and interactions. Holist power is limited because governments lack personnel, skill, and resources sufficient to manage every family, business, friendship, and school. States decline the regulative burden: conceding authority in spheres they can’t dominate, they let people and systems manage themselves. Democratic societies welcome this surrender because it acknowledges that people and systems have an interest in and capacity for self-regulation. The balance nevertheless shifts when complexity bars predictable effects: drivers can’t see bottlenecks ahead and couldn’t clear them if they did. Government is the fall-back regulator; it intervenes to manage complexity when personal or local oversight fails. Reticence is a difficult posture when regulators are pressed or intimidated by powerful interests urging them to intervene for their private interests. But no order of regulation—personal, systemic, or holistic—should frustrate activity short of evidence that it does significant harm without an offsetting benefit. The rationale for intervention is all the more uncertain when regulation is extended to networks. For interests ramify, damage to one is a benefit to another. Regulators aren’t certain that their efforts won’t have effects worse than those reduced. That prospect is ever more likely when regulation moves beyond conflicts that are local and specific to domains where uncountable transactions in myriad locations (the Web) are loosely governed by disparate jurisdictions. Market complexity is confounding. Persons or systems committed to self-regulation act in good conscience while having no idea that their effects are good or bad when generalized. Governments, too, are stymied: they don’t know how to intrude without sabotaging valuable activity.

4.3 Cross-currents Agents of all three kinds can be prudent: do nothing that can’t be altered if evidence confirms that a regulation is faulty. Yet some interventions aren’t easily

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reversed. This is a dilemma familiar to persons and systems, but it baffles governments: their mistakes—often sealed in war or concrete—endure. Regulating vehicular traffic is conceptually simple compared to the task of regulating systems that compete for resources in fragile environments. One doesn’t have the easy solution of dividing traffic while enforcing speed limits: too many variables are unknown or obscure. Traffic laws are enforced by whole brigades—road signs, police, and courts—having no other function. There is nothing comparable when regulating banks. Imagine a company troubled in a single way: it has sufficient resources, clients, and profits, but its workers are principally children or women who work long hours in wretched quarters. The business declines to fix itself because other workers are more expensive and because the absence of alternative employment assures the stability of its badly paid staff. Regulation is exigent, but how shall it be done? Local regulators could require higher standards for employee welfare, but that would provoke employees fearing layoffs, employers fearing lower profits, and a government worried that tax revenues would be reduced. Pull a thread and a garment unravels; disruption ramifies if regulation changes the environment of a system’s economy. Regulation’s principal value in a complex society is its power to prevent harm, mitigate conflict (by self-control or traffic laws), facilitate activity (by laws of contract), or sanction activities (by licensing laws). Yet these concerns may seem peripheral to the everyday lives of local people and their systems. People don’t usually violate others or the laws protecting them; they are the ones most affected by local conflicts, and often the ones best placed to avert them. A state always poised to intervene paralyzes their desire and ability to regulate themselves. Government intervenes in order to be seen as active and responsible, though the grain of local complexity or the diversity of unforeseen consequences often confounds the good intentions of the legislators. A constraint too little emphasized is the practice of inhibition: don’t regulate. Laws are effective if they maintain order as systems pursue interests that are productive or innocuous. But most people and systems have reasonable aims and strategies that exceed the information available to lawmakers. Governments can safely hesitate: see if local people and systems can fix their problems without statist intervention. Large conflicts resist local solutions, yet there is no consensus about the problems and domains where no government should trespass. Reticence demands a list of issues best reserved to local solutions. This isn’t straightforward because some entries are likely disputed. Do churches or Texas governors have special information or moral authority qualifying them to interfere in the lives of

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people intimately troubled: pregnant women or their families, for example? Women’s autonomy should inhibit interventions that are no less clumsy for satisfying principles declared sacred by those who interfere. The issue is delicate because some abuses are averted by statist regulation: child labor and forced prostitution, for example. But blunderbuss intervention—proscribe anything annoying to me or my clan—is itself an abuse. Statist transgressors—bureaucrats, politicians, or courts—aren’t deterred until there are two lists, one marked Don’t intervene, the other labeled, Too disruptive to ignore. There are rough-and-ready inventories of these two classes in societies where Publics have been constituted for the purpose of oversight and self-regulation. Friends and spouses fall out; businesses close after making bad decisions: we don’t interfere. Slavery and child labor are profitable to their exploiters, but they destroy the people abused: we proscribe both practices because few of their victims will achieve the autonomy, cultivation, and wellbeing the more fortunate want for themselves.

4.4 Obstacles to regulation Here are some obstacles to regulation. Each is further complicated by the crosstalk of persons, systems, and the whole. For any regulation will likely affect all three, whatever its principal focus. i. First is a principle sanctioned by folk wisdom: be slow to intervene. Think again before fixing things that aren’t broken; be deliberate when intervention is exigent. Change is resisted when regulation is crude because regulators are too remote to know the idiosyncrasies and needs of the people and systems enjoined. Go slowly when conduct perceived locally as useful and benign breaches global solutions proposed in the absence of local information. Regulators avert discord with local communities by observing a routine having five steps: a. Seek agreement that there is an issue to be treated. b. Consider the costs and benefits of local compromises. c. Consider the possibility that one of the compromises or the current state of affairs is more viable than regulation’s likely effect. d. Acknowledge that external pressure (oversight and scrutiny) may be more effective than law. e. Pass to laws with penalties only if the current situation is untenable, and if those responsible are unable to contrive solutions of their own. This stepped procedure wouldn’t have cured slavery or corporate monopolies; it has promoted health, education, and mine safety.

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ii. Every intervention is problematic in several ways: a. Whom does it regulate: individuals, systems, or the whole (criteria for citizenship, for example)? b. Does it accurately represent the circumstances where it would apply? c. Does it accurately represent the need it would cure? d. Does it focus on a symptom while overlooking its cause? e. Do we foresee its significant effects? Applying an elegant solution may have deplored and unexpected effects on people or systems distinct from those regulated. e. Will regulation fix a problem by provoking another (doctors held responsible for the deaths of accident victims they’ve stopped to help)? iii. Statist regulation is often perceived by those regulated as having an alien sponsor. No matter that government is itself a system where (in principle) all the citizenry—the Public—are organized for self-regulation. Bureaucracy and remote legislators obscure this truth. It is critical, therefore, that legislation be explained and justified, not merely imposed iv. Regulation is likely to be rejected if insensitive to local mores. Americans refused to accept alcohol’s prohibition; the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ignored, then annulled. This obstacle to regulation was cultural. Access to guns is similar in the respect that this alleged right is a tradition in America, one sanctioned (ambiguously) by the Second Amendment. Its rationale is as much historical as constitutional. Americans needed guns on the frontier; American fantasy declares that we need them still in cities and schools. Pride and pleasure in guns requires a conversation about their use, risk, and significance: why is it that no mass killer has been stopped by an armed citizen in states where guns are legal and pervasive? What is the utility of a defense that always fails while making us vulnerable to street-corner killers and mass murderers? Regulation would require altered attitudes at each scale: individuals, systems, and the whole. v. Sensitivity to cultural or social differences is a condition for regulations that apply cross-culturally. The generic features of core systems are common to all; yet cross-cultural communication is thwarted when their determinate expressions are mutually unrecognizable. Globalization reduces this obstacle in music, fashion, and sport, but not in the styles and habits of traditional cultures. There are few regulations that would be inoffensive everywhere. This impediment would frustrate a world government; it’s an issue, already, when legislating for culturally diverse cities or countries. Solutions applicable to two or more sects may be ineffectual because inoffensive and vapid, or disruptive because construed by one or both as violations.

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vi. Experts are a class apart. They are often required, though excessive confidence in them blinds us to the wit of the local people regulated. One thinks of David and Goliath, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. We often err by supposing that regulators should have no previous role in the matters regulated because experience may imply bias. Yet regulation often profits if regulators have pertinent information: legislators can’t regulate the banking industry without asking bankers to explain the technicalities of their business. vii. Regulation is thwarted by several off-setting interests: effects that are current and desired versus effects (including costs) that are current and unwanted; current advantages versus remote costs; and advantages and costs to me or my system versus costs or advantages to other interested parties. These are perspectival differences. There is no obvious way to reconcile them when pedestrians and drivers, drivers and bicyclists, for example, have contrary interests. Or there is compromise because one can trade a cost or advantage here for an advantage or cost elsewhere. viii. How ripe need a situation be to justify regulation? We know the answer when the intervention is medical, but not with equal clarity when people or systems are disrupted. Global warming will have dire effects, though we hesitate to regulate polluters because many effects are hypothetical and because contending interests defeat legislation. Unproblematic, uncontested regulations are often hard to imagine.

4.5 Dissonance Regulation has a trajectory from disruptions perceived or opportunities foreseen to effects appraised. Points along the way are marked by a succession of questions: Have regulators made a case for change, for their change? Have they calibrated their proposal to the practices and concerns of those directly affected? Would it solve a problem without unacceptable damage to other systems or functions? Is their plan assimilable to a culture’s regulative style? Is it amendable? There may be no regulation that satisfies all these conditions without qualification, though some proposed are more successful than others. Regulations appropriate to the scale of individuals or systems are usually alterable: personal habits can be changed; systems can be reorganized when circumstances require. Patterns and habits created by law can also be changed, as street traffic is

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altered by adding lanes for bicycles. But some regulations have abiding effects. We alter bus lines—hence infrastructure—but not subway tunnels or bridges. The grid is a street plan imposed on Manhattan in 1812. It fractures neighborhoods while encouraging construction of light-blocking towers. This design was arbitrarily chosen and imposed; no one imagines changing it. Could we build a city having a revisable form? Regulation’s uncertainties—what to regulate, when, and by whom—are mitigated by two considerations. Negatively, conflicts, inequities, and damage that might be repaired are ignored for want of knowing how to fix them. Such things pale; we stop being surprised by them. Positively, the distributed responsibility for regulation—it befalls individuals, systems, and the whole—enables persons and systems to cure many quarrels and dysfunctions without assistance. This facility is an inverted entry test for holistic intervention: do individuals and systems have the information and wherewithal to clear impasses by themselves? Individual drivers could do that in 1900. Honking nowadays doesn’t clear traffic on local highways; we require a government’s help. Regulators analyzing a social failure sometimes reason from wholes to regions to details. But there is often no global solution that avoids affecting systems or persons in ways that reduce efficiency or social coherence. For there is no accurate and comprehensive measure of the persons and systems affected, hence no way to appease every stakeholder when rules are altered or imposed. Uninformed about their specific interests or mutual tuning, we can’t intervene without imposing possible costs on one or both when benefiting the whole (by revising rules or laws for the sake of coherence, for example). A regulator’s strategy may be exquisitely calculated, but intervention is compromised if one or another of the interested parties—individuals, systems, or the whole—is adversely affected when a third is satisfied. This isn’t always an issue: pianists play individual notes, then phrases and movements on the way to playing all of a score; architects and painters sometimes start from a sketch of the whole before isolating sections and their details. But these examples are false to the complexities of social life. Traffic laws seem to be an economic and effective way to regulate traffic at least cost to drivers, systems, and the whole. Yet they ignore the different aims and capacities of drivers and their vehicles. Why should a Porsche’s able driver be governed by rules appropriate to a local van? The answer is only pragmatic: we can’t satisfy every interest in situations of complexity and risk. These complexities preclude all-in-one solutions. We regulate ourselves, systems, or the whole, then check the effects and think again.

5 Politics Democratic politics is a competition for power. The contenders are persons or systems, or parties representing them. They have contrary aims: each defends circumstances that promote its interests while averting hostilities with competitors. A community’s formation is perpetually frustrated if persons and systems cannot do both at once. Disparity, diversity, and competition are decisive variables because they diminish the likelihood of compromise and cooperation. Hence these extremes: some democratic societies are coherent, others are fractious. Aims and practices differ accordingly. A coherent society, one informed by a culture that values cooperation and oversight, seeks the common good by organizing to regulate itself. This community of informed citizens is the Public. It looks backwards—to history and tradition—for evidence of its stabilizing habits and structures, then forward to agreed priorities. Other societies are less coherent because of diversity or disparity. Politics is less settled, more anxious because there are breaches to repair, discord to appease, conflicts to avert; policies for the future are unsettled because so much is disputed. Systems or their coalitions are slow to consider the possibility that there may be a common interest because all are preoccupied by self-interest. Each wants authority to install a regime of congenial practices or thwart hostile interests. Their struggle is managed—because these, too, are democracies—within legal frameworks that defend the disparate interests of the participants, be they persons or systems. Authoritarian religious communities or governments fear conflict because they perceive it as a challenge to their status and power. Conflictual democracies—my point of reference—expect discord; it happens because people or systems compete for scarce ideas, space, personnel, and resources.

5.1 Two problem-solving alternatives Democracy implies that citizens should regulate themselves, as usually they do when the disputing parties are neighbors or shops. But how is regulation performed when the task at hand is managing an array of various people and systems? Can people come together as a self-regulating Public that legislates for the good of all? Or is democracy reduced to procedures for arbitrating differences while preventing powerful factions from suppressing weaker competitors? Why would all factions defer to these procedures? Because, as Glaucon observes in the Republic, none has the means to “seize the power and escape

78 | Politics the harm.”1 Or because all are wary in circumstances where power shifts unforeseeably; one takes care not to alienate opponents with long memories. Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government2 was published in 1912, John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems3 in 1929. One conceived democracy in the style of Chicago politics, the other celebrated the public of Madison, Jefferson, Locke, and Kant. Is there a common good? Could we form a Public able to achieve it? Dewey located the good for all in the playing field where every person is free to form or find systems and roles appropriate to his or her tastes and benign intentions. The field he imagined is a space of virtual opportunities. Organize to achieve an aim, then work to assemble resources in a niche of your own; never forget that your well-being and the success of your projects depends on access to this orderly public space. A Public requires that society’s members wear two hats: one private, the other public. Personal concerns, including one’s core systems, are private. The public good may be aggregative and distributed or corporate: wealth and skills are acquired independently; corporate goods require public oversight (no one suffers a communicable disease because society has organized to eradicate it). People wear their public hats when deliberating together to manage resources, mitigate conflict, or set targets for development. Their government is the Public institutionalized. A constitution prescribes its structure, functions, procedures, and powers reserved to individuals or their systems. A society’s people—now its citizens—often perceive government as an intrusive presence, one whose claim to authority seems arbitrary and insubstantial. Yet there is no mystery about a government created from a Public. It, too, is a system, one created because the Public needs this crystallized surrogate when most private citizens lack the intellectual or practical competence to manage the business of a complex society. The foresight required to create a Public would seem a matter of prudent self-regard. Acknowledge common needs and interests; join others to manage the public space where goods are created and privacy is respected. Yet we’re slow to cooperate. We don’t believe other people will consider us, perhaps because we give little thought to them. Thinking of interests that are often opposed convinces adversaries that there are no superseding values. People imagine that they do no better than condone the gritty politics of systems competing

|| 1 Plato, Republic, 359a, p. 44. 2 Bentley, Arthur Fisher, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995). 3 Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1954).

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for scarce resources, safety, and favorable regulation. Enemies are people, tribes, or neighborhoods competing for scarce goods. Cooperation is suppressed as we do everything we can to avoid defeat; no matter that we’re enfeebled by winning. Helping friends, harming enemies becomes, de facto, a policy. Procedural democracy is insurance; a commitment to fairness minimizes everyone’s possible losses. It is achieved as attitudes evolve, from suspicion and hostility to the vague but compulsive groping for some degree of well-being for all.4 Factions are mutually inimical when all believe that there is no common interest, though all may perceive that the desire for well-being is universal. People dominated by the interests of their systems and selves agree to establish this much of Dewey’s Public: let there be procedures that guarantee the right and safety of each benign system seeking means—space, personnel, and matériel—appropriate to its aims. Yet democracy reduced to neutral legislative and judicial procedures is too much like a boxing match: it locates us one step beyond Hobbes’s war of all against all. Losers are precarious because their interests seem inconsequential or adverse to the majority. Why respect them? Because all parties have interests that may converge, and because winners today may be losers tomorrow. A republic is a procedural democracy: Laws, not people or interests is a plausible motto. Complexity and scale explain its emergence when difference, disparity, and discord preclude formation of a Public. But there is also a different explanation for its emphasis on law and equitable procedures, the one foreseen by Bentley: there is no Public because there is no common interest. Interests are only private; they are mutually adverse when systems compete for space, resources, and rules appropriate to their aims. We have, therefore, just three essential ways to establish regulative authority in a democracy: pacify difference within a self-regulating Public where all may participate (directly or by way of representatives), create an impartial legal context where quarrels can be fairly adjudicated; or contrive some mixture of the two. The two contraries—procedural democracy or a Public—have different prospects for success. Intermediate systems were banned by the Committee of Public Safety when it rightly perceived that authority diffused through a hierarchy of systems would disable it from establishing its idea of the common good in revolutionary France. Its law, le Chapelier, was sufficient to extinguish the hope that citizens might organize a Public. Thomas Jefferson favored decentralized— distributed—authority because he feared this result. Yet his federalism, each zone self-absorbed but responsive to the idea of a common good, was remote

|| 4 Rousseau, Social Contract, pp. 60, 124.

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from the contentious politics of his time and ours. A republic of laws and equitable procedures is a reasonable alternative to his Enlightenment ideal. Which of these two—regulated factionalism or a self-regulating Public—is our default position, the one to which we normally accede? The variety of systems enables everyone to participate in self-sustaining alliances. Yet diversity is costly: the scarcity of goods, services, and partners guarantees competition for personnel and resources, hence litigation and hostility. The Public of mutually deferential persons and systems loses plausibility. The alternative, principled adjudication of disputes, is a blessing when there is no prospect that we shall organize the mutually respectful deliberations required of a Public. Autocrats—whether people or systems—demur. Disdaining a process that leaves competitors standing, they prefer power to equitable procedures. Why concede space or safety to feeble competitors? Because of the wisdom in Rousseau’s general will: taking a long view, it wills the good for all, those currently ascendant and those past their time or wanting a chance to thrive. Powerful systems learn that negotiation is the better strategy when resilient competitors preclude domination. But neutral procedures make government boring because predictable and (relatively) safe. Too much like machines that grind away automatically and more or less efficiently, they encourage indifference. Private citizens avoid its hiccups rather than participate as officers or electors making its decisions. But procedures are fragile; they depend on the outspoken support of the governed. Indifference isn’t opposition, but it does make us heedless when judgments are biased or procedures are corrupted. Ignoring those abuses, we disenfranchise ourselves.

5.2 Practical politics Practical politics has two aims in those democratic societies where diversity compromises coherence: manage a competition for the power to legislate; educate competitors that an open playing field, mutual tolerance, and laws neutral to disparate interests are necessary conditions for the stability of core and other systems. This is the justice of Thrasymachus and Hobbes (the power and right of the strong) civilized by procedural democracy. It is also Bentley’s idea of democracy: a conversation among systems that are crudely but mutually tolerant when none can eliminate every other. Bentley construed politics in the style of Adam Smith: the struggle to govern resembles a market where systems of roughly equal force innovate and compete while vying for trade. Can inimical systems coexist? The genius of American democracy is its recognition that they do and should.

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Why doesn’t competition provoke battles that last until one system or alliance suppresses every other? One factor is the statist authority normally in place: its police and army can usually suppress factional violence. Another factor is our natural inhibition: we realize that tumult isn’t good for anyone. Spasms of violence are superseded by truces that enable people to live constructively. Technology reduces drudgery; a flourishing economy distributes wealth. Or we celebrate after a victorious war: all have shared the sacrifice, let’s organize and legislate for the good of all. But these are historical accidents that accrue for reasons independent of a desire for corporate self-regulation, reasons superseded when affairs go badly. The equitable distribution of goods and services seemed a good idea, but now there’s less to share. Good feeling dissipates when old differences are affirmed: the small share you have is the one you deserve.

5.3 Rational discourse Kant, Dewey, and Jürgen Habermas describe a different possibility: humans are capable of espousing procedures that are rational and morally appropriate or merely prudent, but good for all. Kant supplied boundary conditions. The kingdom of ends embodies the idea that no rational being should be treated merely as an instrument for someone else’s well-being;5 the categorical imperative precludes maxims that would generate contradictions if all were to apply them. (Don’t lie because no one would be credible—no one could usefully lie—were all to lie.) Dewey shared these assumptions, though he reconstrued the categorical imperative as an effective policy, not as a principle entailed by our rational nature. His attitude was practical and generous: let everyone find partners for activities suitable to them while good for or minimally disruptive to others.6 Habermas would have us defer action while speaking plainly to one another about aims and values we share.7 Let negotiation instill the mutual esteem promoted by conversation and collaboration. We have this five-step agenda: i. Encourage inhibition and prudence in the midst of discord. ii. Agree to a procedure that establishes rules for a conversation intended to distinguish competing interests from shared values and aims. iii. Test proposed actions to identify those which no one should perform because chaos or contradiction would result || 5 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 51. 6 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 2325. 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

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were all to do them. iv. Encourage all parties to reformulate their aims in ways that are minimally adverse to others. v. With friction reduced by mutual respect and rules that minimize conflict, let people and systems pursue their reasonable aims. The outcome of applying this regime would resemble a congenial city park on a summer weekend: people enjoying themselves, singly or together, with little or no friction. But this is a list of good intentions, not a cure. People and systems are not always prudent or cooperative when opportunities and resources are scarce; rules for equal access are ignored when needs are intense and competition rewards aggression. Kant emphasized universalization as the virtue of reason, but practical reason is opportunistic and particular. Lying is often a practical advantage because lies are successful if other people believe them. What would Kant have us do in circumstances where no maxims satisfy both his imperative and the interests of people obliged to apply it? Should everyone prefer death when the moral law bars deception? That isn’t likely; why is it desirable? A priori conversations and accords, like prenuptial agreements, don’t avert conflict. Material circumstances and primitive emotions—jealousy and fear— defeat our best intentions. Culture and a tradition of forbearance mitigate conflict, but they may not offset the raw needs or ambitions of well-organized systems. Oversight is hobbled because the multitude of persons and systems precludes accurate predictions of their effects and because we promise equal opportunity, but welcome initiative and unequal results. Many problems are solved when individuals and systems improvise effectively, but individual drivers can’t decree the end of traffic jams. Road design and traffic laws weren’t perfected until accidents and coagulation provoked the interventions of planners and engineers. Preventing them requires holistic regulation: an authority builds roads, makes traffic laws, and hires policemen.

5.4 Procedural democracy Procedural democracy has its basis in a constitution—whether written or informal—that prescribes equal treatment for all citizens who invoke the state’s laws when pleading a grievance or defending themselves before a neutral judiciary. Its procedures are a stabilizing framework for discord that would otherwise rupture the state. Assent to judicial decisions is justified by the prudence of the contenders: all acknowledge rules of fair play as insurance against times when weakness commends it. No idealization glorifies this solution; the sullen accord of angry competitors intensifies its fragility. Impelled by self-interest, calculating how best to

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achieve it, they perceive regulations as annoying barriers to success. Why participate in the charade of public deliberation if one believes that regulation is the instrument of a competitor’s self interest? Equity and neutrality are fairytale virtues for people who imagine that luck and quick wit may prevail when compromise is failure. But the choice is bald: defend equitable laws and procedures or concede that the struggle for authority is a disguised civil war; endure schismatic politics and hardscrabble negotiations or succumb to the competition that beggars all. America resists these choices by citing its principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rights, we say, are innate; their enjoyment can’t be justifiably abridged. A system of equitable laws and procedures defends these rights by supplying a forum where violations can be repaired. We install neutral procedures in one step, then exploit them in two more. First is the choice of a framework and rationale for laws and policies—a constitution formulated and agreed at a critical moment or altered as it evolves over time. This framework promotes confidence that persons or systems of all interests can participate in making or changing laws, and that minority interests are defended. Second is the understanding that laws and courts are a fail-safe remedy when dialogue and negotiation have failed. Avert conflict when possible; detoxify those that arise. Third is recourse to a judiciary empowered to enforce rights that are otherwise denied. This agenda is sometimes more programmatic than real because situational inequalities sabotage legal equality. Bringing an action against General Motors doesn’t imply that the plaintiff can afford lawyers equal to those working for the corporation. But there is an intent: America has repeatedly shown its good faith by extending legal guarantees to people once excluded. We don’t have a Public created by citizens organized for oversight and deliberation; we do have procedures for arbitrating sulfurous disputes. If this isn’t the Leibnizian ideal—the divine harmony of many perspectives8—it is better than civil war. This formulation—half idealization, half practice—has a corollary: Participate in the forums where values, priorities, projects, and laws are discussed. Let others know what you propose, then justify it. Procedural democracy works best for those who see it as the complement to participatory democracy. Think of the barons who challenged King John at Runnymede. Confronting him was danger-

|| 8 G. W. V. Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), para. 56, pp. 156-157.

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ous, but their numbers were one defense; privilege was another. Their prerogatives—wealth, rank, and piety—were, nevertheless, damned when Descartes affirmed that I exist each time I affirm it, though every other thought or claim may be false. Status and privilege are contingencies; people who enjoy them mistake history’s accidents for evidence of earned, now inalienable rights. Hence the directives of the American and French revolutions: extinguish hereditary status and rank; guarantee equal standing before the law. Create a social space framed by equitable laws and procedures, then voice your concerns so others may hear them.

5.5 Networks and coalitions Alliances form when people or systems—bankers and accountants, for example—augment their bargaining power or efficiency by forming networks. Coalitions differ from networks in the respect that their objectives are often fleeting. Liberals and conservatives ally to oppose a program odious to both: liberal mavericks want to defeat a conservative bill; conservatives want to bring down a liberal government. A butcher’s political views alienate him from suppliers and clients, though both continue doing business with him despite seeing posters for a coalition they oppose when entering his shop. Their loyalty expresses the resilience of their network, a commitment founded on the long-term selfinterest of its members. The opportunism inherent in these affiliations is reasonable given the aims of their participants, though coalitions, like networks, qualify the autonomy of persons or systems because they subordinate the aims or beliefs of their members. Schools or businesses abandon a plan opposed by their community, then justify their altered view. The new rationale is more or less plausible, but autonomy is compromised because pressure, not this reason, explains the change.

5.6 Factionalism Procedures differ among democracies because of histories and cultures that infuse the aims and tolerances of their systems. Businesses compete on similar terms in countries as different as Ireland and Iran; they also use the same rules when playing basketball. Yet systems having generically similar roles vary in the subtleties of their constitutive reciprocities. Family law is different if families are bastions of inherited wealth or breeders for industrial labor.

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A powerful culture reduces social conflicts by teaching and enforcing traditional values; everyone learns them, almost no one dissents. Suppose, however, that the society opens itself to strangers who resist its ways. Misunderstanding is suppressed if one or the other—immigrant or native—imposes its values on the other; friction is perpetual if neither masters the other. These are familiar differences in cities or countries where immigration introduces unfamiliar faces or practices. But there are equivalent cultural disparities in societies where a vibrant popular culture is unintelligible to people schooled in classical or traditional styles. What is the recourse where mutual discomfort is pervasive because a society’s factions have opposing conceptions of appropriate taste or behavior? Neither side has reason to consider the other if their society is large, prosperous, and tolerant; but what’s to be done when they dispute a resource or opportunity? Participatory democracy counsels talk and negotiation, but cultures resist one another, so talk doesn’t make converts. How are quarrels to be resolved when tolerance and understanding are absent? Procedural democracy acknowledges factionalism, but requires that factions share enough common values and assumptions to use its services and accept its rulings. These values needn’t include respect; they do require inhibition—recognition that violence is unacceptable—and a willingness to submit contested issues to courts. These minimal conditions for adjudication aren’t always satisfied: no polygamist expects an acceptable verdict from a European or American court. There is, instead, the alternative that procedural democracy is intended to avert: schismatic disputes end when one side imposes its styles, tastes, or laws on alien others. Diversity with tolerance has a contrary effect: people have a generous respect for others, even to the point of enjoying other cultures. Variety isn’t threatening; it isn’t a reproof to one’s tastes if different ethnic restaurants are the backdrop to everyday routine. Yet we may enjoy exotic practices without knowing how to work with people whose styles of social organization differ from ours. One imagines couples who struggle to find common ground, but fail because of quirks that make them mutually unintelligible. Magnify this impediment to the scale of communities; see the effects when worthy aims are misperceived. A Public is never feasible in these circumstances; even procedural democracy seems illusory.

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5.7 Negotiation Negotiation needs simplicity: strip away the incidentals; address the interests and conflict at hand. Yet simplification isn’t always possible because lawyers, mutually hostile claimants, or anomalous jurisdictions clog the way, or because neither side—persons, systems, networks, or coalitions—sees the other’s interest and neither makes way. Many negotiations are unadorned. Friends-to-be need assurance that each is reliable. Team members need it, too: are you as competent as I or so much better that you would be disappointed and I embarrassed were we to play together? Bargains are struck when each side has something advantageous to give in trade and some tolerance for the other. Systems make similar calculations when forming networks: bakers and plumbers find clients and suppliers; teams form leagues. Each participant greets possible partners with the same request: these are my needs; tell me yours. Negotiations are tentative because partnersto-be don’t know their needs in situations unforeseen. Or they disguise interests likely to reduce their appeal to others. Coordination is provisional when each system masks its caution: prove that you’ll do (mostly) as you say. Politics is the search for competitive advantage: give something to get something. Negotiation is political because receiving it is a function of those seeking it, the terms they offer, and the manner of their approach. Offering to negotiate may imply a willingness to compromise. But how is the invitation expressed: as a command or request? What’s the likely benefit; what is the cost? Do others have an interest and influence sufficient to avert or promote the outcome? These are questions pertinent to the bargaining conducted at all scales of size and wealth when persons and systems negotiate. Some block the way: ask them to move. Others are useful to one’s aim. What must one give or do to get their assistance? Most negotiations are carried on in ways that are pedestrian, but sensitive to legal procedures. But negotiation is a harsh teacher. For laws are always a silent partner and tacit threat. Prudence makes us cautious: subtle plays on status, gender, or expectations are compromising if an exchange is litigated: better to observe legal constraints now than pay later when seduction is perceived as bribery. Which systems or persons are unreliable? Who makes hard bargains, but keeps them? These are circumstances where procedural democracy shows its merit. Discord is often suppressed, but transactions are fraught because both sides want their benefit at least cost to themselves. Yet open societies are committed to the idea that mutual discovery and collaboration are productive. Let everyone bargain for self-advantage or the advantage of his or her

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systems, while knowing that a web of laws defends those who bargain in good faith. Law and its procedures are the safety-net when agreements turn to disputes. For laws—somewhat like roads and traffic lights—avert conflict by spacing the combatants. We bargain with one another while knowing (or hoping) that courts will save a violated interest. It may seem that negotiation is only metaphoric when transactions among persons or systems sharing space and resources are often contentious: this isn’t the word preferred by friends exchanging gifts. Yet this is the right word because negotiation requires talking and trading in situations where the alternatives are force, capitulation, or lawyers and courts.

5.8 An unstable dialectic Procedural democracy is the predicable outcome to the competition for opportunities and resources when ten conditions obtain: i. Systems are preoccupied by tasks appropriate to their aims. ii. They compete for personnel and resources, but—like most families and friendships—they are not mutually inimical. iii. No system is self-sufficient; each needs goods in the possession of or available to others. iv. Persons or systems have or can obtain a valuable resource or opportunity by bargaining and trading with others. v. People deficient in tradable goods can trade labor for a desirable resource. vi. Information about opportunities and resources is not always available or accurate. vii. Opportunities and resources are scarce; one must often negotiate with others—give something to get something—if one is to satisfy an interest. viii. People advertise their needs and available goods. ix. Negotiation is relatively direct (because unencumbered by intermediaries). x. No system can dominate every other, especially its suppliers. These conditions are sufficient to promote negotiations between persons or systems having disposable resources and those desiring them. One imagines their conversations: no one knows better than you what you need; tell me and I’ll see if you have something I want. The equilibrium hereby implied is often unachieved because the equalities it postulates don’t obtain, and because persons and systems having preponderant wealth and power regard negotiation as an indulgence extended to the weak and poor: why equalize bargaining to one’s disadvantage? Procedural democracy is the final defense against contractual and other abuses, though it isn’t safe from perversion and isn’t available to people or systems too feeble or uninformed to exploit it. We get the society we have: many transactions are fair, but there are also cynical winners, and losers hearing slogans that celebrate equal opportunity. Which changes would miti-

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gate democracy’s subversion? We aren’t likely to equalize the power of persons and systems by supplying each with resources and information appropriate to opportunities and resources. Yet procedural democracy is widely perceived as the appropriate defense against capricious privilege. For we can align social practices so that law’s promise of equal protection is not sabotaged by disparities of status and wealth. There are democracies where conflict is minimized because relatively small populations share a coherent ethos. But they, too, are destabilized when their economies falter or immigration introduces diversity and misunderstanding. Difference alone is sufficient to provoke suspicion or hostility. Or we aren’t different—we understand one another well enough—though we are mutually hostile because we want the same things. This is the possibility prefigured by Thrasymachus,9 Hobbes,10 and Spencer.11 Each is an effective apologist for inequality because the scramble they describe is allegedly our natural state. For notice the effect when a system coalesces around an interest contested by other systems, networks, or coalitions: the moral ethos of its internal economy is superseded by the morality of struggle. Team members wouldn’t usually argue with one another the way their teams batter each other. Why is it morally acceptable to treat a competitor in a manner that wouldn’t be tolerated if done to a partner? Because the Hobbesian struggle is suspended in systems—they can’t stabilize if it persists—though enmity is intensified when systems compete. People going their separate ways needn’t bother to understand or notice what others do; single-minded self-interest is tolerable if there is efficient recourse to law when tunnel vision provokes conflict. But procedural democracy is fragile. Ignore its conditions or perversions and there is no defense against the outcome. Moral realists describe it as civil war, but that characterization misses half the damage. Disintegration is intensified in core systems, for systems are modules; they have insides and outsides. The interactions of families, business, and schools are the conversations and exchanges of members who speak of interests, needs, and plans; they don’t talk to people who won’t understand their language, needs, or practices. Visible damage is principally external; the harm invisible to outsiders is internal. Inter-systemic conflict assures that many survivors witness the disintegration of their core systems.

|| 9 Plato, Republic, 347b-354c, pp. 31-40. 10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 111, 149. 11 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, vol. 2 (London: D. Appleton and Company, 1906), p. 607.

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Power is the golden chalice: get it to defend yourself; diminish competitors when you have it. Perceiving politics with Bentley’s eyes strips it of mystery. Demystify politics; let it be seen for the struggle it is; see the interests of systems competing for resources, profit, and the power to make laws and alliances congenial to themselves. Now look back and ahead: convince these brawlers that neutral procedures are their best defense against the time when they, too, are vulnerable because their entitlements have lapsed. Recall them to a principle fundamental to the democracy we have: cooperate with your partners or struggle and compete, litigate if you must, then live and let live. Why expect aggressive great apes, even our breed, to behave differently? Because we can imagine, as others of our kind do not, that each person’s life is important to him or her and that procedural democracy is a least condition enabling each to defend his or her well-being. Can inhibition and bad conscience dissuade us from taking advantage of people less able to defend themselves? Are there allegories making this idea credible? Our anthems and religious texts often have no other purpose: “Do justice and walk humbly with thy God.” This response looks two ways. One recalls Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Social Contract. They agree that each person’s moral and rational well-being requires the creation of a society and culture where virtues and talents are cultivated and enjoyed. The other invokes Plato’s Laws and the fail-safe protections of a procedural democracy. Abandon the hope that we shall forever deliberate together when culture, ideology, religion, or self-interest make us impatient with views other than our own. Large societies can’t sustain the mutual trust achieved when people assemble at town meetings; initiative and difference are prized more than we fear the competition and hostility they foment. We settle for the rules and courts that fairly adjudicate our quarrels. Is this the best we can do? Are there no corporate—holistic—goods to which we aspire? They are hard to imagine if one has no horizon beyond daily struggles for life and dignity, but there are useful analogies in the arts where the beauty of the whole supersedes dissonant parts. Might there be a social ambience such that people are mutually helpful while assembling to soften conflict or identify agreed priorities? Might there be a corporate good lying over the hill, one achieved when citizens alternately wear the two hats, private or public: the first when living within systems that sustain everyday lives, the other when legislating for the whole? Procedural democracy doesn’t require this hope: its laws and procedures are often refined until they seem as literal and perspicuous as a logical proof. This is democracy construed as the well-refined safety net defending a society that would verge on anarchy for want of a self-regulating Public or a coercive central power.

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This outcome is successful, without feeling right. Procedure’s laws are abstract; neutrality requires that they be dispassionate. Community would add moral substance. People come together for superficial things—a winning team, for example—or for wars and disasters. They want it, too, as an approving backdrop to everyday affairs. “One nation under God” expresses this intention. Let God be the guarantor of the community we’re unable to establish for ourselves. Community comes and goes, but the idea of political community—a Public—is indispensable to a democracy’s unity and aspirations. Like the idea of health, it obliges us to control ourselves somewhere short of excess. Procedures are formal and remote. Judgments one loses often seem arbitrary: why accept them? Because we magnify the potential damage to ourselves by perverting neutral judicial procedures. Imagine the damage a coalition of disappointed losers might do if selection procedures were altered to favor judges preferred by plaintiffs or defendants. Is that already true? For if so, procedures are already corrupted, though now the task is complicated: a doubly personal violation—harm suffered and a biased judgment confirming it—is cause for restoring neutral procedures appropriate to the whole. But this answer is personal and prudential. It lacks social context and a concern for the justice that reassures us because it expresses the good will of a coherent, selfmonitoring community. The idea of a Public is a healing response to the belief that social reality is an aggregate of mutually hostile or careless persons. We suppose that people left to themselves in the Garden of Eden would likely enjoy Mill’s three regions of liberty: freedom of conscience (moral sense) and consciousness (thought); liberty to choose their tastes and pursuits; and freedom to join with others of like mind in cooperative projects (schools, sport, families).12 Having infinite space and resources, no longer requiring other people to help satisfy basic needs, they would likely avert conflict by dispersing. But we don’t live in Eden: the idea of the Public expresses our realization that cooperative oversight is always required because of social complexity, competition, and conflict. There are moments of unanimity. But those times are ephemeral. Opportunist coalitions form, dominate, and disintegrate. Core systems stutter and dissolve. Grievances and jealousies supersede common interests; something happens to remind us that our differences abide. Watching systems founder for want of cooperation, we affirm our singularity. Community would save us, but individualism doesn’t acknowledge social glue; it doesn’t concede that core systems are the solution to basic needs. It supposes, like Mill’s third region of

|| 12 Mill, On Liberty, p. 15.

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liberty, that systems are ad hoc affiliations that don’t endure past the time when partners have satisfied their individual needs Solidarity has lost most of its rhetorical power, though it still implies the affective and intellectual bonds of core systems and community. These are qualities that would infuse a Public. Not having them is one reason for our perpetual sense of anxiety and loss.

5.9 A flawed ontology Participatory democracy implies a Public created when citizens organize for corporate oversight and self-regulation; procedural democracy implies people and systems contending for resources while disciplined by a judiciary that mitigates conflict by implementing neutral laws and procedures. Both formulations presuppose the flat ontology of individuals who go their separate ways, sometimes joining others for shared or complementary aims. Yet societies aren’t flat: higher-order controls—from the simplest core systems to nation states—thwart free movement. Democratic politics is persistently distorted by assuming that people think and move freely, unconstrained by core or higher-order systems: i. The idea of participatory democracy is both a permission and an encouragement. All should hear that there are common interests as well as disparate aims and practices. Let others know what we propose doing and why we would do it. Let everyone contribute to forums where policies and priorities are justified and debated. Detoxify a proposed action by explaining its motive and likely effects on others and oneself. Quarrels we can’t resolve can be adjudicated in a court that isn’t partial to either side’s interest or status. This holistic idea may be construed in either of two ways: as distributive (well-being for each in his or her private space) or as corporate (the beauty of a dance, effective oversight achieved by a Public organized for self-regulation). The first construes Mill’s “greatest number” as an aggregate and implies that politics and the economy cannot do more than distribute benefits equably. The alternate reading is Platonic: the good is corporate because it cannot be achieved without the mutual accommodations of a society’s people and their systems. Royce’s Hope of the Great Community13 and Dewey’s “Public”14 share

|| 13 Josiah Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (Whitefish, Mon.: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). 14 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, Oh.: Swallow Press, 1954), pp.38-64.

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this Platonic bias. They describe a community organized for coherence and selfregulation. Its government is the Public institutionalized; a constitution specifies its structure, functions, and limits to its operations. Participatory democracy is an ideal, one construed as the promise that all citizens do or can participate in making a society’s laws or setting its priorities. We test the weaker form (can participate rather than do participate) by considering the simplest possible society: one comprising two people bound in friendship. Neither is free to do whatever he or she wishes because they are bound by loyalty to their friendship and by the need for the companionship that binds them. There are people who would sacrifice this essential bond for unencumbered freedom of action; but friendship illustrates the simplest societies. Their members are not self-sufficient; their core systems supply a diversity of needs: food, clothing, shelter, safety, health, education, partners, entertainment, wellbeing. No one prudent and sane could long survive while enjoying the freedom of libertarian fantasy. Now consider the higher-order systems, networks and coalitions in which families and friendships are embedded. Notice that personal interests are often superseded by their interests. Members dispute, but won’t defy their network’s rules; one is hungry, but doesn’t complain because his or her religion declares that this is a day for fasting. The participatory democracy of autonomous persons or core systems is never achieved because this effect is generalized: society’s hierarchical organization suppresses the autonomy of persons and their core systems. Democracy’s theorists acknowledge that freedom is often impeded by coagulations of various sorts, but those are usually perceived as distortions of our essential individuality. Family members or teammates may condition one’s thoughts or actions, but this is an effect of crowding (aggregation); a strong mind and character should enable one to minimize or override their influence. This is ideology’s quarrel with reality: spouses, children, teammates, students, neighbors, coreligionists, and other citizens regularly tell us what we can and cannot do by virtue of our roles in shared systems. One isn’t free to vote at sixteen, or join the Marines at sixty-four. One can’t give the President a piece of her mind at three in the morning or three in the afternoon. Participation is channeled by webs of hierarchy and overlap; the individual will is often powerless. Many of us never wear our public hats; a few run for office; fewer win. The rest join on-line commentaries or write letters to a Congressman. That is the extent of our role in deciding society’s laws and priorities. We are all but disenfranchised by its complexity and our demoralization. A thriving economy makes that tolerable for many; popular entertainment distracts the rest.

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ii. Procedural democracy is the last barrier to civil war when competition and conflict are endemic. Traffic laws are neutral: cars of different horsepower observe the speed limit; all stop at red lights. Drivers pay the same penalties whichever cars they drive. Yet here, too, individualism blinds us to the course of procedural justice. Who formulates and benefits from a society’s rules and procedures: individuals and core systems or higher-order systems (government, banks, corporations, or unions) able to use or alter them for their advantage? Here, too, the idea of democracy is compromised by its assumption that reality is flat. Talking to neighbors or workmates, raising children, we suppose that every human engagement is a personal encounter. We affiliate, but never lose the physical, intellectual, and moral authority that come with our singularity. This persuasion has the support of Aristotle’s ontology: reality, he thought, is as we perceive it. Its constituents are independent material particulars or their aggregates: stones, trees, or individual persons. Every complex or generic entity—systems, networks, coalitions, and domains—is a construction or an abstraction. (Aristotle’s views about complex entities are holistic in his biological writings, aggregative in his metaphysics.) But systems are neither constructions that reduce to their parts nor creatures of intellect. They have properties and capacities rightly ascribed to their corporate identity, not to their members, because of the casual reciprocal relations that create and stabilize them. The Green Bay Packers win games as a team, not as individuals, though the team is only the organization of its roleplaying members. Networks and coalitions having persons and systems as their members are corporate systems having real powers because of their constitutive reciprocities and legal status. They claim entitlements first ascribed to individual citizens. Citizens United 15 affirmed that the speech of corporations is at one with the speech of individuals because “the speaker is an association with a corporate form” or, as justices later explained, corporations are just people: my ten dollars versus millions from each of the Fortune 500. The effects of these higher-order systems resonate throughout the hierarchies over which they preside. Over twelve thousand lobbyists work to influence legislation or executive orders in Washington, D.C.; more than twenty-five hundred others do as much in Albany, New York. They work for interests of every sort, from corporations and religions to groups representing teachers, policemen, or the elderly. Someone thinking of their influence on legislation rightly infers that most of our society’s battles are fought on a plane well beyond the knowledge or concerns of individual persons or their core systems. Hence this

|| 15 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

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uncertainty: what are its apostles thinking when they emphasize procedural democracy? Why not tend one’s garden while ignoring elections and all the rhetoric of democracy if the disputes and decisions shaping society concern remote systems, networks, and coalitions?

5.10 An imperfect balance Where is the leverage that would return authority for public policy to individuals and their core systems? Realism says these are minor players who rarely alter society’s shape or direction. A Public can’t form because the populations of many states are too large and diverse. Private interests are often irreconcilable; each wants resources that both can’t have. Ideology is pervasive: we have different private aims; we disagree about the character of public goods. Communication is warped or blocked because transmission lines are biased, or because we don’t share relevant assumptions or a public language. Networks or coalitions defend their turf; they don’t want their influence reduced by a popular assembly that identifies common goods while establishing the least conditions for private choice. Suppose, nevertheless, that we create a Public, a participatory and procedural democracy where life and industry flourish until success undermines us: one citizen dominates the world’s sugar and tobacco exchanges; another is its principal arms dealer. Or, to avert the impression that private initiative is the dangerous variable, imagine whole communities focused by other values: intolerant piety or fatuous wealth, for example. There may be no public virtue that can’t be subverted by its own more or less excessive application. We fool ourselves by thinking that the Public of Enlightenment theory—deliberate, rational, open, tolerant, and coherent—is achievable, likely, universally desired, or unproblematic. Yet there are more than a few occasions when local people acquire power sufficient to redirect affairs in ways useful to themselves. It isn’t surprising that they speak to one another when agitated by an interest or need: safety, jobs, health, education, and war are universal causes for alarm. Democracy is served when these issues are focused during elections by candidates eager to identify with one or another solution. There, in the midst of campaigns, we have the makings of a modest Public. Small democracies have the luxury of limited campaigns where issues, rather than advertising, rouse the voters. They have, indeed, the third of the options listed above: neither simply the Public of a participatory democracy nor a procedural framework, these societies embody aspects of both. Large democracies are less favored because the storms provoked by one

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or another interest are local and hard to sustain. A Public would require the ample intellectual space where oversight is a function of assembly and deliberation. Their version is a rhetorical space dominated by advertisers and ideologists. That space is a distraction: it gives the impression of vitality and choice, though most “news” is canned, most debates are staged for drama rather than insight. The action is elsewhere, in higher order systems—banks, agencies, and corporations—inaccessible and invisible to most people. Elections are won or lost. Winners sometimes open the bureaucratic doors and windows; they may establish and sustain an effective conversation between government and its people. But this is the luxury of citizens living in a few small states. Most of us read a Murdoch newspaper or watch Fox news. We discover an ambiguity in the idea of democracy: how much regulatory power should a people have in order to justify the claim that theirs is a government for and by its people? The very effective man who recently retired as mayor of New York City spent two hundred sixty million dollars of his own money to get elected three times. We, his citizen-subjects, profited considerably from his good sense and intentions. But decisions and plans of every sort were made ex cathedra, without consultation and sometimes in contravention of established law (term limits, stop-and-search, public accountability). We who live in the freest of cities found ourselves the creatures of a higher-order system that decided for its own good reasons how to direct us. Most people moving about the city never doubt that our freedom is all but complete, though regimes of this style aren’t democratic in an elemental way. Should they be? Could they be when societies in general and cities in particular are complex hierarchies of persons, core systems, networks, and coalitions competing for space and resources?16 Why not concede that the idea of participatory or procedural democracy, like the ideal of a democratic Public, is unachievable in large diverse societies? Society is hierarchical; much of its form, hence many of its duties and permissions (its freedoms) are decided arbitrarily at orders of authority well beyond the individuals and core systems to which they apply. We inhabit a forest of rules and customs inherited from or legislated by other powers: couples consult separate religious authorities before an intermarriage; a traveler shows his passport before being cleared to enter a foreign country. We think in a rhetorical space where drama dominates ideas. These effects on the autonomy of individuals and core systems are sometimes mitigated by bringing higher-order authorities closer to persons and their core systems. A large jurisdiction divides itself into departments or states to

|| 16 Weissman, Cities, Real and Ideal, pp. 35-64.

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maximize the authority of local governments while reducing federal authority. Or a multi-confessional state—old Cordoba, the Ottoman empire, and contemporary Jerusalem—secures the mutual amity of its sects by making each religious community responsible for marriage laws, education, or the punishment of those who violate local mores. This expedient reduces the distance from statist authority to those it constrains without altering the fact that local people and systems don’t make law by the trial and error of negotiating solutions among themselves. Coordination is regularized by an authority (a religion’s officers) that prescribes rules or laws to those living within its jurisdiction. This solution is also problematic in the way foreseen by the Loi le Chapelier: it defuses or frustrates the authority of the premier authority. New York State wants direct access to its taxable residents; it doesn’t want them taxed so heavily by New York City that no wealth remains for the covetous state. Politics is misconstrued if perceived narrowly, as a struggle for power among contending factions of roughly equal size and power. It is also the adversarial relation of persons and core systems versus higher-order systems and, just as often, the struggle of higher-order systems battling one another. Who should prevail? The answer is undecidable because situational. The desire to defend one’s family or health may trump every other interest. But corporate interests—public health, public order, and a prosperous economy—often supersede personal aims. This doesn’t entail that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” It does imply that there is and will be a perpetual strain as each side—persons and systems (higher-order ones especially)—compete for power and control.17 Your employer is moving the business to another town or country. Will you move, too, or look for a different local job? Democracy is a slogan; qualifying it with participatory and procedural implies that we—individuals and our core systems—control its rules and directives. Bentley’s observations of Chicago politics dispel both interpretations. There is and will be no abiding Public; the participatory democracy of sovereign persons is superseded or manipulated by contestants of greater scale and power. Politics is less satisfactory than it may have seemed: there is less opportunity for persons or core systems to acquire or use power because competitors often have authority sufficient to frustrate one’s aims. One thinks of Macbeth (already a king): how dominant must I be, at what cost, for how long? The procedural democracy we have—a space where individuals and core systems pursue their aims in ways consistent with proscriptive and prescriptive rules—is the fortuitous result of a history we couldn’t have planned. Moving

|| 17 Weissman, A Social Ontology, pp. 301-392.

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within it resembles swimming at sea. All is well if you know how to swim or float, though you can’t keep you head under water for more than seconds and there are sharks. Are we free? Yes, to a limit swimmers discern, but can’t alter. Is there a political regime that would liberate us from hierarchical powers? We can denounce corporate control of political life and militate for popular democracy. But there is a tension political theorists ignore when they affirm classical beliefs about the sovereignty of a state’s citizens. Individuals have interests, but systems have them, too. A building site is organized for construction. Individual workers sometimes die in the process, but the corporate purpose drives construction to its end. Government, the economy, education, and culture are essential social interests. Individuals working within these systems may share their aims; but that is incidental to the fact that systems themselves have aims. Many of them organize social life for their interests, only incidentally for ours. Systems, networks, and coalitions can’t vote or hold office, but Enlightenment songs and rhetoric are deceiving. These higher-order entities cannibalize political power despite being unacknowledged in our rhetoric and founding documents. Locked out of the formal political process, they pay for influence. Could we restore a balance of power? Acknowledge the interests of higher-order systems—corporations, banks, and unions—in the competition for political leverage, then sanitize their role in public life. Give them a voice; prevent them from buying influence. Make their interventions transparent. Open a space for public deliberation and oversight. Distinguish thought from entertainment. Minimize, if we can’t extinguish, the rhetorical space.

6 Justification Is affiliation sufficient to generate duties? Tradition wants something more: a footing in reason, natural law, or God’s approval. Grounding morality in core and other systems requires justification. Do duties to a system and its members require these traditional justifiers?

6.1 What does justification achieve? How is it achieved? Justification sanctions an action, system, or aim. It has two sides: something is alleged to be worthy; its persistence or pursuit is approved. Your factory, school, or clinic, is morally correct; carry on. Many systems don’t require justification. We don’t justify baseball or Turkish cuisine: those who don’t like either are free to avoid them. Equally, we don’t justify families, friendships, businesses, and schools because the needs or interests they satisfy aren’t contestable. Justification is reserved for systems, aims, or activities that are challenged because of their effects or merely because they are different from those we approve (religions different from one’s own). We justify them by appealing to one or more of these five considerations: i. divine dicta; ii. natural laws; iii. ideologies; iv. principles derived a priori from our rational nature; or v. assorted considerations that include a system’s benign effects, tolerance, permissive laws, or a culture’s aversion to conflict: i. Values or intentions credited to God are everywhere vaunted, though no one closes the circle by confirming that holy books or authorities are divinely inspired. Views ascribed to God are more often the dicta of those who assume his authority. ii. “Natural” laws are alleged to be rules—moral principles—that everywhere constrain social practice. They are not universally observed (in contrast to physical laws), though this difference is a challenge, not a lapse from rigor: we are tested; can we discern and satisfy them? Some natural law theorists affirm that moral principles are engraved in human conscience so that self-reflection confirms the moral lessons of holy books.1 Yet there is no consensus about the content of these moral laws and no way to identify people who report them accu|| 1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Burns, Oates &Washburne, 1920), p. 48.

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rately. Practical life implies that certain practices and standards serve us better than others; but its conclusions require observation and reflection, not a priori illumination. A different way of understanding moral laws construes them as limiting forms intrinsic to human organizations and practices: cooperation and coordination are likely examples. What works, what doesn’t: look carefully, then infer the essential constraints that regulate our behavior. This surmise is cogent when it provokes careful observations directed by fruitful hypotheses, but none of them warrant the hectoring lessons inferred by theologically inspired natural law theorists. Partnerships aren’t sanctified—marriage isn’t holy—merely because partners are loyal or because their children need stable homes. iii. Ideologists prescribe moral codes appropriate to their motivating assumptions and social or political aims. They, too, affirm that arrangements they prefer are “natural,” though obscured by conditions that are temporary and “unnatural.” But ideologies are contested: each has alternatives, so the authority claimed for any one is, in itself, speculative or rhetorical. What additional considerations would make an ideology probative? Empirical, practical evidence that its embodiment would have the desirable effects promised. Consider this sequence: idea, ideal, ideology. Ideas signify possible states of affairs; ideals promote them as desirable. Ideologies are directives for achieving these states of affairs. How we do choose when ideologies compete? (“Drink yourself to death” is a recommendation, no different in kind from “Exercise daily.”) By appraising their logical coherence and material assumptions while testing (if only by imagining) their practical applications. iv. A priori justification implies logical certainty, hence an argument whose negation is a contradiction. But many systems have contraries. Monogamy, polygamy, or polyandry: an argument commending one is offset by evidence for the virtues of the others. A priori justification is defended by claiming that certainty is possible because illumination reveals a conscience seeded with moral truths. They cure ambiguity by supplying a directive for intention: people having them know what to want or do. Their conviction mimics the effect of Descartes’ argument for truth’s relation to reality: nothing is real, according to Descartes, if its reality is not prefigured by an idea—of geometricals or the cogito— whose necessary truth is confirmed by demonstration or inspection. Every true idea has an actual referent. Every idea less than certain may be false: its refer-

100 | Justification ents may not obtain.2 Equally, we don’t acknowledge the morality of any system, aim, or practice if that ascription is subject to challenge. Let mind stand apart from the vagaries of actual practice; let it discern the character that organization and practice should have irrespective of what they are. But there are no strategies for averting error or ambiguity when mind seeks to confirm its moral claims. Rather than validate incontrovertible moral truths, we consider the effects of available systems and their practices, core systems especially. What are their aims; how are they organized; how do they affect their members, other people, other systems, and the environment? Plausible measures are only pragmatic; we justify a system or plan by citing its consequences: what do we want or need; what are the viable ways of getting it for others and ourselves? Cultures and societies respond in different ways, though all share generic success to the degree that they satisfy core biological and social needs. We don’t have more cogent measures despite “authorities” who confuse their dicta with moral truths. There is, however, one commanding voice in the tradition of a priori justifications: Kant’s categorical imperative is the principal example of principles allegedly derived, without collateral information, from reason itself. (There may be no others.) Kant described the imperative as a control on the will of individual rational agents. Nothing in his argument precludes its extension to the choices and actions of systems. Kant assumed that morality is an expression of self-regulation, not the measure of effects achieved when circumstances favor our plans and initiatives. For good intentions may have bad effects; malign intentions sometimes have good ones. Kant responded by rejecting heteronomy: appraising the morality of an agent’s intentions by reference to matters distinct from them. These are, usually or always, matters over which the agent has imperfect control. The morality known today as consequentialism is erroneous in this way: it praises or makes us culpable for benefits or harms we didn’t intend. Morality’s only proper ambit is the domain where rational agents may be fully self-controlled: one is moral if one’s intention is good, not because promised effects would be good. This retreat into the mind’s circle of control is, however, an insufficient basis for morality given the diversity of human perspectives. For morality has competing interests: the freedom ascribed to idealized rational agents requires that we respect the diversity of their choices; social coherence makes the off-

|| 2 Rene Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoft, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 9-15.

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setting demand that we bar any plan that would provoke conflict were it enacted. Yet conflict is pervasive: it can’t be eliminated without suppressing freedom and diversity. Kant’s proposal requires this modest intervention: bar those plans of action that would be contradictory if universalized, contradictory because self-subverting. His examples are lying and failing to pay one’s creditors. Universalizing one entails that no one is believed because everyone lies; the other entails that credit is never extended (business and trade are suffocated) because never repaid. Near paradox is generated by other examples: dominate everyone entails, when universalized, that everyone is both dominated and dominator; leave home entails that there can be no homes (no personal sanctuaries from which to flee). Even benevolence suffers when universalizability is the necessary condition for maxims appropriate to a moral will. So, the intention to give everything to others—call it radical benevolence—is perverse because impossible to generalize, given either of its possible readings. One agent’s success in giving everything to others would preclude other moral agents from giving anything to anyone else (there would be nothing left to give). Or one could never divest oneself of everything because one would always be enriched by others’ benevolence. Generating maxims that challenge Kant’s test is good logical fun, but it hides the cost of his a priori solution: that unproblematic maxims—help the poor—lose moral authority when it is universalizability, not our heteronomous aims, that carry moral weight. There are two principal points of contention: a. heteronomy, and b. universalizability: a. Kant emphasized that heteronomy compromises the a priori purity of the will (we justify a maxim by citing its likely effects), while distracting us from the will’s autonomy. Those claims are moot because his account of moral purity has one material interest and several material assumptions. That interest— achieving harmony within the community of rational agents—is an unqualified good in Kant’s moral theory, its supreme and ultimate value. His categorical imperative is the guarantor of that effect. Adherence to the imperative is all but explicit deference to this heteronomous aim. The assumptions required to make Kant’s argument include two inconsistencies. First is the heteronomy just considered (the desire for social coherence). Second is the heteronomy implied by Kant’s appropriation of the Cartesian ego. Doubting the existence of everything but itself, the cogito imagine stories about other minds, though all are dubitable: there may be no other thinkers. The transcendental subject of Kant’s first Critique has no better information about other minds than that available to Descartes at the end of the second “Meditation”: it, too, may be alone in the world. The categorical imperative nevertheless requires

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a moral agent to consider effects that would accrue if a maxim were willed by all rational agents. Each should be free to will a maxim that all could will without contradiction. Evidence of these extra-mental beings has crept into Kant’s assumption that no maxim should be willed unless all rational agents could will it without contradiction. How did Kant learn of them? That was likely the result of engaging others in the course of everyday life. Indeed, the categorical imperative is a rule of reflection formulated when Kant considered the conditions for acting morally in a crowded world: what must we do to maximize social trust and coherence while minimizing conflict? His answer is lightly disguised: don’t sabotage the well-being of all for a shortsighted benefit to yourself. This answer complicates his account of morality in three ways: it sacrifices the will’s purity by introducing a consequentialist motive—harmonious community—into our plans and actions; it doubles heteronomy by affirming a hypothesis about effects that would accrue were all to act in the way proscribed; it adds a third violation by requiring that we avert those effects. These are several expressions of the same unitary social motive: avert conflict, achieve social harmony, practice benevolence. But who are these other thinkers? Their existence is hypothetical. There may be some, perhaps many, though an ego inferring its transcendental structure from its experience has no basis for assuming their reality. Accordingly, Kant’s rule for testing proposed maxims—they should be universalizable without contradiction—has material assumptions (about other people, actions, and their effects) that compromise the a priori status of his moral inquiry. He can’t know what he needs to know if he is to bar proposed maxims as contradictory because self-defeating. For there was this other possibility: Kant might have been alone in the world. Always unnoticed, he might have lied without guilt, while thinking of it is as make-believe: a game played with himself. Kant’s readers may ignore his illicit material assumptions because Kant presented the categorical imperative as a logical test: don’t act in a way that would entail contradiction if everyone in your situation were to do it. But this defense is moot. For Kant’s examples are self-defeating (they would have selfsubverting effects) rather than contradictory: no one will believe (or cooperate) with others if everyone lies; don’t pay creditors and economies will falter because no one will give credit. This test is pragmatic and speculative (hence heteronomous), not logical or a priori. Why is it speculative? Because Kant supposes that one or another action universalized—lying or defaulting—is sufficient to defeat the cooperation societies require. But these effects may be reduced by collateral practices: imagine a rich society whose gods require that people distribute wealth to others without

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expecting its return (ritual generosity). What Kant describes as credit is always, in that context, a gift one doesn’t repay. Why isn’t the test a priori? Because the consequences derived (no one will believe others or give credit) are material assumptions about social practices. Is it true that no one believes anyone if people always lie? Remember Glaucon’s remarks in the Republic. He describes two men: one is just but thought to be unjust; the good reputation of another belies his depravity.3 Extrapolate from the latter and imagine a society where everyone cheats and all dissimulate. Cynicism is deep; society is stable, though it hovers—like a desperate masked ball—on the edge of chaos. Or imagine that we universalize the following permission: let everyone lie when smiling. Some lips barely move; are they smiling or not? Indecision complicates trade without shutting it down. How do I know that massive fraud doesn’t stop commerce? By way of advertisements from local businesses selling everything from watches to mattresses to cars: “Bad credit?” they read: “No problem.” b. The universalizability of maxims that satisfy the categorical imperative is entailed by the imperative’s a priori derivation from reason. For, as Kant assumed, such principles are necessary: they apply always and everywhere: their application is, therefore, universal. Kant assumed that the human community is an aggregate of persons, each an embodied rational soul. Every such being should willingly control his or her impulses because doing so promotes the coherence and well-being of people and their community. Resources available to these beings divide in three ways: there are goods freely available to all (air to breathe); goods that are scarce but available to those willing to compete for them (money or partners); and goods that no one should want because getting them would subvert community were all to pursue them (slaves). There is also the generous style appropriate to this ontology: let everyone enjoy his or her status as an end, not a means. Be reticent, restrained; do nothing that would diminish the well-being of any or all: neither lie nor steal. This is the possibility intimated by Luther, then described by Leibniz as the divine harmony of created souls. The categorical imperative is this ontology’s red light: rational beings occupy a large open space in which free movement has no moral limit, but this logical rule. His aim—a secular paradise—isn’t faulted. Proscribing actions that none could do without damaging all is surely a good policy. Yet Kant is betrayed by his ontology. Human society is not an array of individual rational agents,

|| 3 Plato, Republic, 360d-362e, pp. pp. 45-47.

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each calculating acceptable means for achieving its aims. Moral responsibility, were that condition to obtain, would have just two measures: how do my actions affect me and how do they affect everyone else (to whatever degree)? Screaming at night, I make myself hoarse and annoy my neighbors. Buying a newspaper, I please myself and enrich several or many others when the profit trickles down. Everything done for myself resonates indefinitely throughout the social world. But this imagined world doesn’t exist; individualism is false to atoms, molecules, cells, families, schools, businesses, friendships, and government. These systems are modules. Each has parts or members reciprocally bound and jointly responsible for its stability. The moral sense of a system’s human members is inflected accordingly; they consider moral principles of three orders, not only the single (universal) order that Kant formulates. Maxims of one sort are general (if not always universal): don’t kill, don’t steal or cheat. Maxims of another kind are personal and self-regarding: respect and cultivate yourself. Maxims intermediate between these two are specific to systems and situations of a kind: feed the baby, pay the rent. Kant wants every maxim of the second and third kinds elevated to the order of the first, though doing that loses or ignores the specificities and urgencies of personal lives and core systems. Unwilling to damage any baby, I feed this one because she is my daughter. I do it without considering that Kant would subject this very specific intention to his universal test. He never doubted that we act for specific aims in particular situations, but he feared that we lose track of superordinate principles and the good of all when driven by impulse, need, or private interest. Why not pause to consider the effect of universalizing even trivial maxims? Don’t hesitate for long, Kant might have said: merely test your maxim to confirm that its generalization doesn’t have self-subverting effects. Why isn’t this demand compelling? Because it loses the impulse of vital interests when testing to confirm that they satisfy abstractions. Must everyone feeding a baby pause to ask if other infants would starve if this one is fed? Of course, you say, this is one of those harmless maxims that all can apply without contradiction. It’s merely our good luck that customary behavior satisfies the categorical imperative in most situations. But that doesn’t justify our moral carelessness: we often do things considered appropriate, though their directing maxims may not be universalizable. Be careful, lest you be immoral. Now consider the converse: I don’t feed the baby because food is in short supply; giving her a sufficient portion would condemn the infants thereby deprived. But this, too, has effects when failing to feed her is universalized. The imperative is satisfied but subverted: none are fed; all die. What does this disaster imply? That a

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pure will (it never acts before testing its maxims as Kant requires) is indifferent to the situated urgencies and specificities of moral experience. Morality sometimes requires triage. I don’t feed the baby while imagining that others aren’t fed; I feed her because she’s hungry. What would I do if reminded that other babies are also hungry, but not fed? I would feed her anyway because morality often or always invokes an analogue to the paradigm of figureand-ground, the systems in which I have duties and the many others in which I have none. Unlike the implications of Kant’s ontology, I am not first and foremost a citizen of the world. My situation is bounded by my core and other systems. I fulfill my duty to this child while ignoring the cosmos of rational agents and (perhaps) people next door. They don’t have my responsibilities, I don’t have theirs, though we adhere to principles of the first kind: neither of us hurts babies. Legislating for all rational creatures in a void purged of material and local concerns (like Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”4) attenuates its moral relevance. Or it implies that each of us has two ontological faces: a noumenal or transcendental self qualified by certain universal virtues or vulnerabilities, and a material situated self having distinctive interests or needs. The appeal to rational agents is the residue of traditional ideas of the soul. They dwell with angels; none are deprived, all are rational and benevolent. Compare core systems’ members: each picks and choose among goods that are usually situational, always finite, and often scarce. Morality is situational but not parochial. For there are maxims of three orders: maxims willed by all, maxims that none should will, and maxims appropriate to some systems or persons because of their circumstances. We require evidence of options and consequences before knowing which order is pertinent to a situation. For every maxim affecting every level of social concern— individuals, systems, and the whole—is a more or less canny estimate of behavior’s effects. Each is a strategy intended to proscribe, enforce, or facilitate an effect. Some maxims imply opportunities that can’t be shared (either-or) because goods available to some aren’t available to all. Others imply a shared benefit (both-and), or effects that are proscribed or unavailable (neither-nor). We formulate and will maxims of all three kinds because practical experience requires them: hence the Ten Commandments (neither-nor); traffic laws that apply to drivers going north or south on divided highways (either-or): and voting rights ascribed without regard to race or gender (both-and). No program less comprehensive is adequate to the texture of moral practice. An agenda more

|| 4 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 17, 77.

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narrowly construed—one sensitive to Kant’s imperative—breeds paradox: Universalizing and acting on the maxim that all should seize a particular chance— none should run for mayor unless all could run—makes it likely that none would profit. The opportunity would be drained of worth if every candidate were to vote for him- or herself; none would win. There is an additional question. How do we test the alignment of these three perspectives and their maxims: how is self-regard qualified by obligations to my systems and respect for universal principles? These questions are extenuated by the ordinariness of most personal conduct and by the socially sanctioned behaviors of typical families, businesses, and teams. “This friendship is much like any other” is confirming in circumstances where the recognition of generic behavior is tantamount to approval. We can ask Kant’s question—Is this maxim universalizable?—but we needn’t ask it if conduct of a kind is characteristic and proper. Common practice is usually all the deontology we require, though we are indebted to the few public martyrs who tell us what not to do when others are crudely doing it. Perhaps Kant was looking ahead, arming them. v. Justifying a system is analogous to confirming a material truth. Both require a testable empirical difference: look for smoke if fire; expect loyalty if this is a friendship. Membership implies a tacit quid pro quo: aware of our needs and interests, we participate—when voluntary—for some degree of satisfaction. That benefit is weighed against the costs of affiliation (including time, money, effort, or emotion); the system is justified to some degree if the benefit is perceived as greater than the cost. This comparative reading is mostly subjective; one may recalculate if there is evidence that one or the other—cost or benefit—was more or less than first believed. Justification never achieves the security of logical demonstration, because evidence that justifies, like evidence that confirms, varies—somewhere short of certainty—in the degree of support provided. Systems of every scale and vocation are often reorganized for efficacy or because of an altered objective. Justification waits on effects—reputation, profits, graduation rates—that are more or less confirming. Conclusions are tentative because early results may not tally with later ones. Elementary human needs and interests are stable (because biology and our material environment are largely stable). Systems themselves are unstable to some degree because circumstances or aims, and criteria for appraising them change. Moral justification is, therefore, often obsessive but always provisional. Yesterday’s justifications—for child labor, slavery, or blind faith—have no credibility today. Do we still have reasons good enough for doing what we typically do? For, if so, why do other people refuse to do it our way? Morality in the midst of social or cultural diversity doesn’t always have compelling reasons. Justifica-

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tion reduces to habits that are tolerable (because minimally destructive) if they satisfy the interests and needs of core systems and significant people.

6.2 Consequentialism Morality is justified by considering the effects of systems (including states), persons, laws, or principles on the well-being of individuals and communities. No one is self-sufficient. Personal interest is served by binding ourselves to those with whom we share common or complementary aims, feelings, and values. We agree to give as much as we get: duties observed for support received. This calculation is too simple for the parents of small children, but they recall the generational obligation inherited from support they received. This ledger—accounts receivable and received—seems crass. But is it? We have many needs that aren’t satisfiable without the help of people trusted because reciprocity confirms their reliability. We participate voluntarily in systems where roles make us responsible for specific deeds because we accept each system’s bargain. We sometimes resent the terms of engagement—too much effort for too little return—but the give-and-take is not cynical: work performed for the benefit received. There are relationships to which we give our all while expecting nothing in return, but generosity is easier (in friendship, for example) if the return on effort is more favorable in others. Vital relationships are systems bound by the causal reciprocities of their members. Consequentialism is rooted in causality, yet its rationale is more than the thesis that every state of affairs is the cause of one or many effects. The morality of practical life requires a third term—a need or interest—used to appraise an effect, hence the action of its cause: mutual care, for example. Yet this calculation—causes appraised by reference to the desirability of their effects—is still too simple. Every situation is embedded in circumstances where there are competing or contrary needs and interests; every ranking—justifiable to some degree or not at all—expresses current but unstable priorities. Taking a bus satisfies a need, but does it supersede the need for exercise or for saving the price of the fare? Too much variety in our aims and justifications is disorienting. Choice and justification require the focus achieved when options are more or less pertinent because ranked in the order of their service to dominant needs and interests. We supply the required focus by adding rubrics that filter and reduce the backdrop of incidental desires or needs, actions (causes), and effects. Four considerations are superimposed on the array of actions that satisfy needs or interests: i. systems—principally core systems—that limit and direct one’s actions; ii.

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laws; iii. moral principles; and iv. culture. These are grids that successively limit the domain of plausible justifiers: i. Human systems, like machines, are designed for purposes they satisfy when qualified members are appropriately organized. Attention is dominated by the complexity, bulk, and energy of working systems, though their activity is instrumental to an aim: hospitals to health: police to safety and civil order; schools to education. The actions sustaining core systems are moral if their aim and effect is well-being under denominations such as these. Feeding one’s children is an objective of that sort; the choice of their names is (usually) incidental. Consequentialist justification sees the four variables—aim (including a criterion of success or failure), organization, activity, and effect—as mutually implicative. Each is a function of one or more of the other three: no effect without activity, no activity without organization, no clarity about an aim without an idea of its likely effects. These variables are distinguishable, but not separable when systems perform as designed. People see doctors who treat them more or less effectively within parameters established by the medical profession and its insurance companies. Acceptable treatment has a range of effects; unjustifiable treatment is covered by malpractice insurance. There is also this qualification: human systems are justified if they enhance the well-being of their members or others to some degree without offsetting costs to members or others. Careful measures of this balance are often impossible because effects are unforeseeable. Child-rearing is costly to parents without a full accounting of its effects until children become adults. Parents believe their troubles were justified by the well-being of their children; they’re proud when all is well, but shake their heads when the result goes badly. The aim was justified, often the process, too, but something collateral or unforeseen didn’t work. ii. The actions and effects of systems important to well-being are often covered—thus tacitly justified—by laws that forbid some actions or promote others: couples living together for forty years feel illicit and incomplete until marriage laws are extended to cover their union. But law is not a necessary sanction for core systems. Friendship has aims and expressions too various and subtle for law’s impatience with ambiguity. iii. Principles, too, are a grid that focuses moral attention when actions that satisfy local laws violate their terms: eating meat is legal, but many vegetarians shun it for moral reasons. They complicate the simpler calculation of deciding whether this or that cause will have legal effects appropriate to an interest or

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need. Principles trump the short-term advantages that lying could afford: they crystallize the fear that cooperative action is hampered if, for example, one can’t be trusted to speak truly to partners. They often supersede the permissions of law, for there are no legal sanctions against lying in most situations. Many principles are concise—the Ten Commandments, for example—though some are vague or unformulated: civic virtue—cleaning one’s sidewalk, eyes on the street—is principled behavior without a covering formula. iv. Yesterday’s duties seem quaint today. The duties of other cultures have a similar effect: people and systems vary; the duties and permission of other times and places may have no currency in ours. Throwing oneself on a spouse’s funeral pyre—suttee—was once morally justified in societies where it is now illegal. Cultural relativism is the familiar challenge to justification: is nothing justifiable beyond dispute when no practices are favored everywhere? Is the ferocity of our commitments only parochial: other times or places, other duties? Could we acquire duties that violate our current moral sensibility? Wouldn’t a different sensibility—a different conscience—make us strange to ourselves? Sensibilities evolve: some vegetarians would rather starve than eat flesh, though we descend from hunter-gatherers. Are there moral limits on the diversity of systems and roles, hence a limit to the variability of morally valid duties? The most likely way to discover a limit, if any there be, is an analysis of systems considered core, those satisfying essential needs. Several interests satisfy this description, including family, friendship, health, safety, education, work that supplies essential material goods, and the leadership responsible for social efficacy and coherence. Family suggests a Good Housekeeping ideal: a husband, wife, and children living in their comfortable home. But this is also a generic idea, one that implies a complex of functions: a. Husband and wife are mutually dependent; they work together to provide goods or services that each would be hard pressed to satisfy alone. b. These partners may also be friends who share interests and support one another emotionally. c. They educate their healthy children while d. living in a settlement and e. doing work useful to people other than themselves. f. Family members affirm the legitimacy of the social code by observing its mores and laws. g. Members participate in one or more of their community’s social organizations: its schools, clubs, neighborhoods, or teams. h. They contribute, because of their talents, education, and passion, to the ideas or practices that make their community stable because coherent and effective. These variables are principal conditions for the well-being of persons and communities. They apply universally, irrespective of organizational and stylistic differences among cultures and societies; each is a nonnegotiable condition for

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a society’s stability and survival. It’s unlikely that all members participate in activities critical to all the variables—many are not civic minded, they don’t participate in their society’s deliberations or management—but every function must be satisfied if the society is to be self-sustaining. There are variations for common determinables: clothing differs among cultures, but bodies are made to the same design, however distinctive the clothes. Cultural relativists emphasize the different implementations of the basic variables in stable cultures: extended families acknowledge graded intensities of duty to uncles, aunts, and cousins (should rather than must), while nuclear families may believe that water (friends and colleagues) is thicker than blood (collateral family members). Elementary interests are common to both, though we often notice differences rather than generic affinities when systems having shared roots (Mosaic religions) seem mutually unintelligible. The differences are real, but all are consistent with the mechanical conditions for sustainable core systems: namely, the causal reciprocities—the moral codes—that stabilize systems. Difference isn’t excessive until pathological societies sabotage the wellbeing of individuals and core systems. That risk is flagrant when societies distort the balance between individual freedom and communal authority. Anarchy and holistic tyranny (restrictions on free speech and assembly, forced conversion) are equally unsustainable because neither generates the mix of initiative and coherence characteristic of vital societies. Many are less than vigorous but still viable because their members have liberty sufficient to satisfy basic needs. They educate their children; do mutually useful work; observe their society’s mores and laws; and participate in its core organizations. Anthropologists describe these cultural idiosyncrasies while remarking this moral constant: the generic functions of core systems are everywhere the same. All are stabilized when successive generations learn their sustaining duties and permissions. Structures that satisfy these social functions differ considerably among cultures, though all are formed and stabilized by the reciprocal causal relations of their members. These are the grids that narrow our focus when appraising a system, its aims, or actions. Are its effects appropriate to its aims, without offsetting consequences? Does it satisfy pertinent covering laws, principles, or cultural mores? A system’s actions are justified if its aims or actions satisfy this hierarchy of criteria.

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6.3 Well-being My emphasis on the sustaining mechanics of core systems is annoying because incomplete. Any number of machines are competent without being morally justified. Moral justification requires a factor that would explain the persistence of generic core systems and their distinguishing practices and moral codes. That factor would answer these additional questions: what is the purpose of the social mechanics binding core systems; what do these systems achieve? Each has specific aims, but is there also a superior aim, one to which all others defer? That objective is well-being. People of one culture don’t always treasure benefits perceived as uncompromisable within another. Yet commonalities abide because some human needs are everywhere the same. All are vulnerable to hunger, illness, isolation, or assault. All need bodily integrity, safety, health, satisfaction of animal needs, education, work appropriate to their talents, and companions. All want dignity: everyone should have self-regard of such a degree that he or she can ignore affronts. These are essential elements in the complex of aims that all pursue. Morality is their facilitating condition. Systems that satisfy basic interests are a social core. They are everywhere the context for whatever degree of well-being a society’s members achieve. Yet elementary needs are satisfied in disparate ways. Their variable satisfiers are challenged because some serve well-being better than others. Families aren’t always effective; states aren’t always prosperous or well-ordered. Cultures strong in some ways are weak in others. Rain dancers are much esteemed, but they might agree that their rituals enhance cohesion without producing rain.

6.4 Transformation or management? My account of zone morality is principally descriptive and pragmatic. Systems are stabilized when members satisfy their duties by filling their roles. We correct excess or imbalance with careful appraisal and effective intervention; we learn what to do and how to do it. These activities are managerial. Morality is transformative when we resolve to do or be better than we are. This is the hope of the Platonic tradition as it inspires secular life, and religious traditions that read “God” where Plato‘s Republic cites “the Good.” But too strong a contempt for established ways is destabilizing: we fail to acknowledge the worth of systems that secure, educate, and satisfy us. Parents and children, teachers and students, employers and their workers, physicians and patients, preachers and their congregants, buyers and sellers: these are complementary roles in service

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to elementary human needs. Deficiency doesn’t entail incompetence. Judgment walks the ample space between intolerant prescriptivism (ours is the only way) and a mindless tolerance for failure that parades as legitimate (artistic, social, or cultural) difference. Family members are morose; they abuse one another. Why carp about this family’s private business? The likely answer evolves with experience, history, and the gathering persuasion that mutual respect is a condition for the efficacy of systems and the well-being of their members. Deficiencies can be repaired if systems are better managed, but who should fix them: members or someone (persons or an agency) that intervenes? Management—revision—will be seen as interference if the moral views of overseers are imposed on people or systems described as “clients.” Worse, there may be no accepted standard for repairing systems if social or cultural differences defy arbitration. We stop the regress by fixing a baseline for acceptable behavior. This is likely to be a standard formulated after surveying a range of behaviors in our culture or those where systems and mores are similar to ours. Or we find crosscultural leverage for judging or repairing a condition chronic in many cultures. Finding a standard that is cogent everywhere while sensitive to cultural differences is daunting, but there is no leverage for managing systemic breakdowns without one. The alternative is transformation: interfere in local conduct by imposing an ideal standard or one native to the persons intervening. Philosophic tradition is overtly prescriptive. It doesn’t like a range of contingent choices (different here and there) when establishing moral or other foundations: it wants clear and distinct ideas (their negations are contradictions) or deductive arguments with luminous, self-confirming premises. But ethics is a domain where logical rigor eludes us. There is often no cross-cultural agreement about the moral values appropriate to the reciprocities of core or other systems: each side gives its reasons and affirms its traditions. (This is true despite the generic similarities of core systems across cultures: the roles and status of women, for example.) But there is evidence of a kind: ask people in societies that have rejected cruelty or repression; ask its former victims which style they prefer. There are myriad systems that violate consensual notions of fair and decent treatment. Many of these violations—child labor and spousal violence—endure for millennia. But systems are altered in ways that purge abuses when reflection clarifies the conditions for human well-being. Abusers are deterred if abuse is punished. Adopting standards that would once have seemed transforming becomes a problem for managing the systems we have.

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6.5 Moral vulnerabilities Morality can’t be restricted to the mechanics of systems because they have aims and effects and because they use their members: i. Aims are more or less worthy; pursuing them affects people within and beyond a system for better or worse. How do aims satisfy the determinable values common to well-being everywhere (health and education, for example) in ways appropriate to local culture? ii. Effects suffered by other systems, the environment, and (most directly) a system’s members may be benign, innocuous, or pernicious. Murder Inc. may be efficient; its members may like their work. But its effects are unacceptable. iii. How are a system’s members used? Is use an excuse for abuse? Justifiable duties—meaning those unencumbered by unacceptable costs— are required of people having roles in systems that satisfy several conditions. Three are apparent: i. A system’s aims and practices are unjustifiable, if malign. This criterion is vague because one can’t anticipate all the effects of any action, but there is a plausible criterion for prohibition: a system’s aims are unacceptable if they require that it damage other people, other systems, or its members with no compensatory advantage to those affected. Protection is reasonably extended to some animals and the environment, though these interests are confounding when prohibition is extended to war, farming, mining, dams, and pharmacological experiments that use animal surrogates. When are an aim’s malign effects offset by the benefits of achieving it? There is no unproblematic answer: pacifists are confounded when having to argue that Hitler should have gone unchecked. This first condition has a corollary: an aim seemingly benign in itself is not benign if the means for achieving it have effects that would be disqualifying if directly consequent on aims judged malign: saving a life, for example, by causing intolerable pain. This test is disreputably vague; it may be construed in ways that legitimize almost any personal deed or corporate activity. Is there any limit to the harm done before we weigh the offsetting advantage: bad for you, but good for me? This condition is nevertheless useful for its inhibiting effect. Systems must specify the compensatory benefit to themselves, their community, or others if any or all are damaged by their actions. This demand is appropriate because harmful effects may be less apparent than good ones, and because every action in a complex environment may have consequences of both sorts. Judgments that weigh the balance are always disputable, but always relevant when we choose between alternative plans and actions.

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ii. Systems considered malign are unjustifiable because they compromise or sabotage the well-being of their members or others. This value, was once explained by saying that each person is made in the image of God: this is leverage because the very idea of treating him badly is sacrilege. His creatures—creatures like him to some infinitely small degree—should also be treated with dignity. Secular life reformulates this conviction as an expression of each person’s discovery that he or she is valuable to him- or herself, but also to his or her partners in core systems. Why is it a discovery? Because much of our selfperception is a reading of other’s people’s views of us, and because many people receive little or no evidence that those views are positive. Why should others agree with one’s positive self-regard? Because they may notice and be convinced by one’s self-affirmation, and because empathy enables us to recognize that the drama and intensity of other lives is a mirror of our own: they, too, value themselves. This ascription is inconsequential from the perspective of the cosmos; it matters to us. iii. This third condition is more parochial than the others. My landlady in London invited me, her student tenant, to lunch. All was cordial until her elderly husband announced to no one in particular that Americans have terrible table manners. I, the only American present, recoiled before seeing what had provoked him: the English eat with a knife in the right hand, a fork in the left. Americans don’t pick up a knife unless there is something to cut. We then put the fork, normally in the right hand, into the left while using the right to wield the knife. Cautioned, I used the cutlery as he was doing, to his satisfaction. Culture inflects the expression of core systems; one culture’s duties and practices may be intolerable or merely unintelligible in another. Suppose that various systems fail these three conditions: is that an occasion for management or transformation? Many schools work badly, but that is work for management, not a reason to eliminate schools. No core system is compromised by these conditions, though most can be focused and organized more effectively. Transformation would require a wholesale rethinking of the need satisfied by core systems of a kind. Families seem especially fluid in this respect, but that is mostly the effect of altered relations between men and women, not the discovery that we can grow children like oysters on strings or educate them like battery hens. Greek society knew problems and solutions generically like ours. Core systems abide; there is moral weight in the aims and mechanics—the duties and permissions—sustaining them.

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6.6 Moral quandaries and confusions We are often baffled by conflicting interests or perspectives: we can’t see the way ahead for our systems, selves, or troubled others. There are many such quandaries, but eight are conspicuous because of their impact on core and other systems: i. People engage one another beyond the range of well-defined zones. Moral codes are projected into what seems a void where no systems control a situation or its effects. ii. A system’s aims or procedures are wrongly projected into the work of another. iii. Moral codes are generalized beyond their native systems to all systems. iv. Having duties to several or many systems, we prioritize responsibilities: less here, more there. People in systems having a lower priority feel annoyed or betrayed. v. We balance duties to ourselves against duties to our systems. vi. Action is sometimes confounded if several or many choices seem equally justifiable. vii. Duties to protect and enhance the lives of systems’ members—past, present, or possible—are qualified by war, suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment, and abortion. viii. Some alleged duties are unjustifiable. i. People often engage one another beyond the range of well-defined zones, hence without the regulative force of constraining roles or reciprocities. How should we behave when there are no settled roles to direct us? Compare cities where vehicular traffic is chaotic to those where accidents are minimized because lines of opposed traffic move right or left. One resembles the state of nature, the other satisfies a prescriptive rule: separate vehicles to maximize safety and facilitate movement. We may describe this effect by saying that people abstracted from their myriad systems are regulated by a principle—a traffic law—that all affirm. But there is also this other explanation: regulated traffic is a system orchestrated by street lights, road signs, and acquired habits. People and drivers know what to expect of one another and, by and large, each responds appropriately. This explanation is faulty because it answers the question by making it disappear: seeing chaos, we introduce a system that gives it context, duties, and coherence. This tells us nothing of encounters unmediated by systems. What do people do when sharing no system that mediates their encounters? People are likely to project the expectations of their most recent role when meeting out of context, but they are edgy and unsure: is this a social void (the state of nature)? Is it hostile or benign; should I expect violence or safe passage? Imagine finding another tourist lying wounded in the road while walking alone on a country road in a foreign country. One understands his need; what

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should one do? Intervention is so common, we regard it as appropriate: aunts, uncles, or neighbors step in if children are neglected. But those are situations structured by established social expectations: a core system has failed; collateral relatives or friends compensate for the failure. This situation is different because one considers projecting the value of a familiar system—care—into a void. Would it be morally acceptable to ignore this victim, or is there a duty to intervene in the absence of a system formed by the reciprocal relations of its members? Do I have neighborly responsibilities for unknown children newly installed next door? Would I have a duty to help this victim? Morality has depth: it expresses itself in specific systems but also, more generally, as a lubricating backdrop of moral feelings and attitudes. Hume wrote that sympathy is a universal sentiment,5 hence the idea that there is a family of man and a willing concern for others in need. Yet there is a difference between a willing desire to help, and the moral duties acquired in systems: the first carries no promise of reciprocity; the second requires both. Are we obliged to act in its absence? People often behave heroically when there is no expectation or possibility of reciprocity. Responses are confused: should they have done it? There isn’t a good answer. Should one help neglected children and accident victims? Of course. Is that a duty? Maybe not. ii. A system’s aims or procedures are sometimes clumsily projected into the work of another. We’re confused when rapid transitions provoke expectations that are appropriate in a previous role, but disabling in the next. Or we fail to distinguish between concurrent but vaguely differentiated roles (talking to one’s spouse and children). Teachers strike parental attitudes, but disorient their students; citizens are alternately pleased and confused when their state assumes duties for all their needs. This generalizing instinct requires tight control: the policeman can’t behave at home as he does at work. People moving freely among an array of systems avert confusion or misconduct by compartmentalizing themselves: each transition requires inhibition of one’s recent expectations when anticipating those to come. Or we prefer the comfort of a system that absorbs all our time and energy because we don’t like having to integrate several or many roles while successively turning them on or off. iii. We sometimes abstract from the particularity of a dominant system to a generality which alleges that its signature value or rule of action ought to be our

|| 5 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 317.

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criterion for appraising people, systems, or actions at large. Confusion is perhaps most common where people apply the values of a favored core system when encountering people engaged in the business of other systems: one is competitive at work, then competitive at home; deferential everywhere because deferential in church. These errors resemble the effect of driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Witnesses are surprised. They signal as one passes, but they aren’t seen: one keeps going. Families and hospitals emphasize care; friendship requires loyalty; schools teach discipline and skill; businesses want cooperation and initiative; markets teach competition; religions value piety; safety is a priority wherever individuals or systems are vulnerable; aggression and violence are appropriate to war. Abstracting from these value-generating sites creates an inventory of what seem to be generally applicable virtues or moral standards, though none fits well everywhere because all are sublimed from the idiosyncrasies of distinctive systems and their native situations. The diversity of these abstractions is confusing: we save lives in hospitals, but take lives in war. Which value is best chosen for generalization? One thinks of Plato‘s birdcage:6 grabbing the wrong bird is consequential if neither care nor aggression is the appropriate response to every situation. The National Rifle Association’s president wants armed guards in schools. He believes the moral codes of war and defense are applicable to zones of every sort: kindergarten and battlefields. iv. Each person apportions his or her time and energy while having duties to several or many systems. Other members of discounted systems object that they receive less time or effort than duty requires. This perception bedevils every working parent and anyone having several jobs. No solution averts every criticism, so people having multiple responsibilities struggle to give some acceptable part of themselves to each of their core systems. Friendships suffer; interests lapse. This was less a problem in simpler times; it is less pressing in smaller communities where the array of systems and commitments is reduced. People busy on a family farm work with spouses or siblings; tasks are different, but affinities are the same. Always in touch with the same people, one excuses their ways of dividing themselves.

|| 6 Plato, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: the Theatetus and the Sophist, trans. Francis McDonald Cornford (New York: Dover, 2003), 197c, p. 132.

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v. One is tired and distracted, but caregiver to spouse and children, hence responsible for several tasks before doing something for oneself. Cabdrivers speak of careers abandoned when they immigrated. They imagine passing accreditation exams for local professions, but duties to families or debts to banks leave no time for study. They drop me at the steps to my college office; I point to the admissions office. They shrug: their children will do it. vi. Indecision often expresses the fact that one can justify contrary actions or choices by reframing them: buy it because it looks good or don’t because you’ll have to pay for it. This works as well for systems: was the sheriff right to persecute Robin Hood or wrong because Robin stole for the poor? One likes an aim, but not the means. Which is overriding and why? Different answers, each with its justifier, are likely given. Add that one participates in several or many systems, so the dialectic of competing justifications agitates them while confusing us. Reasoned choice exceeds our powers of calculation in domains of this complexity and scale. Habit, impulse, and a few dominant values usually save us from making these calculations. The overlay of action’s determinants—causality, systems, laws, principles, and culture—reduces occasions for afterthought and revision without eliminating the likelihood that most situations have several determinants and as many offsetting justifications. For every system has aims, organization, practices, or effects that are problematic. Each may be justified by considerations independent of those cited in criticism or defense of the others. This is the briar patch where justification loses its authority, not because one can’t give reasons for a particular action or system, rather because so many competing actions or systems are justifiable to some degree. Marry Tom? Sure. How about Dick or Harry? Yes, to them as well. Should I join the army, accept a priestly vocation, or enter the family business? All may be viable because the army, church, and firm are going concerns and because one’s place in each may seem unproblematic. Moral justification is compelling when an aim’s relation to a system or practice has ample supporting evidence. But the choice and strength of justifiers is a function of complexity (circumstances or talent, for example) and the priorities of one’s system or self. Declaring a dominant value reduces the relative force of justifiers for other choices, though every emphasis and its justifier is contestable if all are defensible empirically: Tom is better looking, but Dick is rich, and Harry is kind. Reduce the complexity before seizing the duties of a system you may regret. Know yourself: what do you like; what do you need?

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vii. There are several challenges to the claim that regard for life and well-being drive every system and community. They include: a. war; b. suicide; c. euthanasia; d. capital punishment; and e. abortion. How is it appropriate to terminate the life of a current or possible member? There are reasons: a. War: Life is the condition for everything we do, good or bad. Self-defense is a primal reaction to threat: attackers risk losing their lives as we defend ours. Their deaths are the consequence of resistance, not evidence that we want to kill. This defense is stretched to silliness by aggressive wars and weapons that murder indiscriminately. Its justification requires graded responses to actual risks; it isn’t calibrated to people who shoot first and ask questions later. Justified wars generalize this response: we defend ourselves against an aggressor that has no regard for the lives of its citizens or ours. Justifiers languish because aggression is construed differently on the two sides of a front line. b. Suicide: This is sometimes an act of self-affirmation—I decide, because dishonored or irreparably ill—though suicide is more often the evidence that worth and choice are nullified by despair. Its effects devastate survivors: someone vulnerable wasn’t saved; one who was vibrant and loved abandons roles that aren’t easily or ever filled. Should people be stopped from taking their lives, whatever their reasons? People who claim to know God’s creative force and will are quick to voice his disapproval. (Though a God so powerful could choose to intervene.) Those who doubt the existence of a creator God or that he cares about individual lives need a different answer. Regard for systems diminished by one’s death is a better reason. Though systems critical to life don’t nullify a member’s autonomy; they don’t annul the right to deliberate about one’s future. I can’t be an effective participant in any system if dominated by weakness, pain, or distraction. Where dignity and self-control are important to me, I may decide to terminate myself with a sobriety that takes the measure of my prospects. That response seems arrogant or crude to a tradition we esteem—man made in the image of God—but no longer construe literally. c. Euthanasia: This, too, is self-affirming: I choose to die given my condition and its likely progression. The right to choose my systems and roles is acknowledged; why shouldn’t I have this additional right, given my state and the likelihood that I shall be a burden on others rather than a vital member of systems important to me? Euthanasia is a terrible mistake when the person making it misperceives his or her condition. But medicine is usually sufficient to dispute or confirm a diagnosis. Does God assent? Who in this world has information

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about God’s will, if any there be? Why pretend to know what no one knows? People and churches that argue strenuously in his behalf speak for themselves, not for their God. Should others share responsibility for my death, given my inability to proceed without help? This is a two-fold problem: their alleged criminality, and the psychic effects of assisting in a death. The first is a personal danger until euthanasia is perceived as a rational and moral choice sanctioned by the state. The other—knowing that one has enabled the death of someone likely close and dear—may be an enduring psychic wound. There is solace in remembering the once vital person who chose not to continue. Having known his or her condition while respecting his or her desire is perhaps one’s refuge. d. Capital punishment is clouded by mistaken verdicts: people innocent, but unable to prove it to a jury. Suppose, however, that people condemned are guilty of having intentionally killed others without the excuse of self-defense. Does their guilt warrant death? There are contrary views. Murderers aren’t easily accepted as team members: why wouldn’t they kill again? But that isn’t reason to take the life of one who murders. Life is particular and prized in itself; unable to replace or recreate it, we shouldn’t destroy it. The murderer has killed; why repeat his crime? Because life’s value is not the function of life itself, but is instead a consequence of its use: what do we make of it? A murderer’s life has diminished value because a life was taken; because that loss is costly to the victim’s core systems; and because murder rends a community by intensifying vulnerability and distrust. Everyone would be provoked— were we not calloused by murder—to consider his or her relations to others, perhaps all others: could they do this? There is no definitive reason for choosing between these two notions of life: life as unqualifiedly valuable in itself, or valuable more or less because of how it’s used. Someone who debases life by violating others may not earn the esteem of a life valued in itself. e. Abortion: This is a critical issue for every society because there would be no society if everyone were celibate or aborted. There is a troubled balance: a woman’s desire to control her destiny versus the life of her fetus. Her life would not (usually) end if it lives, but it dies if she chooses. The coupling seems unbalanced, especially given the impulsive character of many choices. But two other considerations have weight. A fetus is dependent in every way on a woman’s body: it would be unviable for its first six or seven months. It matters, too, that a fetus isn’t a person and doesn’t become one until it evolves neurologically and wakens, after birth, to the caretakers with whom it bonds. Personhood is condi-

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tional on the abilities and relations established as the infant acquires roles, however elementary, in systems. The balance shifts unsteadily: a woman’s considered preference versus the possibility that this fetus will reach term and acquire roles in valued systems. No one thoughtful chooses easily. viii. Unjustifiable duties: Some alleged duties are unjustifiable. This would seem a solecism: duties can’t be unjustifiable without losing force as duties. But that isn’t so when duties originate in a complexity—a system—appraised in four ways: for its aim, organization, practices, and effects. Duties to a system accrue by virtue of a role, but one may discover that a prized role is an aspect of a complex having deplorable effects. Or duties have an admired effect, but they are unjustifiable because work conditions are poor or abusive. Conflicts of this sort are familiar in many organizations that behave badly while emphasizing discipline. Members have an ugly choice: close their eyes for the sake of salary, rank, or reputation (they will be perceived as disloyal), or renounce a personal advantage for the sake of conscience.

6.7 All-in-one moral solutions Personal virtues are a principal condition for sustaining systems: character of a sort makes us reliable. Yet virtue is unformed in members who ignore their tasks (because irresponsible) or misrepresent relevant facts when communicating with partners (they lie). Moral practice and judgment would be more secure if there were all-in-one solutions. Those would be rules that correct moral faults, adjudicate moral conflicts, and appraise the aims and effects of persons, systems, and networks with a simple affirmation: always do this; never do that.. There are several of these grand ethical principles, including the Golden Rule, Kant‘s categorical imperative, and Mill‘s distribution principle. Each prescribes a necessary least condition for moral practice or an aim that would maximize moral value. There are, however, reasons for caution: these principles are recommendations (policies), not a priori truths; all distort moral life by abstracting from its grit and particularity. Does any supply an unproblematic rubric for distributing benefits or for appraising aims and effects while solving conflicts? Consider: i. Mill‘s distribution principle—the greatest good for the greatest number— rightly emphasizes the well-being that all pursue. Every enlightened society taxes the wealthy in order to build social capital by improving the lives of the poor. Yet, the principle overreaches because of implying the possibility of a

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Leibnizian solution: the unqualified harmony of persons and systems satisfied by uncompromised goods. That result isn’t achievable in situations of scarcity and crowding: some win if others lose. The greatest good for the greatest number may require heavy costs to a minority. ii. The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is recognition that vulnerability is universal and a précis of virtues such as truthtelling and reliability. Systems don’t survive if cooperation and coordination are sabotaged. Hence the rule: defend reciprocity, let a system’s partners act as their roles require; let systems honor their duties to the others of a network or domain. I want that advantage, let others have it, too. This interpretation exposes the principle’s weakness: the Golden Rule has no leverage when its determining condition isn’t satisfied: people and systems must decide what they want for themselves before offering it to others. Who am I? What should I want? Can I be or have what I want if others are not equally considered or endowed? Or the Golden Rule may be construed cynically as the prudential maxim that one should do for others whatever he or she wants or needs (however trivially or impulsively) from them? iii. The categorical imperative is an earlier formulation of Mill‘s no-harm principle: one is free to act up to the point of harming other persons.7 Kant‘s imperative was considered above (this chapter, Section 1) in the context of a priori justification. Here we consider the possibility that its application is an all-in-one justifier. Here, too, his emphasis on the individual will is generalizable. The imperative—do nothing that all could not do without contradiction—bars the self-defeating conduct of persons or systems. Justification is troubled because Kant leaves too many things unsaid: a. The rule warns us not to take actions having adverse and foreseeable effects. It may have been intended as a curative response to German history: no German principality of Kant‘s time could will a war with others if a war willed by each would destroy all. Hence his inference: let all inhibit aggression. This reading is disconcerting because. It imputes to Kant a policy approved because of its desired—heteronomous—effects: namely, national comity and community. b. War’s effects are foreseeable; many others are not. Generalizing the imperative’s applications entails immobility because the effects of remotely colliding

|| 7 Mill, On Liberty, p. 13.

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causal chains are unpredictable. Should we annul every initiative to avert unimagined self-annihilating conflicts? Inhibition is often appropriate, but can we justify doing nothing, ever, because anything we do might be self-subverting in the long-run if universalized? c. Little seems uncertain when persons and systems choose simple directives (maxims): wash the windows, walk the dog. Other intentions are more problematic because they’re paired to contraries that are equally virtuous but mutually defeating when both are universalized. “Always compete” promotes initiative and innovation; “never compete” encourages mutual patience and harmony. “Always care for others” is bad if it encourages dependence in those receiving care, always good if it promotes autonomy and initiative in caretakers. What would Kant have us do when contrariety entails paralysis, not contradiction? One solution deprives Kant of his principal criterion for appraising maxims: don’t universalize. Do one or the other, not both; or be judicious when doing some of each. d. The categorical imperative is morally powerful because it inhibits selfsubverting choices. Murder would end were it universalized because all would be dead. Kant‘s imperative would bar heinous acts, but that is all it does. It supplies no additional guidance for choosing maxims that are cogent in the particular circumstances where action is appropriate or incumbent: a business is failing; someone is coughing blood. Kant tells us what not to do when doing nothing is intolerable. His imperative is a rule proscribing bad choices, not the one-off solution to every moral problem. Imagine, by way of analogy, that the principal rule for playing a game is a prohibition: so, baseball is explained by the rule that foul balls (such as those hit into the grandstand at the side of play) don’t count. No game can be played in accord with this single rule because it leaves all positive content unspecified. Inhibition deserves emphasis in our time, given practices that Kant‘s imperative would have stopped. But we need direction that points both ways: what not to do, but also what we may usefully do. That orientation is missing when commentators emphasize inhibition without considering the skills required to choose maxims that don’t violate the categorical imperative, maxims calibrated to the heteronomous interest or needs of one’s situation. Those are maxims justified by their effects. Kant wouldn’t accept this rebuke; he had no doubt that people generate plans and projects appropriate to their circumstances, not only maxims that fail his test. Yet there infinitely many rules or maxims that satisfy his imperative without being relevant to situations where moral choices are made: let everyone

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sneeze is universalizable but usually irrelevant. Kant needs an adjunct principle, one that identifies maxims relevant to matters at hand, whatever they be. This principle would sanction heteronomy because relevant maxims are always situational: we apply them in order to achieve particular effects. His emphasis on universalizability is also compromised. Kant supposed that conflicts would be resolved or avoided if every maxim adopted were willed by all. He assumed that morality has social coherence as its paramount aim and that this effect would be achieved if all were to refrain from enacting maxims that promote conflict. This is good social policy, but notice both Kant‘s explicit bias and the fractious moral issues he ignores: avoiding conflict is critical to the morality of the whole, but insensitive to the moral dilemmas of persons and systems. Local businesses have clients and suppliers. Lowering prices to clients may entail that one bankrupts suppliers by requiring that they lower their prices; or the business pays a premium to suppliers while risking its own health when raising its prices alienates clients. Or a single parent chooses between two events held at the same time on the same day. One is a game in which one of his children is likely to shine; the other is a play in which the shier child has a small part. Where does he go? Which is the right moral decision when no choice is best and effects are only local? Kant‘s imperative has no play in situations like this because no universalizing rule clears the air by directing choice. e. Kant bars innocuous choices when his positive formulation—treat everyone as an end, not only as a means8—frustrates efficient practice. People regularly address one another in the context of their vocations, as teachers, mechanics, or accountants. We go to them for their skills, using them as means, not ends; their dignity is considered only to the degree that it confirms their reliability. Is an end ever dominated by its means? It is if the person wielding a knife is a surgeon. Imagine the dilemma of patients asked to choose between two doctors, one a paragon of humanity but clumsy, the other a person disreputable in every way, except that he or she is a gifted and reliable surgeon. Wishing the best for both, one likely chooses the second. Each of these grand principles is a useful backdrop to moral judgment, but neither is sufficient to direct all the work of gathering information or appraising possible plans or actions. Situations are complex. Having no a priori principle that purges social life of conflict or inequity when everywhere applied, we make

|| 8 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 91.

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fumbling, pragmatic decisions. Moral reflection joins considerations of two sorts: it deciphers whatever is morally problematic (if only conspicuously) in the situation at hand; it affirms applicable pro- and prescriptive laws and plausible rules of thumb (maximize well-being, the Golden Rule). Solutions are apparent, even formulaic, if a task is plain and simple. But there are many problems for which there are no morally unequivocal solutions. We manage moral progress and conflict without purging systems of every fault. We survive because they do.

6.8 Irresolution Morality defends three relatively independent goods: persons, systems, and the whole. Systems intensify moral conflicts by interposing an interest distinct from the other two concerns. Either may be an end or a means. Which has priority: doctors, hospitals, or public health? Assuring the wealth of private doctors compromises public health and the economy of hospitals; giving priority to public health subordinates the other two. Each of the disputed issues considered above is also a conflict of this sort. No resolution appeases all three interests because affirming one diminishes the relative worth of the others: the whole—society—supersedes the interests of persons (capital punishment) or euthanasia, abortion, and suicide deprive society of present or possible persons. We hope for resolutions that would satisfy all sides by making choice coherent, but resolutions of that sort are rare. What is a thoughtful person to do when each of the three factors has interests contrary to the other two? We choose— deliberately or impulsively—an action that favors the priority of the moment: my system, myself, or the whole. Or we estimate: which choice would do the least harm? The moral codes of core systems are the easiest part of morality. One inherits a family and acquires friends, a partner, schools, and work. One learns what these systems require and typically one behaves appropriately. Other people recognize and respect these affiliations; laws defend them. There is moral failure because some people and systems are insufficiently aware of their effects on others. But these are frictions occurring in the struggle for space and resources. They don’t occasion the moral paralysis occurring when systems abuse their members in pursuit of good aims or, conversely, when people work well together for pernicious effects. Should we participate in systems that are abusive or inefficient because badly organized, though we value their aims? Answers are equally uncertain when parameters change: what to do if a system has questionable aims though

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members are loyal to partners who will suffer if they criticize it or withdraw? Is the moral burden relieved or intensified if one willingly misconstrues the malign as tolerable or the tolerable as malign? These questions don’t have formulaic answers. Justification requires judgment. Complexity and perspective guarantee that reasonable judgments will vary. Moral dilemmas aren’t always distinguished from moral failures. Failures— because of absence, carelessness, or neglect—are quickly identified and, in principle, easily repaired. There are no easy solutions —no algorithms or all-inone principles—for moral dilemmas. Responses vary. Some people are tortured by moral tension. Others avoid anxiety by doing whatever seems least costly to themselves. The first seems virtuous, the other cowardly; but neither response— anguished or self-regarding—can be faulted for failing to do the right thing when there is, sometimes, no right answer or even a better one. It is better neither to do harm nor suffer it. But is there a tidy solution when every live choice requires that one do harm or suffer it, or that one suffer harm while doing it? Each of the forms of violence considered above is contestable in this way. Every banker foreclosing on houses might ask if he isn’t similarly compromised. Our mortgage holders have missed their payments, he says defensively, though the bank is profitable while they are unemployed because there are no jobs. Moral puzzles expose our discomfort. We imagine switching a tram so it kills one person rather than five; culpability, we imply, is a matter of degree. Is this puzzle an intimation that we who escape the harm don’t escape the guilt? Justification is disappointing: there are no appeasing solutions for moral dilemmas.

Bibliography Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Dover, 2007). Bentley, Arthur Fisher, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995). Descartes, René, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I and II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoft, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 and 1985). Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1954). Edwards, Jonathan, Resolutions: and Advice to Young Converts (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P& R Publishing, 2001). Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York: Oxford, 2009). Fletcher, Joseph, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966). Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). Hayek, Friedrich, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press). James, William, The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1968). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London: Longman’s, 1963). Kaufman, Stuart, The Origins of Order: Self-organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Leibniz, G. W. V., Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Marx, Karl, Critique of the Gotha Program (Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press, 2008). Marx, Karl, Communist Manifesto (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1954). Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, In.: Hackett, 2001). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. i-vi. eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934, 1935). Plato, Apology, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961). Plato, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theatetus and the Sophist, trans. Francis McDonald Cornford (New York: Dover, 2003).

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Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis McDonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945). Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Royce, Josiah, The Hope of the Great Community (Whitefish, Mon.: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). Simmel, Georg, On Individuality and Social Form, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Spencer, Herbert, Principles of Biology, vol. 2 (London: D. Appleton and Company, 1906). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Burns, Oates &Washburne, 1920). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).

Name index Aquinas, Thomas 98 Aristotle 1, 4, 10, 46, 54f., 65, 93 Bach, Johann Sebastian 35 Bentham, Jeremy 19, 64 Bentley, Arthur Fisher 78ff., 89, 96 Decatur, Stephen 50 Defoe, Daniel 17 Democritus 4 Descartes, René 1, 4, 8, 84, 99ff. Dewey, John 27, 32, 78f., 81, 91 Edwards, Jonathan 49 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 34f. Engels, Friedrich 57 Fletcher, Joseph 27 Franco, Francisco 20 Freud, Sigmund 37, 46 Glaucon 77, 103 Habermas, Jürgen 81 Hayek, Friedrich 70 Hegel, G. W. F. 31, 35, 38 Hobbes, Thomas 2, 79f., 88 Hume, David 9f., 15f., 31, 62, 69, 116 Jacobs, Jane 75 James, William 30f. Jefferson, Thomas 78f. Kant, Immanuel 1f., 4, 17f., 27, 61ff., 78, 81f., 100ff., 121ff.

Kaufman, Stuart 26 Leibniz, G. W. W. 83, 103 Locke, John 4, 9, 17, 53f., 78 Luther, Martin 4, 103 Madison, James 78 Marx, Karl 4, 17, 19, 22f. Mill, John Stuart 4, 6, 17ff., 48, 51, 54, 62, 64, 90f., 121f. Moses, Robert 75 Newton, Isaac 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich 18, 32, 34ff., 55 Peirce, C. S. 36 Pessin, Jacob 36 Plato 1, 4, 17, 19, 51, 56, 61, 69, 78, 88f., 103, 111, 117 Quine, W. V. O. 30f. Rawls, John 105 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 56, 79f., 89 Royce, Josiah 91 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8, 38 Simmel, Georg 30 Smith, Adam 80 Socrates 61 Spencer, Herbert 88 Thrasymachus 80, 88 Truman, Harry 60 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 10, 31f., 67