Political Judgment E-Book

Peter J. Steinberger

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Political Profiles Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Politics is the process by which communities collectively decide to pursue certain courses of action. It is, as such, always a matter of judgment. Courses of action are chosen at least in part because they are somehow adjudged better than the alternatives, and this has given rise to a great deal of speculation about the ways in which we determine the relative merits of proposed laws and policies. What exactly is good judgment in politics? What are the characteristics of people who judge especially well? How is good judgment acquired and how can we recognize it in others? Peter Steinberger addresses such questions by considering a variety of important developments in the history of political thought - ancient, modern and contemporary - introducing readers to important and on-going debates about the idea of prudence or practical wisdom as it functions, or should function, in the realm of public affairs. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of political theory, the history of political thought, and political ethics.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Series Title

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication page

Introduction: What is Political Judgment?

Notes

1 Foundations: Plato and Aristotle

1

2

Notes

2 The Kantian Problematic

1

2

3

4

Notes

3 The Arendtian Theory of Judgment

1

2

3

4

5

Notes

4 Hermeneutics, Tacit Knowledge, and Neo-Rationalism

1

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Notes

Index

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

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Series Title

Key Concepts in Political Theory

Charles Jones and Richard Vernon,

Patriotism

Roger Griffin,

Fascism

Peter J. Steinberger,

Political Judgment

Copyright page

Copyright © Peter Steinberger 2018

The right of Peter Steinberger to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1310-9 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1311-6 (paperback)

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Dedication page

For Mo

Introduction: What is Political Judgment?

In 2012, David Brooks, the New York Times commentator, wrote a column about presidential leadership that emphasized, above all, the importance of good judgment. Specifically:

A president with political judgment has a subtle feel for the texture of his circumstances. He has a feel for where opportunities lie, what will go together and what will never go together. This implicit knowledge is developed slowly in people like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson who have spent decades as political insiders and who have a rich repertoire of experiences to draw on.1

Its astonishingly gendered language notwithstanding, many or most readers are apt to find this a perfectly intelligible and entirely plausible observation. It seems obvious that the president ought to be an individual of good judgment. The problem, however, is to determine exactly what that is and how it is to be identified in particular individuals. Brooks seems to take a stab at fleshing some of this out. But when he says, for example, that judgment is a matter of having “a subtle feel” and a kind of “implicit knowledge,” this seems largely to beg the question. What exactly is such a subtle feel? How is it different from other kinds of mental phenomena? If someone has the requisite implicit knowledge, what exactly does that person know and exactly how does that person know it? To what extent does such knowledge produce judgments that are, in fact, reliable, justifiable, and correct? Is it possible to say with confidence that one particular person has the feel while another one doesn’t? In the absence of answers to such questions – without a cogent theory of political judgment, a political philosophy of judgment – statements like Brooks’s seem facile, gratuitous and, in the end, largely useless.

But there are, in fact, theories of political judgment out there, important and serious ones. The topic is, indeed, of long-standing interest – a central theme of political thought – and has been tackled by philosophers of great distinction and influence. It is to an account and analysis of at least some of their theories that this book is devoted.

I begin with an assumption: politics is the process by which communities of people, acting in some kind of collective capacity, decide to pursue certain courses of action and avoid others. It is a matter of making decisions – adopting policies or laws – that have public consequences, in the sense both that they affect lots of people and that they affect those people in their status as citizens of a state. Obviously, political decisions can be made in all kinds of ways. They can be made by autocrats (monarchs, benevolent despots, tyrants), by specific groups of individuals (aristocratic councils, committees of experts, administrative functionaries) or by the larger body of citizens themselves according to any number of possible choice-making procedures (majority rule, unanimity, lottery, and the like). Most theorizing about politics focuses, of course, either on evaluating such various processes against one another or assessing the virtually infinite range of policies and laws that states, using those procedures, have adopted or could adopt in the future. But in all cases, politics is also understood, at least implicitly, to be a matter of judgment. Decisions are not generally made randomly, nor are they made for no good reason at all. They invariably represent at least some effort to judge the relative merits of different options.

The very idea of judgment in politics thus reflects at least two premises, neither of which can plausibly be denied. First, it presupposes that some courses of action – some policies or laws – are better than others. This doesn’t mean that there is necessarily one best policy for any given circumstance. It may be difficult or impossible to say with any confidence that a political system, in adopting a particular course of action, has clearly done the single right thing. Nonetheless, we do, and I think must, presuppose that it is generally possible to distinguish between policies that are better and those that are less good. Indeed, the very idea of choosing – of making a decision – assumes that we are able to assess the merits of alternatives in relation to one another and thereby to make sensible choices, that is, to adopt certain courses of action that will be more beneficial than others. Second, all of this presupposes in turn that someone or something – some decision-making entity, whether a single person, a group of people or an institution – has the capacity to adjudicate intelligently among alternatives, to judge their relative virtues; hence somehow to understand and see what will work well and what won’t. We assume, in other words, not simply that politics is a matter of judgment, but that good policies are the result of good judgment. I believe that there are no significant examples of political action and no significant theories of political endeavor that do not presuppose the importance of, and also the possibility of, developing and identifying the capacity to judge well in politics.

The problem, however, is to determine exactly what that capacity might be. This is, in large part, a conceptual problem. What does it mean to have good political judgment? Is it a particular intellectual faculty and, if so, what does it look like? How does it operate and how is it similar to, different from, and connected or not connected with other intellectual faculties? Is political judgment a skill that can be acquired, a body of truth-claims that can be learned, a set of procedures that can be set in motion? Or is it more like an innate attribute? Is it purely practical, or does it have a theoretical foundation? Do certain kinds of people have political judgment?2 If so, what are their characteristics, and what enables them to judge well? Is political judgment something that can be attributed only to individual persons, or could it be a property of groups of individuals, large or small? If certain people or groups of people do indeed have good judgment, how can that be recognized? How is it possible to decide that this person is a person of good judgment while that person is not? Is good judgment related to experience, education, social background, natural ability, analytic skill, or inexplicable instinct? Is there a connection between good judgment on the one hand and moral virtue on the other? Are good judges necessarily good people and are good people necessarily good judges? Can we, in short, come up with an account, a philosophical description, a conceptual definition of political judgment that will allow us meaningfully to address some or all of these questions? The problem is obviously of the greatest importance. For if good politics requires good judgment, then we need to know at least roughly what we’re talking about if we are to pursue political issues and political action in a reasonably intelligible and coherent way.

Our ordinary thoughts about judgment are typically confused, vague, and unhelpful. Consider what I would regard as a representative example. In reviewing a book on the history of the Federal Reserve system in the United States, Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the Treasury, writes as follows: “The Fed’s effectiveness … ultimately depends on human judgment …. It is true that the Federal Reserve has sometimes exercised poor judgment. What is clear, however, is that a number of the reforms currently being proposed in Congress could undermine the system’s effectiveness by adversely affecting the Fed’s independence from Congressional political influence and reducing its policy-making flexibility.”3 We find here, as we found in the passage from David Brooks with which this book began, many of the hallmarks of standard discourse on the subject. Judgment is thought to be crucial, but there is little or no effort to describe what it is, how one gets it, how it operates, or how we recognize it. On the contrary, the implication seems to be that judgment is almost a kind of mystical property: either one has it or one doesn’t. Rubin’s statement implies, further, that judgment can be the possession of an institution – the Federal Reserve system itself – rather than of a particular individual. But elsewhere in his review, Rubin seems explicitly to connect the good or bad judgment of the system to the particular qualities of individual persons, namely, various chairs of the Federal Reserve. There is a clear presupposition that judgment is not of a piece; it can be good and it can be bad. But there’s virtually no effort at identifying a method, a formula, a set of criteria for distinguishing the one from the other. To be sure, Rubin might well argue that, in this case and perhaps in most or all others, the proof of the pudding is in the eating – which is to say that someone or something has good judgment when the relevant decisions turn out to produce good results. But there are, of course, two problems with this. First, it ignores the possibility that good outcomes might emerge for reasons of luck or other contingent factors, hence despite an absence of good judgment. Surely we believe this to be a not unusual occurrence. And second, waiting until we see the results of decisions is often or even usually too late. We need to have at least some idea as to who does and doesn’t have good judgment before decisions are made, hence before the damage, so to speak, has been done. Without this, the idea of good judgment would seem to lose any kind of practical or intellectual force.

Rubin’s comments, like those of Brooks, are typical of what we often say and hear about political judgment. Someone is said to be statesmanlike, or to be a shrewd analyst of public affairs, or to have a certain kind of strategic acumen for making good political decisions. Collections of individuals are thought somehow to produce genuine insights, or to have a knack for doing the right thing, or to sense or feel or otherwise intuit the advantages and disadvantages inherent in one course of action versus another. Of course, none of these claims makes any sense without the complementary if often only implicit claim that other people or other groups are somehow deficient in precisely those same terms. Rarely, however, do we encounter serious efforts to unpack, identify, and explain the difference. The presumption seems to be, roughly, that we cannot define good judgment in politics but that we know it when we see it – a presumption that is not only intellectually troubling but also deeply unhelpful as a practical matter, especially in cases where we disagree about who does and doesn’t have good judgment – a kind of disagreement that is characteristic, perhaps even constitutive, of politics as we regularly and routinely experience it.

Given all this, it can hardly be surprising that the history of serious political thought – or, at any rate, the history of political philosophy in the West – has sought to address systematically the question of judgment in politics, understood fundamentally as, again, a conceptual problem. The principal goal of the present book is to examine and critically evaluate a number of important approaches that philosophers have thought to be especially promising. Those approaches have been various and often mutually contradictory. Theorists have sharply disagreed – sometimes explicitly, sometimes otherwise – about what it means to have good judgment in politics and how such judgment is to be achieved. But I believe that those disagreements, though persistent, have also been enormously fruitful. They have provided deep insights both into the nature of the problem at hand and into the ways in which we might best understand not simply the question of judgment in politics but the broader question of political right and wrong.

The chapters that follow examine a range of perspectives – from ancient to modern to contemporary – that reflect a fairly wide variety of theoretical, practical, historical and cultural concerns. They deal with a number of very different works that come from very different places and times. In the face of such diversity, however, I propose to put those perspectives in dialogue with one another, thereby embracing a commitment that underlies, I believe, virtually all philosophical and theoretical work, namely, that the pursuit of intellectual problems is a matter of on-going discussion, conversation and discourse that, at one and the same time, embodies and transcends differences of space and time.

Notes

  1

David Brooks, “The C. E. O. in Politics,”

New York Times

(January 12, 2012).

  2

Considerations of ordinary language usage may create a certain ambiguity here. Obviously, our concern is with the analysis of good judgment, as opposed to simply judgment. But when we say of someone that he or she is “a person of judgment,” this often or usually implies, in and of itself, that he or she is a person of good judgment. At times, then, I will talk about “judgment” and at other times specifically about “good judgment,” and hopefully the context will make clear when and if I think the modifier is superfluous. Sometimes it will be and sometimes it won’t.

  3

Robert E. Rubin, “America’s Bank,”

New York Times Sunday Book Review

(October 19, 2015), p. 1.

1Foundations: Plato and Aristotle

As with so many other topics of importance in Western political thought, the recognized or canonical discourse of judgment begins largely with Plato. I focus, in particular, on a dialogue from the so-called middle period of Platonic writing, namely, the Gorgias. It is true, of course, that scholars have long disagreed about the relationship between the teachings of Socrates on the one hand and those of his most famous pupil, Plato, on the other; and this is perhaps an especially complex problem in a dialogue such as the Gorgias where the main character is, as with most of Plato’s works, Socrates, but where the central argument is thought in some sense to mark a certain kind of transition from the Socratic to the Platonic. Given the focus of the present book, however, it is also a problem that we can largely ignore. For what is of interest to us is simply the doctrine of judgment that one finds in the work. As a matter of convenience, then, I intend simply to assume that the doctrine in question is Plato’s, which is hardly an eccentric claim; and so it is with Plato, I suggest, that we find a canonical and enormously influential statement of the idea that judgment in politics is essentially a matter of rationality. The faculty of rational thought, broadly conceived, is the best or perhaps only reliable and intelligible source of good judgment in politics – a proposition that turns out to have wide-ranging implications both for theorizing about political society and for the actual practice of politics.

1

The Gorgias ostensibly presents a discussion between Socrates and the title character, a famous sophist widely celebrated for his intellectual prowess and accomplishment. In fact, it turns out that Gorgias is not so clearly the main interlocutor of the dialogue, or at least not the only significant one, for his role as opponent to Socrates is quickly taken up by two colleagues, Polus and Callicles, each of whom has important things to say on a variety of issues. With respect to judgment, however, the opening discussion with Gorgias is, perhaps, particularly important and revealing. Indeed, it presents what is, I would suggest, a foundational set of claims regarding exactly what it means to talk about judgment in politics.

Socrates begins by asking Gorgias to explain what he does – which is to say that he inquires as to Gorgias’s profession. Gorgias responds by saying that he is a rhetorician and that he is, as such, skilled both in the practice of rhetoric and in teaching that practice to others. The ensuing exchange is a prototypical example of the Socratic method or elenchus, a Greek word meaning, roughly, refutation. Socrates asks Gorgias to describe the practice of rhetoric – what does it mean to be a rhetorician – and Gorgias answers by indicating, plausibly enough, that to be good at rhetoric is to be good at using words.1 Of course, there are a great many human activities – arguably most – that in one way or another involve the use of words. Doctors use words to talk about disease and treatment, builders use words to communicate plans and work schedules, military leaders use words to formulate tactics and strategies, and so on. Does Gorgias mean, therefore, that every one of those activities is basically a matter of rhetoric and that he himself is an expert in all of them? Such a suggestion would be plainly absurd, and Gorgias clarifies: a rhetorician is someone who is skilled at using words apart from or independently of any particular manual endeavor. It is a matter of words and words alone. Good doctors use rhetoric to communicate effectively with their patients, but this is only one small part of what it means to be a good doctor. A professional rhetorician, on the other hand, is primarily or solely concerned with the effective use of language. This is another plausible qualification of the initial claim. It appears to comport with our ordinary intuitions about what it means to be skilled in rhetoric. Socrates points out, however, that while things like medicine and building and military command are not just about words, a fairly wide variety of other, seemingly quite different activities are, or at least appear to be. He mentions arithmetic and calculation, geometry and chess. That’s an interesting collection of examples, not obviously parallel to one another, but it does seem true that each of them involves little or no physical activity; rather, they are all primarily matters of thought itself, and presumably the thoughts are, in each case, part and parcel of the words that are used to express them. Does Gorgias want to say, then, that mathematics – which seems to be a purely verbal activity – is basically rhetoric? Once again, such a claim would be unlikely, to say the least; but how then does rhetoric differ from mathematics, and from many of those other things that are primarily linguistic? Here Gorgias changes direction slightly. He now indicates that rhetoric is not simply about using words. It is, rather, a particular and distinctive way of using words. Specifically, it is the activity of deploying words in order to convince others to believe something that they might not otherwise believe. It is the art of persuasion. Again, it is a plausible suggestion, but again Socrates is not satisfied. An arithmetician uses words to teach arithmetic, and this means using words to persuade students that certain things are arithmetically correct and others not. Is that what Gorgias has in mind? More specifically, does the rhetorician try to demonstrate or prove to his or her listeners what is true, as the teacher of arithmetic does, or is the goal rather to get the audience to believe one thing rather than another, regardless of whether or not it is actually true? Is the goal, in short, to produce knowledge or is it to produce beliefs that might or might not be matters of knowledge?

Gorgias’s response to this last challenge is difficult and equivocal, and it is here that other individuals – Polus and Callicles – begin to jump into the conversation. They do so by asking Socrates what he thinks rhetoric is, and his response is, arguably, the central claim of the entire dialogue: rhetoric is a kind of “knack.”2 The Greek word he uses is empeiria. This could also be translated as “experience” or “habitude,” and it is precisely in the complexity or subtlety of translation that we may find any number of clues as to what Plato, speaking in the voice of Socrates, has in mind. Consider, to begin with, the activity of playing a flute, which Plato regards as a typical example of a knack. We would all agree that some people play the flute very well, others much less so. But how shall we explain the difference? Plato seems to identify two factors. On the one hand, certain individuals simply have more talent for the flute than others. They have, as we say, natural gifts; and indeed, it is a long-standing feature of our understanding of the world that gifts of this kind are not equally shared. For many or most areas of human endeavor, some people are talented, others not so much; and with respect to flute playing, this means that some simply have a special knack for doing it well. On the other hand, we also realize that our talents, such as they may be, can be exploited more or less assiduously. Mere natural ability, however real, is often not enough; whatever the activity, even the most talented among us usually have to work at it. In the case of the flute, then, a serious, perhaps even monomaniacal dedication to conscientious and diligent practice – the constant, recurrent, habitual effort to develop ever more dexterity in the fingers and an ever more symmetrical embouchure – becomes a necessary condition for being able truly to develop the knack. But notice what this means. The expert flute player is, for two different reasons, unable to provide an account of what he or she is doing. The activity in question is not the product of systematic rational and theoretical self-reflection. It is not underwritten by any kind of analysis. Rather, it is a result, first, of sheer, innate, inexplicable ability as developed and perfected through, second, a training regimen – involving, often, a program of endless repetition – that constitutes, in and of itself, a significant level of “experience” and that, as such, gives rise to an appropriate “habitude.” The more we work at it, the more our fingers and lips are apt to do what they’re supposed to. The improvement in our innate facility seems not to be the result of a self-conscious explanatory or theoretical mode of thinking. It is not an abstract, intellectual process. It is, rather, a matter of habituation. Exactly how does this occur? How is it that we can develop the appropriate muscle memory? What explains the fact that practice makes perfect? Ordinarily, we don’t really know, especially if we’re not experts in bio-mechanics. We know only that things usually get better through repeated effort, that hard work often pays off. It is true, of course, that we sometimes devise methods or routines that seem to increase the effectiveness of our training efforts and that can be codified as general rules. But such rules are apt to be largely heuristic in nature, prescribing, for example, standard exercises that have proven over time to be successful for reasons that nonetheless remain unclear, unknown and perhaps unknowable. The result is, again, a knack – something that might be very reliable but that cannot give a systematic explication or account of itself.