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.

Series Title

Key Concepts in Political Theory

Copyright page

Dedication page

Introduction: What is Political Judgment?

Notes