Abstract
Judgment is central to engineering, medicine, the sciences and many other practical activities. For example, one who otherwise knows what engineers know but lacks “engineering judgment” may be an expert of sorts, a handy resource much like a reference book or database, but cannot be a competent engineer. Though often overlooked or at least passed over in silence, the central place of judgment in engineering, the sciences, and the like should be obvious once pointed out. It is important here because it helps to explain where ethics fits into these disciplines. There is no good engineering, no good science, and so on without good judgment and no good judgment in these disciplines without ethics. Doing even a minimally decent job of teaching one of these disciplines necessarily includes teaching its ethics; teaching the ethics is teaching the discipline (or at least a large part of it).
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Notes
By “practical”, I mean an activity occurring in space (as well as time). The practical in this sense is opposed to mere thought, which occurs only in time (or, if one is a materialist, only “in one’s body” rather than in any public space). Writing is a practical undertaking; thinking about writing is not. This sense is much broader than “a practice”—as in, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre’s often quoted sense, “any coherent, complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity”(MacIntyre 1984) Engineering, the sciences, and so on are, of courses, practices in MacIntyre’s sense, though some disciplines may not be—those that are not complex enough, or not socially established but individual, or without internal goods. Judgment may be necessary for disciplines that are not practices in MacIntyre’s sense as well as for practices that are. For that reason, I adopt this very broad sense of “practical” (and “practice”).
Licensing, though done by government, is nonetheless predominantly in the hands of the discipline; for example, members of the discipline typically prepare questions for the screening exam, grade the exam (or, at least, determine the right answers), predominate on disciplinary boards, and advise on overall policy.
Jack Snapper has pointed out to me that this explanation of how the authority of disciplines arise (or fall) is close to Hume’s defense of critical judgment in aesthetic appreciation (Hume 1757).
For more on the various senses of profession (and the special salience of this one), see Davis (2009).
The affinity of the young for certain disciplines was already obvious to Aristotle, for example: “It is notorious that young persons are capable of becoming excellent geometricians and mathematicians and accomplished students in subjects of that nature.” (N. Ethics VI-8) (Aristotle 1953) Aristotle also noted that, in contrast, the young generally lack phronesis. The young can have good judgment (in some disciplines) but not (as a general rule) phronesis. This, then, is one respect in which phronesis is distinct from judgment. We shall consider other ways later.
See, especially, (Ayer 1952; Stevenson 1944; Urmson 1968). Of course, there are other senses of “value judgment”, for example, simply a judgment of value (in the sense of “judgment” just sketched)—the sort of disciplined judgment a property assessor might exercise or a philosopher would recognize if she believes in objective value. Nothing I say here is meant to reflect on these other senses of “value judgment”. It is interesting that related terms—such as “moral judgment” and “ethical judgment”—never picked up this pejorative sense.
Readers of Dworkin (1977), esp. pp. 31–35, will recognize his distinction between three senses of “discretion”. I am here rejecting the second and third as interpretations of “judgment” (without claiming that anything is wrong with either sense as such). His first sense, which he too calls “judgment”, is the only sense that interests me.
Judgment is good judgment in much the way that all luck is good luck. Bad judgment is only judgment in a sense, much as bad luck is luck only in a sense. Hence, the joke: “If it were not for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”
Instinct may also improve on judgment. For example, it is probably good that we cannot control the suffocation instinct indefinitely. If we could, more of us might suffocate without meaning to.
I avoid the now common description of virtue as “excellence” because “excellence” suggests something beyond the average (literally, running ahead). There is nothing in the idea of virtue that forbids it being a disposition almost everyone has. So, I prefer the less elitist “disposition (and ability)”. That, of course, is closer to the Latin “virtue” (literally, strength or power) and the Greek “arête” (that which is good). What explains the popularity of the superlative “excellence” as a translation of these non-superlative terms?
We may dismiss two other less common translations of phronesis: “common sense” and “sagacity”. “Common sense” may be dismissed because phronesis is not necessarily common (no more than wisdom or good judgment is). “Sagacity” may be dismissed because a sage seems to be someone more given to contemplation than practical activity, a “fount of wisdom” but not necessarily a man of affairs. In this respect at least, sagacity is closer to intelligence than to phronesis. Another plausible candidate for translating phronesis is “practical reason”. It has, as far as I know, never been used, perhaps because it is so strongly associated with Kant (who treats reason as equivalent to rationality).
I prefer “wise” to phronetic—a term that has not caught on with anyone but a few sociologists, perhaps because it sounds too much like “frenetic”.
Aristotle might, of course, have found fault with this example as an elucidation of phronesis, since it is concerned with technical knowledge, not general good sense. I use it nonetheless because it so nicely reveals the difference between science and that knowledge of particulars that is not (according to Aristotle) science.
In fact, English does not seem to have a word for the disposition to good judgment in every aspect of life, speculative as well as practical, though such global good judgment is possible (as one species within the genus of judgment). The only obvious candidates—“divine wisdom” and “divine judgment”—clearly fail because wisdom does not extend to the speculative and “divine judgment” has a quite different meaning (punishment and reward by divinity).
The English word “wisdom” may (or may not) be more flexible. We certainly have expressions like “the wisdom of a physician”. What such expressions mean is the question. To me, “the wisdom of a physician” suggests a wise person bringing to professional practice what she brings to the rest of life (as in the once popular Dr. Kildare). But perhaps there is also a suggestion of some merely “technical wisdom”. That mix of suggestions is treacherous enough to make avoiding the term seem prudent. We might do better speaking, for example, of “wisdom in a physician”.
Might judgment be predetermined even though creative (and therefore not to be predicted)? How are to know? We may be entitled to conclude predetermination from prediction, but what entitlement have we for such a conclusion where prediction is hit or miss (or, in the case of invention, possible only in general terms)? Contemporary science seems to acknowledge a good deal of indeterminacy in physical phenomena. A metaphysical theory implying predetermination where science did not would be implausible precisely because it had that implication.
I think we owe to Brown (1988), p. 137, the best definition of “judgment” we have: “the ability to evaluate a situation, assess evidence, and come to a reasonable decision without following rules”. This definition is unsatisfactory insofar as it is in part negative (“without following rules”). There might be more than one way to come to a reasonable decision without following rules. Some of these might not involve judgment. I can’t think of a good example, I admit. Brown also has an overly mechanical notion of what it is to follow rules. What Brown’s definition needs is to replace “without following rules” with a positive description of the process of judgment—just what we still lack more than two decades after he offered this definition. Brown’s definition also omits the active side of judgment (the disposition to exercise the ability he identifies).
Journalism seems the obvious example of a discipline, indeed, profession, without theory. Journalists certainly say it is. But when I talk to journalists, I hear a lot about the general principles of their “craft”—for example, how certain ways of organizing a typical story can help keep the reader’s interest. Those general principles sound to me like theory. I would say the same about plumbing, carpentry, and other manual arts. Each seems to have a theoretical component. Of course, a lot depends on what we mean by “theory”.
This form of argument seems to have been taken up (or reinvented) in moral theory by “particularists”—without much delving into moral judgment as such. See, for example, (Dancy 2004), esp. pp. 15–52.
That is equally true of his most recent work on reasoning (Toulmin 2001). The nearest Toulmin comes to discussing creativity is p. 24, where he wonders how Kant might have written the Critique of Pure Reason had he written the Critique of Judgment first. Creativity plays no part even in Toulmin’s rare discussions of phronesis, for example, pp. 116–117.
Dworkin has since refined the theory in (among other works) (Dworkin 1996). Dworkin’s approach seems to depend on humans searching for patterns in the law, much as human chess players search for patterns in the arrangement of pieces on a board. Is this a feature of judgment generally?
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bauke Steenhuisen for a discussion (concerning his dissertation) that provoked this paper—as well as for many helpful comments on several drafts; and to Michael Pritchard, two reviewers for this journal, and participants in the Humanities Colloquium, Illinois Institute of Technology, September 10, 2010, for similarly helpful comments on one or another later draft.
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Davis, M. A Plea for Judgment. Sci Eng Ethics 18, 789–808 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9254-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9254-6