Reliance on the Moral Authority of Others: Actors and Jurors

I started this gathering project with the aim of collecting small papers and occasional talks first and making them available to anyone who might want to follow my trains of thought over the years. My ultimate aim was much bigger: to gradually process in a preliminary way a mass of journal material that has some integrity but that never got integrated into larger wholes. While I hope to go back and string some of this material together, I realize that it may be important to let the fragments speak for themselves. This is my first experiment in such work, written in February of 1999, just a few months after my father died. That connection is important, perhaps, because the paper addresses the problems of depending on a moral expert or a moral authority for judgments of various kinds: the ones the actor makes, the ones the juror makes.

We often know how the story comes out, what the likely right answer is, but we may not know how to get there. People are critical of Clinton in relation to Monica Lewinsky for doing what was transparently the wrong thing. “Anyone could have told him not to do that!” But he could have behaved and still have been morally clueless – just a sexually frustrated version of himself.

Consider a ‘Chinese’ model:  the Sages got it right, and our job is to do what the Sages said and to pass on what the Sages said. For generations, we grow into a particular tradition, adopting its roles and rituals, finding the satisfactions that go with that way of life, without adopting an independent stance at all, without stepping back to judge the Way to be good.

In this model, there is still room for different relations to authority. One might adopt the traditional ways without fitting them together into a satisfying life or a harmonious way of acting in the community. One might cling to the traditional ways just as an alternative to not knowing at all what to do. And one would thereby break the chain of  transmission, in that one’s life would not seem admirable to the next generation; one would not be an ad for the tradition.

"Breaking the chain of transmission" – that’s a general topic under which lots of different issues come, including misinterpretation, misapplication of examples and also wrong relations to authority.

(I think about Kierkegaard’s discussion of the Abraham and Isaac story, echoing his own bizarre relation to his father. It is almost as if one’s parent is one’s destiny, the real and unavoidable source of authority, so that any contradictions in one’s parent’s life become koans for one’s future thought and experiment. A breezy dismissal of one’s parents’ lives may not fly psychologically – or, when it flies, one may be left rootless, homeless.)

One problem of transmission: how do we keep each gang of young Turks from constructing hellholes, experimentally – pursuing some single ideals without any sense of tensions or complementarities.  

So, is taking people to be moral experts a problem of transmission?

A simple thing to say is that what matters is a person’s right relation to his or her moral beliefs and moral attitudes, and that having them on authority is not the right relation.

Consider the case of someone who makes a questionable moral call in a fairly specialized circumstance – say a surgeon’s decision not to operate on a patient with AIDS. The surgeon comes before a jury. One might think that expert testimony is relevant to determining guilt here, but also that the surgeon could not appropriately rely on expert testimony in deciding what to do. This is his or her own decision to make, and it is irresponsible to rely on authority. But perhaps our judgment of the person may rely on authority.

What is hard here is to say what kind of reliance on advice becomes a problem, since most folks would concede that seeking advice is reasonable in hard cases, and that some advice should be taken very seriously. But taking advice seriously somehow has to be distinguished from relying on it as on moral expert testimony.

Consider the profiler: he knows statistical stuff about mass murderers, stuff you couldn’t guess, stuff that doesn’t necessarily hang together on any meaning thread at all. One might have such statistical information in any area of human life, and experts might warn someone away from some innocuous activity or profession – or recommend some apparently crazy action – on the basis on some broad generalizations about how people tend to act. If there’s a social science of normalcy as good and as persuasive as the social science of deviance, that may well be possible. But, one might want to say, it is supremely important that my acts be meaningful, that they arise out of some understanding of my circumstances. It would be abdicating responsibility, to act on the basis of probabilities. Maybe so, but it would also be rational.

Clearly, on any consequentialist view, there are going to moral experts just in the sense that training makes one better at sorting out consequences. I would bet that any theoretical position sets up somebody as a moral expert – because somebody is particularly good at processing action according to the prescriptions of the moral theory. So, let’s call these folks: experts within a theory. If one admits them as experts, it is somewhat odd to say: “Oh, but there could not be real moral experts, because no one can judge among the fundamental commitments that are the starting points, among the theories.” If every commitment sends one to some expert or other, then experts have been made essential to the process – only one needs a decision to activate the appropriate expert. One could imagine that attorneys would call several witnesses to apply various moral theories to the case, and then leave the jury to settle on a theory and thereby to determine which expert to believe. So the point about the plurality of possible commitments doesn’t go very far toward fencing out experts.

The problem in essence seems to me to be that the solution of ethical problems by recourse to theory and basic general commitments is in tension with a way of doing moral thinking by understanding what one is doing – or, in the case of the jury, by  understanding what the defendant has done.

Can there be expertise with respect to understanding what one has done or understanding what the defendant has done? In one way, of course there can. Hemingway understands the actions of the revolutionary leaders in Spain in a particularly rich way, as does anyone who has read For Whom the Bell Tolls with care. His juxtapositions are telling. He would make a great witness. But the key thing is that the proof is in the plausibility of the interpretation. He isn’t predicting anything, as the profiler is predicting. We don’t have some independent reason to believe in his reading of the situation, apart from the plausibility of that reading.

Of course, those who have gotten it right in one circumstance may carry over some credit to the next, especially if, in the next circumstance, they are treating a situation with which we, the readers, are unfamiliar. We might say, “That would not have been jarring to me, but I can take his word that it would be jarring to the sensibilities of a sensitive pianist.”  There may always be room for reliance on authority, and always the problem: how far do I have to follow some authority’s reasoning before I may properly accept his/her conclusions.

It is odd to take the case of the jury as central – the case of the expert witness in court. The jury doesn’t need to act on information, beyond bringing a verdict, and so the question: what can they motivate, to what extent can they, on the foundation of expert testimony, build or construct an action – that question does not arise. But consider my wondering whether I can keep my mother at home, or  send her to a nursing home. Here the problem with expert testimony is that I must somehow derive enough energy from my decision to do what needs to be done.