Chapter 9
MODERN DEMOCRACY came into existence by defining itself over against its predecessors and competitors as a revolutionary departure. Its champions often claimed that in criticizing traditional mores and institutional arrangements they had broken completely with a feudal and ecclesiastical past. One hears echoes of this claim in Paine’s The Rights of Man, in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” and in many lesser texts. The claim exaggerates a real difference.
Modern democracy was in some sense a revolutionary break with the past. Its emergence was intertwined with the English, American, and French Revolutions, and the use its early defenders made of such concepts as the rights of man was indeed an innovation. But the rhetoric of revolution obscures the slow, evolutionary process of a transition that actually took place over the course of many centuries and has yet to unfold its full implications. If not used with caution, revolutionary rhetoric also generates a good deal of perplexity over how the champions of modern democracy could have been rationally justified in urging some of the changes they brought about. A complete break with tradition would seem to require either a transcendental point of view, wholly independent of what I have called the ethical life of a people, or a point of view so discontinuous with that of the traditional past as to be incapable of arguing with it.
I will begin by giving a thumbnail sketch of the emergence of rights-talk in the modern period. Thereafter, I will examine some of the pitfalls surrounding the idea that modern democracy eliminates deference to authority. The early defenders (and opponents) of modern democracy who made this idea seem essential to it were wrong. I will then turn to the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the French Revolution. My analysis of that debate will lead, finally, to an account of the role that observational social criticism has played in the emergence and development of modern democratic culture. Each section of the chapter contributes something to the case I am making for the conclusion that democratic culture is best understood as a set of social practices that inculcate characteristic habits, attitudes, and dispositions in their participants. Because those practices do involve a sort of deference to authority (as well as much defiance of authority) and have achieved enough stability to be transmitted from one generation to another, it makes sense to call them a tradition in their own right. But in working out what it means to say this, we are transcending oppositions that Burke and Paine took for granted. This, I take it, is what American pragmatism has long sought to achieve—an antitraditionalist conception of modern democracy as a tradition.
THE VOCABULARY OF RIGHTS: A JUST-SO STORY
Once upon a time, there were feudal kingdoms. In those days, rights were mainly treated as if they belonged to persons identified with particular roles. What are rights? All rights are normative social statuses. To have the status of a right is to have a legitimate claim on others for the enjoyment of a good. In the feudal past such statuses were determined by a hierarchically arranged set-up of persons, each of whom had his or her place in the providentially designed order of things. Because the basic social order was thought to be divinely ordained, human beings were not responsible for determining what the available roles should be. The question of who gets to play which roles was also to be answered by discerning God’s will. Occasionally, a group of religious purists would press demands for universal poverty and equal standing, but the need for some variant of the hierarchical framework was mainly taken for granted. There was ample room for reflection, in the form of political theology, but such reflection tended to reinforce the inequalities of the entrenched hierarchical arrangements.
Questions about rights tended in this setting to be of the following form: “What claims may you legitimately assert against those to whom you are bound by relations of obligation, given the stations to which you and they have been assigned by God?” The question assumed that the basic order is fixed: prince, king, father, mother, first son, second-born, mere daughter, commoner, peon, outcast, priest, bishop, pope, and so on. Your assigned roles constituted your ethical identity, your vocation. Your roles plus the relations they involved determined your obligations. The relations of role-determined obligation in which you stood determined your rights. In this linguistic setting, “dignity” was a term associated with the bearing appropriate to a nobleman, the sort of person who rarely, if ever, had to beg or grovel when acting appropriately within hierarchically defined relationships. There were, in the feudal era, basically two ways of managing social conflict that could not be resolved by recourse to political theology. One of these was physical coercion, in which one party forcibly pushed another into a subordinate role in a hierarchy. The other was submissive behavior on the part of a weaker party, which established the hierarchical equilibrium more peaceably.
Eventually, however, church councils began to strike many Catholics as a model for more collegial, less hierarchical, exercise of authority within the church.1 And in certain places, including England, the demand of Protestant radicals for egalitarian social and political relationships made significant headway. Increasingly, people started asking about the whole set-up. They began to think of the set-up itself as something for which a social group, and not just the divine source of all things, bore responsibility.2 So they began posing hard questions, not just about, say, whether a specific prince should be deposed or a specific priest defrocked or a specific lady respected, but about whether there ought to be such a role as that of a king, or a priest, or a lady. In The Rights of Man, Paine is out to show that present-day kings are merely the descendants of another age’s “bands of robbers.”3 In Democratic Vistas, Whitman remarks on the “fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady.”4 Remarks like these gradually shifted the burden of proof so that nowadays anybody who affirms or proposes a hierarchically defined role needs to bear the burden of proof in a debate where objections will be allowed from all sides. The argument, if made, will be expected to acknowledge that we are going to settle the question, if at all possible, by talking things out. We will not simply assume that a hierarchy of fixed roles is given in the nature of things.
The net effect of such developments was the creation of what amounted to a new basic role, that of rights claimant and responsibility holder. This role would henceforth be open to everybody who could talk and display enough civility to listen, avoid groveling, abide by the results of deliberations conducted by fair and agreed-upon rules, and so on. There are still role-specific rights. That is to say, there are legitimate claims that a role-occupant can make for the enjoyment of a good, given what other role-occupants owe him or her as a matter of duty. But now there are also widely recognized rights of another kind. In other words, there are legitimate claims one can make on behalf of oneself or one’s group at those points in the discussion where the set-up of available roles and the procedure for assigning individuals to roles are up for grabs. In this sense rights are statuses involving legitimate claims to a social arrangement of a certain kind, a set-up capable of ensuring “that one will not be deprived of the enjoyment of the good in question by ordinary, serious, or remediable threats.”5 The linguistic innovation was to use the old word “rights” to stand for statuses involving these new sorts of legitimate claims. A parallel innovation (there were many others) was to say that everybody with the level of linguistic competence and civility needed to participate in the discussion had something called dignity. In both of these cases, a “fossil and unhealthy air” might cling to the old word for a while, eventually to be dispelled by the vigor of its new uses.
The contemporary feminist philosopher, Annette Baier, makes a profound point when she associates modern rights-talk with an unwillingness to beg. Here is a passage from an essay of hers called “Claims, Rights, Responsibilities”:
The social device of dominance itself avoids mutually disadvantageous infighting, but its cost is high for the dominated. The various rituals of deference, and of begging and response to begging, reduce this sort of cost. We are a species who recognize status (and so avoid the war of all against all) and who have a strictly limited willingness both to beg and to give to those who beg. The conditions of the form of human justice that recognizes universal rights include not only moderate scarcity, vulnerability to the resentment of one’s fellows, and limited generosity, all of which Hume recognized, but also a limited willingness to beg, a considerable unwillingness to ask, even when—if we did ask the powerful for a handout—it would perhaps be given to us. What we regard as ours by right is what we are unwilling to beg for and willing only within limits to say “thank you” for. We seem to be getting less and less willing both to beg and to give to beggars. The increasing tendency to talk of universal rights and the extension of their content correlates with the decreasing ability to beg.6
Baier does not defend rights-talk in the usual, highly theoretical, metaphysical way. She does not make excessive claims on behalf of such talk, and she is careful to say that rights are less basic, even in our modern moral discourse, than responsibilities. Moreover, she candidly analyzes the problems that rights-talk can get into, especially when it is not supplemented by other ethical and political concepts. But she does have a clear sense, it seems to me, of what rights-talk does for us. The problems come from asking rights-talk to do too much. When it comes time to appraise character, for example, we need to speak of virtues and vices, not of rights. But there are other linguistic tasks that are hard to accomplish without speaking of rights in the way citizens of modern democracies tend to speak of them, as legitimate claims about matters that are not merely by-products of other people’s role-specific duties.
MacIntyre has proposed that we drop rights-talk in favor of an older moral vocabulary focused mainly on the virtues. In defense of this proposal he argues that questions of rights are inherently arbitrary and that there is no reason to suppose that basic human rights even exist.7 Belief in rights, he concludes, is on a par with belief in unicorns. The practical worry about such proposals can be expressed in the question, “When the powerful try to shut us out or hold us down, what are we supposed to do, beg?” In a democratic culture begging and certain other expressions of deference come to seem responses unbecoming of a human being or fellow citizen. The language of rights arises in such a culture as an alternative to begging, on the one hand, and to certain kinds of coercion, such as torture and religiously motivated warfare, on the other. But it does not arise alone. Accompanying it is a significant alteration in the character traits held up for praise and blame. The members of such a culture do not stop talking about the virtues. But they are more likely than their ancestors were to look kindly on the traits in common people that would allow them to stand up before power-holders and participate in the practices of claim-making and reason-giving. Their participation in turn demands from them respect for other claimants and a willingness to be constrained by the reason-giving that occurs in the discussion.
One institutional constraint that matters in this context is that everybody who satisfies the minimal conditions of being able to speak and remain civil deserves a hearing. If they can avoid the posture of subordination, the conclusions they urge upon us will have some hope of being treated as the (perhaps legitimate) claims of fellow citizens, not as beggary. The virtues, postures, moods, and gestures that become habitual in this culture are easily recognizable, provided that an ethnographer like Whitman calls them to our attention. Speaking of the common people, Whitman writes: “The fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech—… their good temper and openhandedness.” All of these, he says, are “unrhymed poetry.”8 They reveal the ethical life of democracy.
Of course, it is not always so easy, even in relatively ideal circumstances, to discern the difference between legitimate and illegitimate claims to the enjoyment of goods. But then it isn’t always easy to discern the difference between legitimate and illegitimate claims of other kinds. Factual claims, for example, are claims about what is the case. We know what some of the legitimate factual claims are, but others remain in dispute. This is no reason to conclude that there is no such thing as a fact or that all fact-claiming is arbitrary. If facts are legitimate claims about what is the case, then if we know that there are claims about what is the case and that some of them are legitimate (that is, true), we know that there are facts.9 And if we know that the legitimacy of some claims about what is the case can be settled beyond a reasonable doubt by appeal to available evidence, then we have reason to deny that all fact-claiming is arbitrary. Rights involve legitimate claims to the enjoyment of certain goods. We know that there are claims to the enjoyment of certain goods. People make such claims all the time. If some such claims are legitimately made on behalf of everyone—such as the claim not to be tortured and the claim to be free from humiliation—then there are human rights, and human rights are not essentially arbitrary. For rights are just statuses conferred by legitimate claims of this sort. I grant, however, that the legitimacy of some claims to the enjoyment of goods can be hard to determine. The reason for the difficulty in the hard cases is that there are conflicting considerations to take into account when settling what the basic social set-up should be. (Similarly, a claim about what is the case counts as legitimate only if it belongs to the best overall account of the matter being investigated, but the best overall account of the facts can be hard to determine.)
Who will know better what some of the relevant considerations will be than the one on whose behalf a right is claimed? All the more reason, then, to highlight one class of legitimate claims or rights, namely the ones that have directly to do with who gets to talk and with what the conversation is going to be like. Suppose the talking that went on in a given community were principally a matter of mere coercion, from which the weak could save themselves only by assuming a posture of submission. Suppose the “discussion” were essentially analogous to the decision making and conflict resolution that goes on in a pack of wolves. We would not then be prepared to count it as discourse. As democrats we would object to it unconditionally, without regard to the substance of what had been decided. A democratic claim is not something one asks for by assuming a prone position before a superior. One need not say “pretty please” or “I beg of you.” The claimant is not meant to be assuming all the while that of course it would be legitimate for the real decider, in his superior place, to decide whatever he wants, regardless of the reasons one might give.
Our sense is that there ought to be a discussion. Anybody who bullies other people into exclusion or into submission is someone we tend to blame. We encourage the weak, the likeliest victims of exclusion or domination, to stand up and speak in a way that can be clearly distinguished from begging or beseeching. The ideal of equal voice implicit in these aspects of democratic culture is itself, of course, something one can justify, if need be, in the discussion. But as long as it does stand justified, as long as it withstands critical scrutiny in our common discussion with one another, it imposes unconditional demands—not unconditioned demands, unconditional ones. They are obviously demands shaped by actual historical conditions in which people came to be suspicious of begging and coercion as modes of conflict resolution. But they are unconditional in the sense that they help constitute, in this time and place anyway, what we are justifiably prepared to count as democratic discussion.
No doubt, the foregoing story oversimplifies the historical emergence of rights-talk in the modern period, as anything this brief would. But it does begin to suggest why our ancestors saw recognition of “the rights of man”—and shortly thereafter, “the rights of woman” and “the rights of slaves”—as a sort of revolution or reorientation in moral thinking. Edmund Burke called it an “innovation.” Burke’s democratic opponents, like Thomas Paine, were for the most part pleased to agree, thus transforming Burke’s pejorative term into a positive one. But what shall we make of the contrast Burke and Paine both drew between ethical discourse in feudal and democratic settings? Is it true that democratic discourse, with its talk of rights, essentially eliminates deference to authority? Burke and Paine both thought of the innovation in this way; they differed over whether this made the innovation horrific or wonderful. Burke held that a society without deference to genuine authority could not last more than a generation. Paine saw Burke as an apologist for a corrupt order of power and privilege. To determine where the truth lies, we will need to take a brief philosophical detour.
EXCHANGING REASONS: DEFERENCE, CHALLENGE, AND ENTITLEMENT
The reasons exchanged in ethical discourse pertain to commitments that individuals undertake and attribute to one another. The commitments pertain to such topics as conduct, character, and community. They make essential use of evaluative concepts. They distinguish between right and wrong, justice and injustice, decency and indecency, virtue and vice, the excellent and the horrible, the good and the bad, the responsible and the irresponsible. And they often employ notions that are more specific than these, but clearly belong to the same conceptual family, such as the idea of murder or courage. Ethical reasoning, when fully expressed, involves claims, questions, arguments, narratives, examples, and various other linguistic units in terms of which ethical topics can be specified.
Ethical discourse in any culture bears on reasons for action. It is a discursive practice because reasons, in the form of asserted claims, are among the things being exchanged in it. It is a social practice, first, because the reasons being exchanged pass from one person to another and, second, because each participant needs to keep track of the discursive process in terms of his or her own commitments. By exchanging reasons and requests for reasons with one another, participants in the practice hold one another responsible for their commitments and actions. To be able to exchange reasons for this purpose, they must be able to do certain other things as well. They must be capable of undertaking both cognitive and practical commitments. They must be able to express such commitments, by avowing them and acting on them. They must know how to attribute commitments to others on the basis of what those others say and do. And they must have a grip on the distinction between being entitled to a commitment and not being entitled to it (MIE, 157–68).
“[F]or someone to undertake a commitment,” Brandom says, “is to do something that makes it appropriate to attribute the commitment to that individual” (MIE, 162; emphasis in original). Accordingly, attributing commitments to other people is one way in which we explain their behavior, including their verbal behavior. For example, if my brother is packing his bags frantically, I might infer that he is committed to the cognitive judgment that the train will be arriving shortly and that he is also committed practically to boarding the train. If he then says to me, “The train will be leaving shortly,” I will be inclined to interpret this as an assertion expressing his judgment. But as an assertion, this utterance has significance beyond the confirmation it affords me concerning his cognitive commitments, for it also serves to authorize me (and anyone to whom I repeat it) to employ it as a premise in reasoning. If I proceed to make use of the claim in a practical inference that leads me to begin packing, I will be relying on the authority conferred by my brother’s claim. I also have the authority to challenge his assertion, either by requesting reasons for accepting it or by making claims of my own that are incompatible with it. It will then be up to my brother to interpret what I say and do. Any such interpretation will need to attribute commitments to me and assess those commitments in terms of entitlement.
If my brother sincerely says to me, “You ought to start packing,” this assertion also expresses a commitment he has undertaken, authorizes me to attribute this commitment to him, and authorizes me to employ the claim as a premise in my own reasoning. But in this case the issue is slightly more complicated, for reasons that emerged in chapter 8. The function of an “ought-to-do” judgment is to make explicit a commitment to the material soundness of a practical inference. Which kind of material inference is at issue here? Perhaps my brother simply assumes that I share his desire to board the train. In that case, the “ought” is prudential. But we can easily imagine other scenarios. If my brother has employed me as his valet, he might be making a claim about my role-specific responsibilities. If he is a member of the resistance, and the train he is about to board is carrying a tyrannical leader, he might be asking for my help in packing our bags with the explosives he is planning to use in blowing up the train. In that event, his “ought” statement might very well make a claim about the implications of my unconditional obligation to assist in the fight against tyranny. Notice that on any of these interpretations, my brother’s “ought” statement entails a discursive responsibility on his part, for he is implicitly vouching for the claim as a sound premise fit for use in my practical reasoning. Again, if I request reasons for accepting the claim or issue a counterclaim, I can challenge his entitlement to it. But to know which claim I would then be challenging, I would need to know which commitment he was expressing in the first place.
Holding one another responsible for commitments involves keeping track of the commitments we attribute to each other and of the entitlements we attribute to or withhold from the commitments thus attributed. Commitments and entitlements are socially tracked normative statuses. Participating in a discursive social practice is in part a matter of keeping track of oneself and one’s fellow participants in terms of these normative statuses (MIE, 180–98). It is an exercise in what Brandom calls normative “scorekeeping.” Anything we say or do can have significance in the reason-giving practice we are engaged in insofar as it affects the various scorecards of discursive commitments and entitlements that each participant keeps from his or her own point of view on participants in the discursive game.
Cognitive commitments are commitments to a claim or a judgment, whereas practical commitments are commitments to act.10 We may refer to these as beliefs and intentions, respectively.11 The point of calling them commitments is to draw attention to the appropriateness of being held responsible for them, of being deemed entitled to them or not. What is it to be entitled to a belief or an intention? It is not the same thing as being able to justify the commitment to someone else, let alone being able to justify it compellingly to all rational agents. Sometimes one is entitled to a commitment by default, without needing to offer an argument for it, provided that no one who has the authority to challenge the commitment does so (MIE, 176–78). Sometimes one is entitled to a commitment because someone else (with the appropriate sort of authority) has authorized it by expressing it in the form of a claim. But there are many circumstances in which one does need to justify a commitment discursively to achieve or maintain the status of being entitled to it. And there are also cases in which one needs to justify treating other claim-makers as authorities if one wants to become or remain entitled to the commitments they have authorized.
When studying the ethical life of any community it is important to take note of its (implicit or explicit) way of distributing discursive authority and responsibility. Within a given discursive social practice, under what conditions is someone normally held to be entitled to certain sorts of commitments by default? Under what conditions is someone normally assumed to need to justify a commitment discursively in order to secure entitlement to it, even if no one challenges it? Who is entitled to issue challenges? Conversely, who is excluded from the roles of claim-maker and challenger? Under what conditions are challenges deemed appropriate? And when does a challenge suffice to deprive someone of entitlement to a commitment? In other words, what suffices to shift the burden of proof?
Suppose my sister comes into the hotel room in which my brother and I are packing the bags. She asks me, “Why are you in such a hurry?” “The train is coming shortly,” I say. She says, “But why do you think that?” I might respond by referring to the train schedule that is lying on the night table, committing myself to what it says as a reason for expecting the train to arrive shortly. This would implicitly attribute authority to the schedule. Or I might appeal directly to my brother’s authority: “Ralph says that the train is coming shortly.” In accepting his claim at the outset of the conversation, I deferred to his authority on the question of when the train is coming. Now I am invoking his authority in responding to my sister’s challenge. By invoking his authority, I implicitly attribute to him responsibility for the claim about the train’s arrival. At this point, my sister can defer to his authority on the matter or challenge my implicit attribution of authority to him. She might do the latter by saying, “Why do you think he can read a train schedule?” If I then say, “Because I have relied on him many times before, and he hasn’t been wrong yet,” I will be giving grounds for an explicit attribution of authority.
My family happens to be a discursive community in which a younger sister is considered entitled to challenge brothers about practically anything if she has reason to do so. She need not hold her tongue about when the trains are likely to arrive, what my role-specific responsibilities might be, or what I am obliged to do in the struggle against injustice, simply because she is female or because she is the youngest of the three siblings. That the three of us challenge one another on many occasions does not mean, however, that deference is wholly lacking from our discursive practice. We defer to one another’s authority on a regular basis whenever we have reason to think that doing so provides access to sound claims that will prove useful in our reasoning. Each of us considers the others to be competent readers of train schedules and skillful trackers of rights and responsibilities to which we pay close attention. Whoever has read the train schedule most recently (when alert and sober) is likely to be trusted by the others on the question of when the train is probably going to arrive. And whoever has given the most careful and disinterested thought to a particular moral issue is likely to be trusted by the others to be entitled to his or her commitments about it. We are entitled to defer in such cases because our siblings have proven their reliability in the relevant domains, and we reserve our right to challenge one another if we discover sufficient reason to doubt a claim in a particular case.
All discursive practices involve authority and deference to some extent. The notion that ethical discourse in democratic societies is “nondeferential” therefore requires qualification. It is more accurate to say that such discourse is relatively nondeferential. The difference is a matter of how, when, and why someone defers or appeals to authority, not a matter of whether one does so at all.
Some early defenders of modern democratic ideals wrongly sought to eliminate deference and authority from ethical discourse altogether. The theoretical consequence of this move is known as foundationalism, a doctrine that unjustifiably takes the default status of all claims to be “guilty until proven innocent.” Ascribing this default status to all claims triggers a regress of reasons that can be stopped, if at all, only in a foundation of certitudes. The best way to avoid this doctrine and the problems associated with it is to say with the pragmatists that many claims are “innocent until proven guilty—taken to be entitled commitments until and unless someone is in a position to raise a legitimate question about them” (MIE, 177). This involves treating some claims as having authority by default, which means being prepared to defer to those claims, other things being equal.
But this authority is, according to the pragmatists, defeasible, because other things are not always equal. At any given moment, some claims must be treated as having authority by default. But any claim may be questioned if a relevant reason for doubting it can be produced. As Sellars put it, a discursive practice “is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once” (SPR, 170; emphasis in original). This central thesis of American pragmatism is sometimes presented as a free-floating epistemological truth. But it is best viewed as a modern democratic principle for the governance of discursive practices, for in fact most discursive communities have implicitly rejected it. By granting that some claims must have authority by default, and simultaneously insisting on the defeasibility of all claims, pragmatists have endeavored to reconceive the authority relations of ethical discourse democratically. This alternative to foundationalism is pragmatism’s most important contribution to democracy. For other leading alternatives to foundationalism tend to be authoritarian in the sense that they promote uncritical acquiescence in the allegedly authoritative claims of some practice, tradition, institution, person, text, or type of experience. American pragmatism differs from the version of pragmatism that Martin Heidegger accepted when he embraced Nazism precisely in its principled scorn for unquestioning acquiescence in authority of any kind.12 The new traditionalism that I examined in chapters 5–7 combines an emphasis on the priority of social practices with a kind of authoritarianism. Some varieties of Wittgensteinian fideism use the concept of “forms of life” to arrive at a similar result.
Where do Burke and Paine fit into this array of alternatives? Burke’s traditionalism explicitly endorsed a type of authoritarianism, whereas Paine’s antiauthoritarianism implicitly committed him to foundationalism. From a pragmatic point of view, neither of these positions can survive criticism. Burke and Paine were therefore both wrong in the positions they tried to maintain and both right in identifying the flaws in the other’s position. Pragmatism splits the difference by reconceiving authority in nonauthoritarian terms. It acknowledges that all societies involve deference to authority while insisting that deference and defeasibility can go hand in hand. It thereby aims to make explicit what a democratic tradition involves.
HOW BURKE AND PAINE ARGUED THEIR CASES
If modern democracy were completely discontinuous with the traditions that preceded it, then Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine would have been wasting their time in trying to win over the other’s followers by arguing over the language of rights. But these men were not wasting their time, for they did succeed, now and again, in converting those one would expect to be most firmly tied to the opposition’s commitments. Burke was, after all, nearly driven to distraction by hearing Paine’s arguments and conclusions from the lips of the English noblemen for whose privileges Burkean Whiggism was meant to provide the ideal justification. And the reasoning Paine offered seems, as a matter of historical fact, to have played some role in the process of conversion. Has not the same been true for other great writers working in the midst of dramatic conceptual change—writers like Plato, Augustine, Montaigne, Wollstonecraft, and Whitman? If they had not found ways of arguing their cases at least somewhat persuasively, we would not still be reading them.
The debate between Burke and Paine over democratic ideas was in fact a conceptually intimate affair, fought on the ideological plane between parties who were bending much the same ideas in different directions. In the heat of the moment, the defenders and critics of representative democracy often depicted it as a complete break with the past. But a retrospective view teaches that this is not so, at least if the debate between Burke and Paine is any indication. Both of these men saw modern democracy as utterly discontinuous with what had gone before. In fact, we may owe the theme of revolutionary discontinuity to them. Looking back, however, it is easy to locate them both within the same broad tradition of European thought—Burke struggling to hold several different strands of that tradition together, Paine convinced that the democratic-republican strand he favored was ultimately incompatible with the others. The two men shared more assumptions and concepts than anyone could enumerate. Recall in this connection the surprise and shock Paine felt when Burke, the man who had written the “Speech on Conciliation” with the American colonies, a work that contributed to Burke’s reputation as a great critic of British imperial rule, published Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Interestingly, both Burke and Paine recognize the authority of traditional just-war criteria, despite their other differences. In the Reflections Burke claims that the “Revolution of 1688 was obtained by just war.” He quotes Livy’s version of the criterion of necessity or “last resource,” and applies that criterion to the French Revolution. He inquires into the intentions and putative authority of the Jacobins, declares that the “punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice,” and reflects at length on the disproportionality of revolution in the French case.13
In The Rights of Man, Paine tries to refute Burke on many of these points, but he assumes throughout that just-war criteria are pertinent. He invokes them more explicitly in Common Sense. On the question of last resort, Paine refers to “the peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress.” He defends the justice of his own intentions as a revolutionary by claiming that “I am not induced by motives of pride, party, or resentment to espouse the doctrine of independence.” His appeal to the norm of proportionality maintains that “the object contended for, ought always to bear some just proportion to the expense.” The cause is just, he argues, because “thousands are already ruined by British barbarity.” And he concedes the need to establish just authority by declaring independence and adopting plans for just self-government: “While we profess ourselves the subjects of Britain, we must, in the eyes of foreign nations, be considered as Rebels.”14 His solution to this problem, of course, is to declare independence.
No doubt, something of great importance was at stake in the debate between Burke and Paine. The proposed change in received conceptions of rights was important enough to be termed a conceptual revolution in some sense. Suppose we grant the need to be wary of using the term as Burke and Paine used it, lest we think that the two sides were separated by complete conceptual discontinuity. What does the “revolutionary” conceptual change consist in, then? Where exactly shall we look to find it? Obviously, the two authors differ over the courses of action they are committed to and over some of the explicit norms they endorse. Paine supports the French Revolution, while Burke opposes it. Paine’s norms clearly attribute normative statuses of a certain kind—rights—to all men.15 Our discussion of how the two authors appeal to just-war criteria shows that they also share some explicitly stated norms, but they apply them differently. Their competing applications of just-war criteria reflect differing material inferential commitments concerning the connections between claims about justice and claims of certain other kinds.
What else is at issue here, ethically speaking? The first section’s just-so story about rights suggests that part of the answer has to do with patterns of deference. The culture Burke is defending is one in which pomp and circumstance function as marks of authority and excellence as well as privileges of rank and symbols of power. “We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected” (Reflections, 76). He means that the intuitive, noninferential response to being in the presence of such things is to judge them excellent and thus to admire them and feel awe or reverence. The authority he attributes to persons of high rank in the state and the church correlates with a disposition to defer to such persons on matters to which their authority is relevant. Bad behavior of certain kinds can deprive such persons of their authority and of their legitimate claim to their office. But even the removal of a genuine tyrant from office must be carried out, according to Burke, with pomp and circumstance, above all with proper acknowledgment of the respect due to the office. It is crucial, he thinks, to maintain a culture in which admiration of excellence and deference to authority are not only possible but central to the habits of the populace. Democracy, he thinks, is the opposite of such a culture, a mere destructive force. This issue appears in Burke’s Reflections under the rubric of the loss of chivalry, and it is of great moment to him.
Paine, of course, is out to debunk the culture of chivalry as a set of props designed to mask the operations of tyranny. “It is by distortedly exalting some men,” he writes, “that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the background of the human picture, to bring forward with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy” (59). Where Burke enjoins deference, Paine typically requests a reason or asserts an objection. It is crucial from his point of view to create a citizenry that is not disposed to bow and scrape before the holders of high office. The thousands of ordinary people in England who learned to read in order to read the radical pamphleteers of the 1790s and early 1800s had before them unmistakable models of nondeferential behavior. That they revered these writers for their eloquence and courage—and ascribed moral weight to their pronouncements—shows, however, that the emerging democratic culture made room for admiration and attributions of excellence and moral authority. The practical upshot was not to rid the moral world of such things but to dissociate them from the presumptions of hereditary rank.
We have seen that Burke opposed the Revolution and deferred to certain figures of authority, while Paine differed from him on both points. These are differences in action. The two men also endorsed somewhat different norms, attributed somewhat different normative statuses to people, and committed themselves to somewhat different material inferences. These are differences in practical and inferential commitment. But it now becomes clear that they were also disposed to have different noninferential moral responses to the events, persons, and actions of their time. In short, they perceived or experienced things differently. In terming these responses noninferential, I do not mean to imply that they were incorrigible, beyond the pale of rational scrutiny and revision. I simply mean that they were not arrived at initially as the result of reasoning.
The most famous passage in the Reflections is Burke’s vivid description of the revolutionaries’ treatment of the Queen of France, which calls upon his recollections of having met her when she was “the dauphiness, at Versailles,” seventeen years earlier (66). The point of the passage is to portray a scene that any morally competent observer would regard intuitively as horrible. It is, he says in a passage quoted above, “natural to be so affected.” The failure to respond noninferentially in this way must, from Burke’s point of view, be the result of an improper use of reasoning that effectively strips us of a natural responsive disposition essential to social order.
Paine remarks in The Rights of Man, equally famously, on “the tragic paintings by which Mr Burke has outraged his own imagination” and complains that Burke “pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird” (51). Paine is concerned to offer his own picture of the events of October 1789, a picture designed to elicit moral responses unlike Burke’s horror at abusive treatment of the Queen. In other passages he portrays the oppressed, above all the poor, as victims of a tragedy. Their condition, as he sees it, is horrific. That it is horrific warrants not only pity for them—the dying bird of his metaphor—but also action on our part to change their condition. No less than Burke, he is busy trying to provide occasions for noninferential, as well as inferential, responses on the part of his readers. Both authors buttress or even initiate some of their arguments by saying, in effect, “Look at this! What do you see? Is it not horrible (or excellent)?” The responses they are trying to elicit are noninferential, but they are inferentially connected to moral passions, like awe and pity, and the actions for which they serve as warrant.
While both Burke and Paine are officially prepared to submit their “moral perceptions” or intuitive responses to critical scrutiny, neither of these men finds sufficient reason to abandon them. These perceptions may be noninferential, but they undoubtedly exercise a strong influence over the ethical and political inferences these men make and over the actions they endorse and perform. What is at issue between them is as much a matter of perception as it is a matter of inference and action. It is because their noninferential moral responses to events are to some extent outside of their control and are closely connected with what they care about that the language of conversion can get a foothold here. There is a strong sense in which both men are in the grip of moral visions. Their writings are designed in part to cause others to see what they see. Here is a word-picture of someone—a queen or a pauper—being maltreated. Do you not intuitively take this to be horrible, the violation of something precious? If not, there is no hope for you as an observer of moral affairs. Either you see it, or you don’t. Coming to see it is the process of conversion that each side is trying to initiate in its opponents. What is involved in such a conversion? The parties of Burke and Paine appear to be divided primarily on examples of the excellent and the horrible.
ETHICAL PERCEPTION
While inferential moves are clearly essential to practices centered on giving and asking for ethical reasons, these moves are not the only sorts of moves made in such practices. There are also noninferential moves in which a participant in the practice responds to something he or she observes by becoming committed to a perceptual judgment or claim. That a judgment was arrived at noninferentially does not guarantee its truth. Many such judgments turn out to have been mistaken. Observation is an indispensable source of knowledge, but a fallible one. Because things are not always what they seem, observers sometimes retreat from their reports about what they saw to reports about how things seemed at the time. Observation reports are no more immune from challenge than claims of other kinds. They can be challenged because they conflict with the observation reports of other witnesses. And they can be challenged on theoretical grounds if someone has reason to suspect that the alleged event probably did not happen, given what else we know.
Observations come into play in ethical reasoning in two different ways. The first way, which is emphasized in the work of Sellars and Brandom, is by supplying straightforwardly factual information that has a bearing on ethical questions when combined with considerations of other kinds. Suppose two witnesses—one sympathetic to Rosa Parks, the other her enemy—observed her being arrested by the Montgomery police. We can imagine them making use of this observation theoretically by constructing competing explanations of the tensions between whites and blacks in Montgomery. We can also imagine them making use of the same observation practically when deciding whether to support or oppose the boycott to which Ms. Parks’s action led. Anyone properly situated, whether her friend or her foe, was equally able to observe her being arrested. To report that this had happened to her was not in itself to take a side on an ethical question. Nonetheless, the observational premise has a bearing on an ethical topic in both the theoretical and practical contexts just mentioned—the question of what causes racial tension in the former context, the question of whether one ought to support the boycott in the latter. The observation report is relevant to ethical questions without being explicitly value laden.
It seems clear, however, that some observations land the observer immediately (that is, noninferentially) in an ethically charged or value-laden position. Imagine that you are at this moment witnessing the arrest of Rosa Parks. One of your prereflective, intuitive responses to such a spectacle might very well be to say, “That is unfair!” Another might be to whisper to your companion, “Such splendid courage she shows.” If you said these things in appropriate circumstances, you would be making observations that essentially employ evaluative terms. This shows that observations need not be relevant to ethical questions only by virtue of the role they can play as premises in inferences that lead to ethical conclusions, for they can also directly commit the observer to an ethical stance. This is the second way in which observations can come into play in ethical reasoning.16 One crucial factor in winning public support for the Civil Rights movement in its heyday was the televised spectacle of demonstrators under attack by fire hoses and police dogs. What viewers saw were acts of brutality endured with moral courage. We need not assume that they saw only streams of water hitting bodies and dogs straining at leashes and then used criteria of brutality and courage to construct inferences from what they saw to reach explicitly ethical conclusions. There is no reason to think that moral responses to such events are normally that complicated. Some ethical terms find their way into the vocabulary in which we observe the events transpiring around us. Some of our observations are ethical perceptions.
Observational social criticism is a major genre of democratic nonfiction, and has done much to shape modern democratic sensibilities. Writers like William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, George Orwell, James Agee, and Meridel Le Sueur reported what they perceived with their own senses. From them their readers learned what life was like for the rural and urban poor, for the homesteaders of the American West, for the coal miners of England. As Irving Howe once pointed out, in Orwell’s case the nose sometimes mattered as much as the eyes and ears. Martineau, being hard of hearing, had to rely on her eyes all the more. At times these writers give us bare facts, leaving us to infer the ethical conclusions to which they are hoping to lead us. Sometimes, however, their observations are cast in an ethical vocabulary that makes explicit their revulsion at the conditions they are reporting and their commitment to the improvement of those conditions. Their stylistic differences reflect the full spectrum of observational diction in ethics, ranging from the most austere to the most morally charged. It would be foolish to think that such artful writers give us nothing but the first thoughts that crossed their minds (noninferentially) when they witnessed the people and events they describe. But the authority of their reports depends on our trust in their reliability as witnesses. A reliable witness is disposed to respond to the conditions he or she is observing by making appropriate noninferential judgments and expressing those judgments appropriately. We do not fault witnesses for expressing those judgments in fresh words that would not have occurred to them immediately, but we do expect them to remain true to what they originally observed (unless, of course, they find sufficient reason to believe that they had been deceived). The cognitive value of an observation report as testimony resides ultimately in the reliability of the original noninferential judgment of the observer.
Agee’s descriptive prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with its biblical and liturgical echoes, mainly falls on the morally charged end of the spectrum. Agee always emphasized, however, that Walker Evans’s photographs were as essential to the book’s observational authority as were his own words. Readers were meant to see through the lens of Evans’s camera the same conditions and people Agee had described in prose. Here we have another example of how photographic images enter into ethical discourse. At one level they function in the way most testimony does, as a report of what someone saw. The claim they are used to make is that things looked as the photographic image makes them look. But they also put the public in a position to mimic the eyewitness’ moral experience. Once we begin to focus on the role of observation and observation reports in ethics, it becomes plain that the study of ethical discourse must take the full range of media into account, not merely those that are primarily verbal. It is obvious that the printing press, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and now the Internet have all played important roles in modern democracies as vehicles for the exchange of arguments. But the story of ethical discourse in modern democracies is also tied up with the history of photography, moving pictures, radio, and television—with all of the ways in which we have come to record and disseminate our observations of the world.
Observation involves conceptual skills that one can acquire only through initiation into a discursive practice. While some of these skills are inferential, others are not. The noninferential skills are as much the result of training as the inferential ones. We are trained to respond noninferentially to cats with the word “cat” and to dogs with the word “dog.” Similarly, we are conditioned to respond noninferentially to instances of cruelty by using the term “cruelty” and to instances of courage by using the term “courage.” But the social conditioning of observation does not stop there. Our social practices prescribe not only what sorts of linguistic responses are appropriate in response to what sorts of circumstances, they also often prescribe actions for us to perform if we want our observations to count as those of a reliable observer. Lifeguards are trained to keep a close eye on the swimmers under their protection. They are taught when to reach for their binoculars, how to avoid being distracted by irrelevancies, and what posture improves their chances of seeing what they need to see. New parents have to learn to tell the difference between the ominous and the innocuous sounds that come from a newborn’s crib, between a fever that requires medical attention and one that does not, between a bath that is too hot and one that is just right.
Athletes, referees, chefs, poets, painters, musicians, biologists, police detectives, nurses, and journalists all learn their own highly sophisticated perceptual regimens. In all of these areas, individuals invest a great deal of effort to acquire observational skills that many people lack. They learn to make specific kinds of reliable noninferential judgments. Some of these noninferential judgments are clearly normative. The soccer referee can see whether a slide tackle is fair or a foul. The chef can taste whether a dish is properly seasoned. The musician can hear whether a note is on or off pitch. All such judgments presuppose some set of norms, but this does not mean that the person making the judgment needs first to perceive something in a non-normative way and then apply norms inferentially by determining, through a series of steps, whether certain criteria have been met. In fact, if someone does have to move through a series of inferential steps when making a judgment, this is often a sign that he or she has not yet mastered the skills essential to the role.
I once took a three-day course for soccer referees, and got the top score in my class on the final examination, but I have done very little refereeing. I can apply the rules of soccer properly to any given case if I am allowed a moment or two to consider the relevant facts. As a result, I am a reliable retrospective critic of referees. But I am a very poor referee, because my judgments come too slowly to keep up with the rapidly unfolding events of a game. The reason my judgments are too slow is that I reach too many of them inferentially. Good referees are able to make nearly all of the normative judgments they need to make in a soccer match without inferring those judgments from premises. When challenged, of course, they are also able to defend their decisions inferentially. It is a mistake, however, to think that their retrospective arguments reflect the perceptual process that led them to their judgments in the first place.
Ethical theory has thus far given little attention to the ways in which ethical communities inculcate habits of moral observation. Some religious and philosophical traditions have devised stories, catechisms, rituals, and spiritual exercises that shape how their members perceive people, actions, and events. In some communities special regimens of perception are reserved for those who occupy specialized roles of moral authority. Sages, imams, spiritual advisors, rabbis, and confessors are subjected to specific forms of training. If the training is effective, they acquire a structure of appropriate emotions, a set of approved inferential habits, and a collection of reliable observational dispositions for reaching moral judgments. Moral authorities, in turn, train other members of their communities not only to reason in a certain way, but also to see some people or actions in a certain moral light. Periodic retelling of the lives of the saints within a given community can, for example, create a widespread disposition to respond, noninferentially, to particular people or actions by judging or saying that they exemplify courage in the face of persecution. Repeated exposure to narrated instances of courage prepares individuals to know courage (noninferentially) when they see it, at least some of the time. Perhaps the process of moral development includes an intermediate stage, analogous to my soccer example, in which the initiate is able to reach reliable moral judgments inferentially, but still lacks the sage’s capacity for noninferential, intuitive response to the relatively clear instances he or she witnesses first-hand.
In modern democracies the exercise of observational moral authority tends not to be restricted to individuals who have undergone a highly specialized course of moral training. Moral authority belongs not to a class of ordained experts, but rather to anyone who proves his or her reliability as an observer and arguer in the eyes of the entire community. Religious and academic subcultures may ascribe special authority to clergy or to ethicists, and that authority may be recognized in particular institutional settings (like the local hospital’s ethics committee), but give-and-take in the broader community is officially open to all comers. The authority of moral observation is widely dispersed. Anyone who demonstrates over time the ability to make reliable moral observations is in a position to become recognized as someone to whom others should defer as a reporter of moral affairs. The dispositions of the reliable moral observer are not acquired mainly through highly specialized, professional forms of training. They belong to the ethical life of the people as a whole, and are acquired through the same process of moral acculturation that nearly everyone in the community undergoes—in the nursery, around the dining room table, in the classroom, on the playing field, and so on. The process is formal and purposeful only to some degree, for we learn the skills of moral observation largely by expressing moral judgments in the presence of peers who, though neither parents nor teachers in charge of our development, are no less eager to correct us. The challenge of making observations that can withstand the criticism of ordinary interlocutors is itself a stern instructor, and a suitable one for the formation of democratic citizens.
Explicitly moral observations involve undertaking or acknowledging a prima facie normative commitment to respond to the observed action or event in certain ways—for example, by coming to the aid of the victim of cruelty or by praising the exemplar of courage. Like all observations, they are noninferential, but also potentially defeasible. And they depend on discursive skills of various kinds. Full mastery of ethical concepts involves the acquisition of observational as well as inferential skills. That is, it involves acquiring the ability to respond differentially but noninferentially to the persons, actions, and states of affairs one perceives and to do so in accordance with the norms of the relevant social practice—the practice within which the ethical concepts in question acquire their inferential significance.
How, then, might the standoff between Burke and Paine be resolved through reasoning, if conflicting noninferential responses to examples play such a major role? One promising opening, it seems to me, comes in a passage in the Reflections where Burke is defending the role of monks in the grand scheme of things. Suddenly, he interrupts his reasoning by expressing heartfelt pity for the lot of ordinary people who work
from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things and to impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely-directed labor of these unhappy people, I should be … inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable industry. (141)
Here we can see Burke having the sort of noninferential moral response that disposed Paine to draw democratic practical inferences. He has seen these people. His intuitive response is an inclination to rescue them. No doubt, they remind him of other oppressed people—American colonists, Irish Catholics, the Indian victims of Warren Hastings—whom he has spent years of his life defending. What holds him back? His assumption about the perniciousness and impracticality of “imped[ing] in any degree the great wheel of circulation.” He cannot imagine altering the working conditions of the wretches without threatening the “great wheel of circulation” on which the rest of us depend for our happiness. To attempt to rescue these people from their misery would be to “disturb the natural course of things.” It is not within the realm of imagined possibility. Everything we hold dear would collapse.
This assumption goes hand in hand with his conception of democracy as an essentially destructive, leveling force—as the opposite of a culture. Burke cannot imagine an articulate democratic culture evolving among the working people who will soon be gathering to read Paine, let alone among the wretches he would be inclined, in some counterfactual world, to rescue from their wretchedness. For him democracy is simply a deceptive banner carried by the mob, not a civilizing practice capable of shaping individuals into articulate, reasoning beings who care about excellent things and abominate moral horrors. He suspects that it is really the pretext by means of which an urban elite of talented men seizes power for itself in the name of, and at the expense of, the people. There is truth in this suspicion, a truth forcefully restated in our day by Michel Foucault. But Burke’s conception of democracy also represents a failure of imagination. He and Paine do not only have differing moral perceptions of what is present to them (noninferentially) in their experience, they also differ in how they imagine what is not yet fully present in their experience—the possible futures that may be in the process of becoming actual. If moral perception is a capacity to respond to experiential presence, moral imagination is a capacity to respond to experiential absence, to what is not present (noninferentially) to the senses. Both of these capacities are, of course, inextricably intertwined with the emotions—in this case, with fear and sympathy—and with such virtues as discernment and hope.17
If I am right about the considerations holding Burke back from endorsing democratic commitments, it is clear what the most promising argumentative strategy for his opponents would have been. They needed a way of attacking Burke’s picture of the natural order of things that went beyond Paine’s style of debunking. Ironically, Burke supplied ammunition for this attack by describing symbolic and ritual aspects of this deferential order in Humean terms as artificial. He referred to these aspects as a “well-wrought veil,” as drapery “furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination,” and as “the fictions of a pious imagination.”18 His most discerning radical readers, like Wollstonecraft and Hazlitt, inferred that any such veil or drapery, being artificial in the first instance, could be reimagined democratically if the wardrobe of the people’s moral imagination were rich enough.
After Leaves of Grass and Walden, why wouldn’t it be? The need for some sort of cultural covering may belong to human nature, but once we think of this covering as the product of our artifice, we are in a position to take responsibility for it. When we do, we will be embarked on the creation of a democratic culture. And if the social division of labor in the workplace and in the family is something in which we are all complicit, and thus for which we are all responsible, then we had better test Burke’s assumptions about the inevitability of miserable conditions for the least well-off. The only way to do this without begging questions is empirical. It is an exercise in social experimentation that involves trying out new arrangements on a limited basis to see what comes of them. It can be carried out, however, only if the people claim responsibility for the condition of society and take action on behalf of those in misery.
Two centuries after Burke and Paine, democratic discourse in the West no longer seems like a revolutionary innovation. Its defenders have an established, if deeply flawed, tradition to point to, and a modest record of social experimentation to argue over. It has its own habits of deference, challenge, ethical perception, material inference, and moral imagination—habits that have now managed to be transmitted, with some success, from generation to generation. But what pride can we take in our accomplishment if the wretches are still with us? Democracy remains an empty ideal so far as they are concerned. Our inaction invites them to mock it—and to affiliate themselves with antidemocratic social forces, including the reactionary theocratic movements now actively recruiting them into terrorist cells. If we now lack Burke’s excuses, the responsibility of rescue is ours. The truth of the matter is that we also lack Paine’s will. We acknowledge the responsibility in the principles we avow but only rarely in the actions we undertake.