Political Judgment Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In philosophical terms, judgment is the intellectual process of subsuming particulars under, or otherwise connecting them to, universals. Thus, this particular thing is a cat, that particular thing is a chair, and so on. Ordinarily, we have widely accepted rules, formulas, or tests for making such judgments reliably. The concept cat includes, or is even constituted by, criteria for determining which particular things in the world are cats and which are not.

Judgments In Absence Of Clear Criteria

Special difficulties arise, however, in cases where there appear to be no such rules, formulas, or tests. Is the flower beautiful? Unlike the concept cat or chair, the concept beauty seems to include or suggest no clear criteria that would govern its application. Political judgments—for example, does this particular public policy best serve the public interest?—are often thought to be of this kind. Like beauty, the concept of the public interest does not seem to come with ready-made rules for determining how it should be applied to particular cases. Of course, we routinely make judgments about what is in the public interest. Such judgments are obviously central to all political life. Thus, the problem is to discover how we make them in a way that allows us reliably to distinguish good judgments from bad.

Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle

The theoretical treatment of the problem is conventionally traced to Book VII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Plato had argued in The Republic that kings should be philosophers and philosophers kings, suggesting thereby that good judgment in politics is simply a matter of applying the methods of rational, scientific analysis to matters of political consequence. Against this, Aristotle proposed a strong distinction between episteme (scientific knowledge) and phronesis (practical wisdom, prudence, or judgment) and attempted to show how phronesis can produce a kind of objective rational knowledge despite being unscientific. It is far from clear, however, that he succeeded in doing so. In particular, some scholars have doubted that Aristotle provides a convincing or even explicit positive account of how phronesis actually operates.

Early Modern Approaches: Hobbes And Machiavelli

In the early modern period, Thomas Hobbes proposed a similar distinction between sapience (a kind of infallible scientific knowledge) and prudence (a type of skillful know-how) and offered the still influential claim that prudence or political wisdom is largely a matter of historical knowledge and hands-on experience; the prudent person is the one who has observed or directly experienced what has generally worked well in the past. For some scholars, such an account seems very much to comport with the earlier and personal example of Niccolò Machiavelli, a well-traveled public servant and, at the same time, an historian of note who used both his practical experience and historical knowledge to offer lessons in good judgment to would-be princes.

Modern Philosophy: Immanuel Kant And Judgment Of Beauty

Much later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant produced his so-called third critique, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, a work that, though not directly concerned with political matters, has had a major impact on all subsequent thinking about political judgment. Kant argued that nonscientific or reflective judgment, as opposed to scientific or determinant judgment, is not, properly speaking, a matter of knowledge at all. In Kant’s terminology, it is noncognitive. The logic of reflective judgments is that they claim to be universal—they should be endorsed by everyone—but they are nonetheless subjective (i.e., incapable of being demonstrated).

The case of beauty is, for Kant, paradigmatic and shows how reflective judgment, though not a matter of knowledge, is also different from mere taste. If I claim that spinach is delicious, I am expressing nothing more than a preference. I know full well that I am making a purely subjective claim—spinach is delicious to me—and that I cannot offer any objective proof that spinach really is delicious. On the other hand, if I say that the painting is beautiful, I am implicitly saying that everyone should agree with this—everyone should recognize the beauty of the painting—despite the fact that, as with the spinach, I can offer no objective proof that it is so. In making his argument, Kant adverts importantly to the notion of common sense. Reflective judgments presuppose, without being able to prove, the existence of a kind of aesthetic sensibility that is common to all rational creatures and that makes it intelligible to claim, for example, that the beauty of this or that object is something that we all should acknowledge.

Contemporary Debate

Largely through the work of Hannah Arendt, Kant’s approach has set the terms of much contemporary debate. For Arendt, Kant’s theory of judgment, with its emphasis on common sense and the alleged implications of this for the possibility of free and open deliberation in the public realm, is in fact the core of Kantian political thought.

Subsequent writers have sorted themselves at least in part according to whether they accept Kant’s general approach. Thus, some authors insist on the ineffable, indeterminate, impressionistic, and even aesthetic quality of good judgment in politics. In the words of Michael Oakeshott (1962), political judgment is a “pursuit of intimations” that occurs in a kind of “mental fog.” Others, however, insist that good judgment, if it is to be a meaningful category, must have stronger claims to objectivity. For example, it must be eligible for a kind of rational reconstruction that provides, if only after the fact, objective reasons for preferring one course of action to another.

Bibliography:

Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Beiner, Ronald. Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics. London: Methuen, 1962.
Steinberger, Peter. The Concept of Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

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