This apparently abstract subject is pretty important to me in a basic practical sense. I have spent my life in criminal law, a field in which moral judgments that have major consequences have to be made (literally) daily. Juries decide guilt or innocence, judges choose between prison on probation, on evidence that can never be fully complete and nearly always less complete than anyone would like. Very few of these decisions can be explained or justified in purely rational terms. A lot that goes into these agonizing judgments is incalculable, both practically and theoretically. This makes the judge, jurors, and other participants fair game for analytical philosophers, logical positivists, bio ethicists, and the like, all of whom tend to believe that judgments that are not quantifiable are whimsical or arbitrary.
I could not disagree more strongly. Although it is certainly the case that the judgments made in criminal law can not be expressed completely in rational terms, they are made too conscientiously, too responsibly to be dismissed casually as capricious and whimsical. This is particularly true of jury verdicts, which are almost always profoundly considered and the one saving grace in a criminal justice system that seems to descend more deeply into cynicism every day. In my experience, the problem with expressing the decisions of thus type isn't that they are irrational. Rather, it is that the volume of human reality, the number of factors involved, render any attempt to reduce them all to a calculation an exercise in futility from the outset.
But the fact that the outcome cannot be defined in concrete quantifiable terms does not mean that the process itself is irrational. The value of pi is not computable, but it is possible to draw a perfect circle. Unlike the analytic theorists, I don't view rationality and intuition as opposite ends of a continuum, but as intuition as the better angel of reason. A 'good' intuitive judgment (for there can be bad intuitive judgments, just as there can be miscalculation and imperfectly drawn circles) leaps past and over the rational process, arriving on wings at the same conclusion as the rational process would when it arrives on foot an infinity later, sweaty and out of breath.
Lots of metaphors here, and not all that precise, particularly the analogy of pi and circles to moral judgments - but my Canadian friend knows much more theory than I do, so I have to cheat. I'll round out my argument (if it can be called that) with two rather striking chess stories that illustrate the point.
(1) I only met, or more accurately was in the presence of, the late Bobby Fischer once, back in 1967. He was kibitzing and commenting on the US Junior Championship, played that year at the Manhattan Chess Club. Fischer was a difficult person even then, before Spassky and the onset of full-fledged paranoia. But he was in his element that day, an unchallenged god, open, genial, and frankly charming. The competitors in the Junior Championship were all young masters in their late teens or very early 20's - strong players, of master strength, but way, way below the ultra-grandmaster strength of Bobby, who was then one of the three best in the world. They - we - were in awe of him. I was just one of a throng of spectators. Chess is a game that I am enthusiastic enough to play at the expert level, a degree below the master level. But that degree is huge quantum leap that has always been beyond me.
On the day, two of the participants in the Championship had played a rather entertaining and complex game. One of the alternative lines the winner had considered, but rejected in the interest of simplicity, had been an intricate, complex variation involving the sacrifice of a knight. After the game, winner and loser spent a long time post morteming the game, particularly that variation. Meanwhile, Fischer was holding court in another part of the room. When they were finally satisfied the sacrifice was sound, they went over to Fischer. He was open and curious. They set up the position and showed him the line.
"It's unsound," Fischer said immediately - and I do mean immediately, almost simultaneously with the presentation.
"But why?" asked the winner.
"I don't know," Fischer murmured and bent over the board. He studied the position for maybe 30 seconds. It seemed like a long time in the dead silence, but was perhaps a hundredth of the time the two young masters had spent. (He was, after all, Fischer.) Then he flashed his toothy grin, his fingers flew out, and he showed off the flaw. The winner looked at the board.
"Damn it," was all he said, for Fischer was of course correct.
When Fischer said I don't know, he was strictly speaking not accurate. He did know. He just didn't know why he knew - and that's the crux.
End of story one.
(2) One of the most colorful players back then, with a sense of humor large enough to tell a story on himself, was Mikhail Tal. He was also one of the most talented. In his prime, in the late 50's, he had an almost unnatural ability to calculate variations. His style was to create a malestrom of complications on the board, a whirlwind of sacrifices and tactical possibilities, with the confidence that in the chaos he would be able to outplay his opponent. Often cold-blooded analysis after the fact showed that Tal's combinations were unsound. But he would have the last laugh, for he had won the game. (Twenty years later, Kasparov, an even stronger player, played pretty much the same way, but post mortem analysis showed that most of his concepts were sound.)
In 1960, Tal played the most dominant player of the last mid-Century, Mikhail Bottvinnik, for the world championship. Bottvinnik was a giant of a different type. He believed that chess had an inner logic, that it could be ascertained, and that a game could be conducted and developed along these logical lines. His weakness, such as it was - for when we are describing players of this stature, weakness is a very relative term - lay in precisely the area of Tal's greatest strength, the calculation of variations.
We come at last to the story. Tal told the story on himself. The match consisted of 24 games. During one of the games played in the middle, an interesting endgame arose. The players discussed one of the more obscure variations during the post mortem.
Bottvinnik waved his hand in the air dismissively. "It's simple," he shrugged. "White brings the king to e4 and the rook to b7. Easy win."
Tal said nothing at the time, but he thought to himself, you can't play chess like that. After the match was over (Tal won, but lost a rematch a year later), he found the time to sit down and make an exhaustive study of the disputed position. He looked at line after line, finding many which were drawn and many in which White won. He was finally satisfied he understood the position thoroughly. Then he started to laugh - at himself.
"Because," he recounted, " I noticed that all the winning variations had one thing in common. The White King came to e4 and the rook . . . . " What Tal's exhaustive analysis had done, sweaty and out of breath, was justify the insight that Bottvinnik had produced on wings.
The bottom line here is obvious. Chess is a great game, but only a game, and computable, a simple thing compared to the most trivial of human dilemmas. But I think the two anecdotes (in addition to being pretty good stories) illustrate the point. The intuition of Fischer and Bottvinnik tracked the calculus of variations, just far more quickly. My perception is that the moral judgments of judges and juries, the life judgments of human beings, have exactly the same relationship to the rational considerations involved.
Does that mean that all moral and life judgments are correct or beyond criticism? Of course not. What it does mean is that these types of decision are not made whimsically or arbitrarily, simply because the bases for them cannot be articulated fully.
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