The Role of Principles in Judgment
by Joseph Rowlands

What role do principles play in the act of moral judgment? This is a significant issue and one of the places where I seem to break from the traditional Objectivist view.

My own view is that principles are a recognition of a wide-reaching causal relationship. In order to live life effectively, we need a method of thinking and acting in the long-range. We don't have an automatic and reliable way of determining how to act, or to decide which actions will best promote our lives. We need a way of essentially predicting the effects of various actions.

In my view, there are two different and distinct mental functions that need to be performed. The first is that we need to predict the consequences of an action, and the second is that we need to make a judgment about those consequences. Principles are used for the first part, but not the second. The second function, the act of judgment, takes place after the forecasting has been done. It weighs the expected results by the standard of life, and determines which alternative is better.

The other view, which I believe is the accepted view within Objectivism, is that principles play a different role in terms of judgment. In this view, principles not only provide you with the ability to forecast alternatives, but they are part of the judgment process themselves. A principle of honesty, for instance, would tell you that it is wrong to be dishonest.

This means that when you are making a choice, your alternatives go through two different kinds of judgment. The first judgment acts as a kind of filter. It rules out certain behaviors as incompatible with the principles. Once your accepted moral principles have filtered out any incompatible alternatives, you would presumably still need to compare the expected outcomes by the standard of life. For instance, if you were choosing between staying at a job you have now and moving between another, it may be that the principles of honesty, independence, pride, etc. don't rule out either possibility. In that case, you would still need to make a decision, and the way you'd do that is by comparing the expected consequences.

A distinction I make between these two views of principles is that one describes a recognition of a causal relationship, and the other describe what is better described as a moral policy. So when someone talks about a principle of honesty, they may be referring to something like the fact that when you tell a lie, the recipient of the lie will be unhappy if they believe it and act on it, since acting on falsehoods leads to failure. Note that this simply describes a relationship, but does not assert that you should act one way or another. On the other hand, a principle of honesty in the form of a moral policy would say that for such and such reasons, you should always be honest. This policy acts as a method of judgment. It says some actions are morally legitimate, and others are not.

The fact that there are two ways of understanding principles does not mean there is no disagreement. It is possible that when the word 'principle' is used one way it is compatible with one use, while when the word is used another, it has a different use. But my disagreement extends beyond which meaning of the word should be used.

The fundamental difference in the two views is in the nature of moral judgment, which means the actual determination of whether one alternative is better or worse than another. Judgment is different from moral forecasting. It is the final comparison that takes place. Forecasting is part of a process of gathering information about the alternatives and their expected consequences. But once you've gathered all of the information, you have to actually determine which alternative best fits your moral goals. That is where judgment comes in.

My position is that there is really only one acceptable form of judgment. That is an actual weighing of the alternatives based on the standard of life. It is a process of measuring the effects based on your moral standard. Is this option better than this option? Does it improve my life more or less than the other? Does it address more significant needs? Does it leave me in a better position to pursue further values? This is what judgment needs to do.

The other position can't avoid this need. If the moral policies allow either option, you still need to weigh them. And the process is exactly as stated. So both views of principles must accept this ultimate method of judgment.

However, the other view of principles as a kind of policy has a second method of judgment. It says that options incompatible with the policies, options that "violate" the principles/policies, should be ruled out before even getting to the weighing of alternatives. This is a two-tiered system of weighing alternatives. And this is where the fundamental disagreement is. I do not think this second method is useful or justified.

What justification is offered for it? There seem to be two. The first suggests that without principles, it is impossible to determine whether something is good or bad for your life. The second justification relies on efficiency. It claims that without this second tier of judgment, we would be stuck repeating complex decision-making processes for every decision.

The first one is more important. If it were true that this second tier is needed for even determining whether something is good or bad, then that would mean there is something terribly wrong with not having that second tier. It would mean that we are really unable to act morally without thinking of principles as policies. If this were true, this would be decisive.

The first thing that we need to address is the idea that without this second tier of judgment, we are essentially making choices without the guidance of principles. This is one of the explanations for the need for the second tier. Without it, we are stuck making judgments without any clue of whether something is beneficial to our lives or not. But is this true?

Consider a policy of honesty compared to a policy of occasional dishonesty. We can expect, through the use of principles, that the occasional dishonesty might work in the short-term, but over the long-term we would expect negative consequences, like violated trusts, worsening of relationships, getting caught, etc. The policy of honesty would be expected to lead to beneficial results over the long run. Similarly a policy that allows the occasional breaking of laws would be expected to perform worse over the long-term than a policy of being law-abiding.

The principle = policy approach would see this as an argument for why we should have clear policies. While you might point out that a specific circumstance might seem to favor dishonesty or theft, they could reply that a policy of occasional dishonest is not a policy at all, but picking each choice in isolation. But what's the problem with that exactly?

The usual reply is that it is trying to make decisions without the use of principles. But that's not true. One could certainly examine the choice with the use of principles. Principles provide us with causal relationships. If you're thinking about lying, principles describe many different reasons why your action could lead to undesirable results. You don't know exactly which ones will occur, or whether you'll get away with the deceit, or how bad the consequences will be. But the alternative approach doesn't have a better answer to these questions. It just tries to silence the question.

So what's the problem with making individual decisions? Is it impossible to judge whether an action is good or bad if we treat it as an independent choice instead of as a policy? Why would it be? The policy, if chosen intelligently, would be based on the recognition of likely consequences. But that same recognition can inform individual choices outside of a policy. There's nothing magically added by generalizing.

This is a critical point. The justification for the policy is based on the same tools, the recognition of causal relationships, as an individual choice. This suggests there is no new insight added by the policy. We have the same knowledge either way.

For me, this is decisive. Adding a second tier of judgment is not necessary because the same reasoning that went into justifying the policy can be used in making the individual decision. Nothing is added. At best, there is an argument that consistent honesty avoids the problems that arise with dishonesty, but that isn't a new insight either. Every act of dishonesty comes with risks and costs.

Ultimately, the question is whether an individual choice is able to recognize the outcome as good or bad. And the answer is unequivocally yes. One possible reason why this is confusing is because of the view of principles as a kind of policy. When that meaning is accepted, it follows that a decision made without a policy is a decision made without principles, and principles are needed for long-range planning. But this is a mistake. Principles, in the form of the recognition of causal relationships, are still fully utilized. We aren't left blind to the predictable consequences of our actions.

Now we can turn to the second justification for principles as policies. This is the argument from efficiency. It suggests that if we have to consider all of the causal relationships every time we make a decision, we'll be ineffective. We might also be swamped in details.

For instance, there are many things that can go wrong when you tell a lie. Adopting a policy of honesty allows you to avoid considering each of these issues. You can simply ask whether your action is honest or dishonest, and decide from there.

Note that this efficiency approach does not suggest anything new is gained through the practice of treating principles as policies. It only points to a gain in efficiency in your thinking, which is important nonetheless.

I have a few reasons to reject this approach, though. The first is that with a little practice, it becomes very easy to utilize the principles and predict consequences. I find through personal experience that I get better seeing the likely consequences of actions the more I do it. If someone suggests a perfectly reasonable-sounding scenario where they were less than truthful, I quickly see likely consequences that they don't. So the idea that principles are difficult to use and we need short-cuts may just be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who use short-cuts never acquire the skills and level of integration to make these principles second nature.

To add a little to that, it isn't necessary to treat every principle as if it were in isolation from the others. The idea of having a policy against being dishonest could easily be adopted into a policy of double-checking dishonest actions. When someone considers being dishonest, they could say to themselves "Dishonesty has a bunch of problems. I should consider this more carefully".

A different objection to the alleged efficiency of policies is that the efficiency is gained at the expense of understanding. If you simply rule out dishonesty, you don't learn to recognize the negative consequences. You don't know why it is bad to be dishonest, or how this particular case of dishonesty could come back to haunt you. You simply rule it out blindly.

One problem with this is that the only principles that are compatible with this approach are principles where a policy can be followed blindly. This works for things like "never evade the truth", or "never accept the unreal as real". It can work in practice for things like "never initiate force". But when you have something like independence, which shows the value in having the means of acting on your own choices without the need for permission or reliance on others, suddenly it breaks down. You can't follow it blindly because degrees matter, and blindly following policies cannot deal with degrees.

As an example of that, it is not wise to work in a field with so few employers (perhaps one) that you can't get another job. That could leave you in a very bad position. But degrees matter. If there are 4 such employers, is that enough? 5? 6? A blind policy needs mindless rules, but these kinds of choices need clarity of vision, not blindness.

Inevitably the policy approach ends up limiting the accepted moral principles to those that can be practiced blindly, since the efficiency is gained through the process of blinding you to the details. This is why Objectivists will often interpret principles or virtues in very narrow ways, usually in terms of the mind, where it is safe to say that it is never good to be irrational. So honesty stops being about telling the truth to others, and is more about your own personal recognition of what's real or unreal. Justice is not about fair treatment, but about more judgment which can happen in your head.

This approach has other problems too. Consider how similar dishonesty is with keeping secrets. Many of the problems of dishonesty also affect secret keeping. Often to maintain the secret/lie, you have to add additional lies. You may fear smart people figuring it out, and you may try to limit information people have access to in order to avoid the secret from being discovered.

You might have a policy of not being dishonest, but blindly adopting it leaves you without awareness of the similarities to other actions. If instead of adopting a policy, you recognized the causal relationships and dealt with those, it would be easy to see that many of the same relationships are true in this other area.

So the argument from efficiency has problems as well. Efficiency is gained by blinding yourself to the details, and that inevitably has consequences. You make worse decisions. Nor is it clear that you actually gain any efficiency.

There are other problems as well. When you don't know why a choice is bad, because you blinded yourself through the use of a policy, then the policy appears to be sacrificial in nature. You can say that you shouldn't do it, but you no longer connect it to your life and actual consequences. Instead, you add a tier between your life and your choices. The new tier, which you might call morality, is something that seems to have demands of its own. It's not surprising that so many Objectivists still view morality as an end in itself.

In summary, my position is that judgment should be a weighing of expected consequences, and principles are causal relationships that allow us to forecast those consequences. The alternative approach treats principles as policies, adding an additional method of judgment that blinds you to the implications of those options to your life and offers nothing of value in the process.

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