I am very grateful to Maxwell A. Cameron for his generous review of my book. In my response, let me reflect on what may or may not be remaining disagreements between our approaches.

One issue is the difference between “moral norms” and “appropriate goods.” In my book I set myself the goal of thinking through the division of moral labor between individuals and institutions such that basic moral norms are not violated; in contrast, Cameron wants “institutions to orient practitioners toward appropriate goods.” In Reclaiming the System, I use the term “normative organizations” for organizations that are structured around shared values. Maybe in the best of all possible worlds, all organizations would be “normative organizations” (I am not 100% sure about this, because if some people want to work together in a non-normative organization, without harming anyone else, and without wasting resources that might be needed elsewhere, what would give us the right to prevent that?) But in the world in which we currently live, we also see many organizations that fulfill rather trivial tasks, such as producing gadgets or categorizing data—tasks that may not be completely unnecessary, but would be difficult to describe as “appropriate goods” in a deeper sense. Nonetheless, such organizations have a moral duty not to violate basic moral norms. Hence, the difference between Cameron and me might be a methodological one that concerns different levels of idealization. Or perhaps Cameron would accept calling “fulfilling certain rather trivial tasks while not violating basic moral norms” an “appropriate good.”

A second issue concerns the notion of “wisdom.” Cameron is correct in enlisting me into the group of thinkers who emphasize the importance of judgment, because rules are never self-explanatory, because goods might conflict and need to be balanced, and so on. I have to admit that I have a—perhaps slightly irrational— dislike of the term “wisdom,” because in my native German it smells of old men with long beards, religion, and tradition, but this is, of course, not what Cameron has in mind. What I find more problematic about giving center stage to the notion of “wisdom” is that it is so hard to grasp what it actually is. This, in turn, raises questions about who has the right to define who counts as wise and who does not— and here, my slightly irrational associations with the word point to questions about social power, discrimination, and the right to raise one’s voice for the members of different groups. The examples that Cameron discusses, which include a young nurse, show that he is at no risk of falling into this trap, but it is one that deserves to be taken seriously when the term “wisdom” is used in practical contexts.

I had chosen to focus not on wisdom or judgment, but on the challenges that individuals encounter in organizational contexts. Grappling with them requires wisdom and judgment; organizational structures, in turn, must be such that those who dare to use wisdom or judgment are not alienated or driven away, but rather find support and like-minded spirits. This, I guess, is something Cameron would agree with.