In his recent work on the Paradoxes of Political Ethics, John Parrish attempts to demonstrate that there is a long history in Western political thought of obscuring responsibility for ethically suspect actions. Of the dominant traditions in moral philosophy, at least two are unrealistically optimistic, he contends. Opposed in so many ways, Kantianism and Utilitarianism fundamentally agree, according to Parrish, that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. The presupposition is that if one understands one's moral situation clearly (by discerning the maxim implicitly legislated by any particular action and evaluating it) or if one is capable of calculating the consequences of one's actions accurately (by resolving costs and benefits into one another), then one ought to experience no doubt when making ethical decisions. This, to Parrish's way of thinking, is a problem. His is a more pessimistic position. Political actions, undertaken in the public sphere or in the name of the public good, are reliant on compromises that are very often compromising to those who broker them. Doubt, in such circumstances, ought to be unavoidable, and it is in fact good. Any philosophical system attempting to disguise this fact is merely narcotic.

Employing a variant of virtue ethics, Parrish believes that ethical life is centered on choosing between goods—or virtues—that, in principle, cannot be reconciled with one another. Generosity and judiciousness may both be values; situations are encountered, however, in which the simultaneous enactment of both is impossible. Parrish states that the basic thrust of his book is “to try to jar our accustomed patterns of apprehension a bit in order to see the moral world anew, and in the process to introduce a greater degree of moral ambiguity into our perception of familiar institutions” (pp. 232–3). If one exchanges the diffidence of this assertion for forthrightness, one encounters a bracing initiative: to write a history of the ways in which Western moral and political thought has been riddled with ill-motivated, failed, and corrosive attempts to evade responsibility.

Parrish uses this rubric to reevaluate a fair swathe of ancient and early modern thought. When Plato says that the guardians of his ideal city-state should believe that their lies are noble, he is simply preaching self-deceit. Cicero's willful presumption that morality and duty will coincide is nothing less that a betrayal of the rhetorical tradition, which he purported to represent and which was, in fact, exemplary for its capacity to redescribe the good as the bad and the bad as the good, thereby sensitizing its practitioners to dilemma. Augustine's providentialism is in fact a license to kill, because it absolves agents who have pure intentions, even if they use impure means or bring about harmful consequences; after all, theodicy states that God allows himself to be diabolical in order to achieve the good. Hobbes's concept of sovereignty is nothing more than an elaborate shell game in which responsibility for the immoral acts of the nation-state is displaced onto the sovereign even as the sovereign absolves itself by stating that all its immoral acts are undertaken in the name of the people. Smith's invisible hand is just a retooling of Augustinian providentialism for a capitalist society in which the preening, avaricious egotism of the individualist is washed clean by the mantra that it is all undertaken for the ultimate (if not immediate) public good. At least, one might say, Machiavelli had the good grace to be upfront when he said that the prince must learn how to be bad.

Parrish thus functions as the pars destruens of an argument: There is no easy way—no moral philosophy or calculus, no language of politics or economics—to wash clean the hands that exercise power. What is left here on this moral landscape stripped bare of its pretensions and justifications? In particular, how can one make sense of Parrish's claim that the value pluralism driving him to recognize the existence of genuine moral dilemmas (and to insist that there is no positive action that cannot be redescribed negatively) does not by the same token involve a simple moral relativism that, ultimately, destroys the normative dimension of political debate altogether? Into this breach—one might say—steps another recent work, edited by Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss on Political Judgement. Although this edited volume brings together a number of quite different initiatives in order to honor the career of John Dunn, it does (to a significant degree) assume that decision-making in politics is a necessarily and inescapably complex business, the ambiguity of which cannot be removed by philosophical initiatives that, in their attempts to remove such ambiguity, simply reveal themselves to be naive—or worse.

After all, judgment—in Kant's open-ended and surprisingly pithy formulation—is the capacity to think the particular in the context of the universal (das Vermögen, das Besondere als enthalten unter dem Allgemeinen zu denken). To be sure, Kant intended his account of judgment to be something like a reinforcement of the basic claims of his moral philosophy, where the capacity to think of an action in terms of the principle it enacted was foundational. But many of those who have been more interested in Kant's third critique than in his second have emphasized how his account of reflective judgment sheds light on precisely those situations in which it is difficult or impossible to subsume a particular under an already available universal. There were times, it turned out, in which one had to use a particular situation in order to infer the existence of a universal that had not previously been recognized and in order to articulate its conceptual domain. It thus seemed that Kantian terminology could be used to describe the experience of moral dilemma itself, for judgment, in its reflective moments, revealed that particular cases could be both indeterminate and polyvalent. This turned out to be a modernist rearticulation of an experience recognized by the ancient rhetorical tradition. Judgment—as krinein, “distinguishing” and not phronesis, “practical wisdom”—was the fount of paradiastole, the open-endedness of particulars that permitted them to be described both positively and negatively, the proximity of virtue and vice that permitted courage to be redescribed as foolhardiness.

Although Kant's account of judgment is almost completely absent from this collection, it is on these various capacities to perceive the proximity of opposites that Bourke, Geuss, and their collaborators have focused their attention. From the proximity of the good and the bad derives the importance of the key political capacity—call it metis, cazzimma, List or a host of other names—to distinguish the actual from the merely apparent, the possible from the impossible, the expedient from the merely costly. As Victoria McGeer and Philip Pettit contend, rhetoric is to be understood not simply (or so much) as an art of persuading others, but instead as an ability to release oneself from overcommitment to prior judgments through a process of redescription. For Bourke, judgment is a refusal to move too directly from theory to practice; in place of a moral absolutism, it offers a Burkean capacity to understand the multiple and serial compossibilities unfolded by historical narratives. Quentin Skinner offers the paradiastolic argument that judgment can be redescribed as a form of discretion or prerogative that is, in Locke's definition, “nothing but the Power of doing publick good without a Rule” (cited at p. 127). The implication is that such a prerogative easily becomes simply a power of doing without a rule, an arbitrary executive. (Tony Blair and Iraq is Skinner's example.) But this argument can itself be turned on its head, for one of the opposites of Lockean prerogative is in fact the hyper-prerogative of the Hobbesian Leviathan, which is supposed to have defined legal terms with such precision that, miraculously, no judge would require the faculty of judgment in order to find the right relationship between statute and case. Rejecting Hobbes, early modern authors (whether in the form of J. G. A. Pocock's Matthew Hale on the common law, Vico on the interaction of verum and certum or, in this volume, Istvan Hont's Adam Smith on jurisprudence) argued in various ways that the law was a—perhaps the—quintessentially historical institution, the historicity of which derived from the irreducibility of particular to universal.

The irreducibility of judgment is, thus, what links Paradoxes of Political Ethics to Political Judgement. In the early modern context, as Biancamaria Fontana points out, the topos of judgment thus included Montaigne's complex account of the multiplicity of one's beliefs, something that required a relentless revision of one's commitments in light of each other. But such irreducibility is not simply the decisionism of Carl Schmitt, who exchanged a pre-World War I criterion of the good judicial decision as one that would be upheld by other judges for a post-World War I stipulation that he is sovereign who decides—arbitrarily—upon the exception. In place of Schmitt's mysticism (to remain within the Weimar context), one has the alternative of Weber's complexity. As Sunil Khilnani implies in reference to Jawaharlal Nehru's exercise of judgment, commitment to a plurality of values—Weber's polytheism, one might say—entails commitment to judgment as Augenmaß, a sense of proportion that allows one to understand the pertinence of multiple values to a particular situation and pursue each to the appropriate extent. Even as it expresses its values in various lasting forms, such a sense of proportion can operate only by calibrating and recalibrating itself to every subsequent here and now.

In sum, there is a great deal to be gained by reading these books, one alongside the other.