Here’s an everyday moral issue. As she heads to your cousin’s wedding, your great aunt Sallie asks whether you like her hat. You find it strikingly ugly, yet you choose to say that you love it.

Here is an argument that you made the wrong decision: “All lies are morally wrong. Your statement was a lie. Therefore, your statement was morally wrong.” This line of thinking should be taken seriously. It is tight logically. Morally, it is weighty as well. Your statement was a lie by standard definitions, and lying is problematic.

If you need a reason that lying is wrong, several are available: We don’t want to be lied to, so we shouldn’t lie to others. Lying makes a convenient exception to the rule that we would want to apply in general: Tell the truth. Lying manipulates. If we view Aunt Sallie as a fully rational person, then we should assume that she can handle a truthful reply to her question. Lying is a vice, likely to form a habit and corrode virtues.

But I picked this example because the statement “I love your hat” can fit within other persuasive arguments as well. For instance, “Act so as to maximize the happiness of other people. Your statement made Aunt Sallie happy. Therefore, your statement was morally right.” Or “Express authentic and benign emotions. Your statement expressed your love for Auntie Sallie. Therefore, your statement was morally right.” Or “Be a good nephew and be nice to your aunt. Your statement was nice, coming from a nephew. Therefore, you did the right thing.”

To make matters even more complicated, your words were not just a statement about her hat (although they were that). They were also a step in a conventional conversation, a contribution to an ongoing relationship with your great aunt, and part of the flow of a day that was important to your cousin. In turn, your family relationships and events such as weddings are components of communities that give meaning to life.

I propose that we think about a case like this as a node in a network. It has many links: to abstractions such as lying and love, and to concrete realities such as your aunt’s feelings and your cousin’s wedding. In turn, each of those nodes is linked to many others, producing a complex network.

In reviewing the moral network that we perceive around us, I think we should avoid two common errors.

One mistake is to conclude that there is no right answer to the question, “What should I do?” Since most nodes have many links, we have the ability to choose which paths to follow. That does not mean that any choice is as good as any other. We should take the moral arguments seriously, even if they happen to conflict. They are not mere matters of opinion or preference. They have moral weight regardless of our preferences. For instance, I would much rather not tell an aged relative that I dislike her hat, but maybe I ought to. Our job is to decide what we should do.

The other mistake is to think that we can find determinative arguments that simply settle cases. In network terms, we would draw a line between each concrete judgment or choice and one governing principle. If a concrete situation must be linked to more than one principle (such as both lying and kindness, in this case), we would develop an algorithm for deciding which path to follow to reach a moral decision. The whole network would then become a decision tree or flowchart, with one outcome for each situation. For example, any statement that was a lie might simply be wrong; that would be the only link that counted.

I am highly skeptical of the instincts to delete moral links or to seek rules for steering our way through a moral network. Often, conflicting moral ideas represent genuine insights. Deleting or ranking them makes the world seem more comfortable and neater than it is.

Several methods are commonly proposed for simplifying a moral network to yield decisions:

1. What Amartya Sen calls “informational constraints”: blocking information that ought to be irrelevant to a moral decision. For instance, according to Kantian moral theory, you should ignore any information about your aunt’s likely emotional reaction to your remark about her hat, because it is irrelevant. All that matters is whether your statement conforms to a valid general moral rule. But I agree with Sen that the last thing we should do is ignore information that can be seen, from any reasonable perspective, as relevant to the decision.*
2. Thought experiments. Is it always wrong to lie? Well, what if the Gestapo is at your door asking about the little Jewish girl hidden in your attic? That example triggers a strong and valid negative reaction. If “Never lie” were a hypothesis, the Gestapo thought experiment disproves it. But that example is very remote from the case of your great aunt’s hat. If there is something problematic about misleading her, it doesn’t have much to do with lying to the Nazis. You may worry about insincerely praising her hat without assuming that lying is always wrong. You are concerned about certain aspects of lying whose relevance varies greatly depending on the situation. The thought experiment mainly confuses the issue.
3. Reflective equilibrium. This is the method of forming intuitive judgments about concrete cases (such as your aunt’s hat) and about general concepts or issues (such as lying) and adjusting each until they are mutually consistent. I see merit to the method, but to rely on it presumes that our most serious problem is inconsistency, as if a more consistent network were always a better one. That cannot be right: a moral monster can be perfectly consistent. Better to retain a tension or contradiction than jettison it for convenience and neatness.
   
4. Particularism: This is the idea that we can reason about concrete cases (like your aunt’s hat) without worrying at at all about the general principles. To the extent that we link nodes together, the links should connect concrete cases, and they should be analogies or rough similarities rather than inferences. Moral reasoning is like a pure form of common law in which the court decides each case without reference to law but with respect for precedent. I used to call myself a particularist, but it cannot be wise to ignore all general concepts, like lying and kindness. For one thing, that would make it impossible to distinguish between very serious matters and trivialities. Applying a weighty word like “lying” to a case is a valid move, even if some lies happen to be good.

Here is an alternative view:

Each situation belongs within a dense network of moral connections. An argument is a particular kind of structure within a network: a string of nodes connected by strong logical links. Much as a protein is a chain of molecules that contributes to the functioning of a cell, a genuine moral argument is a valuable contributor to the moral worldview to which it belongs. We should prize moral arguments and take them seriously. However, adamantine chains of reasoning are too rare in the moral realm for anyone to rely on them alone; particular cases are often embedded in contradictory arguments; and each argument is only persuasive if one grants its premise, which tends to be controversial.

Fortunately, moral worldviews are composed of more than “if … then” arguments. A reasonable person also links individual moral beliefs and commitments into networks by means of rules-of-thumb, causal and other empirical generalizations, and analogies. Marriage is a contract, but it is also a manifestation of love. Gay marriage is like heterosexual marriage. People want to love and be loved exclusively and durably. Marriage tends to benefit the children. These statements vary in terms of their grammar, their certainty, and the generality of their application, but all could be endorsed by a reasonable person and could form part of her overall moral network.

Thus, in addition to finding and testing arguments, we must also assess the overall structure of a moral worldview—our own or someone else’s. We start with judgments or principles that we find intuitively attractive and then try to build a system that displays appropriate formal properties.

The two most commonly cited criteria are consistency and coherence. I have been arguing that we need better ways to assess moral networks than these. Consistent networks are not, in general, better than richer but less consistent ones. I argue that a better network is one that enables moral deliberation with other people, and that will tend to be a network that is complex, dense, flat, but somewhat clustered.

More serious cases

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David Williamson Shaffer and his colleagues are developing an influential approach to education and assessment that relies on the notion of “Epistemic Network Analysis.” They posit that a “profession or other socially valued practice” (e.g., engineering) has an “epistemic frame” that is composed of many facts, skills, values, identities, and other concepts that advanced practitioners link together in various ways. Thus you can diagram a professional’s epistemic frame as a network and measure it using tools that have been developed for measuring social networks. What nodes are most central? How dense is the whole network? How many clusters does it have?

One way to collect the data necessary for this kind of analysis is to ask a practitioner to write or talk about her work. Many of her sentences will invoke concepts and link them together. (“I did A because I knew that B.” “I recommend C because I believe in ethical norm D.”) By coding the text, one can produce a dataset that can be displayed and analyzed in network terms. As Shaffer and colleagues note, the graph is not the actual epistemic network; it is a representation of how the engineer’s mentality works under specific practical circumstances (Shaffer et al, 2009, p. 14).

If a profession is worthy, then learning its epistemic frame is desirable. As students experience a course, a project, or an internship, their epistemic frames can be diagrammed and quantified at regular intervals. The learners’ networks should grow more similar to those of advanced professionals. Measures of network structure can be used for “formative assessment” (giving feedback on what the student should study) and “summative assessment” (awarding a grade or credential).

I have posited that moral thinking is also an epistemic frame (to use Shaffer’s terminology). We hold many morally relevant ideas that we connect by various kinds of links, not just logical inferences but also causal theories, generalizations, analogies, etc. We can graph our own moral mentality as a network of ideas and connections. Moral learning means building a moral network map that resembles that of a good moral thinker. (I leave aside for now the question of whether good moral reasoning is related to good moral behavior.)

One can easily see that the moral network map of an average adult is more complex than that of a 2-year-old. It is uncontroversial that a toddler needs to learn to reason more maturely, in which case his network map will look more like yours and mine. But that leaves a lot of room for debate about what an ideal map looks like. Defining good moral thought is a normative, not an empirical, question.

To some extent, that is also true of engineering. It is not self-evident what makes a “good” engineer. However, as long as we assume that the profession is working reasonably well and fulfilling its social purposes adequately, then a “good” engineer is presumably a respected and successful one. We can identify such people empirically: they have high grades, awards, and responsible positions. Then we can diagram their epistemic frames and compare novices to exemplary professionals to assess their learning.

The situation is much harder with morality. We debate what specific moral concepts and relationships should be found on a person’s epistemic frame. For instance, should everyone’s graph show the existence of God, linked to a set of commandments? We also debate what formal properties any moral network should display. Should it be highly centralized around one fundamental truth? Classical utilitarians and some religious fundamentalists would say so. Or should it be very flat and complex, as certain liberals have held?

Here I would introduce a controversial–but not original–premise that makes the identification of good moral networks somewhat more empirical. No human being can have a fully adequate moral theory in place before she faces the various situations of life. The moral world is far too complex for that. It involves countless differently situated people interacting in countless situations in relation to institutions (like education, romance, politics, and punishment, to name a few) that have evolved to have manifold purposes and meanings. So to think well morally is not to apply a theory to each new case, but rather to learn constantly. Learning results from interactions with other people (whether face-to-face or vicariously). By “interaction,” I do not mean only communication, or the exchange of ideas. Groups of people can agree on thoroughly foolish ideas unless they try to put them into practice. So “interaction” means a combination of exchanging ideas, trying to work together, and reflecting on the results–what Dewey often called “conjoint activity.”

Who is good at that? This is not strictly an empirical question, because we might disagree about how to assess various styles of interaction. Should we admire the persuasive ideologue? The follower of fads? But although value-judgments are inescapable, I think it is partly an empirical question who participates constructively in conjoint activity. Good participants do not impose preexisting ideas and do not merely adopt the majority’s view, but shape the group’s beliefs while adjusting their own.

As I have written before, my own unsystematic observation suggests that people who are better at moral interaction have epistemic networks with these features:

1. Lots of nodes and links, because each idea is an entry point for dialogue, and each reflects some prior learning.
2. A degree of centrality, because some moral ideas are genuinely more important than others; and also because one should develop a set of prized values that constitute your character. Yet:
3. No outright dependence on a small set of nodes to hold the whole network together, because then disagreement about those nodes must end a conversation, and doubt about them will plunge you into nihilism. You may believe in fundamental principles, but you should be able to reason around them. The network should be robust in that sense.

We might try to identify the actual epistemic frames of people who are good at collaboration and deliberation and see if they manifest the three features I listed above. We could then map the networks of children and other moral learners to see if they are developing to resemble the exemplary cases. Again, this would not be a value-neutral research program, but it would have a strong empirical component.

We can, in fact, pursue three levels of analysis.

1. Each individual has an evolving and not-fully-conscious epistemic frame composed of many ideas and connections.
2. The individual belongs to a community of other people who all have networks of their own. Their networks overlap and influence each other because moral learning is social. (Even a recluse got his ideas from someone else). Within a community, individuals’ maps intersect in a second way as well. If one person has a moral commitment to a specific other person, that other will appear on her map.
3. Finally, the world is composed of many moral communities. But these are never fully separate and distinct. They are always complex, overlapping, and vaguely-bordered networks. Given two entities that we call “cultures,” no matter how remote, we will likely find common nodes and connections in their respective moral networks. I leave aside the possibility that all human beings share a set of ideas as our biological inheritance. That may be the case, but I do not rely on it. Rather, all communities interact (even the so-called “uncontacted peoples” who live deep in rain forests), and so the members of community A always share some nodes with members of community B nearby as a result of their “conjoint activity.”

At the individual, community, and global level, the process of moral reasoning is fundamentally the same. It is always a matter of developing a more satisfactory network of ideas and connections. This is not easy, conflict-free, or pretty. Individuals face deep internal conflicts among incompatible ideas, and people and communities often actually kill each other on account of such disagreements. Nevertheless, we can point to individuals and groups that are better at constructive engagement, and moral learning means becoming more like them.

Reference: David Williamson Shaffer, David Hatfield, Gina Navoa Svarovsky, Padraig Nash, Aran Nulty, Elizabeth Bagley, Ken Frank, Andre A. Rupp, and Robert Mislevy, “Epistemic Network Analysis: A Prototype for 21st Century Assessment of Learning,” International Journal of Learning and Media, vol. 1, no. 2 (2009), pp. 1-22.

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Emerson’s Self-Reliance makes a provocative case for cultivating the self and shunning morality in the form of obligations to others. One famous paragraph begins, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” The same paragraph ends with an argument against charity as an entanglement that damages integrity: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”

Emerson strongly favors interacting with other minds, especially the geniuses who figure in the books that he devours in his private hours. Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Milton, Copernicus, and Newton are just some of the names he invokes in Self-Reliance. He thinks these people (all men) had distinct and invariant characters. “For I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being.” Thus, to understand an author is to grasp something unitary and unique about him that inspires you to enrich your own equally coherent character, not by sharing his truth but by creating your own. In Experience, Emerson writes:

Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire. Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos.

But this is false. To experience another person’s mind (whether through a brilliant book or an everyday interaction) is not just to pick out one idea that you think defines the other. It is to begin exploring his or her web of thinking while sharing your own. You both have unique webs, but each element of your thought is shared with many other people. You gain the most by exploring many of the other person’s moral nodes and their connections. This does not threaten your “unity” or risk chaos, because your own character was already a heterogeneous, evolving, and loosely connected web that you largely adopted from other people. Touching at just one point is a failure of communication and interpretation.

To be sure, you can strive to disentangle from everyday life and politics and prefer books to “dining out occasionally” (which, Thoreau found, interfered with his “domestic arrangements”), but you should not persuade yourself that you have thereby disconnected your network map from everyone else’s. Your self is still a social creation, and you are still mentally involved with others, even if you detach politically and economically.

References: Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (New York: Random House, 2009) pp. 134-5, 138. Emerson, “Experience,” in ibid, p. 322. Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (New York: T.Y Crowell & Co., 1899)p. 62

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