Received: 25 January 2018 Revised: 2 July 2018 Accepted: 1 November 2018

DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12191

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Moral decisionism and its discontents

Gabriel Abend1,2,3

1
Department of Sociology, University of
Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland
Abstract
2
Department of Sociology, New York Decisionists use decision/choice concepts to understand
University, New York, New York and represent X: bees, Deep Blue, and Ron Carter make
3
Max‐Weber‐Kolleg, University of Erfurt, decisions. Explicit decisionists argue that X should be
Erfurt, Germany
understood and represented using decision/choice
Correspondence concepts: it's correct to speak of bees', computers', and
Gabriel Abend, Department of Sociology, jazz improvisers' decision‐making. Explicit anti‐
University of Lucerne, Lucerne,
Switzerland.
decisionists disagree: bees, computers, jazz improvisers,
Email: abend@nyu.edu algorithms, and drug addicts aren't correctly understood
and represented as decision‐makers. Sociologists look at
decisionism and explicit decisionism as social phenom-
ena, which show up in discourses, practices, technolo-
gies, and organizations. I make a contribution to the
sociology of decisionism and the sociology of morality
by examining three kinds of explicit moral anti‐
decisionism: Murdochian, sociological/structural, and
Confucian/Daoist. I show why these discontents are
discontent, what theories and evidence they draw on,
what assumptions they make, and how they conceive
of morality without decision/choice concepts. Then, I
consider how moral anti‐decisionism might matter,
how the sociology of decisionism might matter, and
where to go from here (if anywhere).

KEYWO RDS
decisionism, decision‐making, Ron Carter, social theory, sociological
theory, sociology of morality

J Theory Soc Behav. 2018;1–25. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jtsb © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1
2 ABEND

“Decisions / between a family

or a porn star /
humble life or sports car / liver
or the whole bar”
(Borgore and Miley Cyrus)

1 | INTRODUCTION

Elena lives in New York and would like to travel to Montevideo on July 16. She sits at her
computer, does an online search, and finds two flights that day. One is with Uruguayan Air-
lines: it leaves at 8 from LaGuardia and costs $800. The other is with Paraguayan Airlines: it
leaves at 11 from JFK and costs $900. Elena looks at her calendar, makes a phone call, thinks
about it for a while, and purchases the Paraguayan Airlines flight. She decided to purchase this
plane ticket. That seems an uncontroversial way of understanding and representing what
transpired.
It's now Friday evening and Elena is at the Blue Note. Ron Carter has just played a
beautifully moving solo. Did Carter decide to play the notes and phrases he played? To be sure,
he had no time to think about finger movements, much less about scales, modes, or responses to
the drummer and the pianist. However, you might still say that “[i] mprovisers constructing
their parts in performance perpetually make split‐second decisions about suitable materials
and their treatment”; then, “players … strive physically to implement their flow of decisions”
(Berliner, 1994, p. 497). You might thus say that Carter is a brilliant musical decision‐maker.
Yet, this account of his brilliance isn't uncontroversial. For one, Carter didn't experience his
solo as a series of melodic and rhythmic choices at all. He didn't decide to play that moving
melody, but found himself playing it. Playing it happened to him. He just was in the moment,
in the groove, in the zone. Things flowed. Some artists report compulsion rather than choice.
Some jazz musicians, like Keith Jarrett, report that it's their hands that improvise: “my body
knows exactly what to do. It's just like my left hand knows what to play. If I tell it what to play,
I'm stopping it. Not only am I stopping it, but I'm stopping it from playing something better than
I can think of.”1 To some, “it's as if the instrument is playing me, not me the instrument”
(Hansen, 2011, 68; cf. Sudnow, 1978, 1979). To override musicians' phenomenology and
first‐person accounts, you'd have to say that Carter's solo was the product of unconscious or
automatic decisions, or that he unknowingly followed a set of decision rules (whether he can
articulate them or not).
Almost as much as she enjoys jazz concerts, Elena enjoys reading scientific articles. One of
her favorite topics is birds' “mate choices” and “the stress of having an unattractive partner”:

As the season progresses, given the strong phenological selection on the timing of
nestling hatching, female choice becomes more relaxed to the point where late
arriving females will pair with the first available male they encounter, and some
females even pair with a member of the wrong species. […] [F] emales that pair with
poor‐quality partners do so on [sic] their own choosing, but the stress response we
have demonstrated here reflects the internal conflict that underlies their decision—
these females are making the best of a bad situation and are dissatisfied with their
partner although he does represent a better option than not breeding at all.
(Griffith, Pryke, & Buttemer, 2011, p. 2803)
ABEND 3

This account made sense to Elena. She thought to herself: it makes sense that flycatchers choose
their sexual partners much like we do—even if they aren't evolutionarily equipped to use
Tinder, or, for that matter, to swipe right.
How about plants? Can they be decision‐makers as well? Meyer et al. (2014, p. 382)
answer in the affirmative: “we provided strong ecological evidence for the existence of
complex decision making through adaptive selective abortion in plants. The idea that plants
exhibit complex behaviors in response to environmental stimuli is not new. Here, we show
how environmental and internal cues can be integrated during plant decision making.” Along
these lines, Baluška and Mancuso (2009, p.S5) argue that “[d]espite the modular and
apparently decentralized organization of the plant body, there are several critical situations
requiring ‘centralized’ decisions, such as, for instance, the onset of flowering as well as the
onset and breakage of dormancy.” Plant and human decision‐making are alike, as Mancuso
explained to the New Yorker:

I asked Mancuso if he thought that a plant decides in the same way we might choose
at a deli between a Reuben or lox and bagels. “Yes, in the same way,” Mancuso wrote
back, though he indicated that he had no idea what a Reuben was. “Just put
ammonium nitrate in the place of Reuben sandwich (whatever it is) and phosphate
instead of salmon, and the roots will make a decision.” But isn't the root responding
simply to the net flow of certain chemicals? “I'm afraid our brain makes decisions
in the same exact way.” (Pollan, 2013; cf. Topham et al., 2017)

This analogy struck Elena as convincing. It seemed consistent with scientific literatures she
was familiar with. The literature on “perceptual decision‐making” and “saccadic eye move-
ments,” which “are the result of neural decisions about where to move the eyes” (Caspi, Beutter,
& Eckstein, 2004, p. 13086). The literature on “motor decision‐making,” “such as to reach for a
cup of coffee,” which requires “one to take into account potential costs and benefits associated
with motor actions” (Wu, Delgado, & Maloney, 2015, p. 417).
While reading Meyer and colleagues' article, Elena decided to scratch her left arm. Then she
decided to scratch her head. And then she decided to reach for her cup of coffee. And then she
decided to take a sip of coffee. Is that a reasonable way of understanding and representing what
transpired?

2 | SOCIOLOGY O F DECISIONISM

New York City. 2017 or so. Decision‐making and decision‐makers seem to be everywhere. Choice
and decision are useful concepts to many people and organizations, in many places, and for many
purposes.2 Shoppers, chess players, brains, and neurons are represented as decision‐makers.
Criminals, gamblers, algorithms, driverless cars, and chimpanzees are represented as decision‐
makers. People are seen as making love choices (Ansari & Klinenberg, 2015; Illouz, 2012; Swidler,
2001), procreation choices (Paul, 2015; Salecl, 2010), end‐of‐life decisions (Livne, 2014), education
choices (Rosenfeld, 2017), and lifestyle and health choices (Schüll, 2016).
For you to count as a decision‐maker, you don't need to remember considering options,
weighing pros and cons, and deliberating, because decisions/choices might be automatic and
unconscious (Brownstein, 2018). You unconsciously decided to reach for your cup of coffee, light
up a cigarette, and utter the words, “how are you doing today?” You unconsciously decided not
4 ABEND

to hire the Hispanic applicant because she's Hispanic. People are said to be unaware of the psy-
chological processes that drive their decisions/choices, their implicit attitudes, implicit biases,
and “unconscious thought” (Lamont, Adler, Park, & Xiang, 2017). From this perspective, “Elena
decided/chose to carry out action A" seems indistinguishable from “Elena carried out action A.”
As you'd expect, decisions and choices are central in the work of economists, management
scholars, decision theorists, and rational choice social scientists. They're also helpful to crimi-
nologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and animal and plant scientists—e.g., the “judgment
and decision‐making framework” works for humans, animals, and plants (Harper, Randall, &
Sharrock, 2016; Karban & Orrock, 2018; Mendelson et al., 2016; Trewavas, 2014). And to many
others: policymakers, politicians, consultants, therapists, educators, social workers, art critics,
and sports commentators—e.g., Messi and LeBron stand out because of their exceptional
split‐second decisions. Smart decisions are commended. Decision‐making skills are taught.
Good choices are to be incentivized or “nudged” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Choice architectures
are to be perfected. Choice means freedom and autonomy. It's wonderful to be free to choose
Friedman & Friedman, 1990).3 Above all, success is due to good decisions; failure is due to
bad ones. No wonder you're unemployed, poor, or in jail.
Speaking of which, decisions and choices come in handy in the moral domain, both within
and outside the academy. Moral decisions are analyzed by moral philosophers, moral psychol-
ogists, legal scholars, business ethicists, evolutionary biologists, and neuroscientists—to tell us
either what people do or what people ought to do. Ethics should determine how to make mor-
ally right decisions: that's its point, that's what it's all about. The paradigmatic moral problem is
a dilemma. An individual must choose a course of action, but she isn't sure what the right thing
to do is. She's facing a fork in the road and she must opt for A or B. She's got to decide what to
do. She's also got to decide how to decide what to do: what factors to take into account, how to
weigh them, what's relevant and what's irrelevant. More generally, a life is a series of decision
trees; a Choose your Own Adventure book; a garden of forking paths (though not a Borges‐style
[2005] labyrinth).
New York City. 2017 or so. Decision/choice concepts seem to have active and consequential
social lives. People, groups, and organizations do things with them. They help you apprehend,
manipulate, and cope with the social world; they help you speak, communicate, and act in it.
Events, processes, and situations are understood and represented through them. They show
up in societies' discourses, practices, tools, and technologies. They have social and political uses.
They have social and political effects. They have performative effects, whereby reality
approaches understandings and representations of it (Healy, 2015; Herrmann‐Pillath, 2018;
MacKenzie, Muniesa, & Siu, 2007).
Sociologists are interested in these active and consequential social lives that decision/choice
concepts can have; their features, uses, genealogies, causes, and consequences across time and
place (Abend, 2018; Breen, 2004; Glaeser, 2016; Rosenfeld, 2018; Schwartz, 2018). From a socio-
logical perspective, these concepts are empirical objects; their uses are social phenomena. To tell
good from bad uses, you're better off hiring a philosopher (Cappelen, 2018; Figdor, 2017, 2018).
My sociological approach makes a distinction between “decisionism” (antonym: “non‐
decisionism”) on the one hand, and “explicit decisionism” (antonym: “explicit anti‐
decisionism”) on the other.4 Decisionists about X use decision/choice concepts to understand
and represent X. Explicit decisionists about X argue that decisionists are getting it right: X
should be understood and represented using decision/choice concepts. Or, which is roughly
the same, explicit decisionists argue that X is adequately, correctly, or profitably understood
and represented using decision/choice concepts; these concepts apply to X. For example, a
ABEND 5

decisionist tells you how bees “decide which patches of flowers to visit” and “decide whether to
dance,” whereas an explicit decisionist tells you why there's nothing wrong with speaking of
bees' decisions (Nicholls & de Ibarra, 2017, p. 82; Zhang, Si, & Pahl, 2012, p. 1). A decisionist
about morality talks about trolley problems in her presentations, books, and blog posts; an
explicit moral decisionist argues that trolley problems are key devices and get to the core of
ethics.5 A non‐decisionist about morality doesn't talk about trolley problems in her presenta-
tions, books, and blog posts; an explicit moral anti‐decisionist argues that trolley problems are
irrelevant or useless in ethics.
To be more precise:

1. Decisionism and explicit decisionism can co‐occur in the same person, organization, presen-
tation, book, or blog post. You might describe plants, birds, and jazz musicians as decision‐
makers and argue that that's the correct way to describe them. But you don't need to.
2. Being a decisionist about X doesn't commit you to being a decisionist about Y or Z. Being a
decisionist about X may increase the odds of your being a decisionist about Y or Z. But it
doesn't need to.
3. Neither decisionism/non‐decisionism nor explicit decisionism/anti‐decisionism are dichoto-
mous variables. They are continuous, so you might be a decisionist about X only to a certain
degree.
4. As ever in social life, people and organizations aren't consistent across situations, contexts,
and over time. You might be most of the time a decisionist (or a non‐decisionist) about X, or
for the most part an explicit decisionist (or an anti‐decisionist) about Y. Scholars are people,
too, so they might be hard to classify as one or the other.6
5. Explicit decisionists argue that X is adequately, correctly, or profitably understood and rep-
resented using decision/choice concepts. But they needn't agree on what adequacy, correct-
ness, or profit is.
6. The issue isn't whether decisions/choices are rational—that's a different kettle of fish.
Decisionists don't understand and represent X as a rational choice, nor as an irrational
choice, but simply as a choice. Explicit decisionists claim neither that X is caused by reason-
ing and cold cognitive processes, nor that it's caused by affect, emotion, and hot processes
(Kahneman, 2011). They simply claim that X is a decision, or that decision/choice concepts
apply to it.
7. The issue isn't whether decisions/choices are free—that's a different kettle of fish. Explicit
decisionists don't say that X is a free choice. They say that X is a choice simpliciter. Explicit
anti‐decisionists don't say that X isn't a free choice. They say that X isn't a choice simpliciter.
That said, X's being forced, coerced, or compelled can be a reason to deny choice‐status to it.
Then, the question is what makes X to be forced, coerced, or compelled, as opposed to
shaped, influenced, conditioned, or constrained—whether socially or biologically
(Greenfield, 2011).

Sociologists may carry out studies about decisionism/non‐decisionism, or studies about explicit
decisionism/anti‐decisionism. (Or both.) The former goes like this. Take a society or set of
societies (or populations, organizations, groups, situations, or fields). Sociologists investigate
the relative incidence of decisionism and non‐decisionism about X (or about X, Y, and Z);
how decision/choice concepts are used, how often, when, where, by whom, and what for;
how these uses are received and what their effects are; and what accounts for differences,
patterns, and changes over time.
6 ABEND

The latter goes like this. Some people and organizations assert that decision/choice concepts
are applicable to plants, birds, jazz musicians, toddlers, sleepwalkers, and drug addicts. Others
reply: “they aren't” or “that makes no sense.” This is a normative disagreement about how
decision/choice should be used, their applicability or correct application, their proper domain
and function, what's a real or genuine decision/choice. Sociologists provide empirical accounts
of such disagreements qua social phenomena, their causes, and their consequences. Why do
those people and organizations have an expansive view about what counts as decision‐making?
What tools do they defend this view with? Why did it carry the day in the scholarly community,
education, and public policy? Were there any second‐order disagreements about how to adjudi-
cate decision/choice disagreements? Vis‐à‐vis studies about decisionism/non‐decisionism, the
data for studies about explicit decisionism/anti‐decisionism are scarcer. Few people and organi-
zations consider these issues. On the bright side, they tend to be scholars, thinkers, and organi-
zations in special fields (e.g., science, knowledge, law, ethics, and culture), so they may leave
public data behind, which researchers can access and collect.
In this paper I make a contribution to the sociology of explicit decisionism/anti‐decisionism
by examining three kinds of anti‐decisionism about morality: Murdochian,
sociological/structural, and Confucian/Daoist. My study also begins to fill a gap in the sociology
of morality (Abend, 2008; Bargheer, 2018; Bykov, forthcoming; Hitlin & Harkness, 2017; Hitlin
& Vaisey, 2010). In the past decade, sociologists have done much good work on moral practices,
understandings, norms, and institutions. Yet, to my knowledge, there's been no research on: (i)
how certain things get understood and represented as moral decisions/choices; (ii) the social
effects of these understandings and representations; (iii) how they've been objected to and
rejected; and (iv) the social effects of these objections and rejections.
This paper is primarily about (iii). I show how Murdochian, sociological/structural, and
Confucian/Daoist discontents argue against moral decisionism, what reasons they offer, what
theories and evidence they draw on, what assumptions they make, and how they conceive of
morality without decision/choice concepts. I show how my account contributes to the sociology
of decisionism. That's how far I get here. But I also suggest fertile areas for future research. One
is the social and organizational contexts of explicit moral anti‐decisionism, how explicit
decisionism has responded, how the two have clashed, and these clashes' consequences. Another
is explicit moral anti‐decisionism's degree of persuasiveness and success, what accounts for it,
within scholarly communities, professional and organizational fields, and societies at large.

3 | MURDOCHIAN CONCERNS

Iris Murdoch didn't like moral decisionism, what it assumes, and what it implies. Choice and
decision are overrated. A different conception of morality is needed, in which they aren't at
the heart of things. Drawing on Simone Weil, Murdoch (1991, pp. 36–37) “[introduces] into
the picture the idea of attention, or looking”:

I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies
that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. There is also of
course ‘distorted vision’, and the word ‘reality’ here inevitably appears as a
normative word. When [person] M is just and loving she sees [person] D as she
really is. One is often compelled almost automatically by what one can see. If we
ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of
ABEND 7

choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is
nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like,
how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value
round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of
the business of choosing is already over. […] The moral life, on this view, is
something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between
the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is
indeed what is crucial.

Murdoch is empirically claiming that “at crucial moments of choice most of the business of
choosing is already over.” Philosophers and psychologists are keen on imagining moral
dilemmas. They imagine a point in time at which an individual must opt for A or B; “a grandi-
ose leaping about unimpeded at important moments.” This is a useful methodological move for
their experiments, models, and arguments. However, in reality, people's choices happen over
time; they are diachronic processes. Or many of them anyway (Antonaccio, 2000; Blum, 2012;
Sayer, 2011). Murdoch's claim isn't about how much time people spend mulling over decisions,
using pros‐and‐cons lists, the “PMI method,” or other “decision tools.” What happens slowly
over time happens to the person herself, her understandings, knowledge, and relationships to
other people and the world. She might acquire the practical and moral equipment needed to
grasp what's important. She might become open to perceive what needs to be perceived. She
might draw new, morally fecund distinctions. Develop in ways that allow her to occupy new
standpoints and undergo new experiences. Find out new things. Attend to new things. Continue
to attend to the same things, but longer or better.
This work of attention is “continuous” and “imperceptible”; “constant” and “quiet.” It can
lead to your having new “structures of value.” It can lead to your seeing things in a different
way and even “partly” making a world. Or a magnetic field, which you've been setting up
throughout your life: “[w] hen moments of decision arrive we see and are attracted by the world
we have already (partly) made.”7 Murdoch's “seeing” is moral seeing, not mere visual percep-
tion. For instance, person M was mistaken about person D, but eventually comes to see her
“as she really is.” As M eventually realized, D was “not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile
but delightfully youthful.” Crucially, D didn't change: she was gay and youthful all along. On
Murdoch's (1996, p. 250) view, “[h] ow we see and describe the world is morals too.”
Maybe looking and attending by themselves don't suffice. Maybe for them to deliver the
desired results you must look and attend lovingly, justly, intelligently, clearly, discerningly,
insightfully, perspicuously, openly, fair‐mindedly, sensitively, or imaginatively (or all of the
above). Furthermore, attention is no guarantee that you'll always free yourself from distortions,
illusions, and “fantasy,” and hence you'll be able to see reality for what it is. In any case,
Murdoch's underscoring attention, vision, looking, and seeing puts her at odds with much moral
philosophy. At odds with Kant and Sartre, behaviorists and existentialists, consequentialists and
deontologists. But in harmony with much virtue ethics, ethics of being, Wittgensteinian ideas,
and Buddhist ideas. At stake is the very object and point of ethics (Abend, 2013; Anscombe,
1958; Crary, 2016; Diamond, 2010; Frankena, 1973; Hopwood, 2014, 2018; Keown, 1992).
Murdoch's ethics isn't about discrete moral choices or judgments, but about the broader con-
cept of moral life (Bagnoli, 2012). The moral life is “not something that is switched off in
between the occurrence of explicit moral choices”; it's not “a series of overt choices which take
place in a series of specifiable situations” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 34). Therefore, the inquiries of
moral philosophers should be adjusted accordingly—and so should the inquiries of scientists
8 ABEND

of morality. The findings of approaches that focus on momentous moments of choice, such as
experimental methods, become less important. Both theoretically and practically. The findings
of approaches that consider “[w] hat happens in between such choices” and “the density of
our lives” (Murdoch, 1961, p. 20), such as ethnographic and historical methods, become more
important. Both theoretically and practically. For this “is indeed what is crucial.”
Choice gets plenty of kudos from moral and political philosophers. Capitalism and liberal
democracies hold it as a basic principle (Rodgers, 2011; Rosenfeld, 2014, 2018). It's a basic prin-
ciple, morally and politically, that choice is good and lack of choice is bad. Choice safeguards
freedom, autonomy, and productive and healthy competition (Werron, 2015). Lack of choice
characterizes paternalistic regimes, tyrannies, and Communist tyrannies. In contrast, Murdoch
(1991, pp. 39–40) argues that “necessity” might be an “ideal situation” and having “no choices …
is the ultimate condition to be aimed at”:

The place of choice is certainly a different one if we think in terms of a world which is
compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a
slow business. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the
sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what
we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice
seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the ‘decision’ lies elsewhere)
and less obviously something to be ‘cultivated.’ If I attend properly I will have no
choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at. […] The ideal situation …
is … to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity.’ This is something of which saints
speak and which any artist will readily understand.

What is it to be free, then? For Murdoch (1991, pp. 66–67), “[f] reedom is not strictly the
exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes
appropriate, occasions action”; “[t] he freedom which is the proper human goal is the freedom
from fantasy …”
In sum, Murdoch argues that moral decisionism fails. It fails both as a descriptive account of
what people's lives are like and as a normative account of what people's lives should be like.
Choice and judgment moments are epiphenomenal. Their psychological prehistories are the real
motors of morality: a person's attention, vision, perception, discernment, and experience; her
thinking, feeling, and understanding.

4 | S O C I O LO G I C A L / S T R U C T U R A L CO N C E R N S

Just like choice and judgment moments have psychological prehistories, they have
sociological/structural prehistories as well. Prehistories or preconditions. Sociologists' and histo-
rians' favorite source here is Marx's (1996, p. 32) “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they
choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.”
Many historical sociologists' bread and butter is to analyze the causal effects of these circum-
stances on social movements, political cultures, and demographic changes. Many sociologists'
bread and butter is to analyze the causal effects of these circumstances on what people do, want
to do, makes sense for them to do, and can do at all. Or, as it's sometimes phrased, what's the
ABEND 9

relationship between agency and social structure. As regards choices and decisions, three issues
can be distinguished.
First, you don't choose the set of options from which you choose. What's on the menu isn't
up to you. As Velleman (2014, p. 4) argues, “[a] n agent cannot invent an entire ontology of
actions from scratch; for the most part, he must choose from a socially provided repertoire of
action concepts.” Similarly, given a society or social group, sociologists ask what moral concepts
are available to people, what kinds of moral reasons they can invoke, and what objects they can
morally evaluate at all. This “moral background” stuff is already in place when an individual
makes a choice, performs an action, or utters a judgment (Abend, 2014).
Second, you don't choose the principles or criteria that guide your choice, including your
preferences, desires, and values. Much like it's not up to you—or at least not wholly up to
you—what you like to eat, it's not up to you—or at least not wholly up to you—whom you like
to hang out with, are attracted to, and are likely to get romantically involved with. As the liter-
ature on assortative mating shows, whom you're likely to meet can be structurally/sociologically
accounted for. This is a function of where you live and work, what school you attend, and what
parks and bars you frequent. Not to mention whether you live in New York or Montevideo, and
whether you were born in 1999 or 1810.
People's preferences, desires, and values can also be structurally/sociologically accounted
for. Someone who has characteristic C1—loves the outdoors, fancy wine, is entrepreneurial,
vegan, tall, or black—is attractive. Someone who has characteristic C2—loves football, country
music, is talkative, has egalitarian values, blue eyes, or white skin—isn't. Your reactions and
feelings are genuine, you genuinely like C1 and dislike C2, but you didn't decide to feel this
way or react in this way. The causes of your reactions and feelings seem to have to do with your
culture, religion, family, and upbringing, along with marketing and advertising (White, 2010).
Wait a second, though. Couldn't you have chosen to train yourself to appreciate and enjoy
new things, e.g., wine, football, wine‐lovers, and football‐lovers? Couldn't you have chosen to
start valuing new things, e.g., someone's being vegan or entrepreneurial? To convert to Judaism
and reject the values you were brought up with? To stop disliking Jewish, Muslim, black, or
brown people? Maybe so. But these choices must have themselves been guided by certain pref-
erences, desires, and values of yours. And how did you choose these? What preferences guided
the choice that eventually led to your changing your alimentary or romantic preferences? Unfor-
tunately, “we are setting out on a regress that we cannot stop. True self‐determination is impos-
sible because it requires the actual completion of an infinite series of choices of principles of
choice.” “Nothing can be causa sui—nothing can be the cause of itself”; you can't truly choose
how you are and what you prefer (Strawson, 1994, pp. 7, 5–6; Strawson, 2010).
Third, you don't choose the conditions under which you choose. Impersonating a fictional
German political philosopher, G.A. Cohen refers to this as the “vertiginous regressivity of
choice”: “For what is choice, if one cannot choose the conditions of one's choice? And what
is it to choose the conditions of one's choice, if one cannot choose the conditions in which those
conditions are in turn chosen?”8
You find yourself in a particular place and time (or historical stage or moment, if you like
that kind of philosophy of history). Certain big structures, large processes, and huge cultural
and institutional arrangements are facts about the situation you happen to be in. They aren't
up to you and can't be changed, at least in the short run. Moreover, there are facts about you,
your biography, your upbringing, your networks, and your genes, which vary across individuals
and groups of individuals. There are social patterns, but also individual differences. As it hap-
pens, you don't have internet access. What's worse, your neighborhood doesn't get running
10 ABEND

water or public transport. So you can't choose to take the bus to work, let alone email your boss.
And you've got no capital, so you've got to sell your labor and accept any wage on pain of star-
vation. What you choose, what you can choose, and what's reasonable for you to choose will be
shaped by your capital—or lack thereof. Your capital, your social capital, and your cultural
capital.
Such sociological/structural considerations lead to objections to moral decisionism. Moral
decisionists focus on decision‐maker DM's decision D at time t: her preferences, beliefs, and
desires; the options she has; the rules she's consciously or unconsciously following; and the
rules she ought to follow. Yet, they miss something crucial: D's and DM's circumstances, which
made D possible the way it happened (or its conditions of possibility, if you like that kind of ter-
minology). If moral life were a theater play, moral decisionists would neglect the play's being
preceded and made possible by much work of many kinds, by many people who aren't on stage,
and by many people who aren't even backstage.
Thus, D is blind to its own circumstances, preconditions, or background elements (Abend,
2014). In moral decisionists' work, D looks like decisions they themselves might have to make.
Their content and form are peculiar. Their contexts are peculiar. Their conceptual structure and
point are peculiar. DM looks like them, their friends, and their students. For example, DM is a
well‐to‐do (not at risk of starvation) and well‐educated (not illiterate) white person who lives in
New Haven, Princeton, or Cambridge in the twenty‐first century (not in Uruguay in the eigh-
teenth century).
According to its sociological/structural objectors, moral decisionism has naturalized the con-
ditions under which DM chooses, her choice criteria and principles, and the set of options she
has. One worry is that decisionists introduced these circumstances by fiat or arbitrarily, without
awareness of their peculiarity. Then, their arguments are at best less general and at worst
biased. They aren't true of “people.” They aren't “timeless and universal truths” (Sunstein,
2015, p.xi). Another worry is that these circumstances are causal determinants of DM's choice
—in the laboratory and even more in real life. While choice and judgment moments might
not be entirely epiphenomenal, social and historical factors are responsible for the most impor-
tant causal work. For moral choices and decisions aren't only psychological phenomena, but
also social phenomena. Like other social phenomena, their variance can be statistically
accounted for and causally explained by variables such as decision‐makers' gender, class, age,
ethnicity, religion, religiosity, networks, whether they live in Cambridge or Montevideo, and
whether they live in the twenty‐first or the eighteenth century.
From these sociological/structural objections, weaker and stronger conclusions have been
drawn. The weaker conclusion is that, given X, individuals do make X‐decisions or X‐choices,
which do make a causal difference. However, they are less decisive than they seem to be. They
make less of a difference than they seem to from a non‐sociological and non‐historical perspec-
tive. The individual decision‐maker isn't sovereign; her choices aren't free; she's constrained,
conditioned, influenced, and shaped by social forces and structures; she's unaware of her
choices' causes or drivers. The stronger conclusion is full‐fledged anti‐decisionism:
decision/choice concepts shouldn't be applied to X. This makes no sense. It's not an adequate
way of understanding and representing X at all.
Both weak and strong conclusions have moral implications. Because ought implies can,
social forces and structures make a moral difference, too. Reason may or may not be
universal, but social forces and structures are definitely not. Moral decisionism is blind to both
this empirical fact and its moral implications. Or so its sociological/structural discontents
claim.
ABEND 11

5 | CONF UC IAN/DAOIST CONC ER NS

In his book, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, Fingarette writes:

Confucius in his teachings in the Analects does not elaborate on the language of
choice or responsibility. He occasionally uses terms roughly akin to these. But they
are not developed or elaborated in the ways so characteristic of their central import
in Western philosophical and religious understanding of man. To be specific,
Confucius does not elaborate the language of choice and responsibility as these are
intimately intertwined with the idea of the ontologically ultimate power of the
individual to select from genuine alternatives to create his own spiritual destiny …9

Fingarette finds this surprising, given the importance of “Tao”—a path, road, “the Way”—
and “the metaphor of traveling the road.” For “the derivative image of the crossroads [is] an
obvious elaboration of Tao imagery to us. Yet this image, so perfectly suited, so plainly available
for use as a metaphor for choice, is never used in the Analects” (Fingarette, 1972, pp. 19–20).
Surprisingly, it's “a way without a crossroads.” Genuineness, reality, and appearance are vital
components of this argument. It might seem to you that you can decide to go for either A or
B; it might seem to you that they are real options for you. But in fact “there is no genuine option:
either one follows the Way or one fails. To take any other ‘route’ than the Way is not a genuine
road but a failure through weakness to follow the route. Neither the doctrine nor the imagery
allows for choice, if we mean by choice a selection, by virtue of the agent's powers, of one out
of several equally real options” (Fingarette, 1972, p. 21).
Therefore, you're sometimes mistaken, “deluded,” or “in error” about the nature of reality.
Your job isn't to make a choice between two or more options, but to understand your situation.
If things go well, you'll realize that you were wrong; you had a “defect of knowledge.” As
Graham (1989, p. 28) puts it, “[t] he overriding imperative is to learn and arrive at knowledge;
once you know, orientation towards action may be left to take care of itself as confused inclina-
tions sort themselves out … [T] he crux of the matter is which way you tend in full knowledge
…” Confucius, Murdoch, and Buddhist ethics come together. Once you see, understand, or know
how things really are, once you free yourself from illusion, the problem of moral choice
dissolves. How to attain this higher perceptual or epistemic level? You have to be in the right
place, stand in the right position, and have the right perspective. In addition, you have to have
the right equipment and be in the right state.
In sum, Fingarette (1972, pp. 22‐24) argues that “the task is posed in terms of knowledge
rather than choice”: “Any task that is as conceivable as that of choosing can also be formulated,
instead, in terms of the Confucian task. This is the task of objectively classifying the prima facie
alternative paths within the order of li [ritual, rites], of discovering which is the true Path and of
detecting which is only an apparent path, perhaps a clearing in the brush leading nowhere
except into brambles.” Confucius might be more of a non‐decisionist than an explicit
anti‐decisionist; Fingarette supplies the anti‐decisionist arguments that support Confucius'
non‐decisionism.
Confucius' critics might retort that this clearing in the brush is a real path. It's a real bad
path that you shouldn't choose. But you do have to make a choice. Playwrights, novelists, jour-
nalists, historians, and ethnographers tell us of people who had no choice, had no alternative,
had to do what they did, or must do what they do. Like Luther, they report they couldn't do oth-
erwise. Or they couldn't see any conceivable options or even any other options at all. “I had no
12 ABEND

choice but to run into the burning house to rescue my toddler!” “I have no choice but to love
whom I love: my partner, children, parents, and God!” These first‐person accounts resonate
with the Confucian picture. But critics reply that, if meant literally, they are false or illusory.
In reality, the agent did have a choice. She didn't have to do what she did. Rather, she con-
sciously or unconsciously decided that that was the best thing to do. The other options seemed
to her so bad that she didn't want to call them “options”: not enter the burning house, love that
other man, or not love his daughter or his God. In which case “I had no choice” becomes innoc-
uous metaphorical talk: it's an elliptical way of saying “there was no other good option.”
Alternatively, perhaps the agent didn't realize there were other options she could have cho-
sen. Perhaps she wasn't paying attention and didn't notice that there were other paths or other
items on the menu. Perhaps these other paths were hidden and it would have taken much work
and intelligence to find them. Perhaps paying so much attention to her smartphone and
Facebook “friends” caused her to fail to see that crossroads altogether (luckily, she didn't get
hit by a car). But the critics will stick to their guns. The agent did have a choice—even if she
didn't realize it. She could have done otherwise, she could have chosen a different path or door,
she could have turned right, she could have ordered a different appetizer—even if she missed
these things and was truly unaware of them.
Fingarette underscores another source of Confucian discontent with decisionism: “li” and
the proper conduct of ceremonies, rites, and rituals. In a sacred ceremony

all that is needed—quite literally—is an initial ritual gesture in the proper ceremonial
context; from there onward everything “happens.” What action did Shun (the
Sage‐ruler) take? “He merely placed himself gravely and reverently with his face due
south; that was all” (15:4). […] It is important that we do not think of this
effortlessness as “mechanical” or “automatic.” If it is so, then, as Confucius
repeatedly indicates, the ceremony is dead, sterile, empty; there is no spirit in it. The
truly ceremonial “takes place”; there is a kind of spontaneity. It happens “of itself.”
(Fingarette, 1972, p. 8)

The ceremony “happens ‘of itself’.” People do A with ease, without thinking about it, spon-
taneously, and effortlessly. It'd be odd to say that people chose to do A, let alone that they chose
to act spontaneously and effortlessly. Choosing to act spontaneously and effortlessly doesn't
seem spontaneous and effortless. It's less spontaneous and effortless than just doing A. Confu-
cius' point isn't only about sacred ceremonies, but can be extended to everyday life: “I see you
on the street; I smile, walk toward you, put out my hand to shake yours. […] We shake our
hands—not by my pulling your hand up and down or your pulling mine but by spontaneous
and perfect cooperative action. Normally we do not notice the subtlety and amazing complexity
of this coordinated ‘ritual’ act” (Fingarette, 1972, p. 9).
Which brings us to the concept of wu‐wei in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, literally “non‐
doing,” but also rendered as “effortless action.” According to Slingerland (2003, p. 7), it
“describes a state of personal harmony in which actions flow freely and instantly from one's
spontaneous inclinations—without the need for extended deliberation or inner struggle—and
yet nonetheless accord perfectly with the dictates of the situation at hand, display an almost
supernatural efficacy, and (in the Confucian context at least) harmonize with the demands of
conventional morality.” In other words, “acting effortlessly and spontaneously in perfect
harmony with a normative standard and thereby acquiring an almost magical efficaciousness
in moving through the world and attracting people to oneself” (Slingerland, 2000, p. 296). Thus,
ABEND 13

as Ivanhoe (2007, p. 284) suggests, “[n] ature is the ultimate paradigm for wuwei behavior.
Rivers flow, winds blow, and the seasons revolve spontaneously and without ulterior motives.”
It seems to follow that these actions aren't the product of decisions or choices. Isn't that implied
by “non‐doing”? Not so fast. For one, it depends on the meaning of “decision” and “choice,” and
how they relate to agency, particularly effortless, spontaneous, and unselfconscious agency. Plus,
empirical differences can matter. People may make choices only in certain kinds of situations
(Slingerland, 2000, p. 300). People's actions may be sometimes effortless, sometimes effortful—
even Cook Ding's actions, a prototype of unselfconscious skilled performance in the Zhuangzi.
Interpretative disagreements about it aside, the concept of wu‐wei points to an action
domain where decisions/choices play a marginal role, or maybe no role at all (Bruya, 2010;
Fraser, 2007, pp. 99–100; Ivanhoe, 2007; Knightly, 2013; Slingerland, 2014). Fast‐forward more
than two millennia and Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow points in the same direction. The
flow experience involves “intense and focused concentration on the present moment”; “loss of
reflective self‐consciousness”; and “distortion of temporal experience (typically, a sense that
time has passed faster than normal)” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi,
2009, pp. 195–196). Absorption is total, performance is automatic, no decision‐making is
experienced (Brownstein, 2014; Finnigan & Tanaka, 2010; but see Montero, 2015).
That's only the tip of the iceberg. A variety of philosophical and sociological traditions have
offered a variety of related ideas: know‐how, tacit knowledge, practical knowledge, practical
sense, kinesthetic understanding, embodied agency, embodied skill, skillful coping, phronēsis,
hexis, habitus, and habit (Camic, 1986). Here authors as diverse as Aristotle (Finnigan, 2015),
Mauss (1934), Bourdieu, Joas (1992), Glaeser (2011), Varela (1999), Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty,
Dreyfus (2014), and Dewey (1922) are on the same page. None of these traditions is too
impressed by decisionism. They don't attend to people qua decision‐makers, who consider their
options and end up going for one of them—except as exceptions to the rule. Their work is either
non‐decisionist or both non‐decisionist and explicitly anti‐decisionist. Their arguments are both
about human action in general and the special case of moral action. A special special case. Just
like sociological/structural and Confucian/Daoist arguments are both about decisionism in
general and the special case of moral decisionism. A special special case.

6 | S O C I O LO G Y O N DE C I S IO N IS M

That's some of moral decisionism's discontents: Murdochian, sociological/structural, and

Confucian/Daoist. That's how they de‐emphasize, or do away with, moral decisions and choices.
That's their alternative moral understandings and representations. My sociological approach
doesn't tell you if their arguments are any good. It doesn't take sides in disagreements about
decision/choice concepts' application and function. Instead, sociology asks what explicit
anti‐decisionism and decisionism are like, what their social lives are like, how they show up
in various social worlds, and what work they do.
To be more specific:

1. How is explicit anti‐decisionism (and decisionism) advanced and put to use? What tools do
explicit anti‐decisionists (and decisionists) employ, and where do these come from? Do they
employ thought experiments, metaphors, analogies, formal logic, scientific methods, art, or
poetry? What philosophical arguments, social science theories, religious ideas, and empiri-
cal examples do they draw on? What do they assume or presuppose?
14 ABEND

2. What organizations, groups, and people advance explicit anti‐decisionist (and decisionist)
views and ideas? How, where, when, why, what for, with what support, and with what
effects? How do they respond to each other?
3. How do conflicts between decisionists and anti‐decisionists begin, unfold, and end? Why do
they end the way they end? What's their impact on academic communities, cultural under-
standings, and legal and political practices (if any)?
4. How is explicit decisionism (and anti‐decisionism) recruited to help effect (or avert) social,
political, and legal change? How is explicit decisionism (and anti‐decisionism) recruited to
support political positions? You should (or shouldn't) be able to choose your career, hus-
band, country of residence, child's school, and what you eat, drink, smoke, read, and watch.
You can (or can't) decide to overcome your addiction, control (the expression of) your genes,
and become rich and successful (Fridman, 2016). You can (or can't) choose your sexual
orientation, gender, religion, ethnicity, and race (Brubaker, 2016).
5. How and why do the plausibility and persuasiveness of decisionism (and anti‐decisionism)
vary across time and place?

While this paper focuses on (1), it invites research on (2), (3), (4), and (5), as well as compar-
ative and historical inquiries. Where and when have Murdochian, sociological/structural, and
Confucian/Daoist concerns been influential? Why? What academic communities and organiza-
tions are open to such objections to moral decisionism? Ceteris paribus, are sociologists, histo-
rians, anthropologists, and theologians more likely to accept them than philosophers,
psychologists, computer scientists, and economists? The issue isn't only fit with scholars'
truth‐claims, beliefs, and intuitions, but also practical fit with paradigms' epistemological
assumptions, methodological tools, and everyday research practices. Besides the specificities
of disciplinary communities and paradigms, cultural and organizational factors can make it
more likely that anti‐decisionist arguments come across as plausible, forceful, ring true, and
carry the day. Ceteris paribus, are Chinese, Indian, and Uruguayan scholars and organizations
more likely to accept them than their U.S., British, and German counterparts?
Conversely, where's moral decisionism hegemonic? Where are Murdochian,
sociological/structural, and Confucian/Daoist reasons marginal, either because they aren't
widely known, or because they seem outlandish or bizarre? (“‘The Way’—come on! What does
that even mean?”) Ceteris paribus, are contemporary philosophers and scientists less likely to
see their point than their antecessors? If so, what accounts for this change over time? (“Science
and Murdoch's metaphysics are irreconcilable, and of course I'll side with science!”) If you're
into macro‐social science, ask what social orders and modes of production increase the odds
of decisionist understandings' succeeding, becoming widespread, and controlling key educa-
tional and cultural institutions. If you're into micro‐social science, ask what interactions and sit-
uations increase the odds of people's seeing things through decisionist prisms, giving decisionist
accounts, using decisionist tools, and expressing explicit decisionist views.
Moreover, sociologists expect the extension or reference of “decision,” “choice,” “decision‐
making,” and “decision‐maker” to vary. They expect variation across contexts, organizations,
fields, disciplines, and paradigms. There might be differences between neuroscience, primatol-
ogy, artificial intelligence, political science, and psychoanalysis. Or between U.S. and French
philosophy. Or between 19th‐century German and Uruguayan history. (Note: translation prob-
lems may—or must—arise.) Differences and conflicts. Sociologists expect social conflicts, not
merely semantic ones, in both the academy and the public sphere. What words or concepts pick
out can be socially consequential and contentious (Bourdieu, 2001). Multiple meanings and uses
ABEND 15

aren't the result of unequally distributed English proficiency, but of diverging factual beliefs,
moral convictions, and political interests: think of “democracy,” “terrorism,” “race,” “diversity,”
“quackery,” “marriage,” “harassment,” or “torture” (Ludlow, 2014). Which polysemy and
contentiousness sociologists exploit: they investigate how decision/choice concepts are
dissimilarly used; what's used in their stead; and how disputes about adequacy and inadequacy
play out.
Suppose you do something at gunpoint. This isn't a free choice. Is it still a genuine or real
choice? Does the concept of choice apply at all? That's controversial. It's also controversial
what's for an action to be forced, coerced, compelled, or under duress. Scholars disagree as to
what outcomes—other than getting killed—are so undesirable that you aren't genuinely choos-
ing anymore, so decision/choice concepts would misrepresent the situation. Equally knotty is
the distinction between persuasion/influence and brainwashing/indoctrination, and whether
the latter is incompatible with decision/choice.
Suppose a person reports no conscious awareness of having made a decision. Scholars dis-
agree as to whether she can be described as having decided to turn the doorknob, leap onto
the subway tracks to save a stranger, play a Lydian augmented scale at the beginning of her
solo, or tap her foot to the music (Mencius, 2009, p. 84). They disagree as to what psychiatric
conditions entail losing the ability to make choices—not just good choices or sane choices (ruled
out ex hypothesi), but any choices at all. Equally knotty is whether luck and chance are incom-
patible with decision/choice. All of these disputes are sociologists' objects of inquiry.
Conflicts between decisionism and its discontents are partly about what counts as a decision
or choice. But what's a non‐decision or non‐choice? What else is there for bodily movements to
be understood and represented as? Disagreements about these questions can be sociologically
exploited as well. Philosophy professor Abreu identifies four varieties of non‐decision: things
that happen to you, things that you find yourself doing, habits, and instincts. Philosophy
professor Fucile isn't convinced. He doesn't see how it can ever be the case that something
happens to you or you find yourself doing it. He sees habit as a kind of decision‐making: it
consists in unconscious, automatic decisions to continue to perform actions that have always
been performed in the past by yourself, your family, or your community. According to Fucile,
Abreu is unable to distinguish habits from involuntary bodily functions (digestion, salivation,
respiration), twitches, and reflexes. You can decide to stop doing what you always do and your
parents used to always do. Not so with knee jerks, when a physician taps your patellar ligament.
Whatever the philosophical value of Abreu's and Fucile's arguments, they are valuable
evidence for the sociology of decisionism.

7 | WHERE TO GO F ROM HERE

I've looked at scholars and thinkers who are dissatisfied with decisionism—on Murdochian,
sociological/structural, or Confucian/Daoist grounds. Scholars and thinkers are part of the social
world. But a peculiar part. The sociology of decisionism has broader empirical horizons, e.g.,
public policy, politics, law, business, education, mental health, journalism, and everyday life.
Table 1 summarizes four types of sociology‐of‐decisionism project. Project A1 examines to
what extent people, groups, and organizations are decisionists or non‐decisionists about X.
Differently put, whether concepts of decision, choice, decision‐making, and decision‐maker
are prominent in their ordinary practices, tools, technologies, and discourses; whether these
concepts help them apprehend, manipulate, and cope with social reality; whether these
 16

TABLE 1 Sociology of Decisionism

Project Research/data about Basic questions Specific questions Main cleavage

Project A1 Any kind of social actor, people, ‐ How they use decision/choice concepts ‐ How often, by whom, when, where, Decisionism v. non‐decisionism
groups, organizations, fields ‐ How these concepts show up in societies' how, what for they are used
discourses, practices, tools, and technologies ‐ Consequences, reception, reactions,
plausibility, persuasiveness
Project A2 Special case: scholars, thinkers, ‐ How they use decision/choice concepts ‐ How often, by whom, when, where, Decisionism v. non‐decisionism
the academy, intellectuals ‐ How these concepts show up in specialized how, what for they are used
discourses, practices, tools, and technologies ‐ Consequences, reception, reactions,
plausibility, persuasiveness
Project B1 Any kind of social actor, people, How they say decision/choice concepts should ‐ How often, by whom, when, where, Explicit decisionism v. explicit
groups, organizations, fields and shouldn't be used how, what for they should be used anti‐decisionism
‐ Consequences, reception, reactions,
plausibility, persuasiveness
Project B2 Special case: scholars, thinkers, How they say decision/choice concepts should ‐ How often, by whom, when, where, Explicit decisionism v. explicit
the academy, intellectuals and shouldn't be used how, what for they should be used anti‐decisionism
‐ Consequences, reception, reactions,
plausibility, persuasiveness
ABEND
ABEND 17

concepts help them speak, communicate, and act in the social world. Project B1 examines to
what extent people, groups, and organizations are explicit decisionists or anti‐decisionists about
X, or, perhaps more often, don't express any normative views at all. Both projects include but
aren't limited to moral phenomena. Their data aren't scholarly texts, but websites, blogs,
Facebook, newspapers, literature, film, theater, and ethnographic observation at parks, bars,
street corners, offices, schools, hospitals, or courtrooms. Both are likely to find variations across
time and place, and across individuals, organizations, issues, and phenomena.
For instance, in some places (societies, fields, groups), non‐human animals, plants, and
microbes are taken to make choices. Human animals are constantly making decisions: scratch
your arm (or not), take a deep breath (or not), take a sip of coffee (or not). Decision‐makers
may be drunk, high on psilocybin mushrooms, delirious, or hypnotized. They may be
impulse‐control disorder (ICB) patients or drug addicts, who are taken to “voluntarily choose
to use drugs in a self‐destructive manner” (Heyman, 2009, p. 114). That's a natural way of
understanding and representing things that move about (or stay put) there. In other places (soci-
eties, fields, groups), even the weather and natural disasters are the product of decisions—the
decision‐maker being God, the gods, destiny, or fate. However, in yet other places (societies,
fields, groups), decisionism isn't common. Few things humans do—never mind microbes and
plants—are described as having been decided or chosen. Decision/choice concepts do little work
in their culture, science, politics, and law.
A sociological study may have both A1 and B1 dimensions, since these can coexist and
interact. Take an illustration that doesn't concern morality, but art. Antonio is an art journalist.
He often describes musicians, composers, writers, painters, film and theater directors, and
actors as decision‐makers. When Felisberto Hernández sat at his desk to write a new piece,
he made great literary decisions: word or sentence choices. When Hugo Fattoruso sits at his
piano to write a new piece, he makes great musical decisions: note or instrumentation choices.
When Fattoruso sits at his piano to improvise, he makes great musical decisions, too. Antonio is
a decisionist about literary and musical creation and jazz improvisation. In his long career, he's
talked about many artists' decisions and choices. He′s talked about good, bad, dull, vulgar, silly,
crazy, innovative, daring, and brilliant artistic decisions and choices. Using these concepts
doesn't mean reflecting on them and their right use. Why would he? He′s a journalist, not a
philosopher.
Till last month. Last month Antonio had a thought‐provoking conversation about
Fattoruso's recent shows. In his friend Lara's opinion, it's unhelpful to describe Fattoruso as
a terrific musical decision‐maker. It's more than unhelpful: it's ridiculous. It's more than ridic-
ulous: it's false. An animated debate ensued. Antonio became an explicit decisionist, whereas
Lara argued for anti‐decisionism. Should you speak of Fattoruso's and Hernández's decision‐
making? If not, what's the best way to understand and represent their doings? In the wake
of this conversation, Antonio gave more thought to decision/choice concepts than he'd ever
had. As it turns out, he ended up changing his mind a bit. His journalistic practices ended
up changing a bit. In his latest columns, he became less decisionist about artistic performance
and creation.
Project A2 and Project B2 are about the special case of scholars and thinkers: their work,
their accounts of reality, and their methodological tools (this paper falls under B2). There are
multiple connections between A1 and A2, and between B1 and B2, as scholars and thinkers
aren't self‐standing entities. They're embedded in social structures and institutions. They shape
and are shaped by social practices, cultural understandings, and commonsense. For example,
sociological research may look at the societal reception and uses of scholars' explicit
18 ABEND

decisionism and anti‐decisionism, i.e., B2 issues' becoming B1 issues. Sometimes people and
organizations are compelled to explain and justify their behavior. Their immoral or morally
inadequate action. Or their immoral or morally inadequate inaction. Put yourself in their
shoes. A friend, family member, spouse, psychotherapist, psychiatrist, social worker, priest,
boss, teacher, dean, journalist, investigative committee, or judge wants or needs to know. For
practical or legal reasons, you can't duck their demand. Why did you decide to do that? Why
did you make such a bad choice?
You think hard about what transpired and you say that you didn't make any choice, but
found yourself doing what you did, or found yourself not doing anything. Or you say that it just
happened. Or you say that you had no choice; you could see no other option. And you go on to
support your account with Murdochian, sociological/structural, and Confucian/Daoist reasons.
You claim that it doesn't make sense to speak of decision‐making in the present case. In brief,
you offer a non‐decisionist understanding and representation of (a segment of) your life and an
explicit anti‐decisionist argument for it.
If you are in the U.S. in 2017, this is unlikely to fly. Regardless of how scholars feel about
moral non‐decisionism and anti‐decisionism, most people and organizations will turn down
your account. They won't accept that you had no choice or that you could see no other option.
They'll deny that that's a correct understanding and representation of your bodily movements
(or lack thereof). Sociological/structural claims will seem mere excuses or unjustified post hoc
justifications, much like poor people blame society for their poverty, instead of blaming them-
selves and their defective work ethic. Confucian/Daoist claims will seem implausible, strange,
or crazy. Your boss, community, priest, or the media won't cut you any slack. Your friend,
spouse, or teacher won't empathize and forgive you.
If your action wasn't only immoral but also illegal, your non‐decisionism and anti‐
decisionism won't be useful in court, since they're at odds with prevalent conceptions of agency,
intention, responsibility, and culpability. These are building blocks of the legal system. Judges
and juries won't be impressed by your unconventional understanding of what you did—except,
perhaps, if you're pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. In this regard, controversies about
decisionism reproduce familiar controversies about free will and responsibility. You chose A
over B; you decided to go for A rather than B; you opted or plumped for A. But you could have
chosen B: you could have done otherwise. So, it's your fault.
Imagine now this wrinkle to the story. What if your action wasn't immoral, but immensely
altruistic or heroic? You'd get praised by politicians, civil society organizations, and the media.
You'd get ethics awards and medals. You'd be lauded for your selfless, courageous, and generous
choices; your decision to lead an other‐regarding life; or your decision to jump into the ocean to
rescue a drowning child. If at this point you put forward non‐decisionist accounts and anti‐
decisionists arguments about your own behavior, that won't go down well with your fans. In
fact, they'll brush it off as yet further evidence of your selflessness: you're so selfless that you
won't take credit for it.
Whether your action was moral or immoral, this is, I think, what would happen in the U.S.
today. But not elsewhere. That's why sociologists raise comparative and historical questions
about explicit moral anti‐decisionism, be it Murdochian, sociological/structural,
Confucian/Daoist, or something else. Some people, groups, organizations, and fields might be
more receptive to it. In some social and historical contexts, explicit anti‐decisionism might come
across as more plausible than decisionism. Indeed, anti‐decisionism might be considered not
just plausible, but true, or evidently true. In these places, it's decisionism about X what will
seem strange or crazy; it's explicit decisionism about X what won't fly.
ABEND 19

8 | CONCLUSION

Decisionists about X use concepts of decision, choice, decision‐making, and decision‐maker to

understand and represent X. This X may or may not have to do with morality. It might be a per-
son's pushing a “really fat man” onto the train tracks; having sex with a stranger at a party;
consenting to have sex with a stranger at a party; not putting on a condom; shooting herself
in the temple; or shooting rather than passing the ball to a teammate. This X might be con-
scious, automatic, rational, emotional, biased, fast, slow, free, not free, caused by this, or shaped
by that. Yet, it's in any case a decision or choice. If a person, group, or organization doesn't
understand and represent X using decision/choice concepts, they are non‐decisionists about it.
Decisionism and non‐decisionism are the poles of a continuum—an analytical and methodolog-
ical device. While there can be perfect instantiations of these poles, much of the action is
somewhere in between.
“Save the driver or save the crowd? Scientists wonder how driverless cars will ‘choose’.” This
is the title of a recent Washington Post article, which reports on a study published in Science
about the ethics of autonomous vehicles (Bonnefon, Shariff, & Rahwan, 2016). The newspaper
observes that “[t] hese vehicles are widely expected to become vastly more prominent in trans-
portation systems going forward … in significant part because they will be safer. But how will
they deal with tough ‘moral’ situations, which are likely to arise in rare but nonetheless contro-
versial and high profile cases?” Driverless cars and autonomous weapons might be technologi-
cally novel, but machine ethics is a longstanding problem in robotics and artificial intelligence,
and a longstanding theme in science fiction (Friedman & Kahn, 1992; Waldrop, 1987; Wallach
& Allen, 2009).
Machines are said to have to make moral choices or moral decisions. The challenge is how
they should make them and how to ensure that their choices are and will always be moral. One
thing is what makes these purportedly moral choices moral. Another thing is what makes these
purportedly moral choices choices. Neither of them seems to be clear to the Washington Post:

Rahwan [one of the authors of the study] explains that with an accident involving a
driverless car, it will likely be possible to reconstruct what information the vehicle
had and how it “chose” to do whatever led to the accident. […] Meanwhile, yet
another survey conducted for the study found that people were particularly
uncomfortable with the idea of the government mandating or legislating that
autonomous vehicles make utilitarian “choices” in key instances … Strikingly, in one
survey question, 59 percent of respondents suggested they were likely to buy an
autonomous vehicle if there was no government regulation of its moral “choices” …
[…] Granted, it is far from clear whether engineers who design self‐driving cars will
actually be giving them any explicit instructions on choices about dilemmas like
these—rather, the vehicles' situational “choices” might emerge from the combination
of other different aspects of its complex programming, said Rahwan. (Mooney, 2016)

This article doesn't speak of driverless cars' choices, but of their “choices” and how they will
“choose”—even in its very title. Further, it doesn't speak of driverless cars' dealing with moral
situations, but of their dealing with “moral” situations.
Scare quotes bespeak ambivalence. Beware: the words “choice” and “moral” aren't being
used in the standard way. A machine doesn't make choices in the same sense that a person
makes choices. A machine's moral situations aren't moral in the same sense that a person's
20 ABEND

are. By contrast, the New York Times, which also reported on Bonnefon et al.’s study, didn't
express that sort of ambivalence: “[t] he researchers found that respondents generally thought
self‐driving cars should be programmed to make decisions for the greatest good.” However, if
“its [an autonomous vehicle's] machine brain has to choose between slamming into a wall or
running someone over, well, sorry, pedestrian.” Thus, “[t] he issue of robotic morality has
become a serious question for researchers working on autonomous vehicles who must, in
essence, program moral decisions into a machine” (Markoff, 2016). There are no scare quotes
in this New York Times article; just moral decisions, machines making choices, drones deciding
to kill. This is unlike the Washington Post article, but like the Science article that the two news-
papers were discussing.
The New York Times provided a moral decisionist representation of driverless cars, whereas
the Washington Post provided neither a decisionist nor a non‐decisionist one. Rather, the
Washington Post was ambivalent about decisionism in this context. Perhaps it was to some
extent non‐decisionist about it, or something along these lines. So, a first sociological question
is what kind of continuum this is; what this continuous variable is showing differences in. It
might be the degree to which people and organizations are convinced that driverless cars make
choices—as measured inter alia by the strength or weakness of their claims, one of whose indi-
cators is scare quotes (Adler & Tso, 1974; Hodge, 2009, p. 630; Kelly, 1992). Or it might be the
relative frequency with which people and organizations represent driverless cars as making
choices—vis‐à‐vis other ways of representing a car's having autonomously swerved into a pedes-
trian. Or the proportion of people or organizations in a population that represent driverless cars
as making choices. Or both proportion and frequency. Or a more complex property.
That's about decisionism and non‐decisionism. A second sociological question is about
explicit decisionism and anti‐decisionism. A newspaper article isn't the place to make claims
about the proper application of decision/choice concepts, or to explicitly argue for or against
moral decisionism. But you—being a curious and enterprising sociologist—can interview the
New York Times and Washington Post journalists who wrote these pieces. Ask them what differ-
ences there are between humans' and robots' decision‐making, and if non‐human animals and
plants can be decision‐makers, too. Run Murdochian, sociological/structural, and
Confucian/Daoist arguments by them. Ask them why in their articles they did or didn't use
scare quotes around “choice” and “moral.” Or why in their articles they did or didn't choose
to use scare quotes around “choice” and “moral.”
This isn't a great sample, but you can collect more data for your research project. Conduct
additional interviews about machines' and algorithms' choices, whether they admit of
decision/choice concepts, and whether they admit of moral concepts. Conduct relevant experi-
mental studies. Analyze a large corpus of newspaper articles, websites, and blogs about machine
ethics. Alternatively, you—being a curious, enterprising, and sensible sociologist—may decide
that none of this makes any sense and choose to do research about another topic altogether.

A C K N O WL E D G M E N T S
Thanks to JTSB editor Douglas Porpora and the anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Alice
Crary, Andreas Pettenkofer, Bettina Hollstein, Caitlin Petre, Gotlind Ulshöfer, Nicholas Mark,
Nicholas Wilson, Patrick Schenk, Sonia Prelat, Sophia Rosenfeld, Stefan Bargheer, Steven
Lukes, Max‐Weber‐Kolleg, Lichtenberg‐Kolleg, Universität Luzern, and New York University.
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, financial holdings, implicit
ABEND 21

biases, or unconscious thought processes that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of
his authorial choices.

E N D N O T ES
1
http://livestream.com/jazz/neajazzmasters14, http://www.thenotesyoudontplay.com/nea‐jazz‐masters‐interview‐with‐keith‐
jarrett/
2
Hereafter “decision/choice concepts” refers to decision, choice, decision‐maker, and decision‐making. While “decision” and
“choice” aren't synonymous, for present purposes they can be treated together.
3
Even scholars who worry about choice and its expansion say nice things about it. Schwartz (2004, p. 3): “There is no denying
that choice improves the quality of our lives. It enables us to control our destinies and to come close to getting exactly what we
want out of any situation. Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well‐being. Healthy people
want and need to direct their own lives. On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that
more choice is better.” Greenfield (2011, p. 1): “of course… freedom and individual decision making need to be protected,
applauded, and engendered.” Ben‐Porath (2010, p. 144): “structured paternalism” should “allow for choice to fulfill its
promise.”
4
These definitions are stipulative. They aren't related to “decisionism” in political theory, international relations, and jurispru-
dence (Guilhot, 2011; Honig, 2007; Kalyvas, 2004; Rossello, 2017; Shklar, 1964; Wolin, 1986), whose locus classicus is Schmitt
(2004, p. 62, Schmitt, 2005): “The sovereign decision is the absolute beginning, and the beginning… is nothing but sovereign
decision. The sovereign decision springs from the normative nothing and a concrete disorder” (cf. Hirst, 1999).
5
“Edward is the driver of a trolley, whose brakes have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people… The track has a
spur leading off to the right, and Edward can turn the trolley onto it. Unfortunately there is one person on the right‐hand
track. Edward can turn the trolley, killing the one; or he can refrain from turning the trolley, killing the five” (Thomson,
1976:206). What's the morally right decision?
6
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing up this point.
7
“We evaluate not only by intentions, decisions, choices…, but also, and largely, by the constant quiet work of attention and
imagination. The image here is not so much that of a body moving… but rather of a sort of seeping of colour, or the setting
up of a magnetic field. When moments of decision arrive we see and are attracted by the world we have already (partly) made”
(Murdoch, 1966, p. 49).
8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSNJGymnLG4
9
Confucianism and Daoism encompass many practices, ideas, groups, and texts. This section isn't about Confucian/Daoist dis-
contents, but only certain interpretations of certain Confucian/Daoist ideas. Concerns about Fingarette's interpretation
include Hall and Ames's (1987, pp. 265‐266), Kim's (2013, p. 34), and Roetz's (1993).

ORCID
Gabriel Abend https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0703-8194

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How to cite this article: Abend G. Moral decisionism and its discontents. J Theory Soc
Behav. 2018;1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12191