Various authors have analyzed contemporary god terms. Mary Douglas writes that "Time, money, God and Nature, usually in that order, are universal trump cards plunked down to win an argument."[4] Alain Touraine, arguing that Western societies have progressively rejected many of these trump cards, discusses religious beliefs, laws of the market, and scientific laws as the central "metasocial warrants" of preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial societies.[5] Steven Tipton presents a typology of four styles of ethical argument, each with its own ultimate, unquestionable grounding: the authoritative (obey God's commandments), the consequential (follow careful cost-benefit calculations), the regular (pay attention to proper rules and procedures), and the expressive (express your inner goodness).[6]

Most god terms deployed in policy debates can be characterized as either moralist or instrumental. Economic laws (Douglas's time and money, Touraine's market laws, and Tipton's costs and benefits) are treated rhetorically by politicians, economists, and others as though they had the force of natural laws (as do Douglas's nature and Touraine's scientific laws), which are the basis for instrumental arguments. God, acknowledged by all three as a key source of rhetoric, is the most common rationale of moralist arguments.

Tipton's regular and expressive styles cannot be reduced to moralist or instrumental But the expressive is rare in public debate, for self-expression provides little leverage for asking others to act in a certain way. Even though Philip Rieff argues that "in the era of psychological man, the self is the only reputable and effective god-term," I find little evidence of this in political debates.[7] Procedural rhetoric--appeals to democracy, due process, the will of the people--is more common, yet it often leads back to the question of the basis and origin of the rules themselves (and often slips into moralist rhetoric). It most often suggests a reconsideration of a policy, which then takes place on either instrumental or moralist grounds.

Moralist and instrumental arguments are almost universal in public political debate. Each has its characteristic symbolic references, and each tries to direct policy by referring to rules drawn from outside the social world. As a result both political styles can short-circuit genuine communication and debate over the proper values and direction for society. That is sometimes the goal of these rhetorics: to persuade without necessarily educating, to compel assent without increasing understanding. Moralist rhetoric is not the same as direct discussion of morality, since the former attempts to foreclose the latter.

Policy arguments normally contain claims about how the world works, prescriptions for solving a recognized problem, and some way of linking the two. All three elements exist in both explicit and implicit forms. First, the explicit elements. Instrumental arguments assume that there are precise and objective tools which can lead to "correct" policy suggestions when used by skilled experts. Algorithms exist that promise to lead to correct decisions: economists have cost-benefits analyses and models of market prices, engineers use formulas to derive the most efficient technologies and designs, game theorists can calculate the "right" moves in international relations. In contrast, the moralist political style presents moral rules which demand that certain policies be proscribed because they are wrong and others be followed because they are right. Moral criteria usually lead to less elaborate proposals than instrumental criteria, but they can lead to very clear ones. Movements against abortion, nuclear energy, or vivisection often present simple and unambiguous proposals for public policies.[8]

In addition to these explicit tools and principles, moralist and instrumental arguments have several facets that usually remain implicit: images and beliefs about how the world works; normative claims that their tools should be used in policy-making; and rhetorical styles for persuading (both oneself and others). Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, works partly by linking specific policy issues to underlying patterns drawn from history and nature: biblical narratives, images of the human body, natural laws like the survival of the fittest, cycles of waxing and waning.[9] It is, after all, through exemplars like these that people understand and think. Various algorithms, metaphors, and syllogisms are used in constructing the linkages. Moralist styles make the link between underlying beliefs and policy proposals more explicit and direct than instrumental styles (whose practitioners often forget their own underlying worldviews), but they both contain or imply all the above elements.

An argument from either group may emphasize either the unspoken rhetorical images or the precise assumptions or principles. But through the process Aristotle called "enthymene," one part of the argument implies and gains force from the other elements. If I speak of "limits to growth," I imply that there are economic and scientific facts behind what I say; if I speak of "evil forces," I imply that there are specific moral rules being broken. The implicit and explicit segments are inextricably linked. By filling in the missing, but implied, part of the argument for themselves, audiences come to adopt it as their own. Political arguments persuade by means of what they connote as well as what they say explicitly.

Since Socrates first attacked the Sophists, we have seen two sides of rhetoric: on the one hand a powerful, unavoidable, even beautiful aspect of an argument that appeals to reason; on the other a trick that falsely appeals to passions and emotions. The difference rests on whether the speaker and audience hold the same values and beliefs. When they do, rhetoric can be a form of education, helping people see the implications of their own values and goals. But when the speaker (or writer) and her audience disagree, rhetoric can be used cynically or strategically to sweep the audience up in the emotion of the moment to draw a conclusion they might reject under careful consideration. Rhetoric grounded in god terms necessarily engages in a similar form of trickery, by making people feel the force of an argument rather than helping them understand it. Both moralist and instrumental rhetorics imply that humans have (or should have) limited discretion in their policy decisions. They should obey certain rules, not debate them. These rhetorical references are shorthand suggestions for making decisions without having to consider issues in all their complexity.

Moralist and instrumental styles both claim that there are fundamental laws of nature that should not or cannot be broken: the laws of the market, of physics, of God, or of nature's equilibrium. These laws are said to transcend the individuals who propound them.[11] But the two styles differ in he kinds of laws they refer to as well as the consequences they claim will result from transgression. Moral laws can be broken, and the resulting catastrophe may be a long time coming. But many instrumental laws cannot really be broken at all: we can try to break the laws of nature, but usually we fail at what we are attempting to do. Or we immediately see effects elsewhere, as in the case of an economic system where policies to lower unemployment are said to increase inflation. While the moralist style outlines right and wrong conduct, the instrumental style attempts to delineate possible and impossible goals and activities.[12] In Weberian terms, the moralist style sees certain policies as wrong in and of themselves (the ethic of ultimate ends), while the instrumental style traces all the ramifications and weighs all the consequences of each policy, rejecting none from the start (the ethic of responsibility).

Other kinds of policy arguments are possible, if less compelling as rhetoric. Instrumental and moralist styles wish to direct policy by reference to something outside society, in contrast to purely social arguments that might refer to group interests and power, or perhaps to the very nature of speech.[13] Arguments based on the self-interest of a group or social class are especially common. Yet they are most often used to mobilize supportive constituents--already aware of their interests--than to persuade a hitherto neutral audience such as policymakers or the broader public. As rhetoric, self-interested arguments lack the punch of god terms that pretend to be universally binding.

Even these other arguments normally rely on some notion of what is natural (for example, the argument that extreme social inequality is unnatural), since this is rhetorically effective; the moral and instrumental styles are simply more explicit in their reliance.[14] Moralist and instrumental rhetorics both tend to short-circuit debates and reasoning about basic values, since they refer to nonsocial realities they claim are beyond discussion. As a result, practitioners of both are dismissive of other kinds of arguments. Experts often reject arguments which are not precise and calculating as irrational. Moralists often dismiss instrumental arguments as immoral. Both tend to ignore or deride arguments from due process or individual rights.[15]

To understand instrumental rhetorics, let us begin with a case in which two of them were used against each other. This kind of clash is rarely public; more often experts relying on instrumental rhetorics do battle through official reports and bureaucratic meetings. One exception occurred in France in 1974, when economists and engineers (and others) debated the wisdom of a large commitment to nuclear fission, in the wake f OPEC's quadrupling of world oil prices. The choice was primarily between building large numbers of nuclear reactors and encouraging a drop in energy demand (through price increases and conservation programs). French engineers tended to favor the former policy, economists the latter.[16]

In many French government agencies and state enterprises, engineers are in command. Trained at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and members of one of the elite corps, they think in terms of grand, engineered solutions to social problems. Nuclear energy was ideal for their rhetoric, linking the country in a single, all-encompassing electricity grid. As a member of the Corps des Mines told me in 1985, "We are trained to think big; there is no problem which is not amendable to rational thought. Nuclear energy was the most elegant solution imaginable." The Ministry of Industry and the national electric company, both with engineers highly placed in administration, strongly favored a huge and immediate nuclear commitment.

Among the main critics of this commitment were economists. The Ministry of Finance, filled with economists, saw little evidence that nuclear reactors were the most cost-effective investment. A prominent institute for economic studies of energy wrote an extensive report, concluding that the engineers had not made their case. They had ignored several costs of nuclear energy, especially social costs, and overlooked the dampening effect that higher energy prices and a recession would have on energy demand. The Institute argued that the eventual costs of nuclear reactors were uncertain. For example, there was no reason to assume that unit costs would fall as more reactors were built. In an article in Le Monde, the head of the econometrics laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique insisted that the electric company, with a history of sound economic analysis, must surely have done "real" studies that it was not making public; no economic analysis could favor such enormous nuclear expansion.

Engineers persisted with the rhetoric of maintaining supply. Several years later, a spokesperson for the national electric utility explained, "For us, there were few choices: France had no oil or gas, and the coal from its own fields was too expensive and insufficient in quantity. New forms of energy (solar, wind, tidal, etc.) would, then and now, require many years of research and development, with no certainty as to the result."[17] Even the mention of cost was a reference to technical feasibility and efficiency rather than to the play of market forces or consumer demand. Under attack from economists, however, engineers and the politicians who supported them added a related rhetoric of energy independence. Economists replied that diversification of energy supply would assure independence more effectively than a massive nuclear commitment. Increased prices for oil imports could be balanced by other exports, and it was not clear that oil prices would remain high (in fact they did not).

The economists and engineers manipulated, presented, and believed different kinds of information. Engineers accepted level of supply as given, and pursued elegant engineering solutions for providing it. Economists, playing with their supply and demand curves, predicted drops in levels of energy consumption. They also saw that conservation programs could be used to reduce demand even further. Although some engineers were open to conservation (which might involve physical alterations in buildings), most--especially those in top policy-making positions--found conservation a limited, decentralized, and dull solution.

This controversy would not have become public if economists had received a fuller hearing within the state, but the placement of engineers in positions of authority in industrial development prevented this. Although making their statements and opinions public, economists had no need to mobilize a public constituency, so they generally retained their professional language. The antinuclear movement adopted some economic evidence, but its rhetoric remained grounded more in morality and democratic process than in economic arguments. The debate did not last long after policymakers decided in favor of the engineers' nuclear commitment. But it tells us much about instrumental rhetoric.

"Nature cannot be ordered about," Francis Bacon said, "except by obeying her." The key lure of instrumental rhetoric is that it promises control and predictability. Everyone knows that there are constraints on human action, such as market forces or the natural environment or human genes, and everyone knows that there are regularities in these constraints that make them understandable and often controllable. Experts claim to have this knowledge and hence to be able to provide the control. To a large extent they are right: engineers know how to generate electricity from uranium; economists can predict how much demand will fall when prices rise. But the very knowledge that promises control describes the limits of human autonomy. Knowing what we can do involves knowing what we cannot do. We abdicate control over large areas in order to gain it over small. Favorable images of science, progress, control, and methods predispose us to believe the claims to precision that the experts present.

That science and technology must persuade their audiences with literary and rhetorical devices contradicts the popular image of science as cumulatively advancing toward objective truth. But since Thomas Kuhn and others first described the importance of paradigms, we recognize science as full of analogies and rhetorical symbols. One paradigm replaces another because its metaphors are more appealing to young scientists or to funding agencies; scientists use literary devices to persuade colleagues that their claims should be accepted as facts. If scientists sharing a precise language still need rhetoric to persuade each other, they need it far more in presenting technical arguments designed to sway the public or policymakers.

Precise quantification is a widespread and effective rhetorical technique. We tend to have more confidence in numbers carried to three decimal places than in numbers taken to one. We even believe in works that have created their own data through simulations. Donald McCloskey has analyzed the rhetorical style of economics. He describes economists "talking definitely about curves that do not have definite shapes." He lists the many rhetorical devices used in a small passage of Paul Samuelson's (heavily mathematical) classic Foundations of Economic Analysis: The presentation of unnecessary mathematics, appeals to authority, appeals to relaxation of assumptions when mathematics is unavailable, hypothetical toy economies, and verbal metaphors such as transaction "friction," yield "spread," and money "withering away."[18]

Objectivity is a common rhetorical device, powerful precisely because it denies or hides the rhetorical shaping of scientific and technological arguments. Textbooks present facts and findings as though they had no history. Rather than unfolding in a historical narrative, they are ordered logically, with basic axioms and simple findings leading to more complex ones. Problem sets, with known answers, are provided. While the textbooks themselves have little aura, the knowledge they present has a sacred, unquestioned status similar to that of religious texts (whether by St. Paul or Mao).

If the seductiveness of instrumental politics comes from its promise of control, its risk lies in positing natural laws and constraints that may not exist. If precision is a persuasive rhetorical device, experts will tend to be more precise than is justified, and they will "discover" more and more constraints on our actions. In addition, each expert will elaborate on the constraints and possibilities for action within her own purview, accepting as unchangeable givens the constraints in surrounding areas of action. Thus engineers, as we saw, may describe the possibilities for increasing electricity supply, which they can justify with figures on growing demand. But they will not consider possibilities for changing price structures so that demand does not increase. The blindnesses of experts can have devastating costs, as when the International Monetary Fund imposes its fiscal conditions on a debtor country. The natural economic laws it believes are the basis for its demands may be lawlike only in certain political and economic contexts, if then. Because of the risks involved in instrumental politics, the romantic, antimodernist tradition questioning it is almost as old as the instrumental urge itself.

Two kinds of groups using instrumental politics coexist and reinforce each other. Central are the experts, with clear professional training that provides esoteric tools for understanding a certain realm of reality. The fact that a profession shares analytic tools, a language, various assumptions about the world, and a way of defining social problems, if not the solutions themselves, reassures outsiders that the profession has accurate, objective knowledge about its domain. That Italian economists think like Indian economists, and often arrive at similar policy proposals, convinces many people that there are indeed natural economic laws transcending social boundaries--rather than a common style of training. Enormous professional interests, including status, money, and institutional prestige, assure that instrumental rhetorics are continually maintained and defended.[19]

Surrounding each group of professionals are groupies who either believe strongly in what the professionals are doing, or can use what the professionals do for their own ends. Most often they do both. Thus in the Reagan administration many politicians used economists' cost-benefit analyses to justify dropping government programs: sometimes the cost-benefit analysis was used strategically and cynically; at other times the decision-makers seemed genuinely to believe in it.[20] The groupies use the instrumental rhetorical style even though they are not always comfortable with the corresponding tools of analysis. But their rhetoric depends for its force on the fact that the precise tools do exist, that someone knows how to use them.

As the French case demonstrated, there are diverse instrumental rhetorics, which critics blur when they lump them together as "technocracy." Because instrumental rhetoric legitimates itself through complex algorithms and methods that require formal training, different professions use different instrumental arguments. They deal with different parts-of the world, and each sees best the constraints and possibilities for change within its own field. Members of each group propose to control and change what their own tools allow them to understand.

Instrumental policy styles can be precise because they reduce all possible options to a single metric (in order to compare them directly). Economists convert all costs and benefits into money; insurance companies reduce all information to actuarial tables; engineers calculate the technical efficiency of various plans; risk analysts compare technologies by concentrating on estimates of expected fatalities. Because different professions reduce information to different metrics, they often disagree. The reduction of all aspects of reality to a single measure may be the biggest weakness of instrumental politics since reality itself, alas, has many facets.

The various instrumental rhetorics are based on three different kinds of knowledge.[21] Some sciences (physics; chemistry) deal with a small number of forces related in mathematically precise ways; they seek lawlike generalizations that apply universally. Others (geology, biology) pursue more contingent generalizations about complex systems unfolding over time. A third type is the semiotic sciences (the human sciences) that deal with interpreted worlds. Economics falls in these two latter categories. Yet its rhetoric, like other instrumental rhetorics, presents it as a source of universal generalizations and certain relationships. Each instrumental rhetoric, no matter what its knowledge base, presents itself in the heat of debate as having universal truths (god terms) like those attributed to physics.

In summary, instrumental arguments use rhetorical appeals such as: "objective" scientific laws; the promise of control over these forces; precision in that control; the general human progress that results from an increase in control; and the simplicity of decision-making when all options can be reduced to a single metric. Instrumental rhetoric raises the specter of great complexities that only sophisticated methods can comprehend, and it promises to reduce these complexities to a simple, easily grasped decision. It also suggests that we give power to the experts who control these methods.

A clash between two moralist rhetorics shows the dynamics of this style. One of the most visible and shrill controversies of the past twenty years is that over abortion rights, where a "clash of absolutes" pits two moral systems against each other.[22] In its explicit statements as well as implicit connotations, prochoice rhetoric implies the rights of individual women to control their bodies, raising issues of equality and discrimination (against poor women who cannot afford private abortions). Antiabortion rhetoric centers around life, linked first (in the 1960s) to a pronatalist urge toward large families, and later (since the 1970s) to images of motherhood, family, and traditional roles for women.

Beginning in the late 1970s antiabortionists also raised the issue of the rights of fetuses, a starker moral absolute than large families or homemakers' status. They backed their claims with visual images presenting the fetus as a tiny human being, an "unborn baby." The film The Silent Scream portrays an abortion "from the point of view of the unborn child"; it recounts what the fetus is "doing," and insists that the "child definitely feels its sanctuary is being invaded." Antiabortionists distribute lapel pins in the shape of tiny feet, and they insist that humans have fingerprints at ten weeks of age. In slide shows, activists start with images of babies and work backward to embryos, helping the viewer come to see the latter as a human rather than an unrecognizable blob.[23] This new frame, of the rights of the unborn child, was an absolute moral principle that prochoice activists had difficulty countering.

Each side in the debate attempts to deflate the moral claims and principles of the other. Prochoice groups use the frame of women's rights to define the abortion issue as one of control over women, while antiabortionists insist that abortion is merely a convenience for careless women, not an exercising of their rights. Accepting either principle--that the fetus is a child or that the woman has the right to control her body--seems to preclude the other. As Laurence Tribe points out, policies that "split the difference--denying some fetuses life and some women liberty--hardly offer a solution" at a logical, rhetorical level.[24] Yet according to opinion polls that is the policy preferred by most Americans, who do not always cling so rigidly to the abstractions of moralist rhetoric.

Kristin Luker argues plausibly that Roe v. Wade shocked numerous Americans who had not been aware that so many abortions were performed each year.[25] This moral shock seems to have begun a process whereby they gradually articulated the principles behind their anger and outrage. Both sides in the debate gradually fell back on moral principles they considered inviolate: individual rights, the sanctity of life. Celeste Condit argues that the news media gradually simplified their own presentations on abortion, forcing the public to rely on simple principles, selective hearing, and stereotypes. Once these moral principles were enshrined in the two movements' rhetoric, there was little room for compromise.

Luker also analyzed the concrete social practices that lay behind the two sides in the 1970s (these may have shifted during the 1980s). Antiabortionists were often Catholic and deeply religious, not previously active in political causes; they followed traditional gender roles, including raising large families and being housewives rather than working outside the home. Their opposition to abortion was motivated partly by the desire to reaffirm the moral worth of mothering as a full-time pursuit and the status of those doing it. Prochoice activists typically had middle-class careers and tried to balance these with family obligations. The life worlds of each gave them sentiments that pointed toward one set of moral principles or the other. Luker found extensive moralist rhetoric on both sides, as she explains it, "because we must believe that the things about which we are passionate are either clearly good or clearly bad."[26] She refers to "two very different moral centers," and argues that "Reasonable people who are located in very different parts of the social world find themselves differentially exposed to diverse realities, and this differential exposure leads each of them to come up with different--but often equally reasonable--constructions of the world."[27] A clash of--socially constructed--absolutes.

If the instrumental ideal is to derive policies from scientific laws through precise mathematical calculations, moralist rhetoric attempts to ban certain policy options as wrong and institute others as right. If the instrumental style claims to be based on natural scientific laws, the moralist style also claims to follow laws: of God for religious moralists, of nature for deep ecologists, to take two examples. The consequences of breaking these moral laws are said to be disastrous, just as experts predict catastrophe if economic or engineering laws are disregarded. The moral style tends to be negative, in that it more easily condemns immoral policies than pinpoints and elaborates new ones. Moralism strongly condemns the use of instrumental calculations for policies that touch on moral values, since the incrementalism of such calculations allows compromise. Cost-benefit analysis, for example, should not be used to determine the value of a human life. Finally, as Luker shows, moralist rhetoric typically applies labels of good and evil to those who are fighting for God or nature and those who are fighting against it: there is a clear boundary drawn between "us" and "them."

Although religious systems have been the usual source of values behind the moralist style, providing the rules to determine right and wrong, there have been other sources too. At the heart of the environmental movement is a concern that humans are upsetting the balance of nature and will bring catastrophe on future generations as a result.[28] Like religious figures, activists see their exemplary action in protest as the only moral path to take.[29] Life worlds--the ensemble of routine activities an actor takes for granted--can also yield moral values, as Luker demonstrated.

Environmentalists combine ways of life and nature as the sources of their moral laws: these consist of living in balance with nature as a whole, and are normally distinct from the discrete scientific laws instrumentalists use. Indeed, much moralism is aligned with a broadly romantic tradition of thought that is holistic and subjective, and which is often an explicit attack on the disenchantment wrought by instrumentalism.[30] The movement against nuclear energy similarly exploited moralist rhetoric, with references to the laws of nature, the potential for catastrophe, the evil of technocrats, and a concern for future generations. Alain Touraine and his coauthors quote an antinuclear activist, talking about exemplary action, who equates antinuclear activism with sainthood: "The classic name for it, 200, 300, 500 years ago was saintliness, quite simply. A saint was not passive, quite the opposite. He experienced a sort of upsurge of instinct, but he was able to tarn it back upon himself."[31] In his article "Being Right Is Not Enough," Richard Grossman criticized the California antinuclear movement from within for being too moralist, since it tended to exclude blue-collar workers for whom economic issues were more important.[32]

Just as instrumental rhetorics can be based on quite different kinds of scientific knowledge, moralist rhetorics can appeal-to rather different types of moral principles. An interpretation of the national moral mission of the United States as fighting communism, for instance, may lead to more rigid policy prescriptions than a faith in the moral autonomy of every man and woman. The difference may be only that the moral principles are simple and directly applied in the former case, and more complex and difficult to apply in the second. But any moral principle can be raised to the status of a rigid absolute, whether it is a woman's right of individual choice or the rights of the fetus. Rights talk, in particular, tends to elevate policy issues to questions of moral absolutes.

The persuasive power of the moralist style derives partly from the fact that it raises the prospect of threats to its practitioners' life worlds, if not their lives: the practices of that life world are good but endangered, while those that threaten it are bad. Moralist rhetoric emphasizes: threats and dangers from the outside, sinning world; duty and the protection of one's own community and life world; and catastrophes that ultimately result from the transgression of basic moral laws. Like instrumental rhetorics, the moralist style promises simple solutions to grave threats.

In addition to clashes between instrumental rhetorics and between moralist rhetorics, there can of course be controversies that pit moralist against instrumental arguments. In such cases moralists can play on the inchoate suspicions and critiques of experts that are widespread in modern societies. In order to understand this dynamic, let us examine debates over economists' proposals to set up markets for pollution or its control by allowing polluters to purchase "rights" to pollute. The underlying assumption is that the lack of an accurate price for scarce environmental resources (such as clean air) leads to their being squandered. Economists argue that their proposals would reduce pollution as much as "command" measures requiring particular technologies, but at less cost.[33] After years of debate, this market proposal was embodied in the Clean Air Act of 1990, which allows coal-burning electric utilities to sell their rights to sulfur-dioxide pollution. Because it is less expensive for some electric plants to reduce emissions than others, the ones who can clean up most cheaply should do the most reducing. They can then sell their extra pollution reduction to a utility facing higher cleanup costs. Ultimately the same amount of clean air can be achieved at less cost to the country--as much as $2.5 billion less according to one economist. The efficiency argument is accurate but, for most noneconomists, beside the point.

Steven Kelman remarks that economists can arrive at precise recommendations for efficient policies because of two lacunae: economists tend to "be indifferent towards and radically nonjudgmental about what preferences people have," and they have "traditionally dealt mainly with material goods."[34] By ignoring nonmaterial incentives and the sources of preferences, economists can develop elegant, parsimonious theories of mathematical simplicity. But they lose sight of the moral dimension of social action--precisely what moralists are attuned to. Most members of the public also seem aware of more dimensions of action than economists place in their models.

Sociologist Todd Gitlin, too sophisticated an observer to give a straightforward moralist response to the Bush proposal, wrote a satirical attack on economic incentives which nonetheless expressed a large amount of moralist outrage. He imagined that "this extraordinary principle [is] going to sweep through the civilized world." His reductio ad absurdum piece conjures other laws creating markets in such "goods" as robbery rights or torture rights. (Torturing regimes might end their practices because is was profitable to sell their rights to other countries or to human-rights groups.) By lampooning the idea of markets used to distribute patently immoral activities such as torture, Gitlin implied that pollution rights tolerated (as they indeed do) or even encouraged (which they do not) immorality. The implication seems to be that there should be no pollution in our society, just as there should be no torture. He rejects economists' (morally neutral) claim of tradeoffs between economic prosperity and pristine air and water (they argue that the cost of abolishing all pollution is prohibitive).[35]

An environmentalist put the moralist position more strongly in a personal interview in 1989: "I think these guys are evil, and letting them make their evil work into a regular business transaction, something they can buy and sell like toilet paper, is wrong." If economists lose track of the moral dimension, moralists can lose track of the practical dimension of how to reduce pollution.

Few politicians or members of the public are sympathetic to the idea of "pollution rights." In interviews with politicians and their staffers, Kelman found that even those who supported economic incentives rarely understood the efficiency rationale, but were driven by an ideological fondness for free markets. Environmentalists and other opponents of the legislation were "worried about the strategic effect on the political prospects for maintaining strong environmental laws."[36] In other words, even sophisticated participants in environmental policy debates were unable to isolate the instrumental efficiency question from issues of political symbolism and moral desirability. The public, presumably, is even less likely to pretend that environmental laws make no moral statement. As Kelman says, a policy of charges ignores the motivations of polluters--who may be completely self-interested--and refuses to stigmatize polluting behavior as unethical.

Albert Hirschman, in his argument against parsimony as a guiding principle for economic theory, uses pollution as an example, following Kelman's argument. He goes further, claiming that economic theory limits its own explanatory power through its simplicity. The reason is that symbolic messages embodied in laws and regulations against pollution will themselves change polluters' propensity (or taste) to pollute. In their concern for precision, instrumental arguments ignore factors inconvenient for their models."[37]

In this case of speaking past each other, economists asked how to reduce pollution as cheaply as possible, while their critics were additionally concerned with condemning pollution. Economists studiously avoided the issue of whether pollution was bad, which they considered outside their realm, in favor of how to reduce it. Noneconomists, especially environmentalists, wished to stigmatize pollution and punish those creating it. Economists were arguing about the efficient solution; others about pollution itself. In this case the public and most politicians seem to have picked up on the moral and symbolic dimensions of the issue (whichever side they were favoring tight controls or free markets). Seeing the complex dimensions of social life, they were unwilling to bracket reality to follow the economists' line of thought. In addition, instrumental rhetoric may lack the emotional punch necessary to engage the public's interest in political debate.

The abortion conflict shows that most people hold their moral principles only implicitly, adopting explicit stands only when politically mobilized. As controversies unfold over time, people are forced to think about their moral intuitions in order to develop explicit positions.[38] They also do this when they receive a moral shock, as many did with Roe v. Wade. Protest leaders also try to reach those who are sympathetic, and force them to draw out the implications of their own intuitive sentiments. Moral absolutes tend to be used rhetorically when large numbers of people need to be mobilized, since they raise emotions that may spur political action. When the audience for a rhetoric consists of potential public supporters, we can expect a heavy dose of moralism.[39]

In the French cases, neither economists nor engineers had to appeal for public support, so neither indulged in moralist rhetoric. Housed in their own, separate organizations (economists were at the Ministry of Finance and the institute; engineers dominated the Ministry of Industry and the nuclear regulatory agency), both professions could spin their analyses with their own data, remaining true to their particular slant on the world. Stable institutional support obviated the need for these groups to turn to moralist rhetoric.

The pollution case shows that instrumental rhetorics, especially those applied to social life, miss large segments of reality. The many layers of meaning that humans express in their actions imply that these actions are rarely open to the elegant simplifications of most instrumental approaches. Policies are, among other things, complex statements about how the world is, how the world could be, and how the world should be. Instrumental rhetorics are limited because they do not reflect the complex ways in which people think; because the media often mimic the popular way of thinking, preferring moral drama to precise calculations; because experts come to believe their own rhetoric about possibility and impossibility, ignoring the active persuasion and political work that is needed; and because certain political processes (such as mobilizing public support) select against instrumental arguments. Humans draw on a range of connotations and symbolic references that experts often ignore, fooled by their own confidence into thinking that "the facts" will force certain paths of action on society. They do not see their rhetoric about precision and possibility as a device for convincing an audience but as objective reality.

American politics may be more subject to both moralist and instrumental rhetorics than parallel debates in other countries. Because the United States lacks a stable system of strong political parties representing clear economic interests in ongoing negotiation, universalist rhetorics based on unquestioned god terms are more prominent as grounds for legitimating claims than they are in Europe. If the political arena were filled with groups who knew their interests and pursued them, then rhetorics would be incapable of changing any minds and therefore unnecessary. Most European party systems, which have traditionally revolved around the struggle between labor and capital, come closer to this pattern. Political parties anchor rhetorics in the systematic pursuit of group or class interests or in ongoing debates over the direction of social change. Moralist and instrumental rhetorics float more freely in the United States.[40]

But the European party systems function in part by ignoring many controversies that especially attract debate between moralists and instrumentalists: those that do not involve negotiations over economic interests. Stable bargaining over time encourages compromise, with each side winning some battles and losing others. Both labor and capital tend to become economistic, battling over an economic pie; as a result they can buy each other off. Money becomes the common metric and language for negotiation and bargaining. But this system typically excludes moralists, who refuse to compromise or be bought off. It also results in a standoff rather than any real agreement between the two sides. Is there any way to overcome these basic disagreements?

One solution to conflicts between those using contrasting rhetorics has been to seek a neutral "third language" to mediate, and various observers have bemoaned the lack of such a common language? These efforts are probably futile. Most instrumental systems of decision-making--cost-benefit analysis, environmental-impact statements, risk analysis--began as attempts to develop such languages. Owing to the variety of worldviews and sources of data in complex modern societies, none has succeeded. In the United States, law is thought to play the role of a third language: a set of rules for deciding between positions as different as those of moralists and instrumentalists. But the question only shifts to "Where do the rules come from?" Moralist criteria or instrumental ones could each be used, and both have been advocated. Some have also argued that the rules arise from conflict between classes or other interest groups.[42] In fact, many public battles are attempts to change the underlying basis of legal rules, which only reflect, rather than solve, the social conflicts that rhetorics address.

New organizational arrangements are another solution. These may not be able to forge agreement, but they may force moralist and instrumental rhetorics to engage each other seriously. Given that no single rhetoric can or should gain a complete victory, and given that a third language may not be found, a first step is to reassure each side in a controversy that its perspective will not be ignored entirely, so that it can be less strident or paranoid. Ongoing organizational support and stability are one means for doing this. For instance, give local communities some form of veto power or property rights to assure them that nothing will be imposed without their consent (one source of moralist rhetoric); once they see that their entire life world is not threatened, they may be able to examine attendant economic benefits of, say, a new industrial plant. They can negotiate over what payoffs they might accept for a toxic-waste site. At the national level, citizen groups--even those "unreasonable" ones that use moralist rhetoric--should be encouraged, funded, and given regular channels of participation in the development of technologies. They may become less moralist if they do not have to appeal constantly to supporters for funds. Recognition and perhaps even funding of both sides is necessary. After all, moralists and instrumentalists share many needs and values: economic well-being, a sense of moral worth, confidence in the survival of future generations. If we discussed these values as something over which we have control, rather than as natural laws, we might develop stable practices for interaction between moralists and instrumentalists. To develop it will require groups of moralists and instrumentalists with enough confidence in their own organizational survival to move beyond posturing.

How do we decisively settle political debates if the "facts" we use are heavily laden with our theories and cultural meanings? We don't. As Alasdair MacIntyre says, "The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character."[43] MacIntyre bemoans this lack of moral consensus. Richard Rorty, in contrast, finds it exciting and healthy. He is willing to abandon "epistemology," conceived as the effort to find a neutral language into which all competing rhetorics might be translated, and he embraces hermeneutics, which "sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts."[44]

This conversation is democracy. Moralist and instrumental rhetorics are dangerous because both imply the curtailment of dialogue. Moralists and instrumentalists both put forward their god terms as ways of closing off discussion, not opening it up.[45] I doubt that it would be possible to eliminate the rhetorics that distort communication, but we can take them into account in setting up political institutions that let all positions have their say, without privileging any one of them a priori. We can keep the conversation going, even if there is no hope of a final consensus.

• Revised version of a paper presented at the International Society of Political Psychology annual meeting, San Francisco, 1987. The author would like to thank Lee Clarke, Marty Gilens, Irwin Coffman, Bob Holt, Kian-Woon Kwok, Dorothy Nelkin, Chuck Stephen, Ann Swidler, Alan Wolfe, and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.
• 1 Joseph Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 51.
• 2 Robert K. Merton, "Science and the Social Order," in The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 258.
• 3 See Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Arjo Klamer, Donald McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow, eds., The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Charles Bazerman, "Introduction" to "Symposium: Rhetoricians on the Rhetoric of Science," Science, Technology, and Human Values 14 (1989): 3--6; John Shelton Reed, "On Narrative and Sociology," Social Forces 68 (1989): 1-14.
• 4 Mary Douglas, "Environments at Risk," Times Literary Supplement, 1972, p. 1273.
• 5 Alain Touraine, The Self-Production of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
• 6 Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
• 7 Philip Rieff, Therapy and Technique (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 24.
• 8 I analyze the interplay of political structures with instrumental and moralist rhetorics in nuclear energy policy-making in Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press,, 1990): Dorothy Nelkin and I examine the rhetoric used by both sides in the controversy over humans' use of animals in The Animal Rights Crusade (New York: Free Press, 1992).
• 9 Kenneth Burke extensively analyzed the role of rhetorical references such as these in political action and argument. See, for example, his classic essay on Hitler's Mein Kampf in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Ernest G. Bormann showed that groups maintain coherence and motivate participation through their rhetorical fantasies about the group's past and future in "Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality," Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 396-407. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson described how the metaphors of our language influence and define our actions in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). And Joseph Gusfield analyzed how our rhetoric shapes our recognition and resolution of one public problem, drinking-driving, in The Culture of Public Problems.
• 10 In theory, a political group could adopt a variety of rhetorics strategically in addressing outsiders that it might not use in communicating internally, while honestly using internal rhetoric to make sense of the world and decide what should be done. In my own research, however, I have found little evidence of this kind of divergence.
• 11 This is as true for scientists as for those who claim to be mouthpieces of God. In the eighteenth century, instrumental rhetoric was a liberating force in attacking the moral" rhetoric and authority of the aristocracy. Rousseau captures this moment well in his Emile, arguing that Emile must respond to the constraints of the physical world rather than to those imposed by human authority. But Feyerabend argues that today the two rhetorics impose similar kinds of constraints: "How to Defend Society Against Science," in Ian Hacking, ed., Scientific Revolutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 981).
• 12 The etymology of the word economics is revealing: from its Greek origins until the nineteenth century it indicated rational management and control over production and distribution. But under the market system of capitalism it came to indicate a system of natural laws outside human control--almost the opposite of its original meaning.
• 13 Throughout his work, Jurgen Habermas has drawn democratic political implications from the fact that the structure of human speech suggests the possibility of undistorted communication between equals.
• 14 Roland Barthes showed how the images produced by bourgeois society made social practices look natural rather than historically produced and changeable. A compelling rhetoric pretends to be based on unchanging nature rather than negotiable social reality. See Barthes' Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).
• 15 Political movements often combine moral and instrumental rhetoric, using any argument that supports their side. The antinuclear movement relied on economic and engineering arguments as well as on moral ones; pronuclear engineers and scientists often couched their support in the apocalyptic terms of the moralist, as in Bernard Cohen's Before lt's Too Late (New York: Plenum, 1983). Nevertheless, moralist and instrumental rhetorics are analytically distinct, even when a social movement or individual speaker blends them.
• 16 See my Nuclear Politics, ch. 9. For a similar disagreement between economists and engineers over water policy, see Kenneth Frederick, "Watering the Big Apple," Resources 82 (1986).
• 17 Jean Guilhamon, "The Conditions of Implementation of the French Nuclear Program," speech to the American Nuclear Society, San Francisco, 1983.
• 18 McCloskey, Rhetoric of Economics, pp. 70-72.
• 19 For an account of this defense, see Thomas F. Gieryn, "Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists," American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781-795.
• 20 Walter Karp analyzes this propensity in "Liberty Under Siege: The Reagan Administration's Taste for Autocracy," Harper's, November 1985, pp. 53-67.
• 21 Roy G. D'Andrade makes this distinction in "Three Scientific World Views and the Covering Law Model," in Donald W. Fiske and Richard A. Shweder, eds., Metatheory in Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
• 22 I take the phrase from Laurence H. Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
• 23 See the discussion in Celeste Michel Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
• 24 Tribe, Abortion, p. 210.
• 25 Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
• 26 Ibid., p. xiii.
• 27 Ibid., p. 191.
• 28 See, among others, Stephen Cotgrove, Catastrophe or Cornucopia (New York: Wiley, 1982).
• 29 The Reformation roots of exemplary action found fertile soil in the United States, at least since John Winthrop first described the Massachusetts Bay settlement as a "City on a Hill" in 1630. Weber's classic description of the Protestant ethic involved the idea that the strict rule of the monastery would now be practiced by all humans, looking for signs of salvation. Because they had to answer directly to God, they were justified in disobeying human laws when they felt these were wrong. Civil disobedience has prospered ever since.
• 30 Yet environmentalist rhetoric occasionally fuses moralist and instrumental, although different groups and individuals typically lean in one direction or the other. In addition to a preachy moralist tone, rather like Old Testament prophets who predicted catastrophe if society did not reform itself, there are references to the science of ecology, which traces the subtle balance of species in ecosystems; and many environmentalists use scientific evidence to support their images of disaster.
• 31 Alain Touraine, Zsuzsa Hegedus, Francois Dubet, and Michel Wieviorka, Anti-Nuclear Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 76.
• 32 Richard Grossman, "Being Right Is Not Enough," Environmental Action 8 (Dec. 18, 1976).
• 33 Characteristic rationales include Allen V. Kneese and Charles L. Schultze, Pollution, Prices, and Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1975); Gardner M. Brown, Jr. and Ralph W. Johnson, "Pollution Control by Effluent Charges: It Works in the Federal Republic of Germany, Why Not in the U.S.?" Natural Resources Journal 24 (1984): 929-966; Wallace E. Oates, "Taxing Pollution: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?" Resources, Spring 1988, pp. 5-7; Wallace E. Oates and Paul R. Porthey, "Economic Incentives for Controlling Greenhouse Gases," Resources, Spring 1991, pp. 13-16.
• 34 Steven Kelman, What Price Incentives? (Boston: Auburn House, 1981), pp. 19-20.
• 35 Todd Gitlin, "Buying the Right to Pollute? What's Next?" New York Times, July 28, 1989.
• 36 Kelman, What Price Incentives?, p. 96.
• 37 Albert O. Hirschman, "Against Parsimony," in Rival Views (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 146.
• 38 I have elaborated this argument in "The Political Life Cycle of Technological Controversies," Social Forces 67 (1988): 357-377.
• 39 In analyzing eighteenth-century sermons, Jon Butler found something similar; when preachers spoke at public events rather than in their weekly church sermons, he says, "Implicitly speaking to the unconverted, they spent more time describing disasters, listing sins, and fixing blame." See Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 172-173.
• 40 Moral crusaders were behind many key events in our history, from the founding of several colonies to the Temperance movement to the civil-rights movement. At the same time, Americans have pioneered cost-benefit analysis, city planning, environmental-impact statements, and other instrumental styles.
• 41 Prominent examples include Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Daniel Bell, "The Return of the Sacred?" in The Winding Passage (Cambridge: Abt Associates, 1980); and Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
• 42 See Richard A. Posner, The Federal Courts: Crisis and Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) for an attempt to ground legal rules in cost-benefit reasoning; and William Chambliss and Robert Seidman, Law, Order and Power (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982) for the argument that laws arise from struggle between different interests and classes.
• 43 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 6.
• 44 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 318. Also see Brian Fay, Social Theory and Political Practice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975) and Mary E. Hawkesworthe, "Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth," Signs 14 (1989).
• 45 In Habermas's terms, they strive for a normatively secured (hence unreflexive) consensus, rather than a communicatively achieved one.

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By JAMES M. JASPER