A Culture of Choices and Compartmentalization

Alasdair MacIntyre

When John Paul II used the expression "the culture of death", it was a moment of great rhetorical power. And moments of great rhetorical power are dangerous. John Paul II invited us to attend to important and significant questions, but we may make the mistake of focusing on these questions in such a way as to forget the social background from which they arise and against which they arise. If we want to think about the culture within which we hope to engage in constructive conversation with others about the important issues, we have to be careful about how we characterize the culture. And if we think about the culture that we share with all our fellow citizens and others in North America now, then we have to recognize that it at least, the wide general culture, is not well characterized as a culture of death, at least initially.

It is very important when one thinks about any culture, and one wants to understand its moral and metaphysical shared beliefs—beliefs not only about what is right and what is good, but those beliefs that provide answers to such questions as "Who am I?", "What may I hope for?", "What is the nature of the universe of which I am a part?"—that one not only looks at the answers that are delivered to such questions but at how the very concept of belief is understood and embodied in everyday life. And so I want to begin by raising certain questions about how belief—moral and metaphysical belief—is construed in our culture. And I want to suggest that an important feature of contemporary belief is a connection between beliefs and choices which marks a radical change in the history of our culture.

I am talking now about tendencies and developments; I am not talking about what is universally the case; and you will probably be able to think of counterexamples to the generalizations that I am going to make. And I'm well aware that the generalizations are not universal. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that, in thinking about choice and those other concepts that are intimately connected with choice, there has been a change.

From what does this change begin? What was that older conception of choice from which we now so often depart? It was a conception of choice as made by individuals within a context of shared conceptions of human relationships, shared conceptions of a given order of human goods and shared standards by which actions were to be judged, so that in their choices individuals revealed to others, and perhaps to themselves, whether what they valued more was in fact better, whether what they valued less was in fact worse, whether those others whom they held in various kinds of regard were indeed those to whom such regard was due, whether those whom they held in disregard were those to whom disregard was due. And that is to say, choices were revelatory of character.

We have moved from this situation to one which, increasingly, individuals understand themselves as not merely invited to but having no alternative to themselves choosing what is to come as good or bad, what is to come as better or worse. It is a matter of choice. It is indeed a burden put upon us to choose how to define those relationships in which we engage with others. It is a matter of choice whether we formulate the standards by which we guide and judge actions one way rather than another. Choice becomes that which underlies belief. And what was formerly supplied by a context of shared beliefs is now to be supplied instead by the explicit or implicit choices of individuals, so that often, even though the individual has made no conscious and explicit act of choice, her or his moral and metaphysical beliefs, and especially beliefs about goods and relationships, are treated as the expression of choice by others. And insofar as this is so, what my choices reveal is not my character but my identity. I am as an agent, with my beliefs and my attitudes in the social world, what my own choices have made me. And to disagree with those choices, to dissent from them, to impugn them, is no longer to appeal to some impersonal standard by which I invite others to judge me as well as those whom I judge; it is instead to take a negative view of the individual who makes the choice, so that criticism, dissent, disagreement, now becomes a threat. And consequently when individuals are opened up to—cannot but attend to—arguments that appear to undermine through doubt on, produce a negative shadow on, what they have chosen, they respond by retreating into solidarity with those with whom they agree. And this, I am going to suggest later on, alters in a very important way the character of public debate.

How did individuals in our culture become like this? I want to consider three influences. There are more, and none of the ones I am considering will I treat at adequate length, but they may suggest what is being said. First of all, when individuals make everyday decisions, at home, in the workplace, in the rest of their everyday lives, they are invited to bring just too many considerations to bear and considerations which are in fact, as far as they are concerned, incommensurable. So in our culture, we are constantly asking whether this or that measure could be justified because it increases the welfare of some individuals or groups because of its utility, when in fact it infringes the rights of some individuals. And we weigh considerations that have to do with rights against considerations that have to do with utility, and the metaphor that I just used, the metaphor of weighing, suggests that there are scales somewhere on which we do this balancing. And indeed we extend this metaphor when the considerations with which we are concerned involve not only rights and utilities but also duties and obligations of various kinds, goods of various kinds. But in fact, as people become aware the moment they enter into moral argument and disagreement about these matters, and this in most ordinary situations of life, they discover there are no scales. When they choose to give weight to this consideration rather than that, or this type of consideration rather than that, they are in fact choosing. And so choice becomes a recurrent feature of the moral and evaluative life.

Secondly, there is a remarkable transformation in the way in which relationships and especially familial relationships are understood. I commend to your attention a remarkable book by the English anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, a book called After Nature, which is about kinship in England. Much of what she says about the history of kinship in England in the last century would apply in North America, in the rest of Europe and perhaps even elsewhere. I can introduce the thought that is central to Strathern's work by inviting you to consider a question which I doubt anyone has ever put to you before: what are the duties of an aunt? That is to say, we do not in our social life tend to have a determinate conception of what it is to be an aunt, of what the peculiar responsibilities of an aunt are to her nieces and nephews. For me this was, in my own life, an enormously important question, because I was partly brought up by an aunt. And this was not an aunt who was being altruistic, as if it were taking on some special burden. She was doing the kind of thing that she had known she would always have to do if she was an aunt—that's just what being an aunt is. People these days don't in this sense have aunts. And if I were to ask you not just what are your duties as an aunt but what are your duties to your second cousins, you would be even more surprised.

Now, there's no great moral attrition to society in losing a grip on one's duties to one's second cousin, and you may even think that I am being simply influenced too much by own history in worrying about the duties of aunts. But it is very important that to an increasing extent in our culture people have had to reinvent and redefine for themselves the roles of a mother and a father, the roles of a sibling; that they are not confronted with a set of relationships into which they can enter easily, so that the given framework of the relationships supports them in the making of their choices. They have to choose what the relationship is to be. Notice that I say they often have to choose. It isn't that individuals inspired by some thought about choice and perhaps liberty insist on doing this; they find no alternative to doing this in very large part. And so choice becomes not only something that underpins our evaluative judgements but something that underpins the way in which we conceive our relationships.

A third influence, about which I will say very little because in order to talk adequately about it I would have to say so much, is the way in which so much of our economic lives are presented to us by market institutions as lives in which we have to make choices: choices as consumers, choices as members of the labor force, choices as investors. And the notion here that it is the preferences of the individual that are in the end sovereign in the market, something that takes on explicit form in rational choice theory but which is assumed, taken for granted, in the everyday economic transactions to which we owe our incomes, our savings, and our other financial rewards—there again the individual is led to understand her or himself as someone whose choices make the social world.

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Now let's ask—we obviously need to ask—what implications does this have for the way in which we think about the beliefs that are shared and the beliefs that divide the inhabitants of our culture? But we can't go directly to this question because there is another feature of our social life which is crucial, the one that I named compartmentalization, and let me explain first the notion of compartmentalization. And I owe it to a number of sociologists. I pick out here my dear contemporary the late Erving Goffman, who in his doctoral disseration studied a café-restaurant in the Shetland Islands. One of the things that Goffman noticed at once was the way in which the waiters in the cafe behaved quite differently when they were among the kitchen staff in the kitchen, from the way in which they behaved the moment they passed through the swinging doors into the dining room with the trays which they were carrying or the menus or whatever. In the kitchen, everything was noise and fast movement: people shouted at each other; people cursed; people dropped things; food would fall off a plate and be picked up by hand and put back on the plate. The general atmosphere was one in which there were well established norms of behavior and everybody conformed.

The moment you passed through the doors, it was another world. You slowed down; you walked in a stately manner (this was so long ago that nobody had as yet learned to say, "I am Marc Antony and I will be waiting on you this evening"; that tells you how long ago it was). Now people behaved as though the food was a sacred object: everything was a matter of cleanliness; there is deference; there is hierarchy—quite different world. And then Goffman drew our attention to something else, namely that when the young men and women who were the waiters and waitresses went home in the evening after they had finished, they behaved differently yet again. The norms that ruled their life in the kitchen were one set of norms; the way in which they behaved, the standards of deference in the dining room, were another; and then when they went home to their families or their lodgings, they took on a third way of living.

The thesis of compartmentalization is this: that increasingly all our lives are compartmentalized, so that as we move from the home to the workplace, to the meeting of the trade union branch, to the sports club, to some religious service in the parish, whatever it is, we move into and out of areas each of which has its own autonomous sets of norms, each of which requires of us that we adapt to those norms if we are to be effective in that situation and in such a way that we have to exchange one set of attitudes and norms for the other as we move between them. So it comes about that a new virtue is added to the list of the virtues, adaptability; and a new vice is added to the list of the vices, inflexibility.

Let's ask how this works out in a particular case, which is not only designed to throw more light on the notion of compartmentalization but also to bring us closer to the topics with which we are most concerned in this conference. Consider the way in which compartmentalization governs the way in which we think about—talk about, understand—death. I could have chosen other examples: I have made a study, for example, of how the norms of truth-telling and lying vary from situation to situation, so that someone who goes through the day—initially in the home having breakfast with the family, then in the workplace perhaps in a lawyers' office, then meeting colleagues from other professions for lunch, moving onwards through the day—will exchange one set of norms of truthfulness for another during the day—what is permissible here is impermissible there and so on. But for us it is more useful perhaps to think about the way in which we treat death. And the kind of death I want to think about is the death perhaps of a young adult, someone on the very threshold of adult life, who is killed in an automobile accident. And now let's think first of all how this will be handled by the family, by friends, by those who call on the family to express condolences. One of the things that everyone will say is that this is an incalculable loss, that this is a loss that cannot be measured.

Now contrast this very sharply with a discussion in an automobile company about what the changes in the death rate will be if such and such changes are made in the number of cars on the road by marketing some new type of vehicle. And then it will turn out that the young adult is absorbed into a statistic analysis, a cost-benefit analysis, in which the deaths of quite a sizable number of thousands of Americans every year are regarded as an acceptable tradeoff for having an automobile industry that flourishes, a highway system and travel. The point here is not to suggest that the executives of the automobile industry are particularly inhumane, for in fact this is a tradeoff endorsed in practice by almost all Americans. We just take it for granted—it's a rational thing to do. Notice how different it would be if we knew in advance who the individuals were who were going to be selected for sacrifice to the automobile—if, as it were, on the first of January there was a list in the newspapers: "This year the following people will be killed in order to make sure that the economy flourishes…"—it wouldn't do. It matters a great deal that cost-benefit thinking about deaths in the aggregate is one sort of thinking governed by one kind of norms; thinking about the death of a particular individual, particularly an individual whom we have known, whose family we have know, we think in quite other ways.

Now consider a third way in which we think, or fail to think, about deaths. Our society only survives as the society that it is because there are individuals who are prepared to risk death in their daily lives on our behalf: police officers, prison guards, firefighters, members of the armed forces. And it is a very interesting question what sort attitude should we take to people who are prepared to die so that we don't have to die instead, so that we can escape injury. And the answer is we think of this as a problem of social function: we pay police officers whatever it takes to recruit them. If they are killed in the line of duty, we give their families a quite inadequate pension but we hold a ceremony. We don't for the most part think about this. In fact, it is very important that most people most of the time don't think about the risks taken by police officers, firefighters and others on their behalf. Yet this is integral to our lives. And we don't think of ourselves as indebted to these individuals in the way in which we do feel indebted to various other classes of individuals.

Or now consider death in quite a different way: consider the context of death in a medical experiment. Medicine has progressed to the point that it has reached—very remarkable point that it has reached in the twentieth century—only through the use of experimental methods which very often may in certain cases threaten the death of those who are subjects of the experiment. And here I am not raising questions about the issues which would be of concern to the ethics committee in a hospital or a university or a clinic; I am concerned simply with the way in which the scientists have to behave in relation to those patients who are the subject of their experiment, and where death is regarded as among the data that have to be handled, that have to be included in the tests. And characteristically somebody who has to deal with patients in this way acquires a certain kind of humane insensitivity. In fact it would be very difficult to do certain kinds of work without this humane insensitivity. So here we get a quite different area.

I could go extending this analysis, and to do this I would need to talk about each of these examples in a great deal more detail, but what I am suggesting is that to a remarkable extent our thoughts about death—thoughts about death that individuals in this culture share with others—are contextualized. That is to say, we do not think about death as such. We think about death in this context, death in that context. And we become unable to think about death as such.

Now what do I mean by saying we are unable to think about death as such? Here I want to propose the following thought, which I won't be able to defend: namely, that no one is able to think about death as such unless they think about their own death; that the most crucial kind of thinking about death is thinking about what my relationship to my death is; and that until I have had this thought and pursued it, I will be in no position to think about the deaths of others.

I once had an interesting conversation with a very distinguished psychoanalyst—distinguished in this way: his patients actually got better in significant numbers (this is always a valuable property analysts sought)—who talked to me first of all about the increasing number of patients he had who suffered from a neurotic fear of death, who did indeed in one sense think about their own deaths but were unable to think—we take the word think seriously—about them, because the moment the notion of their own deaths came into consciousness, they responded with panic, fear, with an attempt to turn away from it, perhaps finding themselves caught in obsessional patterns of thinking. And this analyst then remarked to me that he had found universally that patients who were unable to face up to the thought of their own death, who suffered from deeply neurotic symptoms of a disturbing kind because of this, were invariably people who had no conception of a right time to die. That is to say, they had no conception that there might be a point in one's life at which one could say "If I were to die now, that would be good; my life is, in essence, complete."

The Catholic faith teaches us that we should in fact be in a frame of mind from a rather early age in which we understand that if I were to die now, this would be no injustice; there would be no incompleteness. But what was lacking in these patients was not Catholic theology; what was lacking was any notion of what it would be to have lived one's life so that it had succeeded rather than failed, so that one could say of it, "It was a good life," rather than one that was deeply flawed. That is to say, one of the reasons why we are often unable to think well about death is because we are unable to think well about what it is to have lived one's life well as a whole, for the conception of one's life as a whole is one that we find it increasingly difficult to entertain. When we think of life as a series of choices, we may indeed think of ourselves as having acted in a way that we approve of in this occasion, in a way that we regret in that, but life becomes more and more a series of actions, a series of episodes, rather than something that we can grasp as a whole. And this affects our thinking about death very seriously.

The thesis that I am advancing, then, is that to raise the large questions that are raised by thoughts of the culture of death—questions about capital punishment, questions about abortion, questions about all those situations in which the lives of individuals are put at risk inhumanely—you are unlikely to get the kind of response that you would hope to get unless you recognize that asking people to consider these large questions is asking them to respond in a way that would require a break with habits of mind that are increasingly ingrained, that this is a culture in which death as such—my death—has become a ghost concept, a concept that haunts the culture but one that many people are unable to confront.

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So how should we respond? How do we respond to those who, if we question their beliefs, take it that we are questioning their choices and so attacking them? How do we approach those to whom the notion of thinking about death as such is foreign? I think we are raising questions here to which there are as yet no good answers. But of one thing I am convinced: it is that the forms of public debate—the kinds of forum in which public disagreements are being pursued—these are now generally counterproductive. These are ways in which we are likely to drive others to stand by what they take to be their choices. We are going to produce solidarities; we are going to produce refusals to confront issues; and we have to find some way to deal with this situation, to respond to it ourselves, rather than pressing on regardless of the effects that our interventions are in fact having.

We are misled here sometimes by looking at the great debates of the past. I think of such episodes as the confrontation between Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda before the king of Spain in the 16th century, when the whole question of the treatment of the American Indians by the Spaniards was debated in very explicit moral and theological terms. Or think again in the history of the United States of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It is very important that that kind of debate took place in societies which shared standards, definitions of relationship, attitudes, and which were able to recognize in the debate that the candidates were asking them to pass a verdict in the light of those standards on alternative courses of action. We don't inhabit such a culture for the most part anymore. I'm not wanting exaggerate here: I'm not wanting to suggest that there are no areas, no occasions, in which public debate can't still happen—it could happen, for example, perfectly possible, to have real public debate about tax cuts, provided you could do arithmetic, which is less common than sometimes supposed—but we have to be careful not to go from one example to another here and so fail to recognize the changed character of public conversation.

What I've said has only an indirect relationship to the questions with which you and I are chiefly and most importantly concerned, but unless we attend to it first, I fear that in our larger enterprises we will be frustrated and it will be our own fault.

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[Floor is opened for questions.]

Well, let me say three things very quickly. First, if I had a good answer here, I would not be at this conference; I would be extremely famous. It's an important, crucial question, and most of the answer is "I don't know."

The bits that I do know: it is a commonplace thought (not particularly a thought of mine) that, in the United States especially but in increasing extent in the rest of the modern world, those features of the culture which I have tried to identify this morning result in people resorting more and more to the legal system to resolve their differences. And the huge mass of litigation—the willingness of Americans to sue other Americans at the drop of a hat—this is a very large and distinctive feature of this culture. So it is very natural that when one cannot promote a good cause by other means one takes to the law. Now, sometimes of course, this is inevitable, particularly in a society structured like ours. So all I would want to say here is caution.

As far as political debate is concerned, I simply ask you to consider what has actually been achieved through politics in relation to the causes with which we are concerned so far, and if you remain optimistic, then I admire you.

I think what you say is plausible. I also think it's not true. Let me explain why.

I think that individuals do take very seriously—they feel this burden of choice thrust upon them—they often take very seriously the choices they have to make. And the choices they make are often much more sophisticated and nuanced than we're apt to recognize. If you look at the what the vast majority of Americans believe about abortion, or what the vast majority of Americans believe about capital punishment, it is in general not well captured by the sides that are taken, the theses advanced, in the public debates. There's a gap here. And it's an interesting gap. That is to say, I don't think that the politics of these matters reflects the immediate cultural attitudes. I think people find it very difficult to change their minds to reflect, for all the kinds of reasons I have given, but I do think that they do not embrace equally the putting of people to death arbitrarily; they are seriously concerned about abortion.

One of the problems with surveys and focus groups is that they don't often ask detailed enough questions. There's a classic example which has nothing to do with the issues we are concerned with—perhaps that makes it all the better. In 1972 voters who had declared before the presidential election that they were going to vote for Richard Nixon and that they were certainly going to vote for Richard Nixon, who were polled quite separately in seven states. And the question they were asked was, "If the day after the election, you wake up and discover there has been a landslide in favor of Nixon, will you be very pleased, moderately pleased, neutral, displeased, or very displeased?" And the huge majority of these people who intended to vote for Nixon said either "displeased" or "very displeased". That is to say, they happened to want Richard Nixon to win, but not by a landslide. Now, you aren't allowed to vote that way in an American election, right? My vote is only to count if there is not going to be a landslide. This suggests a cultural—in this case, a political—sophistication much greater than what gets admitted to the formal political system.

Now there's an analogy, I believe, here in thinking about matters of death. I make this point at the same time as I insist people find it very difficult to think about death in general, and I don't think that one can have the right thoughts about either abortion or capital punishment or any other of these issues unless you are able to think well about death in general. And therefore people don't articulate well. They leave the field open to other people to argue about.

Two things: I don't rule out threatening as a teaching method. But it is certainly very important it shouldn't be one's only teaching method. No, I think this again is a very important question. Classrooms are one of the few occasions on which we encounter people face to face over a considerable length of time, in which we can pursue questioning with them, in which we don't, as it were, raise the question and then go away. And one of the great defects of our culture—it's not just that we have compartmentalization; we don't have institutions, social areas, to which people can go in order to stand back, to reflect and to think about the whole.

I did have some experience of this when I was young, teaching in England for the Workers' Educational Association, which was an organization that provided evening classes for adults, usually working class adults, and classes in which people over a period of twelve weeks studied philosophical texts together—all the sorts of things you normally do in college classrooms. But these were people without a formal educational background. This was England in the early 1950's. People had left school at the age of 14–16. And these were people who were teaching themselves how to think about their everyday life through reading Plato or Hobbes or whatever it was. This was enormously rewarding. And it really turned out to be a forum—that is, this is a case where people argued a great deal with each other as well as with me, and in which they were able to stand back.

Now I think that at various times in the past there have been a multiplicity of such institutions. I think that town meetings of a certain kind functioned in this way in this country. I think that churches have in the past sometimes functioned importantly in this way. I think more and more though, now, the church represents simply one more compartmentalized area of life, just as political life is also another compartment.

Yes. Just one remark: I think this is very important. The contemporary world is very striking because of the extent to which, in certain areas of the world and in certain parts of society, there is a very large acceptance of what you've called Rawlsian notions—liberal notions— of equality and toleration and of rights that individuals have that protect. This is the same period in history that will, I think, be remembered later on as the Time of the Great Massacres, of extraordinary incidents of massacres. And the interesting thing is that the people who engage in these massacres are not generally, as it were, the skinheads of the world. The skinheads of the world aren't usually able to organize a massacre well enough. They're carried out by people who know what they're doing. And the Rawlsians have nothing to say to them. That is to say, what do I say? All we say to them is if you go on doing this, we will perhaps send armed force and we will force you to behave as if you were Rawlsians whether you like it or not. And there is something missing here.

Distinguish two or three different issues: first of all, what John Paul II has achieved, or at least an important part of what he has achieved, has been to provide those who are lacking it an idiom, a mode of argument, a way of addressing issues, for which they were already looking but hadn't got. So I think he is talking to a very different kind of public for the most part than that which I was talking about. I think he learned how to do this in Poland in a time in which finding the right rhetoric to rally those who already basically agreed with you was the task. And I think that is what has been to a remarkable measure achieved. And I don't want to in the least underrate that achievement.

When one comes to the United Nations, again I think if you look at the record, you will find things have not gone well. And they've not gone well because I think the forum of the United Nations has been one which has reproduced some of the attitudes that I am talking about. I don't mean that nothing has gone well at the United Nations—I'm very far from meaning that. But I think that there is a very sharp contrast and that that contrast makes the point that I'd want to make.

Yes. [Laughter.]

I think that what you have to do—and I have no recipe as to how to do it—what you have to do is to be with others in their questioning. And that is to say, one of the things we do believe, I take it—and it's a theological belief—is that there is nobody who is not asking the questions to which in the end divine revelation gives the answers. And what doesn't help at all is to go to people and say, "You don't know it yet, but you're asking questions to which divine revelation gives answers." What matters actually is to be with people in helping them to articulate the questions, and it is much more important that they first articulate the questions for themselves adequately, rather than that they give any particular answers. This is why what David Burrell said earlier about teaching is so important.

Now, in the classroom we're given an opportunity to do that. And of course what was said just now about students reponses to this—students often are aggrieved when you try to get them to open up these questions because the questions take them beyond the syllabus; it's not clear that having answers to these questions will get you a better grade. But that's what we need to do. And we need to find a way of doing this in our social life generally.

I mean, what classical Marxists did—classical Marxists didn't invent the working class movement. They didn't invent trade unions. They didn't even invent working class political parties. What they did was they went to where the working class were and they helped them to articulate their questions. And the founders of Christian trade unions in Europe saw this happening and said, "That's what we have to do, too." And this is what happened in Italy, in France and elsewhere in the 1880's and 1890's. And that's the sort of thing we ought to be looking at.

Two or three things: first, no, I don't know think that people have become shallow; I think they have become used to thinking of themselves as though they were shallow; that shallowness is, so to speak, something that we carry around with us as a defense—"Don't press me beyond this point", "Don't raise questions out of context". I think that the problem here is how to get people to discard this image of themselves without feeling too defenseless and too vulnerable.

Ireland is very interesting in this respect: the Irish have shown that it is possible to become American much faster than the Americans were able to do. America is essentially a slow society—it took an enormous time to get to this point—and Ireland's done it in ten years, from a standing start. It's amazing. And this has been an act of cultural self-destruction, very important act of self-destruction. This is why Irish studies are very important, though in general you probably are not taught in Irish studies that Ireland is engaged in cultural self-destruction because most of the people who teach Irish studies were engaged in bringing this about.

What we need here—let me emphasize since we're coming towards the end of our time—is more empirical study of change in the modern world in different situations, and we do have some very good sociological/anthropological studies, but we need even more. So there's another thing that needs to be done. You can treat the sort of thing I said as a set of hypotheses that still need to be tested, that we certainly need to examine how far they hold. And we should look not only at societies such as the United States: we should also look at Ireland; we should also look at the rapidly changing societies of eastern Europe; and we should also look at the societies of east Asia. Every one of them is relevant to the questions we are talking about.

Well, you've really moved the argument to what would have to be its next stage, and that's because for people who live in a radically compartmentalized society, the question of their identity becomes a very different sort of question. If I am one sort of person in the home, another in the workplace, a third elsewhere, I do have to ask myself continually, "Who am I?" And so then the self is threatened—it's a very minimal self already.

So far as the death house is concerned, what is very difficult for people is to understand what they do there except in a narrowly contextualized way. And of course contextualization enables you to do this; it makes it tolerable. Now, this can be done in different ways. When Great Britain still had the death penalty and executions, the public executioner was an anonymous person. The public executioner travelled to the place of execution in such a way that nobody would be at all possible to identify who it was. And the attempt was, at this point, to suggest that the execution was being carried out by the sovereign power, not by this particular individual. Now, you have to have a certain sets of beliefs of a rather deep kind to be able to make this distinction in such a way. When those beliefs are gone—beliefs about the authority of the sovereign power, the right of the sovereign power to do this—then the executioner becomes somebody quite different. And that's a kind of change in the institutions which runs pari passu with the changes I've been talking about. And this is why the death penalty now is a very different kind of question.

Every society has what sociologists have called differentiation of spheres of life. So when I talk about compartmentalization, I'm not talking about ordinary differentiation of spheres. There are obviously differences in the way we behave in different spheres of life in all cultures. What matters is that in most cultures, as people move between these spheres, they're able to appeal to norms, standards, conceptions of the good, conceptions of relationship which are shared by the society as a whole. And so what goes on in a particular sphere is not insulated from these wider appeals.

Now, so long as that's the case, the insulation that the pediatric oncologist requires is not only necessary for her to do her job but it doesn't necessarily involve compartmentalization, for she knows that she is answerable—accountable—as a pediatric oncologist in terms of standards that are much more general. It's when pediatric oncologists, other medical specialists, or the medical profession treat their sphere as an autonomous one in which they are not accountable outside it that we begin to see how compartmentalization can corrupt. So I think it is possible—may in fact sometimes be difficult but in general it is possible—to distinguish between the kind of separation out of a particular sphere from what I am calling compartmentalization.