Woodchopper Revisited 9

Both the informal example sketched above and the opinions in the Olmstead case suggest the strengths and relative advantages of analogical reasoning over deductive reasoning, thinking that begins with general principles and thereupon moves to solve specific cases. One of these strengths is the power of analogy to promote consensus in matters involving legal, ethical, or political disagreement. People who differ over broad, general principles might nonetheless be able to come together over specifics.“[I]n the face of persistent disagreement or uncertainty about what morality generally requires, people can reason about particular cases by reference to analogies. They point to cases in which their judgments are firm. They proceed from those firm judgments to the more difficult ones. This is how judges often operate; it is also how ordinary people tend to think.” Suppose, for example, that we were to approach either of our two exemplary cases(bedtime rules and wiretapping) on the basis of deductive reasoning. We would first have to affirm, as our major premise, either of two controversial principles: a commitment to a“lenient” or a“strict” theory of parenting, or a commitment to one side or the other of the age-old debate between the right of the individual to privacy and the responsibility of the government to protect the community. It would be difficult in either case to resolve the dispute between the principles or to identify the theoretical happy medium or point of balance between them. It would be simpler and surer, however, to come to consensus on specific problematic instances by working from examples over which we have already reached agreement. This is perhaps another way of expressing the insight that broad, general principles tend to be useless in resolving legal and moral controversies.

Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin stress this point in their vigorous defense of casuistry, or reasoning from particulars in the discipline of ethics.’ Although people tend to think of general principles as the whole of ethical discourse, this is a drastic oversimplification of the state of affairs.“Taken by themselves, the