The idea seems to be that a collection of individuals, each
of whom has some evaluative ability, may, as a group, have overall a greater
evaluative competence than a single expert.
(It is important to note that Aristotle is cautious and does not think
this always happens. It just might
happen sometimes.) So there is some
notion of there being an additive quality of the relevant skill or character
trait. Provided the individuals in the
group are not entirely slavish then you can add them together and sum their
respective competences. This seems odd
just because it is not clear that virtue and wisdom (aretē and phronēsis:
1281b4–5) are the kinds of things that can be summed in this fashion according
to Aristotle. Now it is possible to
claim that what Aristotle means here is that collective decision-making by a
group of individually deficient judges can be effective because the group
itself generates a kind of helpful reflection: each learns from the others and
overall a good decision is reached. Perhaps that is a plausible idea. [1]
Unfortunately, I am not sure this fits very well with the
way the rest of the paragraph is presented and, in particular, the various
analogies that are offered. Aristotle
goes on to claim that a good person brings together in one individual the
relevant skills and competences but these might be scattered and distributed
between a number of individuals, each of whom is worse overall than the good
person, but who when combined are better.
This is not a mere additive notion since the idea here is that the group
comes together as if to form a single agent (1281b5). This also seems to make better sense of the
analogy of the feast at 1281b2–3: many people bring dishes to a meal. The feast is better than a single dish, even
if that single dish is excellent while each of the many dishes in the feast is
not as good as the single dish. This
seems plausible to me only on the assumption that the group of many dishes (deipna) contains a variety of dishes
and, what’s more, that variety is such that for example one is a starter, one a
main course, one a dessert and they combine to make a feast (dapanē 1281b3). It is not obvious (though I can see how
someone might want to argue for it) that a collection of a large number of
mediocre but pleasant chocolate mousses is better than a single really
excellent chocolate mousse. Certainly, I’m not at all convinced that the
collection is better in terms of chocolate mousse-ness. But if each dish brings something different
that contributes to the overall meal as a whole then perhaps the collection may
be better than the single very good item taken on its own.
Incidentally, this notion of adding together complementary
parts into a whole is probably present already at 1281b4–5 where the many
individuals each have a ‘part’ (morion)
of virtue. If we think of the parts not
merely as ‘a certain quantity’ but rather as parts in the sense that each jigsaw
piece is a part of the overall puzzle, then adding together all of these parts
is what is needed for a good whole.
If that is right then thinking in terms of collective
decision making that involves debate, reflection, learning from one another and
so on, might be a more plausible way to defend the idea of the competence of
crowds, but it doesn’t fit well with Aristotle’s analogies which are instead
put in terms of this ’jigsaw pieces and jigsaw-puzzle’ model.
This idea of a sum of the good parts of a collection of
different items, where each item is overall not that great, seems also to be
what Aristotle has in mind in the analogy from aesthetic judgement at
1281b8–10: if each person makes a good judgement about a separate aspect of the
performance (one is good at flute-playing evaluation, another at evaluating
some part of the dancing) then they might add up to a single all-round
excellent judge. It doesn’t matter that
the good flute judge has no idea about choreography because it’s only the
flute-judging jigsaw piece that he provides.
Similarly, at the end of the paragraph Aristotle seems to have in mind
that the collection is a collection of just those positive aspects of each of
the individuals. He compares a single
beautiful person with an combination of a set of different beautiful parts from
different individuals: Clooney’s jawline, Grant’s eyes, etc. etc. (1281b12–15).
But that raises is another worry. It’s just not true that if you bung together a
collection of the best bits of different faces the collection is going to be as
good as if not better than a single beautiful face. Here’s the proof:
[1] I think this is the sort of view favoured in R. Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford,
2002), 402–6.
