The attempt to engage a society from no particular point of view is an attempt to see as God does. A "God's eye perspective" is in theory, an objective, dispassionate perspective, untouched by the bias, or parochial near-sightedness that comes along with membership within the society under scrutiny (page 36). From this vantage point, the path of discovery yields a morality in the same way that an explorer finds a new continent. "The religious leader (God's servant) is like an explorer", Walzer argues, "who brings us the good news of its [the moral world's] existence and the first map of its shape" (page 4). But even if the morality he "discovers" is new to some, perhaps its first hearers, it does not hold that advantage for long. For once this new moral world is inhabited, the critical edge provided by its discovery is lost, and we must soon begin the practice of interpreting what we are now familiar with in the face of daily-lived experience [i.e. the Israelite experience of the Law of Moses]. This is the case whether the discovery is philosophical, or religious in nature.
Similarly, the path of invention is taken when philosophers seek to aid in the creation of a better common life. It, too, is developed from no place in particular, and without a blue-print to guide its development. For Walzer, John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas are characteristic of this type of moral philosophical endeavor. Rawls' "difference principle" deprives would-be moral legislators of any knowledge of their standing, interests, values, relationships, or talents in the world in which they seek to provide a notion of justice. Similarly, Habermas argues for conversations that are free of ideological confrontation; conversations in which moral legislators are liberated from all bonds of particularism and enabled to speak based on reason (pages 11-12). But discovery and invention -- both deny the truth of our lived experience. The truth is, there is no starting place for morality other than where we actually are. We are always in some particular place of value (page 17). Discovery and invention are, as Walzer argues, "efforts at escape in the hope of finding some external and universal standard with which to judge moral existence" (page 21).
But why escape? Because the real work of social criticism is challenging. The work of interpretation is an internal job, not external. The social critic is connected to the society he/she speaks critically of. As such, the critic is more like "the local judge ... who earns his authority by arguing with his fellows -- who angrily and insistently ... objects, protests ... the critic is one of us" (page 39). The critic pays attention to the consistency of her own society’s moral life, and critiques it internally on that basis. A critic can come from the outside, but he would have to get on the inside, into local practices and arrangements before criticizing. To be sure, Walzer does argue for the presence of a universal morality; a thin minimalism that consists of prohibitions as a universal code (like murder, deception, betrayal, gross cruelty), but we cannot deduce the shape of a fully developed moral culture base on minimalism (page 25). Thus, the social critic is an interpreter of her own culture, like the prophets of Israel. Walzer uses Amos as an example of the social critic. Indeed, the prophets were ancient social critics, inventors of the trade (page 71). Amos did not find, nor invent, the message he gave to Israel. He assumed that his hearers could immediately understand and accept what he had to say (page 72). The prophet did not seek to rule the country, and in that regard, sought a critical distance from authority within his society. But the prophet invoked values that the community shared. Walzer also refers to Jonah as an example of universal critique in the form of minimal values universally held. In Jonah's case, with Nineveh, he confronted them about a common understanding that violence and oppression is bad. But between the two, Amos and Jonah, Amos' critique goes deeper. For, we are not capable of knowing the details of a transformation that needs to occur in the life Nineveh other than repentance, because minimalism is abstract. But the thick, maximalist code shared between Amos and his culture is more than the abstract, it is reiteration and interpretation of their own values.