Blog News

RCL to become PSL!

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RCL is not quite 2 years old, but in the short time we’ve been live, we’ve had several small scale changes (particularly with the blog roll).  Now it is time for a bigger change.  RCL will soon become PSL: Pro-Social Libertarians.  

The name comes partly as a response to pieces like this one by Paul Krugman , but really its straightforward: libertarians are too often seen as being anti-social and much of what RCL, BHL before it, and now PSL, seek to do is correct that mistake.

The blogroll at PSL will be smaller than that of RCL, but we hope the content will not be reduced. Of course, we’ll also have guest posts along the way. The main bloggers will be:

Andrew I. Cohen

Andrew Jason Cohen

Lauren Hall

Connor Kianpour

Aeon Skoble

James Taggart

James Stacey Taylor

PSL is born from experience with BHL and RCL, but with new thinking from Jim Taggart (JD, Phd-Phil).  As blogs have partially given way to podcasts, we anticipate having both.  We also anticipate having a more open policy with comments, though reserving the right to remove unproductive (especially mean-spirited) comments.  

What remains the same is perhaps more important than what is changing.  You’ll still see great posts from our main bloggers as well as guests.  Many posts are likely to be libertarian takes on issues of social justice; many are also likely to be about civil discourse.  Indeed the tag line for PSL is “Owning Civil Discourse and Social Justice.”

To our way of thinking, libertarians-—at least libertarians of the BHL/RCL/PSL sort—do own both. That’s because we and so-called “Rawlsekians” or “liberaltarians” are concerned with the plight of the less fortunate and because we see points of agreement and disagreement with people in both of the dominant parties—and elsewhere (including the dominant ideologies)—and are willing to honestly debate the issues on the merits. That last is sorely missing in contemporary discourse and we want to help improve that. To do so, we will be maintaining some of the rules from RCL; namely:

1. While we may criticize the views of others and/or their work, when we do, we will remain civil.

2. Trolls and obnoxious commenters can be banned, but only by a majority vote of the group.

3. We won’t have posts that are mere links to something posted elsewhere.  We might post a link to something someone else wrote, along with commentary about it. We may also have posts that serve to “round-up” links to several things others have written that we think you would be interested in.

4. We’ll try to space out posts, time wise.

Our policy regarding comments will be different:  

5. Each of us will have our own default regarding comments, but if we allow comments, we reserve the right to delete unproductive comments.  Generally speaking, the point to deleting a comment will be to prevent incivility from escalating.  

Look for an intro post to PSL soon!  I hope you’ll join us in this new chapter!

Uncategorized

Misleading Mill Meme Makes Muddled Minds

Going around the internet recently is a photo of a sign quoting John Stuart Mill “Landlords Get Rich In Their Sleep.”  The sign is apparently in a bank, suggesting that the bank thinks it would be a good idea for you to get a loan enabling you to own property, but the meme seems intended to criticize the idea that being a landlord is a good thing, by supplying the passage from Principles of Political Economy from which the quote is ostensibly drawn.   The meme creator has posted the following: “Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing.  The increase in the value of the land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.”  But that’s not quite what Mill says.  The meme cites Book V, chapter 2, section 5 as the source.  The first sentence in the meme is mostly accurate, but the second sentence is not in the text at all.

Mill is arguing in this section that it is not improper to tax landlords, because the value of land to which they have title accrues in value without them having to do anything.  “Suppose that there is a kind of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the owners….  In such a case it would be no violation of the principles on which private property is grounded, if the state should appropriate this increase of wealth, or part of it, as it arises….  Now this is actually the case with rent.”  Mill is certainly not saying, as the meme implies, that landlords aren’t entitled to rents, only that it’s not unjust to tax them on rents.

But there’s a different level on which the meme is wrong-headed, and wrong to conscript Mill into its purpose.  The word “landlord” had a slightly different meaning in the 1840s than it does today.  Landlords used to be literal lords, who had title to lands on the basis of royal privilege.  While it might be fair to characterize them as not working or taking risks, it’s certainly false in today’s context.  While we continue to use the same word, landlords of today aren’t literal lords, just regular people who own properties from which they can derive rental income.  This very obviously does involve work and risk.  Mid-19th-century objections to aristocratic landlordism do not tell us anything about today’s rental market, nor do they undermine the reality of the work and risk a property owner of today must incur, and without which there’d be an even greater housing shortage.  Apartment buildings don’t grow on trees.

Uncategorized

No, Maus Wasn’t Banned by a Tennessee School Board.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the decision of the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee to remove Maus from its 8th Grade ELA curriculum. Much of this discussion has focused on the claim that Board has “banned” Maus from the school; this had led some to claim that the Board did so in to move away from teaching about the Holocaust.

Fortunately, we can assess these claims easily as the transcript of the Board meeting is available online.

One of the Board members did state that the Board was considering banning Maus. (This same Board member was also skeptical that removing the text was appropriate, noting both that he was concerned about the removal based on “a few words”, and that he had read the background on this author and the series, talked to some educators, and it is a highly critically acclaimed and a well reviewed series and book context”.) But what was actually under discussion was not the removal of Maus from the school, but its removal as an anchor text in a module on the Holocaust.

The reasons for this had nothing to do with objections to teaching the Holocaust. Indeed, several Board members stated how important it was for students to learn about it, noting that the module on the Holocaust involved students reading “news articles from BBC, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, survivor stories, and excerpts from other books….. [and] There is even a section where we go to the Jewish Virtual Library and look at some selections from that.” The concern was primarily about the “objectionable” language used in the book–words that “if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so”. Secondary concerns included the presence of a nude picture–of a female mouse!–the fact that some of the objectionable language involved a boy “cussing out” his father, which wasn’t respectful, and that the author Art Spiegelman had drawn illustrations for Playboy (!).

Possible solutions short of removing the book were suggested–such as whiting out the offensive words completely (deemed a violation of copyright, and so unacceptable), whiting them out partially (but then the kinds could guess them!) and writing to Spiegelman to ask if their removal would be permissible (that would take too long). After canvassing the possibilities the Board decided that despite the merits of Maus (one Board member said she would still teach it to her children) since the language it contained violated the speech code of the school it should be removed from the curriculum.

Note that all that was decided was that Maus should be removed from the curriculum. The Board members didn’t vote to remove the text from the school. Maus wasn’t banned.

Was this a good decision? In my view, no. Against the horrors of the Holocaust a few “damns” don’t mean a damn. But from the perspective of the Board members the “cussing” was clearly extremely offensive–and ancillary to the main message of Maus. And they couldn’t find a way to keep Maus without the wording that violated the speech code to which they required students to adhere. This wasn’t a good decision, but it wass an understandable one.

More understandable, in fact, than claiming falsely that Maus was banned because of the putative far-right sympathies of the McMinn County Board of Education.

Economics, Ethical Issues, Externalities, Law & Legal Philosophy, Political Philosophy/Theory, Social Criticism

Employment, Coercion, and Voting

Sally works for a big corporation.  She works 9 to 5, with a half hour lunch, Monday through Friday.  She often brings work home with her and on Saturdays, she takes a class, hoping it will help her receive a promotion and raise.  On Sundays, she cleans her home and preps for the following week.  This is her schedule every week unless she manages to get a vacation day or two (or if she gets sick)—in which case, work backs up and her return is hard.

Sally does not like her job but there are no other jobs available that she would like.  She wishes she didn’t have to work. Some will say she only takes the job because of coercion. This would be “circumstance-based,” “background,” or “situational” coercion (for discussions, see chapter 7 of Scanlon or chapter 4 of Cohen-Almagor). In this sort of coercion, there is no individual person or clear corporate entity that does anything coercive. There is no one to blame for Sally’s situation and no one to interfere with to help Sally.

Some will insist that what is described is not coercive at all—that without a coercer, there cannot be coercion.  They might also insist that Sally consents to the the employment.  They might even say Sally consents to the social system within which she is employed.  Some of this is true—Sally does, I think, consent to her employment. What about the claim that there is no coercion?

Generally speaking, we think of coercion as one agent, P, acting to get a second agent, Q, to do some action, A, typically by threatening to do something Q does not want to happen (firing Q, harming Q’s relative, etc).  When P does this, it is reasonable to think P is responsible—or at least partly responsible—for Q’s (coerced) actions and that P is subject to justifiable interference.  In Sally’s case, there simply is no P acting to get Sally to keep working.  There are only the facts of the social, political, and economic world which jointly make it such that if Sally does not work, she will not be able to afford to live. The circumstances are what matters and circumstances aren’t agents that do things.

Does this mean it makes no sense to say Sally is coerced?  I’m skeptical.  Sally is not doing as she wants to do.  She acts counter-preferentially because of the way the social, political, and economic world she (and we) inhabit is set up.  While there is no particular agent to blame or interfere with, we can still think there is something unfortunate going on.  If you don’t want to call it coercion, call it shcoercion.  The important point is not one of conceptual analysis but of the morality of the situation.

Some think that the situation is not merely unfortunate but that it is so unjust we ought to change things in the political and economic order so that Sally (and the rest of us) would not be coerced (or shcoerced) by circumstances to work a particular job.  Marxists and others on the left might even say the situation is so unjust that we ought to have the government act to make it such that Sally would not have to work at all.  (See, for example, Van Parijs.)

While I would deny that the world should be set up in such a way that anyone can choose not to work at all if they prefer that, it seems clear that a situation where many people have to work at jobs they don’t like at all is at least unfortunate. (I’m also OK with saying it is coercive or shcoercive, but would note that not all coercion or shcoercion is bad).

A world in which most people work is good for all of us.  A world in which many have to work at jobs they don’t like is, obviously, less good than one in which all of us could work at jobs we like.  This is not a Marxist or socialist claim.  Indeed, I believe the most reasonable way to actualize such a situation—where all or most can work at jobs they like—is to move far more toward a free market (or freed market—see, for example, Carson) than we have.  I’ll keep further thoughts about that for a possible future post. 

In the meantime, here’s what really strikes me as odd: the same people that think they are unjustly coerced into working will often also say that voting in a democratic system—including a democratic system like ours—is indication of consent to the system.  This strikes me as completely incongruous with the view that they are coerced into working.  I didn’t have any part in making our democratic system and I deny that when I vote within that system, I am thereby consenting to it.  I vote, when I do, thinking “I wish we had a better system, but I want to vote now even though I am participating in what seems to me a clearly illegitimate system.”  No one asked for my consent to a two party system.  Or a system within which the majority can ruin the lives of a minority.  Perhaps this system is less coercive than the employment system—but if so, its because I can choose simply not to vote at all.  I’m not, that is, coerced into voting.  I am, though, coerced into voting in a bad system if I wish to vote at all.  Its not like I can go out and vote in a good system—that option is not possible for me.

If it’s true that others made impossible the option of Sally not working at all—or not working at all given the system we live in (I doubt it)—then the coercion there would be on par with the coercion that leaves me only able to vote in what seems to me an illegitimate system. It strikes me as more likely that it is circumstance-based coercion (or shcoercion) in both cases. In both cases, I think, there is no specific agent to blame or interfere with. In neither case does this mean we should rest comfortable with the social-political-economic order. If we ought to think of changing things for people like Sally, we ought to think of changing things for people like me. But many people seem to think Sally is treated unjustly and I am not. Why? That is, why do people believe that voting in a system they had no part in making constitutes consent to that system but working for an employer in a system they had no part in making does not?

Discourse, Education

Discourse and Attendance in College Classes

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Many of my posts on RCL have been about discourse. None has been directly about discourse in classrooms, but I do try to make my classes sites of civil discourse. This is both because student dialogue is what makes the classroom fun and exciting for me and because I believe it is an essential part of college. (See this.). The discourse that occurs in classrooms and elsewhere on college campuses is an invaluable part of the college experience.

As I’ve discussed previously, I think there are 2 basic reasons to engage in discourse: to maintain or nourish a relationship or to convey information. (See here.) In college classrooms, I will simply assume, the latter reason is paramount. That is also hugely important elsewhere on college campuses—students learn a lot from each other—but the first reason is also hugely important as students make connections with others, some of whom will be life long friends and some of whom will be business associates.

This post is primarily about classrooms, so it’s the conveying of information that is relevant here. In particular, its what is relevant when asking whether attendance should be required in college classes. My own view about this has changed over the years. In the past, I’ve marked people down for poor attendance or multiple tardies or made class participation—for which attendance is a necessary prerequisite—a separate and substantial part of students’ grades. At a certain point, though, colleagues convinced me that making participation a part of a student’s grade was unfair to those students who have significant psychological issues with speaking in class. At first, I responded to that by allowing the “participation” to be outside of class—either in office visits or email. Eventually, I dropped it as a requirement and instead made it only a way to improve one’s grade. I’ve never stopped believing, though, in the importance of attending and participating in class.

Over the years, I’ve had students approach me about taking a class without attending. Some had very good reason they could not attend courses during the day when the course was offered—needing to work full time to support their family, for example. My standard reply was always something like “no, attendance is required” or “you can’t pass this class without attending, so no.” More recently, I have been questioning the wisdom of that. The issue has to involve consideration of the sort of information that is conveyed in classes.

As a philosopher, I am not at all concerned that students learn biographical facts about philosophers and only somewhat concerned that students learn even basic facts about different theories. My main concern is in getting students to see how to do philosophy. What that means is that I want students to learn how to think clearly, check assumptions, make valid inferences, and engage in both verbal and written discourse about arguments and their premises, inferential moves, and conclusions. I want to convey to them how to do this well.

Given what I want the students to get out of my classes, my question becomes “is attendance necessary for students to think clearly, check assumptions, make valid inferences, and engage in both verbal and written discourse about arguments and their premises, inferential moves, and conclusions?” Another way to ask the question is to ask: “do individual learners need professors to learn how to do those things?” I think most do.

Classically, education has three stages: grammar, logic, rhetoric. I prefer to think of these in terms of mimesis, analysis, synthesis. The idea is that young children must memorize information, imitating language and such, and until they have some minimum amount of knowledge, they can’t be expected to do anything else. Once they have that, though, they can move on to the second stage wherein they can use logic to analyze things, figuring out what goes where and why. They can even question—analyze—the bits of information they previously learned. Only with mastery of analysis can they move on to the third stage wherein they can make something new, synthesizing something from the parts of what they have analyzed.

Teachers are clearly needed for mimesis—someone has to provide the student what it is that should be learned (memorized, imitated). Perhaps teachers are also needed for the beginnings of the second stage, pointing students in the right direction as they begin to do logical analysis. One needs to understand basic rules of deductive logic to do analysis well and I suspect most of us need someone to teach us that. But does everyone? Frankly, I doubt it though I suppose how much teachers are needed here will depend on how much of logic is innate to our reasoning abilities. It seems even less likely that teachers are necessary for the third stage, though clearly someone to give us direction can be useful and I think it likely that most of us learn best in dialogue with others. If that is right, attendance in class would clearly be useful. So perhaps that is the answer to my question: most people need direction, they can only get that in class, so attendance should be required.

What, though, if some want to learn without professors? Some certainly can do so. Whether they should be allowed to do so when in college is another question. After all, if they are able to do so, why should they enroll in college at all? If they do enroll, the college can simply say “you are enrolling here and that means accepting that we know best how you will learn (or at least recognizing that we get to decide), and we deem it necessary for you to attend courses.”

Some will no doubt think that the sort of view just attributed to a college is overly paternalistic. On the other hand, some people will be unfortunately wrong when they think they can teach themselves collegiate level material. Some people, after all, read great books and completely misunderstand them. I have met people who thought themselves erudite for reading Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and others, but whose comprehension of those authors was abysmal. Such people would be well served by a policy requiring course attendance. Without it, they would lack comprehension and thus do poorly on any assessments.

Still, presumably some can read those materials and do well. (In other systems, after all, attending classes is—was?—not expected; one studies a set of materials and then is examined.) Others might not do well, but do well enough for their purposes. They may, that is, only want some knowledge (or some level of skill)—happy to have read the texts even if their comprehension is limited—and be happy to get a C or C- in a course. They may have reason to want a college degree independent of learning well. (In our society, after all, many seem only to go to college to get a degree to signal to employers that they are worth hiring. It’s hard to blame them for this given how our society works.)

So a student may have good reason to enroll in a college, register for a course, and not attend. But what should we think about this and what should professors do? Some professors, of course, may be annoyed or insulted if students are apparently unconcerned to attend regularly or show up on time. I was in the past, but no longer am. I still, though, have a hard time tolerating feigned surprise at grades from students who obviously did not prioritize the class. I would prefer a student who says “its not worth my coming to class; I’ll just try to pass without doing so” to one who lies about how hard they are trying to do the work. Frankly, I am coming to think that if they pass, the former simply deserve congratulations. (If they don’t pass, they can’t expect me to be upset. I can root for their passing, without being surprised if they don’t.) But, honestly, I’d be hugely surprised if they did at all well without attending. That is the main concern—the best pedagogy.

Why would I be surprised if a non-attending student passed? Frankly, I think that the vast majority of people learn better in a class with a professor than they can without. If nothing else, in philosophy and other humanities classes, they learn something very important—how to engage in good civil, honest, and productive discourse. That does affect how they perform on exams and papers. What I expect in all of the writing my students do—whether on a short essay exam, longer essay exams, or papers—is well-written and well thought out, honest and civil responses to whatever prompt is provided. I want them to do philosophy after all, not sophistry or fluff. Attending class means being in an environment designed to help them learn. If they participate as I hope they do, they can also help improve that environment. That makes for better outcomes for all in the class. Even if they don’t participate—and, again, I realize doing so is honestly hard for some students—they are likely to do better simply because they hear the sort of discourse I seek to promote. If they hear others practicing good discourse, they are likely to pick up on what it is. Attendance helps.

The whole point of classes is that for most students, they promote learning—for those attending. Why, then, would someone want to register for a class if they don’t plan to attend? One answer is that the current system mainly doesn’t allow them to get the credentials of college without doing so. Mainly. We do have fully asynchronous online classes for which one does the work on one’s own time so long as one completes it by the required deadlines, including finishing it all by the end of a semester. (But why insist on a time limit?)

While we don’t have a system conducive to students not registering for classes and yet getting credentialed, that isn’t reason to require attendance in the classes we offer. Perhaps we ought to make it possible for students to take a syllabus, learn the material on their own, and sit for an exam when they feel themselves ready, without imposing a schedule on them. If they pass, great. If not, perhaps they try actually taking the class (i.e., including attending). That may be what we should do. Until then, some of us will require attendance and some will not.

Open for comments and discussion. What do others think?

Uncategorized

Structural Racism and Individual Choice

A story this week in the New York Times about the Minneapolis school district raised some interesting questions about racism, liberalism, and individualism.  The story explains how Minneapolis school officials “assigned families to new school zones, redrawing boundaries to take socioeconomic diversity — and as a consequence, racial diversity — into account.”  This is in response to legitimate concerns that Minneapolis, described in the story as “among the most segregated school districts in the country,” has tangible gaps in academic performance by race.  “Research shows that de facto school segregation is one major reason that America’s education system is so unequal, and that racially and socioeconomically diverse schools can benefit all students.” 

The article elaborates on the problem: “Research has shown that integration can deliver benefits for all children.  For example, Black children exposed to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education experienced higher educational achievement, higher annual earnings as adults, a lower likelihood of incarceration and better health outcomes, according to longitudinal work by the economist Rucker Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley. The gains came at no cost to the educational achievement of white students.  Other research has documented how racially and economically diverse schools can benefit all students, including white children, by reducing biases and promoting skills like critical thinking.  Racially segregated schools, on the other hand, are associated with larger gaps in student performance, because they tend to concentrate students of color in high poverty environments, according to a recent paper analyzing all public school districts.”

So the plan is to increase integration, not necessarily by bussing black students to predominantly white schools, but by bussing white students to predominantly black schools.  Predictably, not every family is enthusiastic about this.  But what I found interesting about the story is that it highlights the ways in which a structure can have outcomes that are racist even if individual actors within that structure aren’t racists.   Many people bristle at the terms “structural racism” or “institutional racism” because they take them to imply that individual actors are racists.  People who use these terms typically don’t mean to imply this (though some do), but this distinction can get lost in the shuffle.  One specific anecdote in the article is helpful here.

Heather Wulfsberg, of Minnetonka, had her daughter reassigned to North High School.  She appealed this decision, but let’s see why.  Wulfsberg, “who is white, had intended to send her daughter, Isabella, 14, to Southwest High, a racially diverse but majority white public school that is a 10-minute bus ride from their home.  The school offers an international baccalaureate program, as well as Japanese, which Isabella studied in middle school. Isabella’s older brother, 18, is a senior there, and Ms. Wulfsberg envisioned her children attending together, her son helping Isabella navigate freshman year. So Ms. Wulfsberg appealed the reassignment to North, citing her son’s attendance at Southwest, and her daughter’s interest in Japanese. (North offers one language, Spanish.)  She was also concerned about transportation. There was no direct bus, and Isabella’s commute could take up to 55 minutes. She would also have to walk from the bus stop to school through an area where frequent gun shots are a problem.”

If Wulfsberg had said something like “I can’t bear the thought of my daughter going to a majority-black school,” it would be clear these are unsupportable reasons.  But the preceding paragraph gives all perfectly legitimate reasons.  Isabella can’t continue learning her language.  She would spend 2 hours a day on the bus.  Is it reasonable to force Heather to do that to Isabella?  I don’t see that it is.  And Heather didn’t either, so Isabella is going to private school.  On the community Facebook page, Heather was called a racist.  ““They were like, ‘Your cover is, you want academics for your kids, and underneath this all, you really are racist,’” she recalled. “It’s a very scary feeling to do a self-examination of yourself and think, ‘Am I?’”  She paused, reflecting. “But I don’t believe I am. I really don’t.””

I have no idea whether she is or not, but she certainly can’t be called a racist for the reasons given here.  So in this case, the parents in the community Facebook group were in fact using something about structural racism as a personal accusation, precisely what the coining of the term was meant to avoid.

It’s possible of course that both (a) the evolution of American public schooling has been heavily influenced by racism and yields outcomes that are demonstrably unequal and (b) parents like Heather aren’t motivated by racism at all.  But then we’re stuck with a conundrum: what’s the fix for (a)?  If the answer is “Isabella’s good must be sacrificed for the greater good of helping ameliorate racial inequality in schools,” you’re certainly in for rough time getting Heather to agree.  Another approach might be systemic: since the outcome problems are systemic, it wouldn’t be crazy to think the solution would be systemic as well.  The anarchist response “don’t have public schools at all” is probably correct, but politically unfeasible.  But even if we have public schools, there’s no reason they have to be structured the way they are.  One reason for the disparity in schools is that in most districts, local property taxes pay for the schools, so wealthier suburbs have better schools than poorer areas (this affects poor white areas too of course).  So maybe don’t tie school funding to local property taxes.  Or maybe don’t have school districts be drawn like Checkpoint Charlie.   Any rigidly drawn district would have some families living at its fringes – why prohibit those kids from attending school in the next district?  The classic pro-choice argument is: figure out what the state government spends per pupil, and then give that money to the families to spend on whichever school they think is best, public or private.  This would eliminate geography-based funding discrepancies.   We address the problem of people not being able to afford food not by having state-run farms and grocery stores, but by giving people money for food.  Why not give them money for school?

Discourse, Social Criticism

The World is Not a Therapy Session

Braver Angels does fantastic work helping people improve conversations with those they have significant and stress-inducing disagreements with so that they can gain greater mutual understanding of each other, thereby reducing polarization. It seems to work. As I noted earlier, though, the desire to maintain or improve one’s relationships with others is only one of the two main reasons we engage in discourse. The other is to exchange information, both “teaching” and “learning.” As I noted in that previous post, I worry about the “truth deficit” likely to emerge if we stress mutual understanding (of each other rather than of each other’s views). Here, I’ll discuss this a bit further.

What is encouraged in Braver Angels’ workshops is active listening, where one attends to what the other says, providing non-verbal clues of interest, along with reflecting back to the other what they said. In a therapeutic setting, reflecting back to another what they said can be incredibly useful. “People like having their thoughts and feelings reflected back to them” (Tania Israel, page 51) and so increases their comfort level when in therapy, thereby allowing them to open up. For therapeutic purposes, it seems really quite useful. Nonetheless, I have long been uncomfortable with it in other settings.

I had a date once with a woman who, throughout dinner, reflected back to me what I had said. It so threw me off that I didn’t really know what to make of it. I don’t recall how long it took for me to realize that she might have resorted to the tactic because she found what I was saying antithetical to her own views (I don’t recall what we were discussing). I’ll never know for sure as I found it so distasteful that I never saw her again. If the same thing would’ve happened today, I’d probably ask why she was doing it, but I suspect there are others who would do as I did and walk away. (I don’t deny, of course, that others appreciate it.)

Again, the technique has value—there is good evidence that it helps people feel comfortable which can be useful both in developing relationships and in therapy situations (see Israel footnotes 5 and 6 on page 74). Importantly, though, the world is not a therapy session and sometimes what matters is exchanging information, not (or not merely) developing a relationship. Put another way, while it’s true that we sometimes want to develop a relationship and learn about the person, other times we want to figure out the truth about a topic and are less willing to except the truth deficit. If we are trying to persuade someone to change their views about abortion, capitalism, gun control, immigration, schools, welfare rights, or any number of other contentious topics, we might want to know more about our interlocutor, but we also just want to persuade—or be persuaded. (Part of why we want to know who they are is to determine how we might persuade them!)

To be clear, when we are engaging in a serious discussion with someone about an issue we disagree about, we should be open to the possibility that the view we start the conversation with is mistaken and that we can thus learn from our interlocutor. Of course, when we start, we will believe we are right and hope to teach (persuade) the other, but we have to know we can be wrong. We should also be open to the possibility that neither of us is right and there is some third position (perhaps somewhere between our view and theirs, perhaps not) that is better still. What is important in these cases, though, is figuring out the truth about the issue (or getting closer to it). We shouldn’t give that up lightly.

Getting to the truth may, in some instances, be aided by reflecting to each other what we’ve said. Obviously, if we do not understand what our interlocutor has said we should ask them to explain. Sometimes we simply need some clarification. We need to know, after all, that we are actually talking about the same thing and we need to understand where our views overlap and where they do not. Sometimes, also, we might ask someone to repeat what they say in different words to make sure we understand; we might also do it for them (common in teaching). But if reflecting back to each other is used for other reasons (making the other feel comfortable, for example), I wonder how far it goes. It seems to me that we need to challenge each other. Sometimes, we may even need to be abrasive—or to have others be abrasive toward us. This can help us improve our own views. (For more on that see Emily Chamlee-Wright’s article on the topic here, as well as my response. See also Hrishikesh Joshi’s Why Its OK to Speak Your Mind.)

In short, it seems to me that in normal discourse with someone with whom we disagree, we ought to be at least as concerned with determining the best view as we are with making each other comfortable. Making each other comfortable is important, but perhaps primarily as a precursor to honest conversation. If I say, for example, that “I believe we should have completely open economic borders, perhaps just keeping out known criminals” and you reply “let me be sure I understand; you think we should not stop anyone from coming into the country (perhaps unless they are criminals in their own country) even if it means they take our jobs, push for an end to Judeo-Christianity, and bring in drugs,” I am likely to skip over the first part—which strikes me as unnecessary and vaguely insulting—and move on to the latter claims, which I think are all mistakes. I might think “OK, so they wanted to be clear” or “OK, they wanted time to gather their thoughts,” but if it becomes a regular part of the conversation, I am less likely to continue engaging (and, frankly, less likely to trust the other). I may even wonder why why people approach all of life as if it’s a therapy session.

Crime, Current Events, Discourse, Economics, Externalities, Social Criticism

Three News Items to Rally Around

Since I spend a good bit of my time thinking about polarization and ways to combat it, I thought I would bring attention to three recent news items that should help reduce polarization but seem to mostly go unnoticed.

First, there is this from WaPo 10/24/2021, about a police chief in a town in Georgia, seeking to have police officers shoot to incapacitate rather than to kill (so, shooting in the legs or abdomen, for example, instead of the chest).  Of course, it would be best if no one had to be shot at all, but those that (rightly) complain about police violence should be embracing this as an improvement as it would presumably mean fewer killings by police.  And those who worry endlessly about “law and order” would seem to have to choose between that and saying “yeah, we don’t mind it if the police kill people.”  Since the latter would likely be seen as including some nefarious beliefs, it’s hard to imagine why they, too, wouldn’t embrace it.

Second, from NYT 11/3/2021, is a short about a Swiss company literally taking CO2 out of the air and making soda with it. Why everyone isn’t talking about this ecstatically is beyond me. I know folks on the (pretty far) left who worry endlessly about global warming and claim we have to stop this and stop that to at least slow it down before we all die. I know folks on the (pretty far) right who claim, more or less, that global warming is fake news. Either way, this should be good news. If global warming is fake, then this sort of technological advancement may be uninteresting in the long run—but those on the right should be happy to say “OK, we know you’re worried, why don’t you invest in this to help?” If its not fake news (fwiw, it’s not), this may be the way to save us and the planet. Those on the left (assuming they don’t want simply to be victims and keep fighting about “green new deal” sort of regulations) should be embracing the possibilities, declaring “yes, we need more of this as a good way forward without killing the economy and making everyone worse off.”

Finally, from Axios 11/5/2021, is a story on the jobs report.  In a nutshell, “America has now recovered 80% of the jobs lost at the depth of the recession in 2020. … Wages are still rising: Average hourly earnings rose another 11 cents an hour in October, to $30.96. That’s enough to keep up with inflation.”  I know that some question the specific numbers.  That’s no surprise.  What is surprising (even given how bad Dems usually are on messaging) is that Biden and the Dems haven’t been touting this at every chance.  It should please Reps a well except that it may make some swing voters less likely to go to their side.  

The above three stories are pretty clearly good news for everyone.   The third is perhaps better for Dems than Reps, but somehow they haven’t decided to hype it up or use it as a way to convince moderate legislators or voters to help them.  The first and second are good for everyone.  Yet it doesn’t seem like many are talking about any of the three.  It’s almost as if both sides of our political divide want to remain divided.  And to alienate those of us who refuse to take either side.  Or perhaps they want to clearly demonstrate that neither side should be taken seriously and it’s high time for a party to emerge in the middle. 

The “middle” here might be interesting.  What party consistently opposes state coercion and force against civilians?  What party consistently opposes the state looking the other way when negative externalities become worse and worse?  What party consistently favors policies that grow the economy so that all will do better?  There is such a party, even if it has its own problems.

Current Events, Ethical Issues

Diagnosing the abortion debate

Reporting back in January 2017 showed that abortion rates have fallen to levels lower than any year since 1973, the year of the Roe v. Wade decision, and reflect about a 50% decrease in the rate from its peak in 1981. The study, conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, cites as causal factors greater access to contraception as well as laws in many states that restrict abortion clinics or require ultrasounds. The controversial Texas bill is the most recent attempt by states to broaden restrictions by preventing abortions when “cardiac activity” can be detected. Of course, pro-life groups still ultimately want to see Roe overturned. This would mean that individual states would determine what legal restrictions, if any, would apply to people seeking and providing abortions.

Abortion rights and restrictions can pose a special challenge to a species of liberal views about when it’s permissible to interfere with a person’s liberty of action. Liberal views generally presume non-interference as a moral default and impose the burden of justification on those who would coercively restrict them. And, on some prominent liberal views, simply pointing to “the truth of the matter” won’t be sufficient to overcome this justificatory burden. On these liberal views, beliefs, values and commitments that don’t make sense to people, or for other reasons they can’t go along with, don’t satisfy the justificatory test. These “alien” restrictions would, from the point of view of these people, undermine their authority and agency. Coercion will sometimes (often!) be permissible, but only in virtue of considerations that make sense relative to their commitments.

Applying this to the long-standing abortion controversy, first, notice how easy things would be if it weren’t based on reasonable considerations. If it were flatly unreasonable to deny fetal personhood, then it would be much easier to justify laws restricting abortion. And if it were flatly unreasonable to ascribe personhood to fetuses, then there would perhaps be no accounting for such a law. But reasonable people disagree about fetal personhood. 

More: both parties to this disagreement reasonably believe that the other side is involved in imposing serious harms to the interests of others. This means that abortion law will lack authority for pro-choicers if pro-lifers have their way politically. It’s relatively obvious how this is so: most restrictions won’t make moral sense to pro-choicers. They say that the restrictions violate women’s privacy or bodily autonomy. But abortion law will also lack authority for pro-lifers when pro-choicers have their way politically. The reason is that, since pro-lifers reasonably believe that fetuses are persons with a right not to be killed, they think they have adequate justification for protecting them by imposing coercive measures that increase the costs of people killing them. In other words, pro-lifers have an intelligible rationale for rejecting laws that carve out space for people to kill other people. 

This situation, then, describes something like a moral state of nature between the two sides. We’ve failed to achieve coordination. Pro-choicers know that, even after engaging in careful and respectable reflection on the relevant moral and empirical evidence, pro-lifers won’t acknowledge the right of women to have an abortion. But this doesn’t mean that they just let pro-lifers violate women’s bodily autonomy. Pro-choicers are basically left with one option: to take up what P.F. Strawson called the objective attitude towards pro-lifers. They will see pro-lifers as a force to contend with, managed and kept at bay as best they can as they go about their affairs, but that’s different than exercising genuinely normative authority over them. 

Yet in the same way, pro-lifers know that abortion-seekers won’t acknowledge the personhood of fetuses, even after careful and respectable reflection on the relevant moral and empirical evidence. “Public reason” has run out for them, too. But this doesn’t mean that pro-lifers just let abortion providers kill children. Third-party protection is publicly justified. From the pro-life perspective, abortion seekers and providers are doing something similar to driving a car towards a person in the street they can’t see. They have reason to stop them or make them swerve. In other words, pro-lifers similarly must treat abortion-seekers as mere objects of social policy rather than people with whom they are interacting on genuinely moral terms.

The problem, then, isn’t that both sides are willing to impose their preferences, limiting the freedom of those who disagree, simply because they know they’re right. Rather, both sides are intent on protecting their freedom to protect themselves or important third-party interests. Both sides, from their respective points of view, are resisting subjugation. 

I’m at a loss to make moral headway here. Disagreement doesn’t always lead to this kind of social breakdown of reasoning and moral community. I can think of some other examples (meat eating?), but it’s relatively rare, which is a good thing. It also seems pretty isolated most of the time — thankfully, a disagreement and breakdown in this area hasn’t led to a more general breakdown of moral relations among people who are on opposite sides of the issue. Most people even have friends who disagree with them about abortion. 

In fact, I think this lends some credibility to the account of the abortion debate that I’ve offered here. It’s a case where we are forced to take the objective attitude towards our opponents because it turns out that they aren’t true moral subjects of the proposed requirements. Strawson’s participant reactive attitudes wouldn’t be appropriate since those things suggest serious culpability for violating something everyone is in on and knows better than to do.

Uncategorized

Objectivity, Rigor… and Irony.

Back in September the Urban Institute published a ‘blog post arguing that “Equitable Research Requires Questioning the Status Quo”. The author—Lauren Farrell—argued that both “objectivity” and “rigor” were “harmful research practices” that should be rectified.

Not surprisingly, this has generated a flurry of responses from persons with more conservative leanings eager to defend “objectivity” and “rigor” in research. Also not surprisingly, some of these responses have been hyperbolic. Writing for Persuasion, Zaid Jilani claimed that these claims were “emblematic of the struggle between truth and social justice that is taking place across many left-leaning institutions in the United States.”

There’s a certain irony to this response to Farrell’s argument, for in their rush to defend objectivity and rigor many of their putative proponents have abandoned both.

Farrell writes that an appeal to objectivity

“…allows researchers, intentions aside, to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience.  Objectivity also gives researchers grounds to claim they have no motives or biases in their work. Racism, sexism, classism, and ableism permeate US institutions and systems, which, in turn, allows for research that reproduces or creats racist stereotypes and reinforces societal power differences between who generates information… and who is a subject…”

With respect to rigor, she writes that

“…researchers often define rigor as following an established research protocol meticulously instead of ensuring data are contextualized and grounded in community experience”. This understanding of rigor, she holds, “does not guarantee trustworthiness or accuracy.”

It might be that some of Farrell’s critics have been “triggered” by her use of certain words (“objectivity”, “rigor”) without paying attention to how she is using them or her intended message. If these terms are removed, Farrell’s claims become utterly anodyne. To paraphrase:

“…researchers should not define themselves as experts without learning from people who have direct experience of the subject the researchers are studying. They should recognize that their work might be motivated by pretheoretic commitments or be biased in some way…” 

And

“…researchers should recognize that established research protocols might not lead to results that are trustworthy or accurate unless the data that they gather are placed in proper context and accurately reflect the experiences of the persons who are the subjects of research.”

But these claims shouldn’t be controversial. Consider how they’d apply to Nancy MacLean’s much criticized work Democracy in Chains. (MacLean argues, in brief, that James Buchanan and public choice theory was at the heart of a stealthy conspiracy funded by the Koch Brothers to protect the privilege of rich white men.) For Farrell, MacLean should not have defined herself as an expert in this area without learning from people who knew and worked with Buchanan to ensure that she was getting her facts right. She should also recognize that her interpretation of documents and events might be biased by her ideological antipathy to libertarianism—and taken pains to correct this. And she also should have recognized that despite her extensive documentation of her sources her adherence to this established research protocol of her discipline (history) is no guarantee that her work will be trustworthy or accurate unless her data is placed in proper context and reflects the experiences of those who are the subject of her research.

But isn’t the problem with Democracy in Chains that MacLean failed to be objective and rigorous? If so, how could her methodological failures support Farrell’s rejection of “objectivity” and “rigor”? The answer is simple. Although Farrell takes herself to be rejecting “objectivity” and “rigor” what she is really arguing against are appeals to these values that mask poor research methodology.

To be sure, she should have been clearer about this. But to rush to condemn her for rejecting “truth” in favor of “social justice” on the basis of this ‘blog post is to commit the very errors in research that she decries.

Owning Civil Discourse and Social Justice