The Eliot Spitzer fiasco generated some blog posts (which I neglected to bookmark) arguing that prostitution should be legal. The bloggers I read acknowledged that Governor Spitzer should be liable for breaking the law, but they argued that the law was wrong. Their premise was libertarian: private voluntary behavior should not be banned by the state. One can rebut that position without rejecting its libertarian premise, by noting that many or most prostitutes are actually coerced. In the real world, incest, rape, violence, and human trafficking seem to be inextricably linked to prostitution. But that fact will only convince libertarians if the link really is “inextricable.” If some prostitution is voluntary, then it should be legal, according to libertarian reasoning.

Which I reject. Libertarians are right to prize human freedom and to protect a private realm against the state; but issues like prostitution show the limits of libertarian reasoning. We are deeply affected by the prevailing and official answers to these questions: What is appropriate sexual behavior? What can (and cannot) be bought and sold? Our own private, voluntary behavior takes on very different meanings and significance depending on how these questions are answered. Answers vary dramatically among cultures and over time. Deciding how to answer them is a core purpose of democracy.

This position can make liberals uncomfortable because of its implications for other issues, such as gay marriage. One of the leading arguments in favor is that adults should be allowed to do what they like, and the fact that two men or two women decide to marry doesn’t affect heterosexuals. Actually, I think gay marriage does affect heterosexual marriage by subtly altering its social definition and purpose. I happen to think that the change is positive. It underlines the principle that marriage is a voluntary, permanent commitment (which is clearly appropriate for gays as well as for straight people). Other moral principles also favor gay marriage, including equal respect and, indeed, personal freedom. But for me, personal freedom does not trump all other considerations.

By the way, because prostitution seems to be so closely linked to incest, rape, and violent coercion, I think the best policy would be very strict penalties against soliciting. It is buying, rather than selling, sex that seems most morally odious.

1. Should the government require national service?

That’s a question that modern political philosophers are primed and ready to address. It concerns the proper power of the state and the responsibilities of its citizens. Libertarians, communitarians, civic republicans, and others have fundamental principles that they can easily apply to this question. I call it a “background” issue because it deals with the fundamental rights and duties that define a whole society. It’s like a question about whether everyone has a right to health care or free speech, or whether the government may compel taxation. These “background” issues are central to modern political theory.

2. Should I enlist in the military or join a civilian service program such as CityYear?

This is also a topic that political philosophers are equipped to address. It raises fundamental ethical questions about the use of force, membership in hierarchical organizations, duties to the community, and the shape of a good life. Pacifists, communitarians, various kinds of virtue-ethicists, pluralists, and others have fundamental principles that apply pretty directly to this question. I call it a “foreground” issue because it deals with a matter very close to the individual–a personal choice. It is like questions about whether to marry, have an abortion, or join a church. Such foreground issues are central to modern ethics.

3. What would a good service program be like and how could we make such a program come into being?

This is the kind of question that modern philosophers are not very good at addressing. One cannot easily answer it by applying the fundamental intuitions that drive mainstream theories of ethics and political theory. There isn’t necessarily a libertarian or communitarian answer.

As a result, the question tends to be addressed in thoroughly empirical, administrative, or tactical ways. The empirical issue is what consequences result from various types of service programs. The administrative issue is what rules or processes increase the probability that the program will be run well. And the tactical issue is how one can build and sustain political support for the program.

All these questions have crucial moral dimensions. It’s not enough to know whether a given program causes a particular outcome (such as higher incomes, or more civic duty). We must also decide whether those outcomes are good, whether they are distributed fairly, whether any harms to others are worthwhile, and what means for deriving these consequences are acceptable. Further, it’s not enough to understand how to run or structure a good program. We must also decide what forms of governance or administration are ethical. (Mussolini made the trains run on time, but that was not an adequate defense of fascism). Finally, it’s not enough to know that a given argument or “message” would produce political support for a program. We must also decide which forms of argument are ethically acceptable.

Thus it’s a shame that philosophers tend to cede the “middleground” to social scientists, administrators, and tacticians. As a result, no one raises the serious, complex moral issues that arise when one thinks about political tactics, the design of programs, and their administration. This is not only bad for policy and public discourse; it is also bad for philosophy. Theories are impoverished when they miss the middleground. For example, it would be a decisive argument against requiring national service if it were impossible to build and sustain a good service program. So any argument for national service that depends entirely on first principles is a lousy argument. It needs its middleground.

Some areas of philosophy have developed a middleground and thereby not only served public purposes but also enriched the discipline. Medical ethics is the best example. It’s no longer restricted to matters of individual ethics (e.g., should a physician conduct an abortion?) or matters of basic structure (e.g., is there a right to life?), but also to matters of administration, politics, and program design. Medical ethicists work in hospitals, advise commissions, and review policies. Harry Brighouse has argued that the philosophy of education should follow the same model. I would generalize and say that across the whole range of policy and social questions, it is worth asking moral questions not only about basic rights and individual behavior, but also about institutional arrangements and political tactics.

Imagine two people who experience exactly the same amounts of happiness over the course of their whole lives. A experiences most of his happy times near the beginning, whereas B starts off miserable but ends in happiness.* We are inclined to think that B is more fortunate, or better off, than A. If the story of A’s life were written down, it would be tragic, whereas B’s tale has a happy ending. But does B really have more welfare?

One view says no. The happiness of a life is just the happiness of all the times added up. Maybe we feel happier when we are on an upward trajectory, but that extra satisfaction should be factored into an accurate estimate of our happiness. If A and B really have identical total quantities of happiness over the courses of their lives, they are equally well off. Any aesthetic satisfaction that we obtain from the happy ending of B’s life is no reason to declare him better off.

Another view says says that happiness is equally valuable at any time, but we wish devoutly that our own happiest times are still to come. That wish colors our estimation of other people’s lives; but perhaps it shouldn’t. Just because I want the end of my life to be (even) better than the beginning, it doesn’t follow that B was better off than A. Once the ledgers are closed at death, it no longer matters how the happiness was distributed.

A third view says: even if the amount of happiness is the same at two times of life, somehow the quality of happiness is better if it comes later, because then it’s more likely to be the outcome or satisfaction of one’s plans and one’s work. That is sometimes true, but it’s not necessarily the case. One can be happy late in life because of sudden dumb luck. One can have early happiness as the well-deserved accomplishment of youthful efforts.

I incline to a fourth view. Happiness is not more valuable if it happens to come later. But a morally worthwhile life is one that develops, and one should take satisfaction in one’s own development. Thus we think of the old person who has learned, grown, and become better–and who is satisfied with that achievement–as a moral paradigm. He or she happens to be happy, but what matters is that the happiness is justified. The child who is naively happy makes us glad but does not inspire our admiration. Thus our intuition that happiness is better late in life does not mean that it has a greater impact on welfare. Our intuition is a somewhat confused reflection of our admiration for a particular kind of mature satisfaction.

*This topic was raised by Connie Rosati in a fine paper she delivered at Maryland this week. These views are my own and I’m deliberately not summarizing her interesting thesis because I didn’t seek permission.

I need to revise my book manuscript about Dante, which is under consideration by a publishing house. In the book, I argue that interpreting literature has moral or ethical value. Literary critics, I claim, almost always take implicit positions about goodness or justice. They should make those positions explicit because explicit argumentation contributes more usefully to the public debate. Also, the need to state one’s positions openly is a valuable discipline. (Some positions look untenable once they are boldly stated.)

I had taken the stance that contemporary literary theorists and academic critics were generally hostile to explicit ethical argument. My book was therefore very polemical and critical of the discipline. But I was out of date. In Amanda Anderson’s brilliant and influential book The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), she announces: “We must keep in mind that the question. How should I live? is the most basic one” (p. 112).

This bold premise associates her with what she rightly calls the “general turn to ethics” that’s visible in her profession today (p. 6). This turn marks a departure from “theory,” meaning literary or cultural theory as practiced in the humanities from the 1960s into the 1990s. “Theory” meant the use of (p. 4) “poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory” in interpreting texts and discussing methods and goals within the humanities.

“Theory” tended to deprecate human agency. Poststructuralism “limit[ed] individual agency” by insisting that we could not overcome (or even understand) various features of our language, psychology, and culture. Multiculturalism added another argument against human agency by insisting “on the primacy of ascribed group identity.” Anderson, in contrast, believes in human agency, in the specific sense that we can think morally about, and influence, the development of our own characters. We don’t just “don styles [of thinking and writing], … as evanescent and superficial as fashion” (p. 127). Instead, we are responsible for how we develop ourselves.

Continue reading →

On the left today, most people seem to think that science is trustworthy and deserves autonomy and influence. The Bush Administration must be a bunch of rubes, because they continually get into struggles with scientists. Thus, for example, the first masthead editorial in today’s New York Times is entitled “Science at Risk.” The Times says:

As written in 1970, the [Clean Air Act] imposes one overriding obligation on the E.P.A. administrator: to establish air quality standards “requisite to protect the public health” with “an adequate margin of safety.” Economic considerations–costs and benefits–can be taken into account in figuring out a reasonable timetable for achieving the standards. But only science can shape the standards themselves.

Congress wrote the law this way because it believed that air quality standards must be based on rigorous scientific study alone and that science would be the sure loser unless insulated from special interests.

But the definitions of “requisite to protect the public health” and an “adequate margin of safety” could never be scientific. These were always value-judgments–implicit decisions about how to balance mortality and morbidity versus employment and productivity. Costs always factored in, because the only level of emissions that would cause no harm to human health is zero. EPA has allowed enormous quantities of emissions into the air, surely because the agency balances moral goods against moral evils. What the Clean Air Act said was: professional scientists (not politicians or judges) shall estimate the costs of pollution. Since it is unseemly to talk about human deaths and sickness as “costs,” scientists shall not use this word, nor set explicit dollar values on lives. Instead, they shall declare certain levels of safety to be “adequate,” and present this as a scientific fact.

I well remember when people on the left were the quickest to be skeptical of such claims. Science is frequently an ally of industry and the military. It is intellectually imperialistic, insensitive to cultural traditions. It is arrogant, substituting expertise for public judgment even when there are no legitimate expert answers to crucial questions. (For instance, What is the economic value of a life?). Science is a human institution, driven by moral and cultural norms, power, and status. It is not an alternative to politics.

So progressives used to say. Yet scientific consensus now seems to favor progressive views of key issues such as climate change. The conservative coalition encompasses critics of science, such as creationists. And, as Richard Lewontin wrote immediately before the 2004 election, “Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.”

These are short-term political calculations that lead progressives to ally themselves with science and endorse its strongest claims to power. If we are going to defend science, we should do so on the basis of principle, not political calculation. I agree with the Times that the EPA should clamp down on air pollution. I disagree that this would represent a triumph of science over politics. It would be a moral and political victory–and that is all.