Monthly Archives: March 2013

there is a state constitutional right to public deliberation

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(Chicago) “The people have a right, in an orderly and peaceable manner, to assemble to consult upon the common good; give instructions to their representatives, and to request of the legislative body, by the way of addresses, petitions, or remonstrances, redress of the wrongs done them, and of the grievances they suffer.” — Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Art. XIX (1780)

Todd Gitlin, who spoke at Tufts on Wednesday, said that provisions like this one exist in about 30 states. It is the phrase “to consult upon the common good” that interests me (and Gitlin). It is different from a right to speak; in consulting upon the common good, one must also listen to peers in some structured way. These provisions testify to a deep tradition of public deliberation in American ideals and practices. And perhaps they create enforceable rights. When local authorities decided to clear “Occupy” encampments, did anyone ask whether the participants were being denied their rights under state constitutions to “assemble to consult upon the common good”?

what to do about k-12 civic education

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(Chicago) These are my remarks for tonight’s Illinois Civic Mission Coalition “Annual Convening.” 

When Americans turn their attention to civic education in k-12 schools, very frequently they make the following claims:

  1. Kids today don’t know anything about government and civics!
  2. Kids today don’t vote!
  3. Schools today don’t teach civics the way they used to when I was a kid. What happened to civics classes!?

A couple of additional assumptions are buried under those claims. Civics is seen as the name of a course in high school, rather than a broader set of opportunities. And success in that course is defined as knowing some information (the kind that we test) and acting in particular ways, above all, by voting

I see the political value of this argument—it is easy for people to grasp, it fits into their preconceived ideas that civics is in decline, and it grabs attention. When the United States Department of Education released the 2011 National Assessment in Education Progress (NAEP) Civics results, the New York Times story was entitled “Failing Grades on Civics Exam Called a ‘Crisis.’”  The story began, “Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights.”

Maybe getting that story was a win for the civics field.

But I want to complicate matters a bit. All the claims I started with are at least a bit inaccurate and misleading—just as factual matters. From a strategic point of view, they are problematic, too. Since they present the wrong diagnosis, they naturally lead to the wrong cure. Adults are liable to say: Let’s require a year of civics in high school and test kids on the US Constitution! But that is not a good reform plan, as I’ll explain.

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the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life

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Adam Seligman is a major social theorist. For the past decade, he and colleagues have been organizing an annual International Summer School on Religion and Public Life. They convene educators, clergy, NGO leaders, and others from diverse religious traditions in particular places that are challenging sites for thinking about religious differences. Upcoming examples are in Rwanda/Uganda and the Balkans. The goal is not to intervene in the places where they meet, but to influence the participants, who convene there from around the world.

One could generally categorize this effort as a form of interfaith dialogue, but I think the distinctive features are: 1) very strong intellectual components, including serious consideration of theological issues; 2) a general stance that religious identities are central and not easily compatible with each other; 3) and an interest in challenging and provoking people while also trying to build a community. By the way, secular people–including atheists–participate; they just don’t predominate.

I’ve been working in the field of dialogue and deliberation (“D&D”) in the US for 25 years and have board memberships or working ties with organizations like the Kettering Foundation and National Issues Forums, Everyday Democracy, AmericaSPEAKS, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, the Public Conversations Project, and the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network. I recommend that my colleagues in those organizations follow the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life as a distinctive and challenging model.

my evolving thoughts on animal rights and welfare

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We can wrong other sentient beings in three ways: by reducing their happiness or causing them to suffer (moving them down the happiness scale), by violating their rights, or by exploiting them, which means using them as mere means to our ends. I am not convinced that the second and third kinds of wrong apply to animals as they do to human beings. But we cause much suffering in animals–for example, through factory farming and the destruction of habitats–and we are obligated to address that. Reducing the consumption of meat is obligatory to the degree that it affects the supply of factory-farmed animals. But it is not the case that any killing or eating of animals is immoral. Those are my current views, and I will try to explain below.

I think about the relationship between happiness and rights in the following way. You should not cause me to suffer or reduce my happiness. But instantly killing me would not harm me in that way. I’ve had a happy life, and you would be freezing my current happiness score at its high net level. I would then suffer no more. Yet obviously you would have violated my right to life, which must be different from my interest in being happy. Why do I have a right to life? Mainly because I have plans that make sense of my actions. By suddenly killing me, you ruin my plans and make many of my past actions pointless. You also harm other people and violate their rights by removing me from their lives (or so I hope they would feel).

Now, if our beloved dog suddenly and painlessly died, his long-term plans would not be frustrated, and his recent actions would not be rendered meaningless. He has plans, such as stealing the treats out of the closet and snuggling with his human companions; but these plans are short-lived. His past treats and snuggling sessions would still represent successes even if his life suddenly ended. We would be sad, and you would violate our rights if you took him away. But I am not convinced his rights would be affected.

Likewise, our dog would be very sad to lose me and my family; suddenly killing us would cause him harm. But if this happened while he was with his dog-sitter, whom he loves, he would not be sad. The ties among animals, although profound, only matter morally insofar as they cause happiness or suffering. In contrast, human relationships give our actions purpose, and thus wrecking other people’s relationships can violate their rights even if they aren’t unhappy about it.

As for exploitation, this also violates other people’s rights because it frustrates their plans or substitutes our plans for theirs–even if it causes them no unhappiness or indeed makes them happier. I am not convinced that this concern applies to dogs and other mammals. Whether our dog is happy is the issue, not whether we treat him as an end in himself. If we train him to do the right thing by giving him treats, we view him as a means to our ends. That just makes him happy, and why not?

If the sole moral issue with animals is their happiness, we are in the realm that philosophers call “consequentialist,” where you add up all the benefits and subtract the harms. You don’t worry as much about bright lines. For example, eating less meat may enhance animal welfare if it reduces financial support for factory farming. But zero pounds of meat is just a number, like any other. Reducing your consumption from 50 lbs to 40lbs is ten times more important than getting it down from 1lb to zero. The same is not true with eating human flesh, which we regard as a matter of transgression and pollution. Even if cannibalism is merely a taboo, killing other people is truly wrong, and you’re a killer even if you only have one victim. I don’t think that’s the case with animals.

As long as our reasoning is consequentialist, offsets seem appropriate. It could be much better to eat a steak and contribute to an animal-welfare organization than to shun the meat but do nothing about public policy. Offsets and compensatory payments do not excuse violations of human rights, but they make sense with respect to animals (and nature more generally).

Dear Mrs Amartya Sen, men will never understand us

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(Washington DC) The great economist and political theorist Amartya Sen spoke on Friday at Tufts. Sen has, among other things, contributed to feminism by showing that economic development requires investments in girls and women and by identifying new evidence of gender bias. In a famous 1990 article, Sen argued that 100 million more women should be alive on the planet. Their absence is attributable to “remarkably large” disparities in “health, medicine, and nutrition.” Sen is not just a theorist but has been a leader of organizations that promote women’s rights and human rights.

He is, of course, a man. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Rabindranath Tagore chose his name for him; it means “immortal.” Because Amartya ends with “a,” speakers of many languages assume he is female. On Friday, he said that he frequently receives mail addressed to “Ms. Sen.” His favorite such letter began, “Dear Mrs. Sen, Men will never understand us …”

I share this anecdote because it may amuse people who know his work, but also because it raises an important question about demographic identity and how we understand injustice. Sen mentioned the story in criticizing the kind of communitarianism that takes people’s social identities to be constitutive or determinative. Sen said: I identify as a feminist, yet I am male. That shows that we can be free of our ascribed identities.

It is true that one can observe and attack injustices suffered by a group to which one does not belong. In fact, Sen was the original discoverer of specific injustices against a different group from his own, namely, women. In that sense, our reason is different from our ascribed identity. We have more mental and moral freedom then the communitarian view assumes.

It could still be the case that men will never fully understand women’s situations, and likewise for other advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Sen used his own observations and government statistics to quantify certain forms of injustice against women. But he (and I) still may not fully grasp what it means to suffer sexual violence inside a family and to have that sanctioned by the whole society. We may know that it happens and yet not really “get” it. This is why actual representation is so important.