Monthly Archives: September 2016

first year college students and moral relativism

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Justin McBrayer, a philosophy professor, wrote not long ago in The New York Times, “philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” McBrayer attributes this situation to the Common Core, which recommends teaching young children a distinction between facts and opinions. Because values aren’t viewed as facts, they get put into the opinion basket. So the same basket that contains “I prefer vanilla ice cream” also contains “genocide is bad.”

I happen to be teaching a whole class of first year undergraduates in a philosophy course, and I asked them whether they shared the relativism attributed to their demographic group by McBrayer. About one third agreed that moral claims are “mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” Roughly the same number disagreed. Many were uncertain. After about an hour’s discussion, it was evident that most students held quite complicated or nuanced views. Everyone’s position sounded different, but I think many would like to hold onto: 1) moral seriousness and the assumption that it makes a big difference what we conclude about moral issues, 2) an ability to decry certain horrible acts as evil, 3) a recognition of ideological diversity, 4) a distinction between moral claims and empirical claims, 5) falliblism and an acknowledgement that context affects, or even determines, everyone’s thought, including our own, and 6) tolerance, which they recognize as a value, not as an absence of values. Those assumptions are in some tension, but it’s possible to pull them together into a complex position.

I don’t want to generalize based on an “n” of 15 people at one college, but if anyone asks me for evidence that Kids Today are amoral relativists–or that they have turned into censorious absolutists–I offer this counter-evidence.

CIRCLE identifies top 50 congressional districts for the youth vote

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Medford/Somerville, MA – Will the youth vote help shape the next Congress? A new index ranks the top 50 districts where young people could have a significant influence on the outcome of Congressional races across the country. The Youth Electoral Significance Index Top 50 was developed exclusively by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) – the preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.

Taking into account the competitiveness of the Congressional races, as well demographic characteristics, the number of higher education institutions in the district, and historical youth turnout data, the index highlights the districts where young people are poised to have a disproportionately high impact this year.

“Young people can shape our elections and the make-up of Congress, but their potential is limited when campaigns don’t reach out to them,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Director of CIRCLE. “We hope this tool encourages campaigns, media outlets, and advocates in these districts – and in many others – to engage young people on issues that matter to them.”

Key findings include:

  • Iowa’s 1st Congressional District comes out on top due in large part to a large number of college campuses (31) and high percentage of young people enrolled in college in the district.
  • New York has six Congressional Districts in the YESI Top 50, the most of any state. Though New York tends to be reliably Democratic in presidential and Senate elections, many Congressional races are much more fiercely contested.
  • Colorado has four districts on this list, including the number 2 spot in the ranking: the Colorado 6th, which includes the eastern part of the Denver-Aurora metro area. This district ranks highly due to its competitiveness: in 2012, the election was decided by only 7,000 votes, young people cast a high number of ballots, and the seat is expected to be highly contested again this year.
  • Four Michigan districts make the Top 50, including two in the top 15: Michigan’s 7th District, which includes parts of Lansing, the western suburbs of Ann Arbor, and the southeast corner of the state; and Michigan’s 1st District, in which there are 12 colleges and universities with close to 20,000 enrolled students.

Throughout this election season, CIRCLE’s 2016 Election Center will offer new data products and detailed youth voting analyses.

social justice should not be a cliché

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We should strive for social justice. But what is it?

I fear that the phrase can be used to mean: “All the things that we’d like to see in a society.” In that case, anyone who doesn’t commit to pursue “social justice” (by that name) must be against at least some of these good things; and anyone who doesn’t agree with us about what’s good must be against social justice. Then it’s us versus them: the people who care about social justice against those who don’t. The result can be a warm feeling of righteousness and solidarity, perhaps admixed with some regret that our actions don’t live up to our words.

But ask yourself: What are the things you’d like to see in a society? They are likely to be heterogeneous. For instance, equality comes in many forms, all of which may be attractive even though some are in tension (equality of opportunity, of outcomes, of status, of rights; equality for members of a community, for all adults, for all human beings, etc.). And equality won’t suffice, because no one wants to see a society in which everyone is equally miserable and oppressed. So even strong egalitarians also want some combination of liberty, peace, solidarity or community, human flourishing, excellence, and/or sustainability, for all those equal people. But liberty and equality-of-outcomes trade off, as do liberty and solidarity. In some cases, the means to achieve valuable ends are bad or they undermine the ends. For instance, I’d like to see everyone be able to work, but I worry that any policy that guaranteed employment would also undermine the value and dignity of the labor.

Once you spell out what you value with due attention to priorities, means, costs, and tradeoffs, it’s likely that your own view will be unique, or at least unusual. That chips away at the us-versus-them framework. You may begin to see other people’s views as attractive even as you continue to endorse your own. There are certainly selfish and foolish people in the world, but now it begins to seem that many of our fellow citizens also favor “social justice.” They just disagree about what it is, because that’s a profoundly hard question.

See also: we are for social justice, but what is it?; on the moral peril of cliché and what to do about it; on the moral dangers of cliché; and .

three ways of thinking about fluctuations in polls

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With the national presidential polls suddenly looking very tight, here are three ways of looking at the state of the election.

  1. An election is like a race. As in a race, the contenders stand in some relation to each other at any given moment. They can increase or reduce their speeds, but it’s an advantage to be in front, and more so as time passes. If an election is like a race, then it becomes increasingly important who’s ahead as the finish line approaches. A race course may have features that favor one or the other contender at a given moment. For instance, each presidential candidate gets a burst of speed after her or his convention, and a debate offers a chance for one of them to speed up or stumble, but the last stretch will be pretty level and even. In that case, it is bad news for Clinton that her lead had dissipated as we’ve moved through September. Much depends on whether that trend continues or reverses in the next few weeks, because by mid-October, a candidate who trails has little time to make up the gap. (That conclusion follows from the race metaphor.) It supports the idea that Trump has as much as a 40% chance of winning.
  2. An election is an event that occurs at one moment (although kind of a stretched-out moment nowadays, thanks to early voting). Polls ask people how they will vote once the big moment comes. It’s not clear when our predictions are most accurate, and accuracy may not necessarily increase over time. Instead, we might think of each of the many hundreds of polls taken so far as a measure of how the public will vote once the actual election comes. The best estimate, from this Bayesian perspective, averages all the polls taken so far. It does so not only to maximize the sample size but also to negate the random variations in competitors’ standing due to recent events. As Sam Wang says, “I still expect Clinton’s lead to increase again, on the grounds that she has led all year. Previously, I noted that the national Clinton-vs.-Trump margin in 2016 has averaged 4.5 percentage points. The standard deviation is 2.2 points, comparable to the four Presidential elections from 2004 to 2012. … Today, conditions seem right for regression to the mean.'” There is no such thing as regression to the mean in a race, where the leader accumulates an increasing chance of winning. But this second way of thinking about the election avoids the race analogy. Wang‘s own Bayesian prediction is a little more complicated, but it gives Trump only a 14% chance of winning.
  3. An election is an event that will happen at one moment in the future, and each poll is a prediction of what will happen when that moment comes–but the sample that responds to pollsters varies depending on recent events. Democrats, for instance, may have become marginally less likely to answer surveys in the last two weeks because of some generalized discouragement–or Republicans who were going to vote for Trump all along may have become more willing to answer the pollsters’ calls. If this theory applies, I think we should act as Wang recommends, because we should treat the variations in response rates as pretty random. But we might view the real vote as similar to a single poll and ask whether the experience of actually voting will encourage or discourage the people who have been favorable to Clinton or to Trump all along. We cannot tell the answer to that question from poll data, but we might propose reasonable hypotheses about it.

Since I don’t know which of these theories is true, I’m inclined to estimate the odds of a Clinton win somewhere between the Bayesian estimate (86% or so) and the horse race estimate of only about 60%.

how schools teach about political parties

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According to a new paper released today by CIRCLE:

  • Forty-three states require students to learn about political parties; however, the language in the standards nearly always promotes a simplistic understanding of the role that political parties play in a democracy.
  • Only eight states ask students to study the ideological underpinnings of the two major political parties.
  • Only 10 states ask students to study controversial political issues and their relationship to political parties.
  • There is very limited support for learning about political ideology. When states do include language about ideology, it is most commonly mentioned in history/social studies standards and very rarely linked to contemporary political parties.

“This generation has grown up in a vitriolic and polarized political climate. In order to sort through the noise, young people need to have a deep understanding of the ideological values that divide us and how those values do, and do not, map onto political parties,” reports Paula McAvoy, lead author of the study and program director for the Center for Ethics and Education at UW-Madison, who completed this study with Rebecca Fine and Ann Herrera Ward.  “Our team’s findings show that state standards stop short of asking students to make meaningful connections between partisanship, ideology, and the issues of the day.  If schools are to fulfill their mission of preparing young people for political participation, teachers need to be encouraged to bring these ideas into the classroom.”

“Understanding what major political parties are and what they stand for is essential in navigating politics and elections in the U.S., but very little support exists.  These findings emphasize the need to strengthen standards and support teachers in U.S. civic education,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Director of CIRCLE. “Encouraging this type of learning about politics, elections and voting is a major reason why we are collaborating with other organizations to support teachers during this election year via the Teaching for Democracy Alliance.” For more on this Alliance see here.

For CIRCLE’s full briefing, please see here or the interactive map here. More research and background on youth civic education can be found on CIRCLE’s Quick Facts on Civic Education page.

CIRCLE’s 2016 Election Center will continue to offer data products and analyses providing a comprehensive picture of the youth vote, including the Youth Electoral Significance Index, which offers insight into key states where young people have the potential to shape the 2016 general election.