A group can accomplish more than an individual can—whether for good or evil—as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Only once you have a group can you ask the citizen’s question, which is: “What should we do?”
Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-than-ideal groups in order to maintain them for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the amount and type of sacrifice is usually unequal. Therefore, crucial democratic practices include recognizing, acknowledging, and trying to reciprocate sacrifices. This is true at the scale of a nation-state but at least as true at smaller scales.
I recently found a three-word sentence by W.E.B Du Bois that sums it up: “Organization is sacrifice.”
The context is an article in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, that you can read in its original format online. Du Bois is responding to charges that the NAACP is too strongly influenced by Whites. He mentions the 8-to-1 predominance of Blacks in the NAACP’s membership as a whole and in its leading offices. He defends the value of “a few forward looking white Americans” to the organization. And then he suggests that the “real animus back of this veiled and half articulate criticism is the fact that a large organization must make enemies—must create dissatisfaction in many quarters , no matter what it does”
This is where he posits a general principle: “Organization is sacrifice.” And he elaborates:
You cannot have absolutely your own way–you cannot be a free lance; you cannot be strongly and fiercely individual if you belong to an organization. For this reason some folk hunt and work alone. It is their nature. But the world’s greatest work must be done by team work. This demands organization, and that is the sacrifice of some individual will and wish to the good of all.
W.E.B. DuBois, “White Co-Workers,” The Crisis, vol. 20, no 1 (May 1920), p. 8
For someone as fiercely principled and intellectually independent as Du Bois was, this realization must have come hard; but he was right. To be able to ask the question, “What should we do?” implies that all have given—and some may have given much more than others—to create the “we” that acts together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high (Du Bois ultimately resigned from the NAACP over a fairly subtle matter of principle), but some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.
Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature methodis’d; Nature, like liberty, is but restrain’d By the same laws which first herself ordain’d.
– Pope, An Essay on Criticism (writing here of aesthetic laws)
… the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God …
— The Declaration of Independence
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
As I begin to teach a course on Martin Luther King–and while thinking about how to teach civics at all levels–I am giving renewed consideration to the idea of natural law. This is a matter for debate (and should be presented as such), but here are some personal thoughts:
A substantial part of any concept of natural law is a set of rights. Rights impose obligations. If I have a right to life, you have an obligation not to kill me. If I have a right to an education, someone has an obligation to pay for my schooling. These obligations fall on both individuals and institutions. For instance, my right to life implies not only that you may not kill me but that some kind of state must protect me.
To honor and protect others’ rights is obligatory. It is a moral and not merely a legal duty.
Governments do not create rights and obligations, because we can and must assess any given government by asking whether it protects the rights that people deserve.
Other animals have rights because people have obligations to treat them ethically. But non-human animals do not have rights in relation to each other. In that sense, rights are human, although they extend to humans’ treatment of other species.
Rights are linked to the organism’s characteristics as a natural species. For instance, we human beings are born helpless, remain interdependent, yet develop unique goals and desires that are rooted in our private mental lives. Our rights would be different if we had no need for each other, or no private lives at all–or if we differed in other fundamental ways from actual homo sapiens.
Rights are connected to happiness, which means–not the balance of pleasure over pain–but some deeper form of flourishing or self-realization. Flourishing for human beings is natural in the same way that a mouse or an apple tree has certain natural ways of flourishing.
At the same time, one of the unusual and fundamental features of human beings is our ability to flourish in many different ways, and so we have a right to choose our own paths or be the authors of our own lives. This right to choose is based on our ability and desire to choose, which is a natural characteristic.
I have suggested that fundamental interests, needs, and goods are rooted in nature. However, it is not a natural principle that anyone has an obligation to protect or provide for the needs of anyone else. An individual rabbit has a profound interest in not being eaten, yet a fox does not have an obligation to refrain from eating rabbits. Nature is red in tooth and claw.
We are obligated to honor everyone else’s rights, which are based in their natural interests, but this obligation is not natural. It comes from somewhere else. If you think it comes from God, that is fine, but the obligation is then divine and supra-natural, not (merely) natural.
Perhaps we have an instinct to universal beneficence that emerges from our everyday sympathy for other people and animals. That instinct could be seen as the natural (not divine) basis for our commitment to universal rights. Mengzi puts it very well:
Humans all have hearts that are not unfeeling toward others. Suppose someone suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well: everyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion—not because one sought to get in good with the child’s parents, not because one wanted fame among their neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sounds of the child’s cries. [F]?rom this we can see that if one is without the heart of compassion, one is not a human. If one is without the heart of deference, one is not a human. The heart of compassion is the sprout of benevolence. The heart of disdain (shame/disgust) is the sprout of righteousness. The heart of deference is the sprout of propriety. The heart of approval and disapproval is the sprout of wisdom.” (2A6; see also 6A6)
Quoted in Owen Flanagan, The Geography of Morals (p. 57). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
However, we have many instincts, including warlike, competitive, and cruel ones. Universal beneficence seems a subtle and rare sprout in the wild garden of our instincts. To select and cultivate that particular sprout may be wise and right, but it is a choice that’s not itself directed by nature.
Nature can be understood as everything that science can explain (and science is any valid explanation of nature). So defined, “nature” offers no basis for obligations. A purely empirical study of nature would suggest that members of any species, including homo sapiens, are unequal in capacity, frequently selfish, and fully determined by physical processes rather than choice. We can broaden our understanding of nature to encompass things like obligations, purposes, and goods–for instance, happiness as the purpose of human beings, and non-domination is a good required for happiness. But then nature is not exhausted by positivist science.
Partly because positivist science does not comprehend things like rights, it is very hard for people to know the ideal list of rights and their correlative obligations. All of our ancestors were wrong about some rights–according to us–which means that we ought to be humble about our own ability to know the ideal list.
The best we can do is to decide, in reasonably fair and reflective forums, which rights and obligations ought to apply to whom. That means that although governments do not create rights, people must identify and determine rights through politics and in institutions such as governments. We should expect their outcomes to vary over time and space, not because rights are mere matters of opinion, but because the only way we can know real rights is to exchange and test our opinions.
In conclusion, I feel comfortable speaking of law that is importantly connected to nature, and especially to the nature of human beings. Understanding it requires reflection on our natural circumstances. But I wouldn’t call it “natural law” if that implies that it is part of, or determined by, nature, because it has sources other than nature itself.
The Summer Institute of Civic Studies is an intensive interdisciplinary seminar that brings together faculty, advanced graduate students, and practitioners from many countries and diverse fields of study. In 2020 it will take place from the evening of June 18 until June 26 at Tufts University in Medford, MA, and Boston.
To apply: Applications are now being received and should be submitted by March 31 for best consideration. The application consists of a resume, a cover letter about your interests, and an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable).
The Summer Institute was founded and co-taught from 2009 to 2018 by Peter Levine, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Tisch College, and Karol Soltan, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. Since 2019, it has been led by Peter Levine. Each year, it features guest seminars by distinguished scholars and practitioners from various institutions and engages participants in challenging discussions such as:
How can people work together to improve the world?
How can people reason together about what is right to do?
What practices and institutional structures promote these kinds of citizenship?
How should empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy relate?
The 2019 syllabus can be found here. You can read more about the motivation for the Institute in the Civic Studies Framing Statement by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania.
The seminar discussions follow a public conference, Frontiers of Democracy, which will take place in downtown Boston from June 18 (evening) until June 20. Participants in the Summer Institute are expected to participate in the conference (free of charge) and then the Institute.
Practicalities: Daily sessions take place on the Tufts campus in Medford, Massachusetts. Tuition for the Institute is free, but participants are responsible for their own housing and transportation. One option is renting a Tufts University dormitory room. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.
You can sign up here to receive occasional emails about the Summer Institute.
In a new article,* Elizabeth Simas, Scott Clifford, and Justin Kirkland provide evidence that empathy is not a solution to partisan polarization in the US. Quite the contrary: people who demonstrate more “empathic concern” are more likely to blame the opposite party for the suffering that they see in the world, hence more likely to decry the other party, to favor censoring it, and to exhibit Schadenfreude (pleasure at others’ pain) when members of the opposing party lose out.
Part of the article involves an experiment with undergraduate subjects. Students are shown a story in which “campus police had to shut down a group of partisan students who were protesting a speech to be given by an individual known for making inflammatory comments about that party. In both versions, a bystander who was attempting to hear the speech was struck by a protestor. And in both versions, the protestors succeeded in getting the speech canceled.” Students were assigned to see versions of the story that randomly varied the partisan identities of the speaker, the protesters, and the bystander.
Students who scored higher on a general measure of empathetic concern were more likely to favor censoring the inflammatory speaker, and more likely to be glad that the bystander was hurt. These results were the same for Democratic and Republican students.
It rings true for me that deep emotional concern is associated with anger and a distancing of intellectual and political opponents, a refusal to hear their arguments.
I’ve posted concerns about empathy several times before.** The main problem is its susceptibility to bias. Usually, empathy is felt for individuals (or concrete categories of people), and it can easily promote injustice against others. There is such a thing as universal, undifferentiated empathy, but it looks more like an ethical principle than a concrete emotion. The Buddhist objective is not empathy (as measured by questions from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, such as: “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective toward them”). Instead, Buddhism prizes equanimity, which is calm and detached.
I do not take for granted that political polarization is bad. Sometimes it is right to blame political opponents for others’ suffering. And although Schadenfreude should always be avoided, it can be welcome news when a political enemy suffers defeat. These emotions of blame and satisfaction are appropriate if and when the opponent is actually at fault. To find out whether someone is actually wrong requires engagement with that person’s arguments and reasons. Censorship defeats such engagement and is almost always a mistake. It’s troubling that more empathy means more support for censorship, especially if that exemplifies a deeper problem with empathy. Perhaps empathy discourages us from hearing alternative views by fixing our attention on concrete suffering.
I’m teaching Public Policy Analysis to undergraduate this spring–a new course. I’ve pasted the working syllabus (minus the grading rubric, rules about technology, and other practicalities) below. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome. I don’t think this design is a very unusual, but it may lean more toward institutional analysis (per Elinor Ostrom) than is common.
Objectives
To learn to analyze institutions and develop strategies that improve the world by changing these institutions or creating new ones. A good strategy must be just (which requires normative argument), effective, and politically viable.
Summary of Content
The class will first investigate one policy question together. That question is: Which students should attend which k-12 schools in the USA, and who should decide that matter? Concrete policy options include mandatory assignment to neighborhood public schools, school choice, charter schools, vouchers, etc. Every student will write a short paper on that topic.
Each student will then select one policy issue and write three 5-7-page essays that connect to produce one policy memo on that issue. As students conduct research for their individual papers, in class, we will discuss methods and theories of policy analysis.
Our overall framework will the Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) framework developed by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues. We will use it both for the k-12 school example and for each student’s individual project.
Working with this framework, we will pose these questions:
What is the institution? What is its name? How would you define it uniquely, and which people, resources, locations, etc. does it involve?
What problem or set of problems interests you about it? This problem may be a failure (the institution doesn’t yield the intended results) or an injustice (it has bad results), or it could be the intellectual problem posed by its success: why does this institution work and can we replicate it?
What other institutions are closely related to it, and how?
Which institutional form(s) does it reflect, e.g., a government, a firm, a market, a network, an association, a community?
What are important relevant biophysical conditions? What natural resources does it use, and which natural processes come into play? What characteristics of these resources and processes are relevant to the institution: e.g., scarcity, fragility, adaptability, ability to reproduce and grow, interdependence, tendency to move?
What are important technological conditions, where “technology” means the relevant affordances and limitations that have been created–or will predictably be created–by human beings?
What cultural meanings (in the sense of Geertz 1973) are involved? Are these meanings shared or disputed?
What official, formal, usually written rules govern the institution? What are its rules-in-use? (These may diverge from the official rules.)
Are the rules grounded (Links to an external site.)in phenomena beyond the institution? For instance, an institution might use a currency whose value is determined by other institutions. Tufts runs on an academic calendar related to the solar calendar, which is grounded in the motion of the earth. (Grounding is different from causation.)
What goods are relevant? Who has which kinds of ownership over which goods? Are the goods subtractable? Are they excludable?
Who are the relevant actors?
What choices confront each actor? What does each actor know about the available choices?
What does each actor value, and why?
Under what conditions do the actors choose (e.g., with or without discussion, once or repeatedly, simultaneously or in turn, with or without knowledge of what the others are choosing)?
What are the consequences of the most important or most likely combinations of choices made by all the actors?
Are these consequences desired by the actors?
Are these outcomes desired by people who are not among the actors?
Are the outcomes fair or just by various normative criteria?
Are they sustainable–meaning a) literally repeatable many times, and/or b) good for nature?
How do the outcomes affect the issues raised in questions 1-15? In other words, do the outcomes of the institution change the institution itself, in a feedback loop?
What deliberate changes in institutional forms (4), technologies (6), meanings (7), rules (9-10), or values (13) would produce preferable outcomes according to the criteria raised in questions 18-20?
How can we go about altering the institution in the light of 22?
Book to purchase
Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek, Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice (Avery 2019)
These will be in the bookstore but you are welcome to purchase electronic versions instead.
Criteria for assessing class participation:
Attendance.
Engaging in a discussion that is informed by the assigned texts.
Focusing on the topic and the texts, which does not preclude drawing connections beyond them.
Being responsive to other students. Responsiveness needn’t always be immediate, verbal, or occur within the class discussion itself.
Building on others’ contributions, and sometimes making links among different people’s contributions or between what they have said and the text.
Demonstrating genuine respect for the others, where respect does not require agreement. In fact, sometimes respect requires explicit disagreement because you take the other person’s ideas seriously.
Taking risks, trying out ideas that you don’t necessarily endorse, and asking questions that might be perceived as naive or uninformed.
Seeking truth or clarity or insight (instead of other objectives).
Exercising freedom of speech along with a degree of tact and concern for the other people.
Demonstrating responsibility for the other students’ learning in what you say (and occasionally by a decision not to speak).
Wed. Jan 15
Introductions. Some preliminary discussion of school choice based on our own experiences
Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek, Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About, pp. vii-81
(Johanek will visit class via videoconference.)
Mon., January 29
Values: What are We Trying to Acccomplish?
Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek, pp. 83-129
Monday, February 3: no class (instructor is traveling)
Wed. Feb 5
Does Choice Work? Qualitative evidence
Robert Pondiscio, How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice (2019); especially recommended pages: 3-51, 77-104, 111-113, 156-163, 175-179, 184-194, 210-219, 257-267, 271-279, 295-311, 320-340.
Meira Levinson, “Is Pandering Ethical? Power, Privilege, and School Assignment,” in Levinson and Jacob Fay, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries, pp. 143-78
(Feb 17: no class; President’s Day)
First paper due: 4-6 pages about school choice
Part II: Other Issues
Wed., February 19
Policy analysis: mainstream approaches
Bardach, E. A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis. (2000), excerpts
(Feb 17: no class; President’s Day)
Mon, Feb. 24
Unpacking institutions
In class, we will build and operate an extremely simple institution by playing a “tragedy of the commons” game. We will apply the IAD framework to it.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1987. “An Agenda for the Study of Institutions.” Public Choice 48:3-25. Reprinted in McGinnis (2000), Chapter 3.
Monday, March 2
Rules
Toulmin, Stephen. 1974. “Rules and Their Relevance for Understanding Human Behavior.” In Understanding Other People, ed. Theodore Mischel, 185-215. Oxford: Blackwell. Excerpts: pp. 189-214.
Wednesday, March 4
Attributes of community: Example # 1, the community’s social capital
Coleman, James S. “Social capital in the creation of human capital.” American journal of sociology 94 (1988): S95-S120.
Monday, March 9
Attributes of community: Example #2, the community’s culture
Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Culture and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2000. 175-201.
Wednesday, March 11
Games: players, situations
Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life: Competitive Edge in Business, Politics and Everyday Life, excerpts
Second paper due: 4-6 pages presenting a public policy issue in terms of “players,” choices, and outcomes.
Monday, March 9
Exit Voice and Loyalty
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), excerpts
Wednesday, March 11
Evaluative Criteria: 1) Cost-benefit analysis
Richard Layard and Steven Glaister, eds., Cost-Benefit Analysis, second edition: chapters on Safety and the saving of life: The theory of equalizing differences, pp 272-289; by Sherwin Rosen; The environment: The environment and emerging development issues pp 319-348, by Partha Dasgupta, Karl-Göran Mäler ); Regulation and deregulation: Enhancing the performance of the deregulated air transportation system, pp 375-395 by Steven A. Morrison
(March 16-19 is Spring Break)
Monday, March 23
Evaluative Criteria: 2) Rule of law
Scalia, Antonin. “The rule of law as a law of rules.” U. Chi. l. reV. 56 (1989): 1175.
Wednesday, March 25: no class (instructor is traveling)
Monday, March 30
Evaluative Criteria: 3) Rights
Dworkin, Ronald, and Jeremy Waldron. “Rights as trumps.” Arguing about the Law (1984): 335-44.
Third paper due: 4-6 pages analyzing the value conflicts and choices raised by your policy issue
Wednesday, April 8
Types of institution
Aligica, Paul Dragos, and Vlad Tarko. “Co-production, polycentricity, and value heterogeneity: the Ostroms’ public choice institutionalism revisited.” American Political Science Review 107.4 (2013): 726-741.
Feedback loops
Mettler, Suzanne, and Mallory SoRelle. “Policy feedback theory.” Theories of the policy process 3 (2014): 151-181.
Complexity and Wicked Problems
Rittel, H., M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4(1) (1973) 155-169
Monday, April 13
How policy gets made
Sabatier. P.A. and C.M. Weible. The Advocacy-Coalition Framework: An Assessment. 189-220
Schlager, E., C.M. Weible (2013). New Theories of the Policy Process. Policy Studies Journal, 41(3), 389-396.
Fourth paper due: 4-6 pages presenting and defending a policy recommendation on your issue.
