the place of argument in moral reasoning

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Here’s an everyday moral issue. As she heads to your cousin’s wedding, your great aunt Sallie asks whether you like her hat. You find it strikingly ugly, yet you choose to say that you love it.

Here is an argument that you made the wrong decision: “All lies are morally wrong. Your statement was a lie. Therefore, your statement was morally wrong.” This line of thinking should be taken seriously. It is tight logically. Morally, it is weighty as well. Your statement was a lie by standard definitions, and lying is problematic.

If you need a reason that lying is wrong, several are available: We don’t want to be lied to, so we shouldn’t lie to others. Lying makes a convenient exception to the rule that we would want to apply in general: Tell the truth. Lying manipulates. If we view Aunt Sallie as a fully rational person, then we should assume that she can handle a truthful reply to her question. Lying is a vice, likely to form a habit and corrode virtues.

But I picked this example because the statement “I love your hat” can fit within other persuasive arguments as well. For instance, “Act so as to maximize the happiness of other people. Your statement made Aunt Sallie happy. Therefore, your statement was morally right.” Or “Express authentic and benign emotions. Your statement expressed your love for Auntie Sallie. Therefore, your statement was morally right.” Or “Be a good nephew and be nice to your aunt. Your statement was nice, coming from a nephew. Therefore, you did the right thing.”

To make matters even more complicated, your words were not just a statement about her hat (although they were that). They were also a step in a conventional conversation, a contribution to an ongoing relationship with your great aunt, and part of the flow of a day that was important to your cousin. In turn, your family relationships and events such as weddings are components of communities that give meaning to life.

I propose that we think about a case like this as a node in a network. It has many links: to abstractions such as lying and love, and to concrete realities such as your aunt’s feelings and your cousin’s wedding. In turn, each of those nodes is linked to many others, producing a complex network.

In reviewing the moral network that we perceive around us, I think we should avoid two common errors.

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two op-eds on civic engagement

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I am on a winter vacation and not blogging, but two op-eds of mine have been published this week:

High school students still read in textbooks about how the legislature is designed to work, and how government depends on the consent of the governed. But Congress passes virtually no bills, and almost all adults seem to despise the government.  …

This is compounded by another problem. At times in our history, we have seen people distrust the national government but trust one another. That combination encourages populist reform proposals like term limits, referenda, and campaign finance reform that increase the people’s control over the government. However, today we are living in a time when Americans trust “the people” almost as little as they trust the government in Washington….

If you grow up not trusting the government and not trusting your fellow Americans, you will not admire the political system, but you will also be unmoved by proposals to reform it by empowering the people. That combination is a recipe for cynicism and withdrawal. Unless we want to live in that environment of distrust and suffer its consequences for many decades to come, we must change the situation quickly. …

In schools that serve low-income and minority students, kids are less likely to experience interactive civic education, meaning discussion of current events, participation in school governance and school media, field trips and simulations, such as mock trials. In schools that serve economically diverse students, those who are headed to college tend to get most of these interactive experiences. And in schools that serve several different racial groups in significant proportions, discussions of current events are particularly rare.

wrapping up the year

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(en route to Georgia for the holidays) As it says on the CIRCLE website:

It has been a busy, productive, and satisfying year. In the past 12 months, we have released a groundbreaking major report, taken a leadership role in several initiatives to improve civic education, advised and evaluated youth development programs, and even helped design and evaluate an innovative multiplayer game.

Last month, we released the CIRCLE Annual Report, which offers an overview of all our work from August 2012 to September 2013. Some highlights:

The Annual Report also looks ahead to the work we will embark on in the near future. For example, we are excited about opportunities to play a role in evaluating and refining emerging tools for civic education like multiplayer games, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and e-portfolios of students’ civic work.

We are extremely grateful to our many friends, funders, colleagues, and collaborators from the past year. See you in 2014!

Read the full 2012-2013 Annual Report.

our study of state policies for civic engagement

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Just published: “Policy Effects on Informed Political Engagement” by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and me. It is in American Behavioral Scientist and available online. (A print copy is coming soon.)

Abstract:

For this article, we tested whether and to what extent young people’s rates of informed voting are influenced by laws and policies that regulate the electoral system and by civic education policies. Education policies and state voting laws vary widely and are in rapid flux; their impact is important to understand. Immediately after the 2012 election, a sample of 4,483 youth was surveyed that included at least 75 respondents in each of the 50 states and national oversamples of African Americans and Latinos. Their experiences with civic education and support from their families predicted their informed political participation as young adults, but variations in the existing state policies did not matter. This may suggest that the kinds of policies that states have enacted—such as allowing early voting or requiring one course on government in high school—are not helpful but policies that promote extracurricular participation and discussion of current issues in schools could be much more effective.

Robert Pinsky, Impossible to Tell

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Imagine a group of people taking turns making clever remarks, echoing and developing each others’ cues. To play the game well is to extend the discussion for another round in a pleasurable way.

For instance, they might be middle-aged Jewish men trading Jewish jokes, like the one

About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street together …

Or they might be “Basho and his friends,” drinking saki one 17th-century night and improvising long chains of the linked haikus called rengas:

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher’s heart: live, rigid, fluid
Like passages etched in a microscopic circuit.

Or all the stories might flow from a single speaker who has a desperate need, like Scheherazade, not to stop entertaining. And that person might not be an Arabian princess but rather a small boy in a sad apartment, whose mother

… tells the child she’s going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her,
The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations
Of different people in the building, he jokes,
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father
Gets home from work, they’ll be okay till morning.

In “Impossible to Tell,” Robert Pinsky weaves these and other stories about story-telling together to create one jazz-like poem. He improvises on the title, which recurs three times in markedly different contexts. Parts of the poem are jokes that made me actually laugh. Parts are like haikus in their fresh descriptions of everyday reality: “In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter.” (Note the 7-syllable phrase.) And parts are very sad, like the death of Pinsky’s friend Elliot Gilbert, as seen by his family.

As for the child who tells jokes to keep his mother from suicide,

… maybe he became
The author of these lines, a one-man renga
The one for whom it seems to be impossible
To tell a story straight.