J.S. Mill on school choice

Here’s a passage from On Liberty that I think is really prescient:

Were the duty of enforcing universal education once admitted thee would be an end to the difficulties about what the State should teach, and how it should teach, which now convert the subject into a mere battlefield for sects and parties, causing the time and labor which should have been spent in educating to be wasted in quarreling about education. If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the schools fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. The objections which are urged with reason against State education do not apply to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State’s taking upon itself to direct that education; which is a totally different thing. That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands, I go as far as anyone in deprecating. All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education.

This fits with a general line of argumentation in this blog (see here and here) that school choice would be a good idea. As Mill points out, there is significant argument about what should be taught in schools. The correct response to this, Mill thinks, is to enforce mandatory education without having the State provide it. Parents could choose an education for their children. Such choice would allow many controversies about what should be taught in schools to be avoided (sex education, evolution, certain highly critical interpretations of American history, etc.) In many cases, this will mean paying for education on family by family basis, but as Mill suggests, subsidies could be provided to poorer people so that they could choose their schools with respect to quality rather than pure cost.

I like this outline of a school choice program, but Mill also thinks that it should be enforced by standardized tests. A child would have to past each test or the parents would be fined. There are many problems with this, but the largest one is that it doesn’t solve Mill’s concerns about plurality in education. He says that these tests should be confined to “facts and positive science exclusively,” but then what about evolution? What about sex? It seems that families who opted for a type of religious education would again object and claim a right for their viewpoint to be respected.

In other words, Mill was hoping that privately provided (but publicly mandated) education would be neutralist, and allow each group of people to educate their children in their own way. However, it seems that such a neutralist position is impossible to justify. We think: kids should learn certain things, and they should learn them regardless of whether their parents believe they should not. Or at the very least, there is no way to mark what is required learning and what is not. From my perspective, parents do harm to their kids when they don’t teach them about sex, but from the parents’ perspective, their child is harmed when they are taught about sex.

Even the requirement that education provide children a chance at individuality and autonomy is value-laden in a question begging way. Some religions and groups of people believe that obedience or piety or some other value trumps autonomy. So even a test that requires children to demonstrate autonomy and not acquaintance with specific facts would fail at being fully neutralist.

Is there any reason to obey the Hobbesian state?

Hobbes claims that we should obey the government out of self interest. We join the state to escape from the state of nature and so we have a duty to obey it due to self interest.

But a problem immediately confronts Hobbes, which he recognizes and voices by putting it in the mouth of a fictional antagonist who he labels the fool: why obey the law all the time. If I have a duty to obey the law out of self interest, why do I have a duty to obey it when it is not in my self interest. Maybe I could cheat on my taxes and nobody would find out, or maybe I can steal something when no one is looking. The fact that the law prohibits these things should have no hold on me, since my hypothesis is that I can contravene the law and still benefit from the safety of society. In one way of thinking about it, I free ride on the law abiding instincts of others. Living in a state of nature might be really bad, and living in a state might be good, but it seems that the best thing would be to live in the state of nature while everyone else was living in the state and following its edicts.

Can Hobbes’ resort to morality to ground a duty to obey the laws? It seems that this option is cut off to him. After all, Hobbes says that there is no morality prior to the formation of the state and it’s laws. Until we agree to do certain things in society, there is no morality. But what grounds the moral force of our original agreement? If agreements have no prior moral force, then it seems that there is no reason to obey the agreement by which agreements have force.

One interesting response might be to say that the agreement in the state of nature applies to itself, so that when I agree that agreements will have force, I’m also agreeing that the agreement I’m making has force. The original agreement or covenant is retroactive (or self referential might be better) and so applies to itself.

I like this clever response, but how will it work for Hobbes? It seems that this again goes against self interest. It seems that all of us will want to preserve the possibility of breaking the laws of the state when it suits our interests. One might say that we all must agree to this provision, otherwise we won’t get out of the state of nature, but is this right? It seems like we could escape the state of nature if none of us agreed that the law had independent force, regardless of what our self interest dictated.

ethics of transgression

Sometimes we think that moral rules change depending on how other people are responding to them. There may be a set of rules A that applies when most people are obeying them, but another set that applies when people are mostly disregarding these rules. The idea is that if I live in a society of callous sadists, I may have different responsibilities then if I lived in a society full of normal, reasonably moral people.

But there are cases when my action is what will make the difference to whether which of the two rules will apply. Pretend that you and I are the only people in a society. Pretend that the A set of rules is “make others better off” where the B set is much more relaxed and just says “don’t harm others.” Well if the A rules are in effect, then by not helping you when I could have, I’ve done something wrong. However, imagine that I decide not to help you, does my not helping, ie not complying, make it the case that the only the B rules are in effect. By doing something that is wrong under one set of rules, it seems that I’ve moved things over to the more relaxed set of rules, set B, within which my action is not wrong.

Not sure what to make of this other than to say that such situations are more common than we think. Think of Hobbes and the state of nature. We have no moral responsibilities until we make a covenant to leave the state of nature and set up a government. But what if I break the covenant? It’s wrong to break the covenant when I break it, but after the covenant is broken, I’ve returned myself to the state of nature where nothing is wrong. Is it wrong to break the covenant?

Human nature

Hobbes, along with many other liberal writers, claim that there is a single human nature. For Hobbes, we are always selfish and suspicious, meaning that we must take drastic steps to get out of the state of nature and that, if were to somehow to revert to the state of nature, we would face the same problems. Humans are only one way, and with a state, their lives are tolerable, and without it, miserable.

But I think a very good question would be: why think that human nature is immutable. Rather, one might think that human nature is shaped by the circumstances. If the state of nature represents an early period of human development where resources are scarce and cooperation even scarcer, than perhaps people are selfish and violent. But what about after humans enter society and get a taste of cooperation and the pleasures of socialization? One might think that there nature changes, and that if we got rid of society tomorrow, people might return to cooperation rather than suspicion. Certainly some have argued that a nuclear war might shock humanity into giving up certain types of violence. Of course pessimists believe we would learn nothing and be just as violent as before.

However, if it turns out that human nature is shaped by circumstances, than we might wonder how many equilibria there are. Do we move steadily to continuously higher levels of socialization and cooperation, or do we oscillate between suspicion and trust? Perhaps we are actually becoming more dangerous and warlike as history proceeds ? (this one seems tough to substantiate)

My point is that state of nature theories act as if we are a certain way, and this way of being resurfaces every time circumstances change back to the state of nature. However, one might believe that humans are irrevocably changed by going through certain historical epochs. I think, it is plausible, for example, to suppose that the rise of democracy, or capitalism, or modern science, or any number of other intellectual movements, has altered humans in fundamental ways; ways that would not just be washed away by the fading of these ideologies.

Anarchy Minimax?

In Anarchy State and Utopia, Nozick argues that we should be careful to condemn anarchy on the grounds that it might be terrible without first acknowledging that some states can be terrible as well. His is a meta point about decisions between types of political organization:

Which anarchic situation should we investigate to answer the question of why not anarchy? Perhaps the one that would exist if the actual political situation didn’t, while no other possible political one did. But apart from the gratuitous assumption that everyone everywhere would be in the same nonstate boat and the enormous unmanageability of pursuing that counterfactual to arrive a particular situation, that situation would lack fundamental theoretical interest. To be sure, if that nonstate situation were sufficiently awful, there would be a reason to refrain from dismantling or destroying a particular state and replacing it with none, now. It would be more promising to focus upon a fundamental abstract description that would encompass all situations of interest, including “where we would now be if.” Were this description awful enough, the state would come out as a preferred alternative, viewed as affectionately as a trip to the dentist. Such awful descriptions rarely convince, and not merely because they fail to cheer. The subjects of psychology and sociology are far too feeble to support generalizing so pessimistically across all societies and persons, especially since the argument depends upon not making such pessimistic assumptions about how the state operates. Of course, people know something of how actual states have operated and they differ in their views. Given the enormous importance of the choice between the state and anarchy, caution might suggest one use the “minimax” criterion, and focus upon a pessimistic estimate of the nonstate situation: the state would be compared with the most pessimistically described Hobbesian state of nature. But in using the minimax criterion, this Hobbesian situation should be compared with the most pessimistically described possible state, including future ones. Such a comparison, surely,the worst state of nature would win.

I don’t think this section convinces. First, as I understand it, minimax usually refers to a game involving two players, and not to a decision procedure for making a choice under uncertainty.

Of course, Rawls famously did extend the idea of minimax to situations involving choice under uncertainty, but he carefully points out that such a procedure is plausible only if we do not know the probabilities of various circumstances obtaining. However, it seems that in comparing anarchy with states, we do have a probability distribution of states. Some are really bad, but not that many, and a good number of them are at least alright (or not?). So it seems that we might choose to maximize expected utility even if the worst state is worse than the worst state of nature.

Maybe Nozick’s point is just that the state has the possibility of doing so much damage that we shouldn’t risk it and opt for anarchy, since no matter how bad it gets, it can’t be as bad as a renegade state (think Nazi germany).  But again, this is a different thesis, and it seems that if on average states are better than anarchy, than the difference in utility might justify gambling that a very bad state comes up.

Also, it’s very hard for Nozick to ask us to think of the range of possible anarchies since no one really agrees about a case of anarchy that we could look at, much less a range of them.

political morality verus individuality morality

In politics, we tend to think at the very least, governments should strive to treat their citizens equally. It’s wrong to impose burdens on one group just for the sake of burdening them (indeed, this would just be oppression) Alternatively, privileging one group (like funding the group’s religion) without doing the same for other groups is also a type of discrimination. This is well in line with the view that morality should reflect the equal moral worth of all people.

However, one large problem for this view of morality is that it forbids partiality. Can I save my mom instead of two other strangers from some danger. What entitles me to bestow my estate to my children versus other people that may have a claim to it?

Anthony Appiah’s answer to this question is that politics and individual life are two different realms. In politics, we must treat all equally, but in individual life, we are allowed, and sometimes required, to treat people differently depending on our ties to them.

Thus, Appiah denies what I call the congruence hypothesis, which is that morality and politics should be aligned. Politics should be an extension of morality or, morality writ large. Appiah thinks that they are separate worlds governed by different rules.

In another post, I want to take up this question more fully, but for now, I have this observation which I think at least makes the presumption rest with congruence of incongruence: states are large agglomerations of individuals. Imagine a homogenous group that treats each other with special consideration. Pretend that this group creates a state and the state’s laws show favoritism to only people from their group and its practices. If these people can show favoritism in their individual lives, why can’t they now show favoritism when they act in concert? What about the creation of a state makes it impermissible to act with favoritism.