As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.

This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”

And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people.

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.

Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?

The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.

It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.

That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.

Whenever I cover the topic of abortion in my ethics classes, I go to great pains to stress to my students the value of a dispassionate inquiry on the subject. I discourage use of values charged, question begging language of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” and encourage more descriptive language of “pro-abortion rights” or “anti-abortion rights” as a way to stress that even though the issue of abortion is in many way a question of competing priorities of the values of choice and life in this one area, nonetheless in the larger scheme of things people on both sides of the issue do believe in rights to life and rights to choice in general. The issue of abortion is morally about abortion and politically about abortion rights, not life itself or choice itself. That said, resolving the political and legal issue of abortion for many who are morally opposed to abortion but legally supportive of rights to abortion, the conflict really does come down to a decision about what priorities must dominate in a free society—-life in all cases or life in most cases but sometimes choice in the hard cases. And so while it is less divisive and less partisan to gut our language of discussion of value loaded words wherever possible, this is just one of the ways in which the attempt to be objective by trying to find a values neutral or non-partisan language in which to speak proves limited and possibly even distortive of the complexity of the issue at hand. It is deceptive to whitewash the fact that values are conflicting.

Nonetheless, my effort in my class discussions is to try to discipline my students to clarify their understanding of the facts and of the actual value choices at hand systematically, one aspect of the issue at a time, in order to clarify where the rightness or the wrongness, the permissibility or the impermissibility, or the advisibility or the inadvisibility of abortion lie exactly. I want them to figure out as specifically as they can where they think the lines need to be drawn and to work that out both morally and, separately, politically. I also stress so much objectivity because I want my students to practice fairness towards the multiple sides of morally contestable matters and I want them to be able to hear and understand each other and the differing philosophers we read in studying the issue. And I’m extremely proud of nearly all of my students I have had these class discussions with for displaying incredible openmindedness and even temperedness with such volatile matters. I know my own thoughts on the issue have deepened from those thoughtful and probing discussions we’ve had together.

Lake of Fire is quite an admirable film for going a further step towards effective illumination of the issue of abortion by not banning the heat and volatile passions that most of us feel when confronted with various aspects of the issues related to abortion. Nietzsche stresses repeatedly and profoundly the importance of finding the truth best not through greater and greater extents of dispassionate thinking but through the ability to feel through more and more affects. Correlately, he stresses that the truth is not to be understood from the right perspective but from through the ability to multiple perspectives, from seeing through a thousand eyes and gaining a fuller picture that way. On these terms, I think Tony Kaye’s film about abortion is an enriching experience worth having. Kaye represents a number of ways of seeing, a number of ways of feeling and through uncensored documentary imagery offers the viewer the chance to see a thousand striking images and feel struck by a thousand emotions. What I appreciate is that for all the vitriol and passion of many of the participants in the film, that feeling of fairness and perspective undergirds the film under Kaye’s direction and editing and I think manages the sort of enrichening of dialogue I would aim at through detachment.

A key virtue of the film too is that among the viewpoints represented are some of the “detached,” philosophical ones usually given short schrift (if any schrift at all) in the public debate. That said, the film does have some limitations that could have easily been remedied within the seemingly endless 154 minute runtime. For one thing, the informedly philosophical discussions could be more frequent and more involved than some of the multiplications of extremist voices and I think some of the issues of broader political nature that distract from the strict ethics of the practice might not be allowed to dominate so much of the screentime. A lot of valuable, helpful, possibly crucial philosophical and legal distinctions are conspicuously absent. Most egregiously absent are non-religiously based (or unexclusively religiously based) arguments against abortion, more thorough treatments of pro-abortion rights positions that concede the humanity of the unborn such as Judith Jarvis Thomson’s very famous “unconscious violinist” argument, the constitutional controversies involved in appealing to “penumbras,” etc., etc.

That said, while ultimately incomplete, the film does an eye opening and laudable job in general of bringing home the urgency of the political context to the evaluation of the morality of abortion but to the morality of those involved in the debate. There is a strong temptation for me, as a fetishizer of detachment, to want to only address the morality of abortion in a vacuum separated from the contingent political practices associated with the debate since those are theoretically periphery to the relative rightness or wrongness of the practice in abstraction. This film brought home to me some of the arbitrariness of drawing neat lines between abortion in abstraction and abortion in concrete political contexts. As much as being able to abstract the practice or aspects of the practice from surrounding context helps to simplify the issue in theory, it also obscures the interrelated consequences of one’s ethical and political decisions given actual conditions.

I felt like everyone was treated rather fairly. I don’t know how the hardline partisans would feel, whether they would all feel like they were treated fairly or whether they would feel like their side was caricatured worse than the other. I think the visual documentation of actual abortions made a strong visual, visceral case against the practice while the detailed documentation of the extent of theocratic and vigilante tendencies of members of the anti-abortion movement made a strong case against casting one’s lot with such authoritarian scoundrels. I think also the extensive discussion of the consequences of abortions performed illegally brought to life viscerally the real dangers of “coathanger” abortions and most of the philosophers included served to make a powerful case about the moral ambiguity and open door for tolerance of choice in the law with respect to abortion.

In sum, I think both sides make visceral visual cases. It may be unique to my temperment but I found the visceral case against abortion stronger but the abstract case in favor of abortion rights far stronger. The degree to which that is a function of the relative humanity and largeness of perspective of the advocates for abortion rights compared to the authoritarian, theocratic zeal of the proponents of restriction of abortion rights is hard to gauge.

Overall, there is much to learn and many, many important things to see and feel in this film even for those of us who have already learned, seen, and felt a great deal about the topic already. Abortion is an issue that I feel epitomizes Nietzsche’s intuition about the necessity of multiplying the eyes, the angles, and affects with which one looks at something if one is to truly understand it. This film is a far cry from a final word on the issue. But it is an effective and valuable aid in multiplying one’s perspectives and one’s feelings.

B+

As the Democratic primary season is winding down, Barack Obama has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates.  Because of the nature of this lead the race is being declared over and done with in his favor.  It makes a lot of sense to think that if the superdelegates were to overturn a clear mandate for the first African American nominee they would devestatingly alienate the incredibly enthusiastic African American and youth voters who have been galvanized by Obama’s candidacy.  A figure that left wing idealists of many ethnicities and colors see as potentially embodying in his nomination a landmark of social progress cannot be denied such a nomination by the will of party bosses without causing deeply bitter feelings and accusations that the Democratic party thereby takes a deeply undemocratic turn.

Now, in this brief essay, I want to ask whether the superdelegates voting in a way contrary to the pledged delegates really would be an undemocratic gesture.  Why should the pledged delegate count be taken as the truest measure of the will of the people?  A couple of days ago there was an excellent profile in the politico  of the lawyer Obama’s employed to master the delegate rules and maximize his campaign’s delegate total. Delegates in the Democratic primaries do not exactly represent raw vote totals. Sometimes districts get disproportionately more delegates than neighboring districts in their own states because in those districts the Democrats have in the past turned voted more heavily Democratic in previous elections. Sometimes quirks of math make for uneven delegate distribution. For example, in a district with only 4 delegates, a 59%-41% margin in favor of one candidate over the other results not in 3 delegates for the winner but a tie in which both candidates get 2 delegates. I think in general proportional delegation is a far fairer and more representative way to allocate delegates than winner take all set ups like the electoral college because proportional delegation more accurately tracks the will of the people in a state. Why should a candidate who gets only 60% of a state’s votes get 100% of its delegates? The problem with our general presidential elections is not the use of the delegates in the electoral college—its that the electors in almost all the states do not proportion their delegates in a way representative of their outcomes. Lately Hillary Rodham Clinton has noted that with Republican rules, she would have already won this primary battle. That does not mean however that that would have been a fairer measure than proportional delegation is giving us now. I think it would be a worse one, frankly.

But, proportional delegation as presently set up comes with these quirks in which quite unfairly a 59-41% split in some districts yields a decidedly unrepresentative 2-2 tie in delegates. Now it is to Obama’s credit as a politician (or to his team’s credit anyway) that his campaign was shrewd enough and gifted in foresight and calculation enough to run up the maximum delegate totals it could by pouring its resources as efficiently as possible into the regions where delegate rules meant that a lost district could be turned into a tie or a big win meant more delegates than a big win elsewhere in the state. But does this shrewdness translate into legitimacy as “the people’s choice?” Not necessarily at all.

David Plouffe recently stressed that even though Obama is winning the popular vote contest that superdelegates should not take that into account but only take into account the pledged delegate score since those were the rules the campaigns campaigned under. Their campaigns were designed to rack up pledged delegate totals and not popular votes. But why should the superdelegates care about campaign strategies? Just because the Obama campaign sought to rack up the most pledged delegates it could by gaming the system as well as it could does not mean that they couldn’t also put efforts into genuinely being the candidate chosen by the most people. And it doesn’t mean that a superdelegate should see their victories tallied up in delegate rich pockets as necessarily indicative of the will of the people. By the rules, their shrewdness in attaining pledged delegates is already rewarded in pledged delegates. Superdelegates are free to take in other considerations with respect to what legitimately represents the will of the people and what legitimately represents the good of the party. When the superdelegates see that the popular vote totals are far narrower than the pledged delegate race—which was essentially over before March 4 even—-why shouldn’t they take that to mean that the will of the democratic party is split, regardless of how that is reflected in the pledged delegate count?

One reason to think the superdelegates should just endorse the pledged delegate results is that it is unfair to caucus states which take a smaller sample of the population to determine delegates. Since caucuses occur in a narrower time-window and require a greater time commitment proportionally fewer people show up. In this respect, Obama’s campaign has a solid case to make that it put resources into caucus states expecting their delegates to be proportional to those in popular vote states. If the popular vote was the primary metric under consideration and not delegates then the caucus states wouldn’t even have caucuses since such would lead to under-representation of their state in the total popular tally. Caucus states and the Obama campaign which put great resources and strategy into them deserve to be given the equal consideration that primary states did. It is reasonable to assume, without doing the numbers, that were we to extrapolate the caucus vote totals to a more equivalent representation of total voters in those states to the representation in other states, then Obama’s popular vote lead would increase significantly.

So even though I don’t think it’s any more legitimate or democratic to consider sacrosanct the results of districts where mathematical idiosyncracies misrepresent the will of the people of a given district, I do think superdelegates should pay more attention to the pledged delegates to the popular vote. But three further challenges must be considered before settling on the opinion that the superdelegate ratification of Obama as Democratic nominee is sufficiently democratic to be considered fair. Are caucuses sufficiently representative of the people’s will? Caucuses favor party activists more willing to commit time, more willing to proclaim openly their support, and less susceptible to peer pressure in standing by their decision. Would primaries in states with caucuses really produce popular vote verdicts of similar percentages to caucuses? If Texas is any indication, a state where they prominently held both a primary and a caucus, the answer is no. Obama lost the popular vote in the state but dominated in the caucus percentages enough to net more delegates total from the state. Take out the caucuses and replace them with primaries and do more of his wins turn to losses? Does more of his popular vote total move into Clinton’s column instead? We don’t know definitively, but I’m afraid that would likely happen.

So, is this democratic? Is it fair? I think it is an acceptable situation because a political party in the United States is in some sense a “private” institution. The selection of a nominee is different than the selection of an office holder. If we are to be truly democratic in our elections, selecting office holders our government must be as democratic as possible, showing no favoritism to party activists or traditionally active voters over casual ones, etc. There should be no party bosses reaching in to decide elections to offices. But a party is a party and not a government institution. The Democratic party has every right to maintain a little hierarchy within its structure and reward those who are more committed to their party with opportunities like caucuses to show their commitment and have it count more. They are open in allowing any one to caucus. That the greater commitment involved requires a little more from their voters only allows those more committed to the party to have a greater say. Similarly all districts in any state are welcome to vote democratic. Rewarding party loyalty with greater say in future nominees to those districts is similarly fair and so I say, “more power” to those districts with a little extra representation in pledged delegates. And since the superdelegates are only superdelegates because along the way they’ve been voted into leadership roles by other members of the party, again the Democratic party is remaining at its core democratic even though it is introducing hierarchical structures that allow a little more say to those who are a little (or, in the case of many superdelegates, a whole lot) more committed to the cause of their party.

I think that the introduction of these hierarchical dimensions is fair for parties. In general elections, every vote should count the same and the voting procedures should be far more normalized. But the party seems legitimate in its weighting pledged delegates to reflect party loyalty and its use of caucuses for party building and for giving special say to the most committed party members. I also think though that along this same logic, the superdelegates have every right to break with the pledged delegates and favor popular vote totals with their votes if they disagree with their judgment. The more committed activists have had their extra say with their extra proportion of pledged delegates. If the total pledged delegates are not enough to seal a nomination and a superdelegate wants to use his or her extra say to vote against that nomination, that’s as fair as the caucuses and disproportionate delegation that went in to creating the initial pledged delegate total. And if enough superdelegates are willing to overrule the pledged delegates, then that means there is a solid enough agreement to overcome the pledged delegates’ current advantage, and so that’s an accomplishment of great support in favor of the candidate who lost the pledged delegates.

So, even though if I were a superdelegate, I would not overrule the nomination of Barack Obama personally, I think they’re entitled to. Fortunately, enough of them will accept the judgment of the pledged delegates (and, incidentally, the legitimate current popular vote total taken from the officially sanctioned contests) and informally ratify Obama’s nomination in a matter of weeks. But, I don’t begrudge Hillary at all her appeal (in general) to the closeness of the popular vote as a justification to be reconsidered by the superdelegates. I don’t think it’s just games with math. Yes, her campaign only emphasizes the math that favors her. But any campaign would do this and it’s unnecessary to demand her to do otherwise. There is a legit way to read the math that says the superdelegates are legit in using their superifluence to overturn the superinfluence of party activists in caucuses. It’s also a legit reading of the math to say, the pledged delegates and the actual popular vote lead in legitimate contests (i.e. contests not in Michigan or Florida this year) should be ultimate.

Both campaigns have a defensible case. There’s not a simple answer to what the superdelegates should do and there’s no rule that tells them to favor one metric over another.

Your thoughts?

My dad just sent me a link to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education for my thoughts. After writing him, I thought I’d share some of my response to him here as well. I’m not an expert on education or educational theory but I do have 12 years of higher education schooling between time as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and 5 and a half years as a full college instructor and adjunct professor at the university level. I also have a teaching award already if that helps with my credibility at all!

Here is the article to which I will respond: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i34/34b01701.htm

First, I agree that not everyone is cut out for college. Most universities are not as small or as selective as the two which I have attended, and at which I’ve only ever taken or taught 3 classes that were so large as to be detrimental to all hopes of individual attention from professors to students. So, I have to concede that while my own experience has been that college can be focused on personal formation; at a lot of schools, there is not the personal attention and commitment to students that backs up the claim that generally, for most students, college is about personal formation and not just about career training. I personally think colleges should be, as mine have been, far more focused on personal formation than they presently are. But part of that means colleges being even less immediately economically efficient than Nemko is promoting here.

As far as I’m concerned, outside of a couple orienting theory courses: teachers should be learning to teach through apprenticeships with teachers and business people should be learning how to do business by working at businesses. Same for numerous other skill-based careers. Those people should be using college for intellectual and personal formation primarily. You can study the basic background theoretics and information needed for your particular field, but you should spend the majority of your time in the liberal arts learning those things that are “irrelevant” to your future job but crucial to your being a well rounded human being who understands culture, history, science, art, literature, philosophy, economics, a foreign language, psychology, politics, religion, etc.

I think it’s frankly insulting and short-sighted when Nemko asserts that those who are college educated would outpace those who aren’t college educated even without college since they are brighter, more talented, and “have more family connections.” The more family connections comment is just a passivity to de facto class structures that is really bothersome. The idea that just being bright or talented means you don’t need an education is really dismissive of the value of what education offers. I agree that if all you’re interested in is making money that you can do that reasonably well on your natural intelligence and other talents. I agree that the average entrepreneur can likely learn more about starting a business by hanging around businesses for four years than by attending a university. And I agree that if you’re going to wind up a cab driver or a bar tender that you don’t need a $100,000 degree to do so.

But the question is not just about how to make money but how to be a critical thinker more broadly. How to use your mind as more than simply a tool for production but as a means to itself and a measn to the broader goods of self-cultivation and critical citizenship. And in that case, I don’t think there are too many better things in life than an education. People’s minds don’t open on their own. Critical thinking, lively writing, literary appreciation, historical insight, psychological awareness, scientific sensitivity, artistic creativity, logical rigor, mathematical formality, spiritual nuance, cosmopolitan familiarity, and on and on are skills that are as important to be apprenticed in as making money or performing surgeries. I have had incredibly bright students but I’ve yet to have one whose natural talent made them a better critical thinker than I was as their teacher. I have had students who have the potential to be better thinkers than I am but without the right tutelage in how to ask the right questions, and without their getting up to speed with what’s already known, it likely won’t happen.

And that’s what this is all about. If you only use your mind in certain ways you don’t know how to think in other ways. That’s why it’s embarrassing to sometimes read scientists expose their ignorance outside of science when they start pronouncing on philosophical matters. They’re frequently infelicitous with philosophical categories because that’s not how they’ve trained their minds and it’s not where their knowledge base has been built up and so they don’t even understand what the questions are or what the complexities of the best currently available answers are.

The economic benefits of being able to think in the multiplicity of ways that a well rounded liberal education teaches are intangible. Nemko himself has allowed his thinking to be shaped nearly entirely in terms of what his own career, as a career counselor to undergraduates, involves—-cost/benefit analysis of his charges’ economic prospects related to their college and career courses. So, to him the political consequences of having more citizens who are less well rounded, less historically, philosophically, psychologically, economically, theologically, scientifically, linguistically aware don’t matter as long as those same citizens don’t waste $100,000 on a degree that “their job doesn’t require.”

Now, again, not everyone is fit for college. Not everyone is going to succeed and not everyone will learn best there. Some people will get different, comparably good benefits of personal formation through unusual routes specific to them and for those exceptional, idiosyncratic folks, I would not block the door as they exited the university. Some rare people might just be too smart for college or learn in a different way. And definitely many careers that are skill based would find better preparation in apprenticeships. And some people just cannot hack it intellectually and drag down the standards across the universities by crowding the classrooms and lowering the lowest common denominator bar to which some professors may teach.

But, what worries me is whether accepting this as a fact of life perpetuates de facto class inequalities. The norms that (1) let many more students accept their lack of fitness to even the exposure to university education, (2) turn a college degree into just a technical training, and (3) tell people not to bother with college if it won’t increase their personal earning potential, are each norms that lead to citizens who are more ignorant and less capable of informed, critical evaluation. This hardly seems like a wise thing to encourage in a democracy. They are also norms that lead to less educated parents who are in turn less equipped to rear reflective, informed children with strong habits of learning. From very early childhood, parental emphasis on education and training in thinking skills seems to be extremely influential on later mental skills from everything I’ve ever heard or read. Maybe the first kid to go to college from a given family doesn’t advance the previous generation the way the family might dream he would. But by striving to raise the family’s bar a bit in terms of overall education, maybe in the next generation the room for growth increases further as the kid still has an economically downscale parent but now one that is that little bit more trained in the ways of the mind. And of course, the case can always be made that the benefits of an education make life intrinsically richer, regardless of concerns for earning power, responsible citizenship, or effective child-rearing.

This is all very frustrating to me because our capitalist society only values what it can correlate directly to a profit. Articles like Nemko’s assume the dogma that the mind is only valuable insofar as it can be made into an immediate tool for specific wealth production. Both the long term benefits and the intrinsic benefits of minds developed for their own sakes just makes no sense on that short term cost-benefit analysis rooted in that particular value-priority scheme.

And, by the way, it is that same overly capitalistic thought process that threatens to reduce academia to a research production machine instead of primarily the home of educators. And this results in someone like me, who is most talented and successful as a teacher, feeling deeply underappreciated, barely successful, and fearful for my future prospects until I can prove myself as a publishing writer. And that just seems to me counter-productive to the academy.