School Choice as Occupational Choice

Many people have noted that the public school model is obviously unattractive when applied to other goods and services. For instance, few would support a shift to residentially-assigned, government-run grocery stores. It's much better to have a choice of grocery stores and to address issues of access with income supplementation.

But here’s another way of getting at the same idea. Think of attending school as a kind of occupation. Suppose that your place of work was dictated by the government based on where your house was located. Your boss might do a bad job. You might have serious conflicts with your co-workers. Your day-to-day work might be tedious and unproductive. But if that's the place of employment assigned to you based on your location, that's where you'll work.

Now suppose there's a much better workplace down the street. You'd prefer to work there. You're permitted to switch jobs, but there's a catch--your former employer will garnish your wages forever even though you no longer work there. You can't afford this loss of income, so you decide to stay.

I assume few would support a shift to this system of employment. Yet this is all too similar to our current system of public schooling. 

Bernie Sanders says that police departments are socialist institutions. Is he right?

Sophisticated socialists and anti-socialists rightly dunk on “socialism is when government does thing” takes. But sometimes these takes contain a grain of truth. For instance, socialists were embarrassed when Bernie Sanders called police departments socialist institutions and tried to explain why this is a mistake. But it’s not obvious to me that it is. Consider that policing is publicly provided and financed, centrally planned, subject to (indirect) democratic control, and accessible to all citizens (in principle). This strikes me as a lot closer to a socialist institution than a capitalist one by the standards of socialists themselves.

One objection alleges that socialism requires worker control and police departments don’t have that. Fair enough, but this objection deprives socialists of one of their favorite lines of defense—namely, pointing to benevolent public institutions as examples of socialism in action. For instance, Chris Maisano writes in Jacobin, “It’s one thing to identify public libraries with socialism. They operate according to democratic principles of access and distribution, providing services to all regardless of one’s ability to pay. They would be one of the most important institutions in any socialist society worthy of the name.” But public libraries don’t function as democratically-controlled, worker-run co-ops, so they shouldn’t count as socialist according to this objection.  

Another objection is that police departments don’t exemplify real socialism because they fail to operate in accordance with principles of egalitarian justice—for instance, they are often corrupt, self-serving, and benefit the few at the expense of the many. But this all-too-familiar reply is unconvincing for many reasons. I’ll just mention one: if we are judging an institutional arrangement in light of the outcomes we simply stipulate that it ought to promote, then socialist objections to capitalism instantly evaporate. The United State doesn’t exemplify real capitalism because employers often fail to treat their employees fairly, the rich obtain political favors, and so on.

Maisano writes, “If the forces responsible for killing Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd exemplify socialism in action, then no person who wants freedom and justice should be a socialist.” Yet these forces do exemplify socialism in action more than Maisano wants to admit, which is why no person who wants freedom and justice should be a socialist.

Put Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill and Norman Borlaug on the dime

If I asked you how many names you recognize from the list of the first 7 United States presidents, what would that number be?

• George Washington
• John Adams
• Thomas Jefferson
• James Madison
• James Monroe
• John Quincy Adams
• Andrew Jackson

I'd guess that you recognize all 7.

Now, how many names do you recognize from this list?

• Fritz Haber
• Carl Bosch
• Karl Landsteiner
• Richard Lewisohn
• Linn Enslow
• Abel Wolman
• Norman Borlaug

You might know Borlaug, but I’d bet that’s it. Yet each of these people are plausibly responsible for saving millions of lives, and in some cases, billions. 

That we know everyone on the first list and few, if any, names on the second list speaks to just how central politics is to our culture. Who is on our money and represented in our monuments? Typically, politicians. But we would do well to reconsider our moral priorities and honor those who have actually done the most good.

(For a terrific lecture by Steve Davies that inspired this post, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K460eqYBio4)

If You Hate Your Job, Embrace Capitalism

Marx writes, “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

However, by making you significantly richer, a capitalist society does a much better job of enabling you to hunt in the morning and criticize after dinner than a non-capitalist society. Ironically, though, you have to cut way back on your consumption to make this happen. But if you’re willing to save 50-70 percent of your income, there’s a good chance you can retire in your 30s or 40s and spend your time doing whatever you want. So capitalism allows you to achieve the flexibility that Marx dreams of—you just need to buy a lot less (which, if you reject consumer culture, should be pretty easy) and save a lot more.

Koch Grants and Government Grants: What's the Difference?

Many academics object to Koch grants but not government grants. As far as I can tell, the objections to the former apply with equal or greater force to the latter. Consider two:

1) The Kochs have committed injustices and accepting Koch money makes you complicit in those injustices, even if the funded project is wholly unrelated to them.

 

But of course the government has committed injustices; indeed, injustices far graver than anything the Kochs have been accused of (e.g. murdering people daily).  Furthermore, most of what people find objectionable about the Kochs is their lobbying efforts. Yet the government should also bear some responsibility for seeking and accepting the influence of Koch money in that case. If you accept money as part of your murder for hire business, you are at least as morally blameworthy as the buyer.

 

2) There are allegations of cases where Koch has applied ideologically-motivated pressure to recipients. But the same is true of government funding. Addiction research is an example:

 

“There are ideological constraints tied to what gets funded," says Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York City. An example? The tendency to fund "abstinence only" programs and the war on drugs at the expense of drug prevention research. "There is not a lot of evidence of what works because it does not get studied. Today, kids lose their drug virginity before their sexual virginity. What’s the needle exchange of today?"

 

Here’s a plausible reply that a defender of government funding could make: just because the government applies ideological pressure in one case doesn’t make it wrong to accept government funding in a different case without that pressure. Fair enough, but this reply works just as well for the defender of Koch funding.

 

Furthermore, 56 percent of left-leaning philosophers (who make up the vast majority of the profession) express an explicit willingness to discriminate against right-leaning job candidates. This atmosphere of discrimination creates a tremendous amount of pressure to publicly conform to the dominant political ideology of the field. Consider these statements from anonymous philosophers:

 

“I said that I am left-leaning and sometimes feel pressure to stay quiet about my beliefs. [. . .] I think this pressure is not coming from right-wing members of the profession, but from left-wing members who might believe that I am not left-wing enough.”

 

“If my professional colleagues knew that I am moderately right-wing then half of them would call me a ‘subhuman pig’ and treat me accordingly. The other half would keep silent for fear of being next.”

 

And here’s Robert Nozick—then a tenured professor at Harvard—explaining what a relief it was when his colleagues mistakenly thought he had abandoned libertarianism:

 

“You know, it was a moment of weakness on my part, but it was so nice for people to be slapping me on the back and telling me that they had faith in me and they believed in me. Because they hadn't been saying that for years. And they started welcoming me back into the fold. And you know, God help me, but I just liked to not be vilified for a change. I liked to not be not a pariah in my own department. And so I went along with it. I could have done the snarky thing and said, No, your approval of me is based on a misunderstanding. I could have said that, but I just didn't. I was tired and I just let it go.”

 

This sort of widespread viewpoint discrimination creates vastly more pressure to conform to a political ideology than some Koch money.

In Defense of Effective Altruism

With Peter Singer in the spotlight, this criticism of effective altruism—that it is anti-democratic and “excludes poor people”—is making the rounds. There’s a lot wrong with it.

 

On one interpretation of the objection, it’s obviously false that effective altruism excludes poor people. After all, effective altruists offer aid to the global poor, who willingly accept it. If I’m thirsty and someone offers me a drink, which I in turn accept, it would be bizarre to say that I was excluded from this transaction.

 

But it seems like Rubenstein has a different sense of exclusion in mind here. When attempting to enact institutional reform within a community, one ought to partner with, and even defer to, members of that community. This sounds absolutely right to me. However, I’ll note that folks on the left who lodge this sort of criticism against Singer often fail to take their own advice when it’s ideologically inconvenient for them (e.g., ignoring communities’ preferences for school choice).

 

More importantly, this criticism overlooks the crucial point that we can have a division of moral labor. Not all help must or even should involve political reform. It’s true that institutional change is needed to address the root causes of poverty and injustice, but it’s important that some people address the harmful effects of poverty and injustice too. I doubt that critics of effective altruism would criticize food banks and their volunteers on the grounds that food production is at the root of alleviating hunger. It’s good that some people produce food and that others distribute it. Indeed, fewer people would get fed if everyone farmed than if some farm and some volunteer at food banks. So criticizing Give Directly for not focusing on institutional reform is as unpersuasive as criticizing Feeding America for not focusing on farming.

 

Lastly I’ll add that for almost everyone reading this post, the expected good of allocating your philanthropic resources to reforming global institutions (Rubenstein’s preferred course of action) is zero and it comes at the cost of allowing particular individuals to die that you otherwise could have saved.

Why You Should Probably Not Vote to Change the Outcome

There’s a great new paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs by Zach Barnett titled “Why You Should Vote to Change the Outcome.” But contrary to some of the claims I’ve seen people make (claims *not* made by Barnett in the paper, I should note), the paper doesn’t show that everyone should vote tomorrow to change the outcome. 

First, the paper focuses on the probability that your vote will be decisive. But with the Electoral College, you can cast the decisive vote in your state without changing the outcome of the election because your state’s electoral votes may not be needed.

Furthermore, depending on your state, the odds of an upset may be far lower than in Barnett’s cases (check out the latest odds here). As Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman quips, “The prediction markets will give you 34-1 odds that Biden wins California, which would be a fair bet if Trump had a 3% chance of winning California, which is approximately 3 percentage points higher than it should be.” 

Indeed, as I wrote in my book: "Even if your vote does defy the odds and makes or breaks a tie, the result would be a recount—a recount whose final tally will surely differ from the initial one. And we’re still not done: if history is any guide, a razor-thin margin of victory will send the election to the courts. As Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt note,

The closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands—most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.

Thus, the outcome of even an extremely close presidential election will probably not be decided by your vote, but rather by lawyers and judges."

 

Lastly, Barnett assumes that “The average social benefit of electing the better candidate is more than twice as great as the individual cost of voting.” I have no doubt that this is often true; the problem is figuring out the total long-term value differences of the two potential presidential administrations before casting your vote. Since we are talking about global-scale impacts playing out over decades, it’s hard to have much confidence in our judgment—especially when we consider how partisan bias distorts our beliefs about the comparative effectiveness of candidates and policies. If you *are* confident in your ability to make these predictions, you could win quite a bit of money in betting markets. (I should say that I am less skeptical of the value difference between candidates in this election, as I believe we have very good reasons for thinking that Biden is far better than Trump.) 

 

So at most, this argument shows that only some people should vote to change the outcome--in particular, only voters in the following states: Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio,Texas. The rest of us may stay home.

If You Don't Vote, You *Can* Complain

In some of my previous posts, I’ve explained why there is no duty to vote. But maybe you should vote for a different reason—you can’t complain if you don’t vote. As I write in my book:

I take this objection particularly seriously. Why? Because, as my friends, family, co-workers, department chair, students, head of human resources, office manager, neighbors, mail carrier, barber, editor, doctor, veterinarian, daycare providers, Uber drivers, flight attendants, and baristas will tell you, the right to complain is something I hold sacred.

But I contend that you can complain even if you don’t vote. Typically when we say that you can’t complain about X if you don’t do Y, it’s because doing Y would prevent X. Consider:

“Ugh, my lower back is always sore.”

“No problem—here are a few simple exercises you can do to easily alleviate the pain.”

“Eh, I’d rather not.”

“Okay, then don’t complain when your back is sore!”

Here it does seem like you shouldn’t complain about your sore back. You can take steps (at a reasonable cost to yourself, etc.) to fix your sore back and so you have no one to blame but yourself if your back isn’t fixed. Now compare:

“Ugh, I’ve got a terrible cold. It’s a bummer because as we all know, there is no cure.”

“Why don’t you use my healing crystals?”

“Wait, will those actually help?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then I’ll pass.”

“Okay, then don’t complain about your cold!”

Here it seems like you do retain the right to complain about your cold despite not using the healing crystals--using the healing crystals wouldn’t cure your cold. Similarly, you retain the right to complain about politics even if you don’t vote because casting a vote wouldn’t change political outcomes.

There is No Expressive Duty to Vote

The odds that your vote will change the result of the upcoming election are small. But maybe you ought to vote to send a certain sort of message rather than to change the result. As the philosopher Stanley Benn puts the point, “Political activity may be a form of moral self-expression, necessary not for achieving any objective beyond itself (for the cause may be lost), nor yet for the satisfaction of knowing that one had let everyone else know that one was on the side of the right, but because one could not seriously claim, even to oneself, to be on that side without expressing the attitude by the actions most appropriate to it in the paradigm case.” Perhaps you should vote to express your commitment to particular moral values. However, in Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics, I explain why arguments for an expressive duty to vote are unsuccessful:  

 

1) We might have good reason to be skeptical about duties to perform purely expressive actions. For instance, few would argue that you have a moral obligation to publicly wish for world peace when you see a shooting star even though the wish expresses your desire to see the world at peace.  

 

2) You can express your commitment to the relevant values without voting--for instance, by putting politically-charged bumper stickers on your car. 

 

3) It doesn't seem as though we have a duty to express our attitudes about moral matters in general--for instance, you're not obligated to "like" a Facebook post about the Against Malaria Foundation--so why would we have an obligation to express our political attitudes in particular?

  

4) To send the right message, you have to cast the right sort of vote. If you cast a vote without making an attempt to ensure that it is informed and unbiased, then you aren’t showing that you genuinely care about justice and the common good. Of course, you could always put in the work of researching and debiasing your vote to send the right message but I'm not convinced this is a good idea. The reason is because you’d be siphoning time and energy away from projects that actually make the world a better place simply to send the message that you care about making the world a better place. As I write in the book: 

 

Forgoing the opportunity to help people to send the signal that you care about helping people actually sends the wrong signal. Helping people is the right way to send the signal that you care about helping people [...] Consider a case that makes the choice between consequential action and expressive action particularly vivid. You pass a starving child on the street who asks you for money to buy food. You have some money but you’re reluctant to hand it over. Why? Well, it happens that you were on your way to buy a shirt that reads “Feed the Hungry” and you don’t have enough money for the shirt and the child. Surely letting the child go hungry so that you can afford the t-shirt sends the wrong message (to say nothing of the wrong you would commit by allowing easily preventable harm to come to the child). In the words of philosopher David Schmidtz, “If your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place."

 

The best way to express your commitment to justice and the common good is not to cast a purely expressive vote but rather to take action that actually promotes justice and the common good.

Rawlsianism, Utilitarianism, and the Asymmetric Use of Extraordinary Counterexamples

In my book Unequivocal Justice, I document how Rawls repeatedly employs a form of asymmetric idealization. He compares an ideal political sector to a nonideal nonpolitical sector and, unsurprisingly, ends up endorsing a rather large regulatory and redistributive state. But Rawlsians are guilty of another kind of asymmetry which is just as bad.

First, they’ll make use of extraordinary counterexamples to object to rival views (e.g. utility monsters, rogue transplant surgeons, people getting electrocuted during the World Cup, etc). Then, they’ll be challenged with extraordinary (or even not-so-extraordinary) examples to their own view. For instance, the difference principle would oblige us to channel all of society’s resources to one severely sick person if that were required to maximize the material well-being of the worst off. Similarly, the lexical priority of Rawls's first principle implies that we may not sacrifice a trivial amount of free speech for a monumental amount of wealth and income. When confronted with these objections, Rawls and Rawlsians retreat to the “Well, my theory isn’t meant to apply to these sorts of unusual cases.” But this is an utterly inadequate response. (Imagine if a utilitarian replied, “Well, my theory isn’t meant to apply to unusual cases like utility monsters.”) You can’t make use of extraordinary counterexamples to object to competing views and then stipulate them away in your own case. (I say more about this worry here.)

The Value of Democracy and the Value of a Vote

Sometimes I hear the allegation that to claim that voting is not obligatory is to disparage the value of democracy. If democracy is a valuable institution, everyone ought to vote. 

But this simply doesn't follow. Hospitals are valuable institutions, but volunteering at a hospital is not obligatory. Fire departments are valuable institutions, but serving as a volunteer fire fighter is not obligatory. I believe that we're obligated to make substantial philanthropic contributions when we can, but what specific form this contribution ought to take will depend on a variety of considerations. 

In particular, we ought to think carefully about how much good we can expect different kinds of contributions to do on the margin. If your local fire department has more volunteers than it can handle but the hospital is in desperate need of help, that's a good reason to volunteer at the hospital. The decision to allocate your time and effort to the hospital in no way disparages the value of fire departments.

In the same vein, if you don't expect the time and effort you would spend preparing and casting a wise vote to do any good, then you have reason to use that time and effort on other causes that will do good. This decision to not participate in the democratic process no more disparages the value of democracy than your decision to volunteer at the hospital disparages the value of fire departments.

Three Arguments for a Duty to Vote (With Replies)

The Generalization Argument: You're obligated to vote because it would be a disaster if no one voted.

Loren Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan provide a convincing reply to this argument. In brief, it proves too much. It would be a disaster if no one fixed cars, but you're not obligated to become a mechanic. It would be a disaster if no one dispensed prescription drugs, but you're not obligated to become a pharmacist. And so on. They suggest a stronger version of the argument is as follows: "Strictly speaking, what makes an ungeneralizable action wrong is not that it fails the generalization test. Rather, it fails the generalization test because of underlying unfairness, and it is the unfairness that accounts for the action’s wrongness.” The mere fact that it would be bad if no one voted isn't what makes it wrong to not vote; rather, it's wrong not to vote because you wouldn't be doing your fair share. This brings us to the second argument: 

The Fairness Argument: You're obligated to vote to meet your duty to contribute to the common good and a just society.

Jason objects to this argument, rightly to my mind, via an appeal to what he calls the particularity problem. It's true we have a duty to not free ride on the contributions of others, but we can do our fair share in ways that do not involve voting in particular. Our contributions can take a variety of forms, including donations, volunteering, and more. Indeed, I might take this argument a step further and say that it's better to make non-political contributions. As I put it in my book:

Suppose we’re on a camping trip where everyone has plenty of water to drink. I’m debating what kind of contribution to offer. I can make a costly-but-needless trip to the well or I can do something else that satisfies an unmet need, like gather firewood. At a minimum, it’s permissible to not fetch water and gather firewood instead. Gathering firewood is a perfectly fine contribution to the trip; I am not guilty of “free riding” on the work of the campers who collected water simply because my contribution takes a different form. Indeed, it seems to me clearly preferable to gather firewood. Given that sufficient water has been collected, getting more water doesn’t do any good. So doing something else with my time, like gathering the firewood, makes a more valuable contribution. The same point applies to political abstention. Political activity is no different from other occupations such as delivering the mail: just as it would be inefficient for everyone to deliver the mail, it is inefficient for everyone to be politically active.

The Collective Samaritanism Argument: This argument comes from Julia Maskivker's outstanding book The Duty to Vote, which provides the strongest and most comprehensive defense of a duty to vote in the literature. We have a duty to contribute to highly beneficial collective activities when we can do so at a low cost to ourselves—even when your individual contribution is inconsequential. To adapt a case from the book, if we see a car in the middle of the road, we have a duty to help others push it to safety even if our individual contribution won’t make a difference to whether the car is moved successfully. Similarly, voting well is a highly beneficial collective activity that promotes justice and social welfare and so we have a duty to contribute our good vote given that we can do so at a low cost to ourselves.

However, I believe that an individual may do their Samaritan duty without voting, by promoting justice and social welfare in other ways. To elaborate on the car example, suppose you see that sufficiently many people are pushing the car to safety such that your help won’t make any difference. You also notice that a car accident victim is at the side of the road in need of CPR, which you are able to perform. Here you can do your Samaritan duty by tending to the particular person and allowing others to push the car out of the road. Indeed, the very consideration that speaks in favor of joining the car pushing effort—concern for the welfare of people on the road—speaks at least as loudly in favor of performing CPR. (We could even describe both forms of help as part of the same collective effort to ensure the safety of those on the road.)

Similarly, suppose you know that sufficiently many people are voting such that your vote won’t make a difference. You also know that the effort you could allocate to preparing and casting a good vote could be spent earning income to donate to an effective charity. Here you can do your Samaritan duty by donating rather than voting. Indeed, as in the car case, the very consideration that speaks in favor of voting—promoting social welfare and justice—speaks at least as loudly in favor of charitable contributions that make more of an impact on people's lives.

Does Nonpolitical Altruism Ignore the Root of the Problem?

As mentioned in yesterday's post, my new book makes the case that citizens should forgo political engagement for more impactful forms of altruism, such as raising funds for effective charities. The basic idea is that time and resources allocated to preparing and casting a good vote are time and resources not allocated to altruistic endeavors that actually make a difference. Casting a vote won't result in any person getting fed who otherwise wouldn't get fed, but donating money to an underfunded food bank will. So if you are concerned about food insecurity, you ought to spend the time you would have spent researching and casting a vote for the candidate who is best on food insecurity working overtime and donating the extra income to the food bank.

A standard objection to this style of argument is that private altruism doesn't address the root cause of social problems but merely treats the symptoms. I'm unpersuaded by this objection, however, because most of us are simply not in a position to fix the root of social problems. As I write in the book:

Acknowledging the limits of our individual impact and acting accordingly does not imply the moral insignificance of systemic problems; rather, it’s a sober recognition of the reality of our situation. If you can ameliorate the effects of something harmful but not the root cause, then by all means ameliorate the effects. By analogy, boarding your windows, evacuating town, and setting up shelter for displaced residents before a hurricane hits does not imply that you endorse “quietism” about the hurricane. Rather, you are simply responding rationally to that which is in your control (mitigating some of the harmful effects of the hurricane) and that which is not (whether or not the hurricane strikes). Criticizing poverty relief for not addressing the root cause of poverty is like criticizing hurricane relief for not addressing the root cause of hurricanes.

Of course, if you are in a position to fix the root cause of a problem, you should do so. But there's nothing wrong with a division of labor. It's appropriate for general practitioners to treat the symptoms of a cold if they are not in a position to work on a cure. Similarly, it is appropriate for citizens to take direct action to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless if they are not in a position to change the policies that govern the distribution of food and housing.

Why It's OK to Ignore Politics

I've got a new book out titled Why It's OK to Ignore Politics, just in time for election season! I argue that citizens have no moral duty to be politically active and, indeed, have strong moral reasons to forgo politics in favor of more effective forms of altruism. I realize this is a controversial view. In the book's introduction, I write: 

 

As a philosopher, I earn a living by challenging conventional wisdom. For instance, I routinely present my students with the argument that they should kill one innocent person if they can harvest her organs to save the lives of two others. Although most students don’t buy the argument, they are happy to at least entertain its merits. But when I present an argument for not voting, they’re downright scandalized. Murder? Well, they can see the point of that, but staying home on Election Day?! There are just some ideas that decent folk refuse to consider.

 

However, I believe that the prevailing defenses of a duty of political participation don't succeed. I'll write a few posts detailing my arguments, but for now I want to draw attention to one part of my case: most of us are probably overconfident that we are casting our vote for the right candidate. Just as a doctor shouldn’t prescribe a medication for her patient if she can’t trust her medical judgment, citizens shouldn’t vote for a candidate if they can’t trust their political judgment. 

So why might we be self-skeptical of our political beliefs? For one, there is the familiar of rational political ignorance. Citizens tend not to know very much about particular policies and politicians or the relevant social science. A popular response to this worry points to various shortcuts or heuristics that citizens might use to vote well. You could consult social scientific experts, the candidates’ parties, endorsements for the candidates, and so on, to inform your vote. But there are a number of problems with the appeal to heuristics. First, we tend to be biased in favor of ideologically-friendly heuristics that confirm the partisan conclusion we started out with. In this case, it's hard to see why using heuristics would be an improvement.

 

Moreover, the case for heuristics is strongest when voters defer to experts who share their basic values but are more up to speed on the facts about the issues and candidates. But his leaves open the question of what your basic values should be. As I put it in the book:

 

George Will is a fine stand-in if you’re a staunch conservative. But the most important question remains unanswered: is staunch conservativism true? By analogy, few would advance the following claim: “You don’t need to do all that work figuring out what to think about religion. Don’t bother reading the world’s major religious texts or analyzing the theological claims they make—just use the Pope as a proxy.” No doubt the Pope is a good proxy if you want to know what a Catholic should think about contraception. But the question of whether you should be a Catholic in the first place is still unsettled. 

 

You might reply that you'll think hard about your basic values and try to ensure that your selection of heuristics is informed and unbiased. However, note that the need for heuristics arises because political ignorance and political irrationality are rational: it's not worth your time to inform and debias your vote because your vote will have no meaningful impact on the outcome of the election. But this consideration suggests that it's not worth your time to inform and debias your selection of heuristics either. As Ilya Somin writes, "Since the whole point of relying on opinion leaders is to economize on information costs, the voter is unlikely to invest heavily in researching the leaders’ qualifications.” 

Public Reason Liberalism and the Problem of Correct Answers

I suppose I should jump into the fray, as I have some thoughts on the ongoing debate between Jason and Kevin on public reason.

Let's take as our starting point the observation that people will inevitably disagree about the right thing to do about abortion, immigration, capital punishment, and so on. Moreover, simply insisting on getting our own way all the time is a recipe for endless conflict. Thus, we might want to figure out how to live our lives together despite our moral disagreements. In this spirit, Kevin analogizes the public reason liberal to a marriage counselor--the point is arrive at a compromise that the spouses can live with even if neither gets exactly what they want.

But the marriage counseling case is disanalogous to the moral case in a critical respect, at least if you believe that there is a stance-independent fact of the matter about various moral problems. If so, a better analogy would be a disagreement about, say, what a 20% tip on a restaurant bill is. Here, there's a right answer. Of course, a marriage counselor might still tell you to split the difference between your two answers and get on with your lives for the sake of marital harmony. Fair enough. But we might also care a lot about figuring out the correct answer. Indeed, if you're a mathematician, it seems like that is precisely what you would care most about. Similarly, if you're a political philosopher, it seems like you might care most about figuring out the truth about justice.

Of course, this is not to deny that figuring out how to live together in the midst of disagreement is important. But, as Jason notes, lots of theorists think this is important. Welfarist consequentialists, for example, will argue that peace and stability are worthwhile because they promote welfare. Virtue ethicists might argue that pushing people around is vicious. Kantians might argue that steamrolling others violates deontic side constraints. One need not be a public reason liberal to care about resolving conflicts in mutually acceptable ways.

Is Micro Schooling Morally Permissible?

As more public schools are opting for an online-only start to the year, families are turning to "micro schools"--hiring a teacher to instruct a few children from several different families--to meet their educational needs. However, the rise of micro schooling has rekindled an old debate about the propriety of permitting educational inequalities that exacerbate economic inequalities. No doubt wealthy parents are better positioned to provide their children with micro schooling just as they are better positioned to provide their children with private schooling in general. But, the argument goes, these educational advantages give children an unfair edge in competitions for spots at prestigious colleges and high-paying, high-status jobs. An article published at Aeon summarizes the worry: "For many parents, enrolling their children in private school is primarily about giving them an edge over their peers. And that, it turns out, is incompatible with the public good  . . . If status is the aim, there must be losers – lots of them. After all, if we are all roughly the same, there is no difference upon which to base unequal distribution of social and economic rewards." 

This is a fair worry but I doubt that it's a decisive objection to micro schooling or private schooling as such. One reason is that even the full equalization of educational opportunities would probably not do much to equalize opportunity in general; instead, it would simply shift parental status-seeking toward other credentials. Yale has to select among applicants somehow--if it cannot use differential educational credentials to do so, it must turn to some other differentiating characteristic. (By analogy, if all NFL prospects run an identical 40 yard dash, teams must turn to some other characteristic to decide who to draft.) 

If wealthy parents are unable to give their children a leg up in Ivy League admissions by buying them better schooling, they have an incentive to buy other opportunities for their children that will distinguish them from other applicants. As I write elsewhere:

New competitions will arise for nonacademic extracurricular goods such as music, chess, sports, and so on. If a credential’s value is due to its unequal distribution, then we should expect partial parents to react to complete educational equalization by investing in unequally distributed private signaling goods. If you can’t get your child into Yale by buying her elite private schooling, then buy her cello lessons instead.

Wealthy parents can, of course, more easily afford to buy their children SAT prep classes, time at golf camp to improve their odds of an athletic scholarship, and so on. Thus, even total educational equalization is unlikely to make much of a difference with respect to overall equality of opportunity.

Lastly, even if you have lingering worries about educational inequalities, it is seems as though the appropriate response is simply to expand the educational opportunities of the disadvantaged. The problem of inadequate access to micro schools could be solved by distributing educational dollars directly to families to spend on a micro school if that is a better option for their children, just as we address the problem of food insecurity by allocating food stamps to families to use as they see fit.

Milton Friedman's Immigration Radicalism

Classical liberals and libertarians, from Frederick Douglass to Ludwig von Mises to Deirdre McCloskey, are nearly unanimous in their praise for open borders. Indeed, the free movement of people across borders seems to be implied straightforwardly by libertarian principles. However, insofar as libertarians are resistant to immigration, it's typically because of worries about the alleged incompatibility of open borders and the welfare state.  Most famously, Milton Friedman said, "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." Many conservatives and conservative-leaning libertarians take this point to count against immigration.

Now, I think this is a bad argument for several reasons. First, estimates of the fiscal impact of immigration "are clustered around zero." Thus, it is simply not clear that free immigration and a welfare state are incompatible for fiscal reasons. 

Second, as I wrote elsewhere:

Libertarians oppose laws restricting people’s ability to do things like consume drugs and sugary beverages, gamble their savings on professional sports, ride motorcycles without helmets, etc. But note that a major argument made on behalf of supporting these laws is that they prevent an increase in the consumption of state-provided benefits. People who ruin their health and their finances are more likely to avail themselves of state assistance. Still, libertarians reject these laws—not just in principle, but here and now. I see no reason to treat free immigration differently. (Indeed, if anything, we have far stronger reason to permit free immigration because it would produce significantly greater gains in human well-being than, say, helmetless motorcycle riding.)

But I'll set these objections aside because I want to draw attention to an underappreciated part of Friedman's views on immigration. Unlike contemporary conservatives who take the alleged incompatibility of redistribution and immigration to weigh against immigration, Friedman actually took it to weigh in favor of illegal immigration. As he put it: "It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country." Friedman is therefore far from an ally of those who would push for a border wall or tell prospective immigrants to "get in line." Insofar as there is a conflict between state-enforced redistribution and state-authorized immigration, he takes a distinctively unconservative and very much libertarian position: simply immigrate without the authorization of the state. (For a more detailed look at Friedman's views on immigration, see chapter 6 of Ilya Somin's new book Free to Move.)