This Is Not News

OK, so brainstorming about the general idea of creating something deliberative juries to set policy – what are the drawbacks?

A major one is participation. I think to work, this is something where you’d have to get large swaths of the population involved. You can’t let people out of it because they have very busy very important jobs, because the perspective given by those very busy very important jobs needs to be represented. We’re not looking for an “unbiased� or “neutral� panel – we’re looking for a panel whose collection of biases resembles the collection of biases in the nation. But that means mandating participation and closing a lot of loopholes. Is one of the rights in a democracy the ability to avoid participating in a democracy? My gut instinct says no – that if you want to enjoy the fruits of certain rights and political structures, you need to pay into the cost of having them. And if a deliberative democracy is going to work, you need people to understand what deliberation is and how a group of citizens can set a policy. If understanding comes through doing, then people need to do it. We make people go to grade school and high school not just for their own benefit but because the costs to society are too large if they don’t.

Why do I think it’s dangerous for citizens to not understand the deliberative process through participation? Because if the process isn’t something you participate in, it becomes something external to you – it becomes a “them� that is against normal folks like “us.� Listen to the way most people talk about “the government� and what it does with your money, your time, your life. “The government� is an Other, a disconnected powerful force that exerts power over us but over which we have no control. So whenever “the government� tries to do something, there’s distrust, suspicion, opposition, and resistance. As a result, “the government� becomes a force to be disparaged even by those people who want to exert power through the government. Watch how many Democratic and Republican presidential candidates complain about Washington and the way it works – even though many of them are senators who are part of the existing Washington power structure, and all of them want to be a very significant part of the Washington power structure. Candidates are more than willing to exploit our alienation from what should be a democratic government. Imagine what will happen to a citizen deliberative body. If a large segment of the population refuses to participate, elites will have incentives to rail against the citizen deliberators in order to muster votes and other types of support from the nonparticipants. This will create added pressures on the deliberators and make the whole process even less attractive.

There are also a lot of logistical issues to work out in setting up a citizen deliberative body, and for the moment I’m leaving those questions aside. I figure I ought to at least raise them. What kind of issues will citizen deliberators discuss? What role, if any, would the existing branches of government play? Do we need a professional legislature to go along with the citizen deliberators? Should laws passed by citizen deliberators have a sunset clause so that they can automatically be reviewed by future deliberators? How long would a particular panel of deliberators meet? Who would pay their salaries? How would this affect the families of the deliberators? How long could the deliberators stay away from their jobs?

Lurking behind these logistical questions is the idea that someone is going to have to maintain the program. Someone has to identify the experts, edit the briefing materials, supervise the selection of the panel, moderate the discussions, perform and interpret any surveys or polling. There is still going to be a bureaucracy and a set of experts involved. While they won’t be setting policy, they’ll be exerting a large influence over the folks that do. How do we avoid Dewey’s problem of experts here? Familiarity helps, so part of each deliberative panel’s process should include an explanation of how the panel and materials were selected and what the goals of deliberation are, something along the lines of the introduction potential jurors get before they are interviewed. This way the citizenry will understand how the process is supposed to work, and if they see it being abused, they are more likely to rise to its defense. (This will only work if the system is sufficiently established that a number of the citizens care about its continues integrity, which I admit is an uncertain bet.)

OK, I still need to flesh out some of what I’ve said here, plus I’m kicking some ideas around about the importance of institutional memory and how a deemphasis of expertise would affect that memory. That’ll be the first weekend thought to tackle.

Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work.

It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism supports the idea of gathering information about a problem, predicting how various potential solutions might play out, and then making a decision based on what the evidence suggests is the best possible solution. But a democracy has to make a lot of decisions, so that’s a lot of empirical information to gather, process, and interpret. No elected official can do it – that’s why they have staffs, and sometimes they don’t even have time to read the text of a bill before they vote on it. So the average citizens can’t really be expected to do it either – and I don’t know about you, but I know I don’t have a staff.

Now, if we can’t have out own staffs, maybe we can at least rely on experts. We can read recommendations or endorsements and make decisions from there. But that brings in what Dewey calls the problems of experts. If you spend a lot of time researching issue X and figuring out how to solve it, talking to other people who care a lot about issue X, and putting enormous amounts of your time and energy into minute details and permutations of issue X, all of a sudden you are not thinking like the average, non-issue-X expert does. You can’t quite relate to how he or she sees the world. You can’t understand why Average Joe doesn’t care passionately about marginal tax rates and sugar tariffs.

Or, to put in other terms: every time there’s a comic book movie made, the film-makers make some small change to the comic story. The millions of filmgoers who haven’t picked up a comic book in years happily see the new movie and hopefully they enjoy it. The thousands of people who are familiar with the comic and can share details of its history with you notice the change, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to them. And they can’t understand why there’s not a mass of people with torches and pitchforks at the movie studios, or at least a halfway decent boycott. They’re experts, and their concerns are very different from the average filmgoer. They see the world, and the movie, differently. So their view of what makes, say, a good Spider-Man movie is not necessarily a correct view, even though they’re the experts. As Dewey says, the experts can become their own class, their own community, far removed from the communities that their expertise is supposed to solve. Read the remainder of this entry »

I’ve spent the last last nine-plus years of my life with philosophy as the focus of my academic and professional life. So it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth to read this article in the Inquirer this week about Anita Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at Penn who has made philosophy a secondary academic and professional focus in no small part because because she doesn’t see the discipline as particularly relevant right now.

“I’m in a livelier, more hands-on world,” Allen says, offering a sharp view of the discipline with which she fell in love as an adolescent.

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them.

“The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow.

“Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?

I do not mean this to be vindictive or defensive, but when a fellow academic is saying you’re not hands-on enough, there’s something of a problem.

Part of the issue is probably the very real diversity problem that Allen cites. Part of it is the fight within the discipline over what counts as being properly philosophical and sufficiently rigorous.

I’ve spent roughly a quarter of my life in philosophy and I’ve done it because I think the discipline has something to tell us about the problems we face in today’s society. And because I think it helps show us some methods that will work to help us solve those problems. Every day I step into a classroom and try to pass along that idea to a group of skeptical students. And some days I realize just how hard of a sell that is.

In the aftermath of Marion Jones’ admission of steroid usage, one of her relay mates says that she should be allowed to keep the bronze medal that the team won in 2000. Passion Richardson says that “I should not have to suffer the consequences for someone else’s bad decisions and choices.” And maybe that’s so – but should she be allowed to profit from them? When you participate in a team event, you’re getting the benefit of your teammates’ skill, but you’re also taking on some responsibility for their actions as well.

It’s a dicey issue, and there are plenty of parallels to contemporary society – I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that I am drawing some benefits from the unjust actions of others, but then what responsibility do I have to correct those injustices?

For some reason I got this Kids in the Hall sketch in my head today, and it occurred to me that it might be useful the next time I have to teach about skepticism. We may not really believe that David Foley has a speech impediment, but all the available sensory evidence agrees with that possibility. So if you can’t rule it out, can you say you know what’s going on?

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to go hunting for old sketch comedy and call it research.

I thought of something I wanted to say as a follow up to my post about the Catholic Church and indulgences last week, specifically the part where I said

the major tension I’ve always felt running through Christian thought: on the one hand, there’s the notion that it’s all in God’s hands and we should trust that things happen for a reason and it will all work out. And on the other hand there’s the notion that what we do with our lives matters.

The way I wrote this, the tension is not exclusive to the Catholic Church – heck, it’s something I’ve commented about before, talking about the problem with explanations. But I do think the tension is especially noticeable in Catholicism and some other religions because there’s the additional assumption that the reason is a good reason, motivated by a benevolent and omnipotent planner. A determinist materialist doesn’t have to worry about why bad things happen to good people – they do because that’s the way the atoms bounce.

At any rate, I’ve been thinking about this tension a lot in the wake of the Chris Benoit murder story, as I read about people who knew Benoit try to reconcile their vision of him with what he had actually done. And I’ve seen people talk about steroids and stress and too many chair shots to the head in the effort to find a physical explanation.

And this may well seem odd, but the whole thing got me to thinking about Paul Hester, the original drummer for Crowded House. In 2005 Hester went out to walk his dogs and instead decided to hang himself. He left behind two young kids. And when I thought about how this would affect those kids, and then I thought about a man who would selfishly inflict that pain on his own children, I got pretty ticked off. And because I didn’t want to be angry at a dead guy, who I figure has enough problems, I tried to mitigate the act by reminding myself that Hester had always been subject to funks and may well have been clinically depressed, and so perhaps something in his body had simply overwhelmed him at that moment and made him unable to think through his actions. But if I try to follow that line of thinking, sure, I don’t have any reason to be mad at him anymore – but there’s not really much reason left to think positively, either. If the depression that drove him to suicide was merely a determined physical event, doesn’t the same thing hold true of his drumming talent and the sense of humor that helped define his band and earn him so many fans? Are there any heroes left to sheer for if we’re all just along for the ride?

I’ve started prepping for a course in Moral Philosophy I’ll be teaching this summer, and I decided to include a hefty chunk of Plato’s Republic. I’ve mentioned this before, but the Republic is the first major work I studied in my first college philosophy course, and it also the first major work I covered in the first course that I taught. So it’s a bit of a sentimental favorite. I like it because I can use it to address so many different areas of philosophy, an then show how each area can link to others.

(I also have a sneaking suspicion that Plato’s guardian class is an inspiration for the Jedi in the Star Wars prequels, but that’s another post. Not sure how well that illustration would go over, but hey.)

I had always used the G.M. A. Grube translation of the Republic that was revised by C.D.C. Reeve, but a couple of years ago I discovered that Reeve had put out his own edition. So this summer I decided to give it a look, and I’ve decided to switch. In terms of the translation itself, I’m about the farthest thing from an expert on ancient Greek, so I can’t comment on its accuracy. But Reeve has decided to convert the format of the work into something of a drama, with every speaker identified and with the background narration put into italics. As Reeve suggests in his introduction, students are going to find this immeasurably easier to read, and anything that removes roadblocks between the student and the material is worthwhile in my book.

I learned today that Richard Rorty passed away a few days ago. I never interacted with him directly, and I disagreed with at least 75% of what I read from him, but in many ways he’s probably responsible for what I’ve done with my life for the last eight years. His work helped revive interest in John Dewey within American philosophy, even if many people subsequently disagreed with his interpretation of Dewey – and I was certainly one of them. And Rorty’s repeated claims that there are no ways to philosophically justify a belief in democracy were one of the major motivations for me to attempt to do exactly that – an effort that led to the creation of this site. So in a way, Rorty’s the reason you’re here, too. Not a bad legacy to leave behind, and people will be arguing with the texts he left behind for decades. I’m sure he wouldn’t have it any other way.

I was reading through some post-mortems on the Philly elections that discussed the relatively low turnout – somewhere around 35% of registered voters showed up, and you could probably adjust those numbers to get lower figures (for all voting-age residents) or higher (just for Democrats, who were the only party with a competitive primary). The idea that many people express is that this low turnout is a bad sign – that candidates can not motivate citizens to go to the ballot box and exercise some control over their government. And there’s a part of me that agrees, that figures that voting is the minimum level of participation required in a democracy.

But then I get to thinking about the economics-driven analysis I encountered in my poli sci coursework. The framework is about figuring out what a “rational actor” would do, the assumption being that a rational actor is one who can compute costs and benefits and will not do things where the former significantly outweigh the latter. I have problems with this framework, but it does help put a question into perspective: why should anyone bother to vote? In my lifetime, I think I might have seen one story about a very local race that was decided by a single vote. And none of those were elections I voted in. So every time I have voted – and every time during my college years that I did not get an absentee ballot – my participation or lack thereof had absolutely no bearing on the outcome. If the person I voted for won, I could have stayed home and still gotten the benefit of that result. (This is the free-rider problem: if I can enjoy a public benefit without doing any of the work to procure it, why should I do the work? Especially when my contribution will make such a negligible contribution to the achievement of the benefit that it might as well be nonexistent?) If the person I voted for lost, I obviously was unable to prevent the undesirable outcome, so why not just stay home and save myself the trouble?

Thought about this way, voting is a completely irrational act, and in order to be successful political candidates have to somehow convince people to be irrational on their behalf to a greater degree than their opponent is able to do. Suddenly the nature of political campaigns makes much more sense.

Now, I’m still trying to work out in my head some way to make the act of voting a rational one, but so far the only luck I’m having is to take it out of the realm of the individual. It seems to me that if you’re going to make individual political action meaningful in any way, it has to either be a way that allows one-to-many interactions, so that what I do has a definite ripple effect, or be something that improves my own life in such a way that the social effects are incidental and not the whole point of the enterprise. That brings us back to the quest for more robust versions of democracy, but more on that another time.

Interesting story up on Yahoo from Reuters, suggesting that fruit flies may be making “decisions” independently of outside stimuli. The scientists who conducted the study argue that this might be an argument for something along the lines of free will. I will wait for the scientists and neurophilosophers to chime in on the comments, but I’m not sure I fully see the argument. It seems to me that the neurological argument for determinism always took the internal construction of the nervous system into account, and at the very least the Reuters article doesn’t pick up on that. If the different fruit flies had different internal configurations to start with, that would seem to explain the different results. At the very least it strikes me as a potential explanation. And if there is some kind of “purpose” being found in the decision making process of these fruit flies that’s not purely a neurological process, what kind of process is it? And is that process determinist?