In Hoc Anno Hominis?

In the past I have enjoyed the fact that The Wall Street Journal annually runs its traditional Christmas editorial "In Hoc Anno Domini."  I suppose that is because traditions have a cumulative effect, and I like that the editors of the paper have not bowed to contemporary pressure to diminish the significance of the holiday by reducing it to consumption or mere family time.

This year, however, I am finally able to give explicit expression to what has never sat completely well with me about the traditional editorial (reproduced in full below).

Law and Moral Philosophy

Yesterday Robert H. Bork died.  He was as polarizing a figure in American culture, politics, and jurisprudence as he was significant.

In recognition of his significance, the editors of The Wall Street Journal compiled excerpts from a number of Judge Bork's writings.  One of those in particular struck me as worth reproducing.  It concerns the public perception of law and morality.  This perception, often confused, is a subject that I have noted previously (e.g., here, here, and here).

A person does not need to agree with Judge Bork to acknowledge the helpful clarity of his thinking and how that lucidity, even incisiveness, contributes to public discourse about matters of substance.

OPINION

The Wall Street Journal

The Wisdom of Robert Bork

  “Their Will Be Done,” July 5, 2005

Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.

The Court's philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances, the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the Court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document.

A version of this article appeared December 20, 2012, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Wisdom of Robert Bork.

Against Fairness

I have addressed the matter of "fairness" in a number of prior posts.  It is an important moral sense, but one that has more than one facet, as I explained previously.  It is also a cultural watchword that can distort as much as illuminate our activities.

The following excerpt from today's Wall Street Journal finds closest affinity with a short piece on gratitude as outlined by Roger Scruton.

The Wall Street Journal
Notable & Quotable
Stephen T. Asma on the social threat of 'fairness.'

Prof. Stephen T. Asma in his new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago Press):

Our contemporary hunger for equality can border on the comical. When my six-year-old son came home from first grade with a fancy winner's ribbon, I was filled with pride to discover that he had won a footrace. While I was heaping praise on him, he interrupted to correct me. "No, it wasn't just me," he explained. "We all won the race!" He impatiently educated me. He wasn't first or second or third—he couldn't even remember what place he took. Everyone who ran the race was told that they had won, and they were all given the same ribbon. "Well, you can't all win a race," I explained to him, ever-supportive father that I am. That doesn't even make sense. He simply held up his purple ribbon and raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say, "You are thus refuted." . . .

More troubling than the institutional enforcement of this strange fairness is the fact that such protective "lessons" ill-equip kids for the realities of later life. As our children grow up, they will have to negotiate a world of partiality. Does it really help children when our schools legislate reality into a "fairer" but utterly fictional form? The focus on equality of outcome may produce a generation that is burdened with an indignant sense of entitlement.

A version of this article appeared November 18, 2012, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Notable & Quotable.

Ancient Greek Tragedies and Our Own

I have been rereading some ancient Greek tragedies, and I am impressed by how relevant their themes remain, especially for our struggles in families and societies.

The Current State of Irreligion

Two recent publications caught my eye on the subject of religion -- or, more precisely, irreligion -- in the United States.  Let me briefly list them, highlight the main points, and add a comment or two.

On Legislating Morality

Back in July, I posted an entry that I called "Two Separate Spheres of Life?"   In it I questioned the common separation of moral questions from political ones.  At the end of a more recent post, the last in my series on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense, I commented on the ubiquity of morality.  By that I meant that we encourage habits and promote views of morality in one way or another even when we are not always aware that we are doing so.

Not long ago, I ran across a discussion related (but not identical) to these thoughts, "Why We Can't Help But Legislate Morality" by Micah Watson.   It is closest to the ideas in the former post, but it has the advantage of being briefer and clearer than both of my entries.

Prof. Watson focuses on law, not politics strictly speaking, but his main point basically concurs with mine back in July.   He observes, "... every law and regulation that is proposed, passed, and enforced has inherent in it some idea of the good that it seeks to promote or preserve.  Indeed, no governing authority can in any way be understood to be morally neutral. ... To legislate, then, is to legislate morality."

For some, Prof. Watson's perspective may be old hat; for others, it may help to crystallize a sneaking suspicion and make sense of heated policy debates.

His essay does not argue for a particular form of legislation.  Instead, it suggests that our often controversial conversations about various laws will be aided if we can do at least two things: (1) move beyond denying that legislation imposes a moral vision and (2) recognize that it in fact always does.

We will make more civil progress together, I take him to be intimating, if we can -- without excluding questions of operational efficiency, prospective success, and potential blowback -- focus on the moral aspects that a law reflects.  Conversations can then more squarely engage what the legislators seek to promote as a moral goal and the means proposed to accomplish it.

Of Rage and the Man

While reflecting in a recent post on the relationship between emotions and moral character, I noted that our culture, it seems, still privileges reason over emotion.  Often this occurs to the denigration or exclusion of  emotion.  It is true:  sometimes human passions can be so powerful as to result in miscalculation and excesses that are contrary to the balance inherent in a virtuous life.  But that is not necessarily the case, as I was reminded while rereading Homer's epic poems. 

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 10: Character

This is the last post in my series dedicated to reflections on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense.  The subject, broadly speaking, is character.

In approaching this topic in this final installment, I thought that I would underscore a number of things that stood out in my reading of Prof. Wilson's book.  These are some matters that I think are particularly important and will likely stay with me for some time to come.  They do relate to character, but some of the strands themselves might not immediately seem to have much to do with it.  My catalog of them may even seem a hodgepodge.  Maybe it is.  By the end, however, the tiles of the character mosaic will, I hope, have come into view, and I will have pinpointed some areas where Prof. Wilson's book has prompted me to think most.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 9: Universal Impulse

In a prior post in which I reflected on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I drew attention to the universal impulse in moral sentiment that he identifies:  "The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise -- and occasionally the application -- of the view that all people, and not just one’s own kind, are entitled to fair treatment" (191).  Because it is so remarkable, and because it has such sweeping implications, it is worth probing further this topic about the development of universalism in moral thinking and practice.

We can begin by focusing on a question that Prof. Wilson himself poses:  "How can we explain the great expansion of the boundaries within which the moral sense operates?  How, in particular, can we explain why we believe that moral rules ought to have universal applicability?  This aspiration toward the universal is the chief feature of the moral history of mankind" (194).  Indeed.

Professor Wilson suggests that the long development of consensual marriage, particularly in northwestern Europe, helps to provide a key, but not the only, component of an explanation.

The link between the two, consensual marriage and universal moral applicability, may not be immediately apparent.  The tie, however, is the parallel development in northwestern Europe of individualism.  What is the connection?

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 8: Gender

The pertinent question is an old one:  how do natural differences between men and women manifest themselves in their respective moral senses? 

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 7: Family

Why are the nature and structure of family life so heatedly debated?

This question can often be overshadowed by the rancor of contemporary disputes about family matters (such as cohabitation or marriage and wealth), but it is important to ask.  It is a question that arises in my mind frequently.  I wonder if exploring an answer to it might lay the groundwork for more constructive and less rancorous dialogue about these substantive topics than we sometimes have.

James Q. Wilson's discussion of the family, which occurs in a different context that is not about moral debate per se, may help us to pose an answer to this question.

Quite simply, one reason the nature and structure of family life are so heatedly debated, it seems to me, is because "[t]he family is a continuous locus of reciprocal obligations that constitute an unending school for moral instruction" (The Moral Sense, 162-63).  The fabric of the family ineluctably shapes the fabric of its members' morality.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 6: Sociability

In Part II of his book The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson discusses the sources of the four moral sentiments that he explores in Part I.  Those sentiments are sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.  The sources of these virtues that he takes up are also four in number:  the nature of humans as a social animal, the family, gender differences, and the modern impulse toward moral universalism.  A common theme across each of the four chapters on these sources is sociability:  “The mechanism underlying human moral conduct is the desire for attachment or affiliation” (127).

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 5: Duty

I concluded my last post of reflections on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense by noting a desire of mine, namely, to be confident that other people, specifically my friends and family but others also, are dependable. I do not think that I am alone in this.

That post was on self-control. We value self-control as morally virtuous to a significant degree not for its own sake but because it tells us something about the character of the person who possesses it. People with that sort of character are valuable to us both practically (because we are social beings who rely upon and must cooperate with others in our shared lives) and emotionally (because we generally need stability in key areas in order to fare well in our lives). Self-control is virtuous, in other words, because it is necessary to advance praiseworthy human goals in life. Something similar is at work when we turn our attention from self-control to duty.

Terminating 2 at 20

Exercising her right to choose ... to kill her twins.

I ran across a disturbing opinion column from one week ago about a woman in Florida who was pregnant with twins.  "Was."  She is pregnant no longer.

No, she was not a sad victim of urban violence -- but her twins were.  She terminated them at twenty weeks of gestation.  She ended their lives half-way through her pregnancy.  Why?  For the supremely sensible reason that ... she just didn't want them, and she felt nothing for her twin children.

The website on which the column appears is littered with annoying political ads, and the column itself ends with an appeal to "the church" that may not make sense to readers or even follow from the text that precedes it.  But what the column does do well is to bring to attention how commonplace this sort of ending of innocent life is in the United States.

It also prompts questions in my mind about what sort of person possesses such a psychological and emotional disposition that she does not think twice about killing the two twin children who are so visibly alive and growing in her womb.  What really causes a person to feel and act that way?

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 4: Self-Control

While in middle school, I had to stay after classes had ended for tutorials in English grammar.  I cannot recall now if that was because I incorrectly wrote my homework or quizzes, or if it was because I asked questions that the teacher could not answer fully before having to move on through the lesson.  I do remember one week when all I did after school was practice how to distinguish an adjectival from an adverbial prepositional phrase.  Once I got that down, something clicked.  Grammar became not only an interest but also more closely aligned with the way I thought -- or how I thought about how I thought.  This tendency only increased when I began to learn foreign languages, which in turn enhanced my understanding of English grammar.

Among other things, I was drawn by grammar to the conventional nature of language.  I am not sure whether I was taught or simply caught prescriptivism, the notion that grammar does not merely reflect language usage but specifies what it should be.  Proper grammar is how people ought to employ language.  Inasmuch as there was an obligatory element to grammar, there was a moral dimension to it for me:  This is not only how others ought to speak and write, which is how we got the grammar rules I was learning, but also how I myself ought to speak and write.

What is more, if I could speak and write in such a fashion, other people, because of our shared convention, would understand me and trust me not only to communicate but also as a communicator.  Well-executed grammar would say something about me, about my person, about my character.  Not splitting my infinitives could suggest that I would likely not divide my loyalty.  Faithfulness in small things would augur faithfulness in larger things.  If I were trustworthy in my communication by following shared conventions, I would be trustworthy in the rest of my life by adhering to that shared life.

To be sure, I may not have been able to articulate all of this explicitly at the time, but I can safely say now that this was to a significant degree how I thought and felt then.  This understanding is similar to thoughts that appear in a previous post on the usefulness of grammar in the workplace.  A main point of that post, of the person quoted in it, and of my remarks above relates to the third of James Q. Wilson's moral sensibilities:  self-control.

In this continuation of my series of posts on Prof. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I offer mostly a descriptive recapitulation of his main ideas, because I find myself agreeing generally with him.  For those who wish to become familiar with his ideas but who do not have time or inclination to read the book itself, such a recap may be useful.  In this vein, I touch briefly below on (i) what self-control is and why it is moral, (ii) some historical perspective, and (iii) addiction and morality.  Lastly (iv) I offer some additional reflections.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 3b: Fairness

What about fairness and private property ownership?  In my last post, I mostly focused on applying Prof. Wilson's categories of fairness to relationships between persons.  These are important, and they are often overlooked.  We need to think, probably more than we typically do, about relational fairness between individuals.  But questions about fairness between groups, particularly differences in ownership of property by various societal segments, are also important and happen to be currently at the forefront of national conversation.  So we need to think about that, too.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 3a: Fairness

Part three of my series on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense is well-timed.  In a recent post, I observed that current disputes about tax policy in the U.S. are at bottom disputes about competing understandings of fairness.  In another post, I noted complications in the advocacy and practice of tolerance, which also turns on rival versions of fairness.  This matter, fairness, is the second of the four key moral senses that Prof. Wilson discusses.  In his hands, just as in my earlier posts, it turns out to be more complex than we might first assume.

Most helpful in this chapter I found to be a taxonomy of fairness.  Professor Wilson identifies three conceptions of fairness: 

1. equity:  proportionate contributions yield proportionate outcomes on the merits
2. reciprocity:  proportionate exchanges
3. impartiality:  a "fair hearing"

Lists visually reinforce to my mind their content; however, for all of their reinforcing benefits, they are usually not sufficiently expansive to provide more workable definitions of terms.  This Prof. Wilson does in the following summary, which is still admirably succinct:

The human sense of fairness appears to embody three related but distinct concepts.  First, equity:  People who are equal with respect to contributions should be equal with respect to outcomes.  Second, reciprocity:  People who have given something to you are entitled to something back.  Third, impartiality:  People who judge another person ought to be disinterested, free of favoritism, and observant of rules agreed upon in advance. (70)

This taxonomy outlined by Professor Wilson is not the final word on fairness.  It is, however, one of the clearest and most useful that I have encountered.  It is helpful as a heuristic.  Immediately following his summary explanation of these conceptions, Prof. Wilson suggests the source of them, namely, the relationship between parent and child:

I suggest that these principles have their source in the parent-child relationship, wherein a concern for fair shares, fair play, and fair judgments arises out of the desire to bond with others.  All three principles are rational in a social and revolutionary sense, in that they are useful in minimizing conflict and enhancing cooperation. (70)

What could be lost in his neat trifold scheme is the natural sociability that various conceptions of fairness all reflect:  "a concern for fair shares, fair play, and fair judgments arises out of the desire to bond with others" and helps with "minimizing conflict" (my emphasis).  Typically when unfairness of whatever variety exists, relational friction also exists.

Perhaps this point is so obvious that it actually needs to be underscored.  Our being mindful of it will help us to be more attuned to dynamics in our own interpersonal relationships.  Conflict occurs when one senses unfairness.  When there is conflict between two parties, a likely reason is that one of them believes that he has been treated unfairly.

As crucial as recognizing this is to assessing what may be a reason for interpersonal conflict, a sense of unfairness, it still masks the reason behind the cause of the conflict -- that is, what caused the cause.  And if Prof. Wilson is right, the original source, that Ursource, as it were, is not unfairness per se but the desire to bond with others.

How would our relationships be improved, or more quickly reconciled, if when unfairness is felt or claimed we kept in mind this underlying desire to bond?

Consider this as an example.  If my brother becomes miffed because he believes that I favored my sister with a more expensive birthday gift than his, or because I spent less time visiting him than her, the proximate cause of his being miffed is unfairness.  In particular, he believes there is unfairness due to inequity.  Both he and our sister are equally my siblings.  They have contributed a proportionate amount of "siblingness" to my life.  Therefore, my brother reasons, he ought to receive a proportionate recognition of his sibling contribution.

But it would be too shallow to end the analysis there.  Is my brother ultimately interested in the gift or the giver?  Is he finally concerned with a perceived inequity, the unequal token (the gift, the visit) to my sister of my sibling affection for her relative to him?  Or is he concerned with the affection itself?  Does he most want a pricier gift or a longer visit per se, or does he most want me?  He is ultimately concerned to be reassured that I, his brother, as a person, view him with the same love and affection with which he views me.  He wishes to confirm, and in this way advance and deepen, the bond with me.

Here we have discovered an additional element in the relational fairness mix:  reciprocity.  In this example reciprocity is closely tied to equity.  My brother has given to me sibling affection, and he wishes to receive back like affection, an amount proportionate to his contribution, not for affection's sake but insofar as it seals, or authenticates, the sibling bond that we share.  

In short, my brother's protests of unfairness reflect less a concern with unfairness itself than a concern with our relationship.  He wishes our relational connection to be acknowledged in a similar gift or visitation (equity) and returned through zealous commitment to one another (reciprocity).  Fairness is not only about the law court; it also pervades the family room.

Being cognizant of this fact will, or should, help us practically in our own relationship situations.  The payoff may be clearer discernment of why conflict has arisen with someone.  Maybe, with a fuller understanding of the forms that fairness can take, we can avoid some conflicts entirely by taking measures to preempt feelings of unfairness.  We may even be able, positively, to cultivate our own sense of fairness and to practice it in our lives so that this is the result:  that other people will naturally characterize the relational bond that we have with them as solid, and that they attribute it to our concern for fair shares, fair play, and fair judgments.

Professor Wilson's interest is not only what fairness is but also how we make determinations about what is fair.  The two, as my example demonstrates, are intimately connected to each other.  In the next post, a follow-up to this one, I will turn my attention to our appraisals about what is fair in relation to property ownership.

Testing Tolerance

Until now I have tried to stay above the fray involving Chick-fil-A.  I post this only to say that the main point of an editorial in today's The New York Times strikes me as correct:  Government officials, such as the mayors of Boston and Chicago, the Speaker of the New York City Council, and an alderman of Chicago, ought not to discriminate against a lawful business enterprise on the basis of the personal views of the business owner.  Those officials have said that they would block additional expansion of Chick-fil-A franchises in their jurisdictions.

The editors at the Times, as well as NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, hold a view of the permissible parties involved in and the moral nature of marriage that is opposed to that of Chick-fil-A owner Dan Cathy.  What they both accurately recognize, however, is that the public relations campaign and business threats by government officials against Mr. Cathy amount to intolerance of his religious beliefs and his entitlement both to hold and to express them.  As Mr. Bloomberg is quoted in the editorial as saying, “You can’t have a test for what the owners’ personal views are before you decide to give a [business] permit to do something in the city.”

The Chicago and Boston mayors', the NYC councilwoman's, and the Chicago alderman's views are intolerant because they seek to deny public rights (the rights to pursue property and lawful enterprise) as an attempt to censure private rights (the rights to free religious belief, free speech, and liberty of conscience).  These officials may attempt this in protest to, or as an expression of disagreement about, some other closely-held matter, but they are still intolerant.

And they are intolerant, moreover, because they deny in practice something at the heart of political liberalism, the fact of reasonable pluralism.  In a contemporary democratic society, John Rawls observes, the fact of reasonable pluralism is "the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life" (Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 3).  The government officials do this -- deny in effect the fact of reasonable pluralism -- precisely by seeking to banish from their political communities (because they cannot be tolerated) those who differ in moral and civic viewpoints from them.  They do not accept profound and irreconcilable differences in worldview; they wish to eliminate them.  The officials make no room for public debate about how to balance in the community all agreed upon liberties with those that may be disputed.  In fact, they make little to no room for the exponents themselves who hold and express differing viewpoints.

In this vein, a creative thought experiment was narrated by Mona Charen in a column that she titled "Al-Rahim and Chicago Values."  She describes a situation in which a Muslim business owner of convenience stores articulates to a Muslim periodical his belief in the traditional, Quranic view of marriage, which is a man's having not more than four wives.  Apparently this differs from the view of marriage held by the mayors of Chicago and Boston, who go on record that they will do all within their power to prevent him from opening up more convenience stores in their cities, because his personal beliefs about heterosexual matrimony are at odds with their and their cities' approach to marriage and civil unions.  What would the response be to this Muslim man's comments?

This is a thought experiment, because it is retelling the story of Mr. Cathy as Mr. Al-Rahim, the story of a Christian businessman's expression of his personal viewpoint as the story of a Muslim's.  As Ms. Charen explains, "Rahim is an invention to illustrate the selective outrage of liberal Democrats. It is simply impossible to imagine that liberal Democrats would treat affirmations of Muslim faith with the kind of bullying that Cathy and Chick-fil-A have received.  Yet Islam is at least as doctrinally tough on homosexuality as Christianity is, and considerably tougher in practice."

The fact of reasonable pluralism, as Prof. Rawls understands it, is an unavoidable fixture of contemporary democratic republics such as the one in the United States.  It is also, as the present brouhaha attests, difficult to navigate in conjunction with a commitment to the core and treasured liberties of the moderns:  freedom of thought, speech, property ownership, and liberty of conscience.  (I borrow the phrase "liberties of the moderns" from Prof. Rawls; see Justice as Fairness, 140-45.)  As much as definitions of fairness still need to be clarified carefully, about which I wrote in a previous post, so, too, does the concept of tolerance.

Tolerance of a belief is not the same as acceptance of that belief.  In my view, however, in common, everyday practice, tolerance has become in many people's minds synonymous with conforming to, or acceptance of, their viewpoint.  This conception of tolerance is the converse of the popular conception of intolerance:  If you accept my view about P, then you are tolerant; if you do not accept -- do not agree with, do not conform to -- my view about P, then you are intolerant.  Disagreement is designated intolerance; reasonable difference of opinion is often quickly labeled bigotry.

But this popular conception, where it prevails, not only may serve as easy ad hominem argumentation.  This conception evacuates tolerance of all its meaning, for tolerance assumes non-acceptance.  It presupposes disagreement.  It says that a differing viewpoint and the one who holds it are not to be excluded from public discourse and the public square.  Reasonable disagreement will be endured and respected -- tolerated.  By contrast, to be intolerant is to be unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression or to penalize people unjustly for making free expressions.

The fact of reasonable pluralism tests real and workable conceptions of tolerance.  We may not agree with the fictional Mr. Al-Rahim's endorsement of traditional, Quranic marriage.  We may object to the real-life Mr. Cathy's advocacy of traditional marriage as a conjugal union.  These sorts of expression of speech and conviction of conscience are rights protected by the Constitution and enshrined as Constitutional essentials.

What we may not do, however, is this.  In advocating for fairness for all, we may not practice a selective view of fairness for some.  In an attempt to prevent certain Muslims and Christians from supposedly treating a group as separate but equal (for so goes the argument for same-sex "marriage"), we may not treat these Muslims and Christians themselves as separate but equal.  We may not, in other words, claim that they are equal but seek to separate them from our civic and business life.

But this is what the mayors of Chicago and Boston have done.  They say, "You may have your beliefs, but you cannot pursue your conception of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in our community through your business enterprise.  You are equal, but you must remain separate from us.  We can discriminate, but you cannot."  In so doing, that is, by practicing a real separate-but-equal approach to matters of freedom of speech and lawful employment, these officials have undermined their professed moral justification for same-sex marriage on the basis of the same, namely, ending a purported practice of separate but equal.

Whether, in fact, the debate about the definition of marriage admits, as some parties believe, the separate but equal line from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is another matter.  The black community, for instance, does not on the whole view the subject in that light, and they might be positioned better than others to know separate but equal when they see it.  Separate but equal sounds nice; it is a powerful sound bite with a known civil rights pregnancy; but I am not sure that upon closer inspection it fully applies.  The debate about marriage seems to me fundamentally about the wisdom and propriety of redefining -- and thereby changing -- an indispensable cultural/civil (and arguably religious) institution, as well as about the moral consequences entailed by such a redefinition.

Be that as it may, the mayoral hubbub about Chick-fil-A demonstrates the ways in which so-called tolerance is frequently championed but inconsistently practiced.  For calling out what would amount to unjust policing and penalizing of law-abiding citizens and businesses for protected First Amendment rights, The New York Times editorial board is to be commended.

Conjugal Haves and Have-nots

In Sunday's The New York Times on July 15 appeared an article by Jason DeParle on "the way family structure deepens class divides."  Among the observations is that children in two-parent homes tend to fare better than children in single-parent homes.

Much of this faring well is understood in the article economically:  "striking changes in family structure [in the U.S. over recent decades] have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility."  Mr. DeParle continues, albeit in a somewhat attention-grabbing, Marx-related way of articulating these descriptive trends:

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns -- as opposed to changes in individual earnings -- may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality.  Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

This is empirically revealing and helpful data for informed debate.  But is marriage really "confined" to one segment of society in the sense that it is out of reach, or in the sense that a man and woman who wish to marry are not permitted to do so?

It may be the case, as Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, says, that “[i]t is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.”  So the main question in my mind is, Why are not people marrying who might stand to benefit in numerous ways by so doing?

Education level is cited as a factor correlated to one's state of marriage and parenthood.  The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have a child out of wedlock.   A racial correlation exists but is decreasing.  Multiple factors are interrelated, to be sure.  I wonder, however, if the view of one of the subjects of Mr. DeParle's story about income levels and family structure is closest to the mark:  “I’m in this position because of decisions I made.” 

These are not the words of a privileged outsider looking in on someone less wealthy.  These are not the words of controversial sociologist Charles Murray, who argues in his most recent book that moral decline is responsible for matrimonial decline.  (That book is reviewed in the NYT and WSJ; also available are a chat with readers, an op-ed, and summary essay.)  These are the words of someone who is actually and personally affected -- by the decisions that she says that she made.

All of this brings to mind a topic from a previous post on poverty.  In it, I reproduced a statement by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.  His main point in recent Congressional testimony is that certain behavior is an extremely accurate predictor of adult poverty or, alternately, of general economic success:  "Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success -- complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby."

Consider these statements from the article in the Times, which are congruous with Mr. Haskin's remarks:

• "Nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a child’s birth split up within five years."
• "Marital decline compounds economic woes, since it leaves the needy to struggle alone."
• "Forty years ago, the top and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns: more than 95 percent of households with children in either tier had two parents in the home. Since then the groups have diverged, according to [two researchers] Mr. Western and Ms. Shollenberger: 88 percent at the top have two parents, but just 71 percent do in the middle." [A different but related research finding is depicted in the nearby chart.]
• "While many studies have found that children of single parents are more likely to grow up poor, less is known about their chances of advancement as adults. But there are suggestions that the absence of a father in the house makes it harder for children to climb the economic ladder."

In other previous posts (two in May, here and here; and one in April), I also commented on family matters.

Upon continuing reflection, two important considerations occur to me.  One is that the heightened contemporary concern about income discrepancy among Americans, the so-called haves and have-nots, may be legitimate, but it may need to be examined and discussed from a wider perspective than purely monetary differences.  Mr. DeParle's article serviceably suggests that conjugal differences are related to income differences.  To put a finer point on the broader perspective that may be required, increasingly cultural or lifestyle or -- may we actually say it -- moral differences, too, must be brought into the conversation about differences in income levels.

In addition, our examinations and analyses will benefit if we can move beyond the passive victim explanation (i.e., "Those people over there wholly did this to me!").  We may not be able to be content either with the opposite, active agent explanation (i.e., "You did this completely to yourself!").  The proper weighting of these two reasons for a certain state of affairs may be difficult in general to quantify.  Neither may be the whole story.  Both, however, passive and active, object and subject, victim and agent, explanations are relevant.  Still, in the public debate, more room than currently seems popularly acceptable may need to be made at the table for the this-is-a-result-of-your-choices element.

In so saying, I do not wish to be misunderstood.  Environmental factors beyond one's control do often influence the opportunities (or the perception one has of opportunities) about which one may make active decisions and in light of which one may pursue certain goals.  Examples may include being born into a family in a violent neighborhood, which entails pressures that limit educational possibilities, or being born to a parent who has few inhibitions, which leads to destructive effects that harm the child.

However, it seems equally obvious that individuals do, by and large, voluntarily if not always deliberately make decisions that have undesirable consequences for themselves.  Individuals are not forced but rather choose whether or not to be married.  They choose whether or not to behave in such a way that they may have children out of wedlock at a certain age.  They choose whether or not to commit themselves to the laborious task of reconciling with a spouse in the wake of the contentious situations that arise in a marriage rather than divorcing.  They even choose whether to (behave in such a way as to) complete at least a high school education or to seek full-time employment.  All of these bear on one's financial prospects, income level, and upward mobility.

Why is this view, that an individual's decisions may bear on one's financial situation and that these decisions may be moral in nature, controversial?  Let me offer a few suggestions.

First, a possible reason is the nation's drift in culture, or character.

In the article in the Times, Mr. DeParle remarks, "Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed."  The language of anomaly and norm reflects not just frequency of occurrence in the culture, as in a move from uncommon to common, but also a moral acceptance of single motherhood in the culture, as in a move from not acceptable to acceptable.  If single motherhood does not carry the same social stigma, then that is because single motherhood is not viewed with the same moral disapprobation as previously.  Whether this is because divorce, too, is more common and less stigmatized that earlier, or because reproductive technology is more accessible to more people, or because the sheer number of single parents makes it hard for people who know single parents to be critical of them, or even because being critical itself is frowned upon -- all of these things reflect both changing behaviors and a changing attitude toward matters of morality.

Answers to questions -- and the questions themselves -- are different.  What shape should a nuclear family take?  What sort of commitment does one actually make in marriage?  What is marriage?  What sort of family structure both is appropriate to and should best foster becoming a parent and discharging that loving, sacrificial duty?  If I wish to be a mother but marriageable men are hard to come by, perhaps because men lack the desired and necessary moral qualities or character, should I go it alone through a means like sperm donorship and in vitro fertilization?  A positive answer assumes that one has the means to pay for the technological procedure.

Or in the case of many inner cities, where poverty and violence are more common, if I have the same desire for a child and find few or no marriageable men not only because of the previous reasons but also because they are unemployed or incarcerated or dead, do I just have a child with my current boyfriend outside of marriage?  This potential answer, of course, assumes something about the permissibility of pre-marital sex, itself a moral topic about which society's public moral opinion has changed.  Pre-marital sex used to be frowned upon; now it is expected. 

The family is a sphere of life that is inherently moral in nature.  In families we confront the messiness of human relationships; we realize the power of human sexuality, which connects us most intimately with another human; we find our notions of and capacities for commitment, sympathy, fairness, patience, and self-control tested.  Insofar as marriage is integral to family structure, which inescapably entails these things, marriage also, and any conception or pursuit of it, is moral in nature. 

This drift, first of individual behavior in community and then society's view of it, involves unavoidably the social conception of what is in fact moral.  I mean "what is in fact moral" in the sense both of what is a moral matter and what is the proper way in which one ought to think or act about a particular matter.  Both have broadly changed.
 

Second, and closely related, this morphed view of what is moral does not include cultural "lifestyles" or has relativized them.  For this reason, so-called lifestyle choices are deemed irrelevant to the morality inherent in the income debate.  To introduce them is to make a contested move.

If it is controversial that an individual's decisions may bear on one's financial situation and that these decisions may be moral in nature, then this may be because activities like pre-marital sex, cohabitation, and single-parenthood are not viewed as moral matters.  Where they are viewed as moral matters, they tend, as I have suggested, to be viewed as equally morally acceptable alternatives to abstinence, marriage as a conjugal union, and two-parent households.  This shapes politically correct debate.  These behaviors, in other words, are either off-limits (because they not seen as ethical in nature) or accepted (because ethical standards have been flattened).  It is perhaps because they are accepted that they are off-limits.  Certain family-related behavior is not illegitimate, but criticizing another lifestyle is impermissible.  "You just don't do that these days."  This is the new morality.

The nature of the family and its role in the social fabric used to be expected; now raising questions about variations from that previous expectation is frowned upon. 

Third, accompanying the drift in the nation's culture and its reconfiguration of what is moral has been a greater abdication of individual responsibility and a tendency to assign blame to other agents.

In a previous post, I drew attention to a suggestion made by Roger Scruton about his perception of growing ingratitude.  According to his (quite sensible) view, when one receives something by grace, gratitude follows; when one receives something by justice, ingratitude follows.  Grace is understood as an undeserved gift; justice is understood as an expected right.

In American society over the last fifty years (and even longer), more citizens receive monetary assistance of some kind from the federal government in greater amounts than in previous generations.  These distributions are made in the name of justice.  The discourse about them focuses on the distributions, and often prejudges them, as rights, a supposed right to health care, for instance.  They are even referred to in the federal budget as "entitlements."  Slowly and sometimes not-so-subtly the culture's assumptions about its own nature shift in this direction, too.  The way in which I think about what I have in life, or should have in life, increasingly includes a component of that which I expect to receive from others owing to a form of justice.

Entailed in this evolving mentality is a diminished, although not obliterated, sense of individual responsibility and local community.  Entailed also, on the other hand, is a magnified, although not total, sense of third-party (often state) responsibility for the national community.  When I do not have what I expect to have by right (and often I may confuse what I wish to have and what I ought to have by certain just deserts), I find fault with some third party.  I blame someone else.  This is usually the third party that I believe is supposed to guarantee my rights (the state).  It also often is the entity that I believe is preventing me from receiving what I suppose, whether by desire or justice, is now rightfully mine (the state and/or an economic system or a party or an industry or a company or a person).

How does this relate to conjugal haves and have-nots?  Recall that the discussion about income discrepancies in the United States generally takes place at the level of those who have agency, those who earn X and those who earn Y.  This is helpful to recall because the argument that I am trying to make is a moral one, namely, that an individual's decisions may bear on one's financial situation and that these decisions may be moral in nature.  When we speak of rights or what ought to be the case, we are squarely in the moral sphere.  Assigning blame is a moral action and reflects a moral judgment.

A curious irony exists.  The fact of disparity in income levels is presented as a moral issue (e.g., "I am not receiving what I ought to receive"), but it is often also seen as illegitimate and prejudicial to explain that disparity by way of other moral issues (e.g., the consequences of individual moral choices and habits some of which relate to family and sexuality).  Put the other way around, why is it legitimate to cast the disparity in income levels among persons in society as driven by immorality (greed, exploitation, cronyism) but illegitimate to offer as a contributing factor other forms of immorality (lack of self-control, failures of duty, infidelity)?

I suspect that one answer, not far off the mark, is that the former immorality (greed, exploitation, cronyism) is committed by other agents but the latter (lack of self-control, failures of duty, infidelity) are committed by the persons with the lower income levels who claim to be hurt by the greedy, exploiting cronies.

What we find, then, is a propensity to criticize but not an openness to be criticized.  We can "call out" other people's immorality, but we cannot bear to have them call out our own.  We moralize selectively.  Whether this is perhaps another moral shift in culture, or just intrinsic to human nature, it is strikingly reflected in contemporary American individual character, at least at the level of public debate.

Why is a moral understanding of the matter important?  What is gained by identifying morality as involved in the descriptive relationship between marital and parental situation, on the one hand, and financial situation, on the other?

One benefit is that a moral understanding allows us consistently to hold together both passive and active causes of the income gap.  Not only may an individual in some sense be on the short receiving end of some other group's morally dubious actions, but also individuals are in a real sense active agents in producing their own financial state of affairs.   The former covers the "I'm not receiving what I ought to receive" notion; the latter covers the "these are some of the consequences of your individual moral choices and habits" idea.  When we see both elements as moral, we may open up to better view than if we do not the nature of the problem, its origins, and potential remedies.

A second benefit is that we can thereby more acutely perceive the effect of the morality of public culture on public debate -- and we can talk more openly about that effect.

Public culture, what is accepted within a community, does imply notions of personhood and society to which persons and society should aim.  These are goals of the group, and as goals they function as constraining norms.  In this way we see that public culture influences behavior, which leads to consequences both for persons and for the group.

This is a significant observation that is all too often dismissed when it is claimed that culture is neutral.  Usually that happens when culture is influencing ideas and behavior in the way that a partisan likes.  In Justice as Fairness, John Rawls, the towering figure of modern political liberalism, writes:  "We suppose, as a general fact of commonsense political sociology, that those who grow up in a well-ordered society will, in good part, form their conception of themselves as citizens from the public culture and from the conceptions of persons and society implicit in it" (122).  Political liberals and conservatives both understand this "general fact":  Culture's influence is always operative; that influence is powerful; and it powerfully influences identity and morals.

If the current debate about the sources of income gaps and class stratification is lopsidedly moral, namely, to the passive/victim/environmental explanation, then the lopsidedness itself says something noteworthy about the morals of the culture that the nature of the debate reflects.  Less cumbersomely put, the focus of the debate reflects the prevailing moral disposition of the culture.  In this case, the moral disposition may be a decided shift to rights-based thinking, enlarging statist institutions, moral blame-shifting, and ingratitude.  Whether this is entirely accurate, we should, at the very least, pause to ponder whether how people conceive of themselves and of society is true to other moral sentiments that we may have (we might not be consistent), or that it may be legitimate to have (we might not have a monopoly on morality).

In writing this, specifically about a possible marked shift of this sort, I wish to be clear.  I am speaking of the broad culture, not of every individual.  Indeed, as we will remember, the lead subject in Mr. DeParle's article says of her situation:  “I’m in this position because of decisions I made.”   

I do hope that these reflections add some balance to what I see as an uneven public debate.  The element of individual responsibility is not only marginalized in the media; it is also frequently vilified or scorned, as are those who suggest it.  In asking why some moral elements are permitted in public discourse and others are not, I am not only pointing out an inconsistency; I am also suggesting that something valuable is lost in our understanding of real social situations like marriage and sexual behavior.  That something valuable but lost is recognition of a more holistic moral dimension that is inherent in social life.

A Taxing Problem

Ari Fleischer writes in an op-ed in Monday's The Wall Street Journal about the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on U.S. taxation.  Mr. Fleischer discusses this in connection with the presidential campaign rhetoric about the income tax system.  He produces a graph, similar to a table produced recently by Harvard's Greg Mankiw, that helpfully illustrates the actual distribution of taxes paid by income level.

Mr. Fleischer's main point is this:  "If fairness in paying taxes means the amount you pay is based on the amount you make, then the only group in America paying at least a 'fair share' is the top 20% — people who make more than $74,000. For everyone else, the tax code is a bargain."  He substantiates his position based on a comparison of data that is summarized in the following graphic.

Based on the CBO report, Mr. Fleischer examines "the top 20% of income earners (over $74,000).  They make 50% of the nation's income but pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes.  The remaining 30% of the tax burden is borne by 80% of the taxpayers, those who make less than $74,000. In short, this group's share of taxes paid, 30%, is lower than the share of income they earn, 50%."

He compares not just income level to percentage of federal taxes paid in the period under review (through 2009).  He also tries to put this into historical perspective:

the share of taxes paid by the top 20% has gone up over the last 30 years, while the share of taxes paid by everyone else has gone down. … The top 20% in 1979 made 44.9% of the nation's income and paid 55.3% of all federal taxes. Thirty years later, the top 20% made 50.8% of the nation's income and their share of federal taxes paid had jumped to 67.9%. … Meanwhile, the federal tax burden on middle- and lower-income earners is lighter. In 1979, the bottom 20% paid barely any taxes at all, just 2.1%. Now their share of taxes is a minuscule 0.3%.

I doubt that the data that Mr. Fleischer presents will be disputed.  What will be disputed is his interpretation of the data.  It is important to remind ourselves of this distinction (data and interpretation of it), even generally, because it will help to clarify the moral issues that are debated and thereby to promote improved public discourse.

Although I sympathize with the perspective that Mr. Fleischer advances, I also think that he misses something critical to the ongoing national conversation about monetary and tax "fairness."  This is a complicated topic, but let me offer one observation.

When the president and others object to the current tax system on the grounds that many citizens do not pay "their fair share," they are objecting, among other things, not just to the rate at which certain citizens pay taxes (that the rate is too low) but also to the level of income on which taxes are paid (that the level is too high).  It is both the tax rate and income level, taken together and with a view to a certain social end, that is viewed as unfair.

To say the same thing slightly differently, the issue in question is both the progressivity of the tax system and the spread between income levels.  The wide spread between income levels now versus thirty years ago -- that is, the difference in earned income between the top and bottom quintiles -- may in fact be what prompts the outcry for greater progressivity in taxation than prevails at present.  (This income discrepancy, by the way, is not a uniquely American phenomenon.)  

I suspect that if the spread were narrower, then demands for greater tax fairness might be more muted.  If some people did not make so much more money than others, then the issue might not seem in certain quarters to be so problematic.

This is important to note.  It is a sense of unfairness about the spread between income levels that is effectively prior to -- and therefore it is this that motivates -- the sense of unfairness about the spread between average tax rates and share of income taxes paid.  The widening income gap seems to some to be wrong (unfair); so current taxes paid on the high levels of income also seem to be wrong (unfair).  At issue, in other words, is the understanding of fairness itself.

Mr. Fleischer himself seems to recognize this, which is why he begins the op-ed in the way that he does, namely, by proposing one understanding of fairness:  that "the amount you pay is based on the amount you make."  This is fairness as equity.

His construction helps him to make his case, since he presents his data in light of that construction.  He spotlights disparities in taxation relative to earnings.  He, too, identifies unfairness; however, it seems to him to be "unfair" to those who have higher incomes.  It is not unfair because they have higher incomes.

When viewed thusly, Mr. Fleischer's objection may not be to progressivity itself but to the degree of progressivity:  that discrepancy in taxation is out of proportion to the discrepancy in income earned; it is too progressive; this spread is too wide.  It is not equitable.  The increase in the amount of taxes paid is greater than the increase in the amount of the nation's income earned.  (See the nearby table.)
 

But others will object that "fairness" is not really or ultimately to be conceived in terms of the amount of tax that one pays compared to the amount that one earns.  If it is, Mr. Fleischer will probably win the argument on that assumption along the lines of his op-ed.  According to his detractors, however, fairness is not a matter of proportionality in Mr. Fleischer's sense, whether proportionality of contributions or proportionality according to merit.  The driving sense of fairness on their view is not one of fairness as equity, but fairness as equality.

On this view, fairness is that system which leads to more equal social outcomes regardless of contributions or merit.  (In some versions it may perhaps be fairness precisely in contradistinction to them.)  It is fair to tax people differently, often very differently, if it is done with the goal of making more equal the primary goods of income and wealth (often through federal programs) across society but especially among those defined as the least advantaged.

This view, as I have articulated it, echoes that advanced by John Rawls, justice as fairness, a theory in which what he calls the "difference principle" operates:  "the difference principle requires that however great the inequalities in wealth and income may be, and however willing people are to work to earn their greater shares of output, existing inequalities must contribute effectively to the benefit of the least advantaged.  Otherwise, the inequalities are not permissible" (John Rawls:  Justice as Fairness:  A Restatement, 64; see also 122-24).

According to Prof. Rawls, the operative principle is not equity but his own special brand of reciprocity.  (I say that it is special because reciprocity is usually, is ordinarily, an in-kind exchange between two parties, whereas that in view in Prof. Rawls's theory involves unlike transfers among multiple parties.)  A controlling idea, then, in Prof. Rawls's view of justice, which has been in the air that many government officials have breathed for the last forty years since he first proposed it in 1971, has to do with acceptable differences across society as judged by a notion of reciprocity.  And it is this notion of reciprocity that sheds light on one current group's sense of fairness:

To sum up:  the difference principle expresses the idea that, starting from equal division, the more advantaged are not to be better off at any point to the detriment of the less well off.  But since the difference principle applies to the basic structure, a deeper idea of reciprocity implicit in it is that social institutions are not to take advantage of contingencies of native endowment, or of initial social position, or of good or bad luck over the course of life, except in ways that benefit everyone, including the least favored.  This represents a fair undertaking between the citizens seen as free and equal with respect to those inevitable contingencies. (124)

Professor Rawls advances this notion of justice as reciprocity, or fairness, by way of a thought experiment:  what sort of society would representatives behind a veil of ignorance choose to create in a hypothetical original position?  Policymakers advance something akin to this notion of justice as fairness not in an original position but at a different stage; they regulate society that is in its current position with constitutional essentials already settled.  The goal of many current policymakers is, with reciprocity as a guiding light, to make progress toward the ideal through social and economic legislation and through the administration of related rules (see 47-49).

When politicians say that they only want the group with greater monetary wealth to pay its fair share of taxes, they do not refer to the statistics that Mr. Fleischer adduces.  They appeal, instead, to a moral idea that is not dissimilar to that of Prof. Rawls's, even if it is not directly dependent on his teaching.  The moral idea is that such a wide discrepancy in income as exists now between the top 20% of earners and the bottom 20% of earners -- which has widened over the last thirty years -- is permissible if and only if the wealth amassed by the top 20% works to the greatest benefit of those in the bottom 20%.

These politicians believe that such a benefit has not been realized.  Because the more advantaged seem to be better off to the detriment of the least advantaged, it follows for them that unfairness exists and that greater taxation is a justified means of producing fairness.  And fairness is what would be to the greatest benefit of the least well-off.  Increased taxation -- which is a form of coercive state power -- on one group of society is a justified means of producing "fair undertakings," or just plain fairness, for the rest or whole of society.  Hence, "fair share" on this view is the share that secures a fair distribution of monetary goods across society.

The debate about taxation, precisely because it is tethered to the ongoing debate about the best American political scheme for the future, is not going away soon.  It is therefore critically important to make explicit the assumptions about what is fair that are often unarticulated but that are nevertheless powerfully at work in people's thinking and speaking.  Taxation is a material manifestation of a more formal matter:  competing conceptions of fairness.

Until and unless we engage each other candidly at the formal level, inquiring sincerely about a person's view of fairness and pressing respectfully why that person believes in this sense of fairness and not another, we will be fruitlessly volleying material arguments back and forth.

Forcing the Issue

Today's The New York Times runs with a front-page story on forced abortions in China.  A woman is pictured whose child at around 36 weeks (a universally recognized point of viability) was killed by Chinese officials.  (Supposedly third-trimester terminations are illegal in this woman's province.)  The article reports on the growing push by some segments to end the policy.

The Chinese government insists that it will maintain its one-child policy, which was begun in 1980 and is a cause of many terminations in China.  The government attributes the policy to avoiding 400 million births.  Assuming that only 1 out of every 1,000 -- that is, only 0.1% -- avoided births were so avoided by termination of the child, that still amounts to 400,000 deaths.

That amount of deaths might garner "epidemic" status if the issue were different, say, West Nile virus.  That hypothetical figure of 400,000, as large as it is, still is less than one-half of the actual number of abortions performed in the United States each year, for example, about 860,000 in 2006 which were aided by publicly funded family planning services.  For comparison, the Rawandan genocide in 1994 involved the murder of an estimated 800,000 people.  That was genocide and in one year, not a "political disagreement" and per annum.  Maybe the problem in China is an epidemic; apparently it is not at home.  To the child in utero, however, that abortion to end life is, well, forced.