Nebraska’s Death Penalty

Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment, Nebraska has spent an estimated $100 million on death penalty cases and executed three people.

“Why do we have something on our books that is so inefficient? So costly?” asked Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln, who also once supported the death penalty.

Coash said Nebraska would never again carry out an execution because it was becoming increasingly difficult to get lethal injection drugs.

“There isn’t going to be another execution in this state,” he said. “It’s not gonna happen.

“What good has the death penalty done for our citizens? What good has been done?” Coash asked. “Without an execution, the death penalty is pretty meaningless. It hasn’t saved money. It hasn’t deterred any crime.”

For the first time in 34 years, a majority of Nebraska lawmakers seems to support abolishing the state’s death penalty.

But a bill they considered Monday to do so appears to be going nowhere since a ”test vote” showed there probably is not enough support to stop a filibuster.

You read that right. A majority of legislators support repeal, but not enough to stop a filibuster or override a veto:

Custom dictates first-round debate on a bill can last as long as eight hours. At that point, it takes 33 of the 49 senators’ votes to end debate and move to a vote.

But after Omaha Sen. Beau McCoy launched a filibuster against the measure, Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha decided to float a trial balloon by filing a motion to kill the bill and then asking for a vote to gauge support.

A vote against killing the bill was, in essence, a vote in support of abolishing the death penalty. The tally was 18 for killing the bill and 26 against — more than the 25 needed to advance the bill to second-round debate but not the 33 needed to end the filibuster or even the 30 required to override an expected veto by Gov. Dave Heineman.

Lawmakers will reach the eight-hour limit Tuesday. Speaker Greg Adams usually will not bring a bill back for further debate at that point unless supporters can prove they have the 33 votes to end the filibuster.

That’s some mighty impressive leadership right there.

(Source: journalstar.com)

Here We Are Now Entertain Us

Here’s Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, putting forward what might be the motto of the contemporary edutainment industry:

I was taking an advanced calculus class and my instructor was reputed to be a fabulous researcher, but he barely spoke English. He was a very boring and bad teacher and I was absolutely lost and in despair.

So I went to the campus tutoring centre and they had Betamax tapes of a professor who had won teaching awards. Basically I sat with those tapes and took class there. But I still had to go to the other one and sat there and wanted to kill myself.

I thought at that time, in the future, why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?

We’re still not quite there. In university you’re still likely to be in a large lecture hall with a very boring professor, and everyone knows it’s not working very well. It’s not even the best use of that professor’s time or the audience.

I don’t want to argue that college lectures ought to be boring, far from it. I spend a great deal of time trying to engage my students and to make my subject matter — political theory, which some believe to be dry — seem relevant and exciting.

But I’m struck by the way that Wales really captures in such a short quote what so many students are looking for these days (incorrectly, I think).

First of all, Wales points out that his calculus professor barely spoke English; there’s no other justification given for Wales’ claim that the professor “was a very boring and bad teacher.” Speaking with an accent, not being “from here,” is a major complaint from students and, for some reason, it’s associated with bad teaching. I have a leg up on some of my colleagues simply because I’m obviously American and I speak in unaccented English. Does this make me a better teacher? Not necessarily, but the perception amongst students is that it does. I learned introductory German from a Chinese graduate student whose English was limited but whose German was not. Did I learn introductory German? I did.

Secondly, Wales notes that his professor was supposedly a first-rate researcher. He goes on to suggest that the professor’s time would be better spent on research rather than on teaching. In this case, perhaps; in general, I don’t think so. Great researchers are usually among the most effective teachers … even if you have one or two examples of bad teaching from your own education. Why? I knw that I’m a much more effective teacher because of the research I do, as I’m able to teach my students about the newest books and articles I’m reading rather than just teaching the same material over and over again each semester. If I wasn’t doing research, my courses would get stale.

Finally, and most importantly, is the central claim that the test of education is whether or not it’s entertaining. Wales asks, “why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?” Is there evidence that the most entertaining lecture is the one that gets “knowledge into people’s heads”? Again, I’m not suggesting that a boring lecture is going to do the trick, but I’m arguing that entertaining students doesn’t necessarily equate with teaching them something. When I lecture on Kant, I don’t think I’m really entertaining my students. In my opinion, Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals doesn’t lend itself to entertainment; it’s a dense text that needs some serious explication. Now, I don’t speak in a monotone and I try to find relevant examples to help them make sense of the material, but I’m not standing in front of the class hoping that they’ll all have a great time; I’m standing there with the express purpose of teaching them about Kant.

And, in fact, I’m convinced that they’ve learned about the categorical imperative and about perfect and imperfect duties; they can thoughtfully write about these topics in their essays and convincingly answer questions about them on their exams. I could tell jokes or show a video, and then present a watered-down version of Kant’s theory; this would probably be easier for me. But I hold my students in fairly high regard and I believe they’re smart enough to know when they’re being entertained and when they’re being educated. If you want to learn about Kant, you don’t want to watch a video; and if you want to watch a video, you don’t really want to learn about Kant.

Do my students enjoy my classes? On balance, I think they do. I care about the material that I’m teaching and I care about whether or not students are learning it. That, I think, is why a lot of students like the classes I teach. Does this mean I’m entertaining them? Not necessarily. Liking something and being entertained by it aren’t always going to be the same thing.

A university isn’t Disneyland and professors aren’t Mickey Mouse.

You can have a ton of fun in a class that doesn’t challenge you or teach you anything, just like you can have a ton of fun at a theme park. But professors aren’t tasked with making sure you’re having a good time; we’re here to make sure you learn something.

Syria and the Bystander Effect

About a week ago, as people were writing about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, I read a blog post in which the author argued against American intervention and in favor, more broadly, of a moral responsibility not to intervene when others are suffering:

Let us suppose that I see a person being physically assaulted on the sidewalk.  The aggressor appears to be using their fists, but no weapons are visible.  If I see that person being assaulted, and I fail to intervene, am I morally at fault?

This was a question faced early on by common law judges, and the answer they gave was almost universally no.  At common law, there was no duty to rescue, and there are good reasons for this.  First consider that in most cases, I will be ignorant as to the motivation for the assault I’m witnessing.  The person being assaulted may actually be the more “culpable” of the two based on some prior bad act, and I’m simply witnessing some sort of aggression in-kind.  But I have no way of knowing in the moment of initial apprehension.  Second, Intervening may require me to place myself or someone I love in harm’s way, as the aggressor may see fit to visit retribution upon me or my loved ones at a later date for becoming involved in his or her dispute.  It is selfish and reckless of me to place an uninvolved third party potentially at risk based on my desire to rescue the person in front of me from the apparent violent predations of another.  While we can agree that I may place myself at risk to rescue another, I have no moral claim on placing others at risk through my actions.   these considerations mitigate any moral responsibility to intervene I might otherwise have.

But let us suppose that I do intervene to try to save the person being assaulted, but in the process, I only make matters worse.  Perhaps the aggressor, realizing he or she is outnumbered, draws a weapon that he was not using before.  Now, what began as a fistfight has been escalated into a more lethal situation for both the victim and myself.  An aggressor who may have merely seen fit to “beat up” the victim is now rearing to kill them.  Am I morally responsible for that escalation?  Absolutely.

It is certainly possible that my intervention will only be helpful to the victim.  But the difference between our example and official state military intervention is that, as you add more human beings and political interests to the example, the potential for unintended consequences increases.  Furthermore, imagine that the last four or five times I intervened in a sidewalk assault, I ended up doing as much and more harm as I prevented.  That would certainly make non-intervention seem to be a more morally responsible action, even if there’s still a chance that I’m watching a genuinely innocent person get assaulted without just cause.

In other words, because it’s possible that intervention won’t help and might even cause harm, we ought to feel either a) unconcerned or b) good about not attempting to assist those who are suffering.

This is an elaborate defense of being a bystander.

It’s the sort of argument one constructs in order to excuse the sort of non-action that, in other circumstances, most people wouldn’t want to admit. You see someone being assaulted but you don’t want to get involved … so you tell yourself that, if you did get involved, things would probably just end up worse than if you’d left well enough alone. “If I try to stop a simple assault, the victim — who would just be badly beaten — will probably end up being shot. And, hey, maybe the victim in this situation isn’t really even a victim; maybe she’s done something to deserve the assault. I shouldn’t get involved.”

Of course, the author of the blog post wants to suggest that it’s a very different equation because we’re dealing with the American military and we have knowledge that previous interventions were carried out badly. This should, apparently, change the moral calculus … just as it did for the U.S. when extremist Hutus were massacring Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. We’d intervened badly in Somalia, of course, so we decided that we ought not to intervene in Rwanda. If we’re being honest with ourselves, I’m not so sure the Rwandans are grateful that President Clinton recognized the possibility of unintended consequences and decided we weren’t morally required to provide any assistance.

Now I’m equating Rwanda with Syria in this post and I’m not writing some sort of full-throated call for intervention either. I’m just trying to make clear two things:

1. Past actions don’t actually give us any indication of what will happen in the future. It’s quite possible to do something badly nine times and then to do it perfectly the tenth time;

2. We need to stop giving ourselves so many excuses for our desire to turn our backs on people in need. We have a hard enough time pushing ourselves to act on behalf of others as it is.

And, indeed, the blogger knows this. Here’s how he attempts to mitigate what he’s said:

Note that this is not an argument for never intervening to stop a perceived injustice.  This is an argument for not intervening in a perceived injustice when you have prior knowledge and experience which suggests that your intervention will cause at least as much damage as it alleviates.  This is why, say,Oskar Schindler’s interventions on behalf of Jewish victims of the Third Reich, for example, are different than U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.  The moral calculus of humanitarian intervention changes when you have prior knowledge which suggests that your intervention will cause affirmative injuries elsewhere or in the future, even if it appears to alleviate the suffering that is in front of one’s face.

On what basis should Schindler have believed that he would succeed in saving the lives of Jews during the Holocaust? Indeed, on what basis should any of the Righteous Among the Nations have taken action? They didn’t really have any reason to believe that they would succeed in their efforts to rescue Jews and they had every reason to believe that they would be killed if they were discovered. I suppose the blogger’s argument would be that they couldn’t possibly make things worse for the Jews by attempting to rescue them, since they were almost certainly going to be killed by the Nazis one way or the other. This puts the threshold for intervention at cases where things couldn’t possibly get any worse for the victim … which means, happily for us, that we will almost never have to take any risk or exert ourselves in any way for others since we can almost always say to ourselves, “I could conceivably make things worse so, for everyone’s sake (and especially for my own sake), I’d better just stay put.”

Plain and simple, this is nothing more than an excuse to remain a safe, secure, happy, and healthy bystander while others are suffering. It’s not some sort of moral high ground.