Research Proves Students Only Read Research That Proves Them Right

In today’s Daily Nebraskan, Zach Nold argues that the death penalty is good public policy. This is a very timely op-ed because the Nebraska legislature has a bill before it to repeal the death penalty. It’s paired nicely with a piece by María Antonia García de la Torre, who argues that the death penalty ought to be abolished. Neither student references the repeal bill.

I’ll spend a few moments picking apart Nold’s argument because de la Torre’s piece doesn’t address the problems with it and because it would be a shame for anyone to come away from this op-ed debate thinking that Nold is correct.

In particular, Nold’s central argument is that the death penalty serves as an effective general deterrent to homicide:

Emotional arguments aside, the death penalty as a deterrent has been supported by scholars from many colleges to prevent homicides. It is time for all of us to sit down, and read the statistics ourselves and evaluate our stance on the death penalty through a scientific lens.

Alas, Nold doesn’t provide his readers with enough information to do what he asks and he reaches his own conclusion — the conclusion he almost certainly had in mind before he began doing his research — without referencing all of the information.

Does the death penalty deter homicide?

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Public Inquiry and Democracy: Should the National Science Foundation Fund Political Science Research?

Jeffrey Isaac, a professor of political theory at Indiana University, has a really excellent piece in Dissent about Tom Coburn’s repeated attempts to strip political science of funding by the National Science Foundation and reactions to those attempts by political theorists.

Even if you haven’t followed the Coburn saga or don’t much care about federal funding for political science research, the whole piece is well worth your time for its thoughtful reflections on the value of public inquiry to democracy:

This is my favorite part:

While NSF-funded research does produce the benefits the APSA claims it does, the manner in which it produces these benefits is highly mediated. What passes for the most sophisticated “scientific” work among the scholars who do this kind of research tends to be extremely and excessively statistically and mathematically esoteric, inaccessible, and forbidding, and many of the journals that publish this work operate on a natural science model according to which public accessibility and public relevance are not high priorities. As a result, its contribution to “the public good” is very indirect—and occurs when it is engaged and critiqued by other political scientists who write in a more discursive style and tend to publish in more ecumenical journals, where they can inform the tens of thousands of people who teach government courses in high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation.

This broader political science scholarly inquiry and debate does more than furnish vehicles for the dissemination of NSF-funded research. It also serves as the intellectual soil from which this research grows, furnishing broad concepts, problem definitions, and political and policy perspectives that inform the most esoteric political science research. The formal study of legislative politics, for example, is linked to, and parasitic on, broad theories of democratic representation. And highly mathematical analyses of public opinion are connected to theories of democratic citizenship.

In short, the observation that NSF-funded research is important to democracy is true only if one seriously acknowledges—and accords recognition and value to—how it is embedded in the broader streams of research, writing, teaching, and public argumentation that constitute U.S. political science.

My colleagues who are experiencing Schadenfreude at the Coburn amendment see little value in the “high tech” work funded by the NSF, because this work is typically pretty remote from the work that they do, and they experience no direct and palpable advantages from it. But in fact this NSF-funded work is an important part of broader inquiry in political science, for the reasons stated above. NSF funding is also crucial to the functioning of the APSA and for the funding of much graduate education in political science, in academic departments and centers across the many research universities in the United States. These are the most important reasons why I strongly support continued NSF-funded political science research.

At the same time, my colleagues who are simply outraged over the Coburn amendment, and who imagine that every decent political scientist ought to rush to the barricades in “defense of political science,” often fail to appreciate that the political science they are calling on their colleagues to defend often relegates many of these colleagues to second-class status in the discipline. This failure to appreciate how their “science” is experienced by other colleagues, and to recognize (and own) that the discipline has been politically constructed in ways that are not inevitable and that privilege some over others, is unfortunate for the cause of NSF funding and for the discipline more broadly.

It is obvious that the defunding of political science is a very minor development in the broader fiscal crisis of the U.S. state. It is also obvious that for Coburn and his allies, clearer and more persuasive evidence that political science research is good for democracy would probably only further incline them to oppose the funding of such research—for they are not especially interested in robust public inquiry and debate about the deepening of U.S. democracy. In the grand scheme, what the institutions of political science do or might do better at this very moment is unlikely to make a real difference. But this crisis is not simply a “teachable moment” for the discipline; it is a learning moment, and how the discipline processes and moves from the crisis will be important to its future vitality. As we move forward, we ought to recognize that political scientists have over time constructed a scholarly world that is often forgetful of the true source of our work—the public problems of our common world. And if it seems to others that our work has lost public meaning, it is incumbent on us, especially if we wish those others to support the funding of our work, to make the public meaning of our work clearer and more accessible and thus more publicly valuable and valued. This requires a greater mindfulness about the way we frame our work, the way we do our research, the way that we write about this research, and the venues through which we seek to disseminate and publicize our ideas.

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The problem with Peter Singer’s account is not only that a lot of people would consider it to be monstrous but also that it’s based on what I take to be an unsupportable distinction.

At what point, one might justifiably wonder, does a fetus gain a right to life: conception, viability, birth, or some other time? Famously, Peter Singer has argued “that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person” (Writings on an Ethical Life, 160). On this point, he and I are in agreement: fetuses are not self-conscious, cannot engage in self-creation, and are not bearers of dignity.

But Singer goes much farther: “Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either” (Ibid.). The reason, on my reading, that Singer goes too far with his suggestion about the permissibility of infanticide is that he puts too much weight on the psychological aspect of the human mind and not enough on the biological.

It might well be the case that we who are persons do not have strong psychological connections to the infants we were, but – as yet – we aren’t certain. We know, however, that healthy infants’ brains display organized cortical brain activity (OCBA) and, David Boonin argues, we can measure both the beginning and ending of this “electrical activity in the cerebral cortex of the sort that produces recognizable EEG readings” (A Defense of Abortion, 115).Given that, Boonin’s argument for using OCBA as the standard by which to judge whether a fetus is a person makes a good deal of sense. If OCBA is not present, we would be hard pressed to make a case for the self-creative feature of the human mind about which I’ve already said so much. For the cerebral cortex must be working in a organized manner before anyone can claim that the brain has created the sense of self that is the key feature of personhood.

If we are drawing lines – and with questions of birth and death it often appears that we must – then the line should be drawn at the earliest stage possible. With regard to self-consciousness and dignity, it seems to me that Boonin’s line allows much less room for error than Singer’s. Although it might very well be the case that selfhood (as we understand it) begins in infancy – and with it, dignity and personhood – Boonin suggests that we draw the line at the 25^th week of pregnancy; the reason is that there is “ample evidence to suggest that [OCBA begins] to occur sometime between the 25^th and 32^nd week” (Ibid.).

We might push the line back a bit, however, and adopt an even more conservative estimate about OCBA by drawing the line at 20 weeks; as Boonin concedes, “Burgess and Tawia identify 20 weeks of gestation as ‘the most conservative location we could plausibly advocate’ as the beginning of what they call ‘cortical birth,’ because it is at this point that ‘the first “puddle” of cortical electrical activity’ of an ‘extremely rudimentary nature’ begins to appear in brief spurts” (128). Adopting this position – rather than Singer’s – would be to argue for a fetal right to life at the 20^th week of pregnancy (the earliest time at which it is possible for OCBA to occur) and, of course, to prohibit things like infanticide.

This is, of course, a somewhat radical position, as it suggests that the ruling in Roe v. Wade – already controversial enough – needs to be reconsidered in favor of limiting some abortions. While many would argue that redrawing this line is wildly problematic, those who would most feel the effect of doing so are those who suggest that fetuses are persons with rights from the moment of conception, for Boonin notes that “even if we push back the gray area from 25 weeks to 20 weeks, it will still turn out that 99 percent of abortions take place before the fetus acquires a right to life” (Ibid.).[1] In the end, tying the permissibility of abortion to the absence of organized cortical brain activity seems to have a limited effect on public policy and squares a difficult issue with the nonreligious understanding of personhood I advance in my book.

[1] This does, however, affect that notion – drawn from the ruling in Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey – that viability is an important moment to consider in the life of a fetus. As William Cooney suggests – in “The Fallacy of All Person-Denying Arguments for Abortion,” 8 Journal of Applied Philosophy 2 (1991) – it is not: “Does a 5-month-old fetus then become a person when that stage of technology exists? Can personhood be a condition relative to and dependent on technology?” (161). If technology were to allow for earlier viability, this would not change the facts about personhood because a viable pre-OCBA fetus lacks a sense of self and, consequently, dignity and rights.

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Human Personhood and Human Dignity

Several thoughtful commenters have asked me to say more about human personhood and human dignity after yesterday’s post on Rand Paul’s argument against abortion on the grounds that human life begins at conception.

As I argued there, the fact that human life begins at conception doesn’t actually do any heavy lifting with regard to questions about human personhood or rights. Being a person means more than simply being alive. Think, for example, of the patient in the hospital whose cerebrum is fundamentally injured. The continued existence of the patient is not open to question: so long as she is breathing and her heart is pumping — functions that are regulated by the brainstem rather than the cererum — she is living.

At issue, though, is that the person who existed before the traumatic brain injury is now no longer in existence. All the things that made the patient who she was have left the body of the patient. These things are far more integral to our coneption of personhood — and of life itself — than the mere animal functioning of brainstem, heart, and lungs (which can be duplicated by machine). What cannot be duplicated or replaced is the sense of self, the “I” that I argue makes us persons and from which human dignity, the source of our human rights, is derived.

I don’t want to suggest that we achieve dignity through rational thought or action, i.e., that we earn our dignity in the way that Kant suggests; instead, my argument is that dignity arises from our higher brain function. In particular, dignity is a function of our self-consciousness, our ability to talk and think about ourselves.

The Greek δόξα, from which dignity is derived, is defined as “the opinion which others have of one, estimation, repute.”[1] While this ancient concept was thought to rely on the way we were perceived by others, I want to argue that of far greater importance is the opinion we have of ourselves and, in particular, the stories we tell about ourselves. My dignity is bound up with my answer to the most fundamental identity question, “Who am I? [which] will normally address what is most salient in one’s sense of self.”[2] This narrative identity, David DeGrazia notes, “involves our self-conceptions, our sense of what is most important to who we are.”[3] Bound up with my narrative identity is the sense that I can make something of myself; it is the ability to posit a future that I have a hand in shaping (which can be traced back at least as far as Nietzsche and has been updated by contemporary theorists like Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty). DeGrazia puts this especially cogently: “Much of what matters (to most of us, anyway) is our continuing existence as persons—beings with the capacity for complex forms of consciousness—with unfolding self-narratives and, if possible, success in self-creation.”[4]

Ultimately, then, I argue that personhood and dignity are bound up together, that one cannot be a human person without the ability — derived from organized cortical brain activity — to feel as though there is a “I” in the center of one’s brain, pulling levers and adjusting dials (even though we know that, in fact, this is simply an evolutionary strategy developed by our genes to make ours brains better, more clever ones). This “I” amounts to a feeling of selfhood that, finally, accounts for our having dignity and being persons. As I conclude in my book, “It is, in my estimation, the feature that separates human persons from human animals and, so far as we know, from all other animals.”

Though the patient with the traumatic brain injury and the person she was before the injury are the same biological animal, the person died when her cerebral cortex, the self-creating part of her brain, stopped functioning. The patient with the traumatic brain injury is no longer a rights-bearing person because the patient does not possess the equipment necessary for personhood and dignity. The same is obviously true of the blastocyst, insofar as it’s simply a ball of cells and has no brain whatsoever.

In the end, I think human life alone is not enough to provide us with rights, that a heartbeat — which can be accomplished entirely by machines — doesn’t require governmental action on my behalf. Indeed, in the cases at issue here, the idea of “my” in “my behalf” doesn’t really have any meaning, as without higher brain function, I cannot conceive of myself at all. That’s why I argue that our rights hinge not simply on our bodily functions but on our dignity. Certain fetuses, on my reading, cannot properly be understood to be bearers of dignity and are thus not the bearers of rights.

While I have no doubt that some people will want to suggest problems with this argument — and I look forward to hearing them! — I think it’s a much stronger position than the one put forward by people like Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, or my thoughtful commenters. First of all, it contains an explanation about why human persons have special rights that require governmental protection while other living animals do not. Secondly, it provides us with the measuring tool of higher brain function — which ensoulment clearly does not provide — for making decisions that would potentially infringe on the rights of women. And, finally, it keeps religious belief away from a heated public policy debate, ensuring that people who believe that blastocysts are the beloved children of God are entitled to that belief but are not entitled to enforce it on anyone else.

[1] Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 444.

[2] David DeGrazia, “Identity, Killing, and the Boundaries of Our Existence,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31(4) (Fall 2003), 423.

[3] Ibid., 424.

[4] Ibid.

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Rob Portman and Personal Identification

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Senator Rob Portman over the past twenty-four hours, from both the Right and the Left.

The former I suppose I understand, even though I think the principled position behind it doesn’t resonate with me in any way and is a terrible, terrible mistake. The criticism from the Left, however, really needs some examination.

The suggestion behind this criticism is that Portman is just one more privileged white guy who only came around on the issue of same-sex marriage because it personally affected him. But of course he is.

Many people on the Left reacted cynically to Portman’s announcement because their position is that the people should embrace same-sex marriage because it’s morally right and because all human beings are fundamentally the same, not because individuals personally know and like someone who is gay and who therefore suffers from discrimination.

But that’s not really a critique of Portman or his change of heart on the question of same-sex marriage.

As Richard Rorty argues in Truth and Progress:

To get whites to be nicer to blacks, males to females, Serbs to Muslims, or straights to gays … it is of no use whatever to say, with Kant: notice that what you have in common, your humanity, is more important than these trivial differences. For the people we are trying to convince … are offended by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human (178).

This sounds pretty awful, to be sure. And that’s why it might feel good to criticize Portman’s announcement that his personal experience has led to a change of heart: He should have come to this realization sooner and without needing inequality to affect him personally.

As Rorty notes, “We resent the idea that we shall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of the weak, slowly open their dried-up little hearts” (182). But this, Rorty tells us, is the best we can hope for and, he argues, might achieve its end more quickly than we anticipate: “These two centuries are most easily understood…as a period…in which there occurred an astonishingly rapid progress of sentiments” (185).

How has the progress of sentiments occurred and what can we do to extend its reach? On this, it will be helpful to quote Rorty at some length, from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:

The right way to take the slogan ‘We have obligations to human beings simply as such’ is as a means of reminding ourselves to keep trying to expand our sense of ‘us’ as far as we can. That slogan urges us to extrapolate further in the direction set by certain events in the past – the inclusion among ‘us’ of the family in the next cave, then of the tribe across the river, then of the tribal confederation beyond the mountains, then of the unbelievers beyond the seas (and, perhaps last of all, of the menials who, all this time, have been doing our dirty work). This is a process which we should try to keep going. We should stay on the lookout for marginalized people – people who we still instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather than ‘us.’ We should try to notice our similarities with them. The right way to construe the slogan is as urging us to create a more expansive sense of solidarity than we presently have (196).

The way to accomplish this progress of sentiments, this expanding of our sense of solidarity, is by telling “the sort of long, sad, sentimental story that begins, ‘Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,’ or ‘Because she might become your daughter-in-law,’ or ‘Because her mother would grieve for her’” (Truth, 185). Telling these sorts of stories, he argues, is the most practical method for increasing our sense of solidarity with those we once considered ‘others.’

In other words, the best way to convince the powerful that their way of thinking about others needs to evolve is to show them the ways in which individuals they consider to be ‘Other’ are, in fact, much more closely akin to them than they ever realized. It is, in short, to create a greater solidarity between the powerful and the weak based on personal identification.

Rob Portman’s change of heart is a good example of the way in which we ultimately achieve a progress of sentiments that leads to the equal treatment of more and more people. Viewed in this way, it’s really not something people on the Left ought to be criticizing; it’s something we should be working to encourage for those without the sort of immediate personal connection that Portman fortunately had.

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Marissa Mayer's Work-From-Home Ban Is The Exact Opposite Of What CEOs Should Be Doing

The CEO of Yahoo!, who made news when she took the position last summer while five months pregnant, announced through the company’s human resources arm yesterday that employees will no longer be permitted to work remotely.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” says the memo from HR director Jackie Rees, and reprinted by Kara Swisher on allthingsd.com last night. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

No. It doesn’t.

It did 40 years ago, when work and home were separate realms and workers had the luxury of taking care of one at a time. More accurately, men had the ability to take care of work because they knew that women had it covered at home.

It did 20 years ago, when the tools of work were all in the office — all the files and paperwork; the office phone, with the office number, and the cord that didn’t reach beyond the cubicle wall.

It did before there were studies showing that flexibility improves worker productivity, and morale and health.

It absolutely baffles me that we still haven’t figured this out.

I don’t even think about this issue from the perspective of someone who is devoted to family-friendly or feminist arguments (though these are not minor considerations by any means); for me, this is all about flexibility and productivity.

There are certainly some people who benefit from the traditional work environment and there are undoubtedly jobs where “being together” is important. But there are just as certainly some people who do faster and better work when they are in a different environment.

In my own case, there are some times when it’s absolutely critical that I’m physically present at work — either in the classroom, in my office, in a meeting. But there are other times when I benefit a great deal from being able to make use of technology and forward-thinking colleagues to work from home and participate in group work.

As an (obviously idiosyncratic) example (because my job is admittedly not a traditional office job): I’m currently involved in several collaborative research projects with other faculty members and with students. Occasionally, if our schedules allow, we’ll meet in person. More often, though, we’ll meet together on Google+ and share documents via Dropbox. It’s certainly nice to sit down together, but it’s absolutely false that doing so somehow produces better or faster work than meeting remotely.

In fact, in my own case, meeting together is actually far worse for my productivity than meeting remotely. Because I tend to schedule meetings for days when I’m not teaching and because I commute to work, I have to stop what I’m doing at home — typically reading or writing for an on-going research project, but also administrative tasks for UNL’s human rights program or grading student work or writing letters of recommendation — drive to work, attend a meeting or two, and then drive back home.

The commute represents a distinct loss of productivity and it would be a loss whether I do it first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon so that I’m at work all day or midday so that I’m physically at work just for my meetings. When I’m able to work from home, there’s no loss of productivity. I work, then I meet online, and then I go right back to working.

Of course, all of this begs the question of whether or not working from home in itself encourages or discourages productivity. Again, in my own case, it’s clear that I’m much more productive when I work from home than I am when I work at the office.

The office is filled with distractions: I am friendly with my colleagues and enjoy talking with them, and undergraduate and graduate students routinely stop by my office to visit. The distractions at home only exist if I actively select them: I have to turn on the television or mess around online. I don’t do these things because it would be costly for me if I did, in at least two obvious ways: first, I’m paying (a lot) for child care so that I can work (I could write a separate post about working from home while my kids are home too, incidentally); second, if I’m just playing around, I’m obviously not accomplishing the work I need to do for my job.

And yet there are still a good many people who assume that working from home means not working. As someone who has always worked from home, no matter where I’ve lived or what sort of work I was doing, this mentality defies explanation. If it was true that I played more than I worked, I don’t know how I could have successfully competed for and then held onto my current job … or any job, for that matter.

In high school and college, I did my homework in my room. In graduate school, I set up a small home office; that’s where I studied for my comprehensive exams and that’s where I wrote every single word of my dissertation. I had a lovely office at my first job out of graduate school; that’s where I met with students and visited with my colleagues. But turning my dissertation into my first book was done at my dining room table, as was all the writing for the articles I published in those three years. The same is true of my current office; it’s comfortable and spacious, but I simply do not work well there. I am far more prone to give in to distractions, of my own creation and from well-meaning others, than I am at home. So I wrote my second book from home too, not at the office.

And I’m convinced this is because I grew up working from home; we all do. No fourth grader packs up his spelling or math homework and takes it to some other location to work on it; we all do that homework at home. As we grow older, it’s certainly true that some students work better at the library than they do at their own desk. And so I obviously don’t think those students, when they leave school and enter the workforce, should be prevented from going to the office to do their work. But that’s also why I can’t comprehend the notion that everyone should go to the office every day … even if they’d be more productive from home. This mentality treats workers like interchangeable cogs.

Our failure to be flexible not only hurts parents, and specifically women, it also hurts our overall productivity because it forces everyone to work the same way whether or not that way allows them to do their best work.

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In his piece at the New Yorker, Teju Cole laments that something terrible seems to have happened to President Obama, our country’s “reader-in-chief”:

The recently leaked Department of Justice white paper indicating guidelines for the President’s assassination of his fellow Americans has shone a spotlight on these “dirty wars” (as the journalist Jeremy Scahill rightly calls them in his documentary film and book of the same title). The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

Alan Jacobs responds:

The idea that the reading of literature is somehow intrinsically ennobling is something I have been fighting against for a long time, but people always find this strange, and invariably, when I have popped off on this subject, someone says “Well, why are you a literature professor, then?”

I could simply say that I find literature immensely interesting both because of its aesthetic qualities and because of the insights it yields into the cultures from which it arises. And that would be enough. But in fact I do believe that literature can have a significant role in a person’s moral and even spiritual development: it just is highly unlikely to have a leading role. It has an ancillary role in character formation: what readers can get from literature largely depends on other, more powerful forces.

For my own part, I find myself agreeing with Cole — and through him with some of the excellent authors he cites — about the transformative potential of literature. As someone who teaches human rights and great works of literature for a living, I have a vested interest in the argument; I very much want it to be the case that literature can be transformative for most of us … even if the upper eschelons of power somehow manage to undo much of the great work that reading can do.

Note, though, that I used the word “potential” in the above paragraph. It isn’t necessarily the case that reading great works of literature will expand one’s moral imagination or that, once expanded, one’s moral imagination will rule the day. In this sense, Jacobs has a point. One could read literature and be inspired to care about others … but only to a point.

This is where my reading of the philosopher Richard Rorty comes in. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes:

Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves.

Rorty here is describing his ideal type, the liberal ironist, who benefits from reading great and challenging works of literature because it enables her to gather as much information as possible about the suffering of others and about the language in which they express their beliefs, fears, and highest hopes. The liberal ironist is an ideal because she not only “faces up to the contingency of … her own most central beliefs and desires [but also] include[s] among these ungroundable desires [her] own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease” (xv).

The trouble for President Obama, for Cole, and for me is that we are liberals, insofar as we care about minimizing the suffering of others, but we are not ironists, at least not publicly. Indeed, Rorty’s ideal of liberal irony is fundamentally a private one rather than a public one; he writes, “I cannot go on to claim that there could or ought to be a cuture whose public rhetoric is ironist. I cannot imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization” (87).

As Cole notes, “Any President’s gravest responsibilities are defending the Constitution and keeping the country safe.” He goes on to ask, “What makes certain Somali, Pakistani, Yemeni, and American people of so little account that even after killing them, the United States disavows all knowledge of their deaths?” The answer, of course, is that these people are perceived as threats to American citizens and to the United States, as standing directly in the path of “keeping the country safe.” It’s the point at which our private ironism that allows us to see the problems with this way of thinking runs headlong into the necessity for us to be publicly unironic about things like security and thus to think of ourselves different from those who might harm us.

Of course, we don’t know whether or not President Obama is at war with himself about these drones strikes, but it’s certainly important for me to imagine that he is, that he is deeply disturbed by them or at the very least that he doesn’t undertake them lightly. This allows me to cling to the image of Obama as our deeply-conflicted reader-in-chief, someone who cares about the suffering of others because he has read “the sort of long, sad, sentimental story that begins, ‘Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,’ or ‘Because she might become your daughter-in-law,’ or ‘Because her mother would grieve for her’” (185).

Whether or not Obama is conflicted, ultimately, doesn’t much matter for the people whose deaths he has ordered or for those who were merely nearby. But I think it does matter a great deal for us. This isn’t, after all, really a debate about the transformative potential of literature; it’s a debate about our public beliefs and opinions with regard to the suffering of those who are different from us and who might (but also might not) threaten us in some way. We must ask ourselves, how we will treat those people and how our thoughts on the matter reflect our understanding of ourselves as political liberals.

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Vigilantes

Since when do people think they have an inalienable human right to be vigilantes?

I understand that people want to feel safe and believe that having a gun in the home will enable them to defend themselves. And I understand that acting in one’s self-defense is a legitimate legal defense. But using the language of self-defense to defend oneself in the (rare) case of shooting an assailant is not the same thing as asserting a human right to defend oneself.

To be sure, if we read a foundational text like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, we find a natural right to punish anyone who would harm us in our life, liberty, health, or possessions. In the state of nature, Locke tells us, each person is effectively judge, jury, and executioner unto herself. And, of course, it’s precisely the problem of a lack of independent judgment in the state of nature that leads people to join together to form a political community.

But for people to establish a political community, Locke asserts that people must give up to the government their natural right to punish criminal behavior and agree to have the government settle grievances. This is why we have standing laws that are meant to be applied equally by independent officers of the law and by the courts.

So, again, where is all of this talk of self-defense and vigilantism coming from?

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Human Rights and Guns Rights

The ridiculous and offensive meme that’s been making its way around Facebook and Twitter for the past few days, linking the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and gun ownership today, is being grounded in the language of human rights.

One blogger immediately responded to my most recent post to reiterate the right-wing talking points about how racial equality and gun rights are the same:

Insofar as they are both expressions of fundamental human rights, yes, they are the same thing.

The civil rights leaders of the Jim-Crow-era South knew that having a gun was the only thing that would protect you from the KKK, because the local police wouldn’t. Even MLK himself had guns; one of his advisors described his home as “an arsenal”.

Gun Rights Are Civil Rights.

The amazing thing about a response like this — and there are lots of these sorts of posts all over the internet right now — is just how amazingly wrong it is, both in terms of the way we think about rights and in terms of historical accuracy.

Let’s start with human rights:

First of all, there is no human right to gun ownership. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Leaving aside the intentions of the Founders, as I’ve already written about this extensively, we can clearly see that there is a right to keep and bear arms afforded by the American Bill of Rights. But this right, like all of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, has never been understood to mean that citizens have the right to own any weapons they want or that there should be no barriers at all to gun ownership. We regulate a citizen’s ability to procure weapons today without any constitutional problem and we restrict the types of weapons that are available for sale to the public today; it would be difficult to make an argument that further regulation or restriction would somehow be ruled unconstitutional.

Further, no such right to gun ownership appears in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The closest we get is Article 12:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

This language seems to refer both to governmental and private interference: The government cannot arbitrarily interfere with a citizen in these ways and, further, the UDHR notes quite clearly that the government and its laws exist to protect citizens equally against private attacks. Nowhere does the UDHR suggest that citizens have the right to arm themselves to protect themselves against criminals or that armed insurrection is the way to deal with the threat of a government that might become repressive.

If we go all the way back to John Locke’s argument about natural rights and resisting tyranny in his Second Treatise of Government, we find that in Chapters 18 and 19 he recommends a system in which the people can change their leaders with relative ease, thus allowing them to withdraw their support from a potentially repressive government and to replace it with a better one rather than resorting to rebellion and armed insurrection (which would bring with it a whole host of evils).

Now, a few words about American history:

Did Martin Luther King, Jr. own guns? You bet he did.

William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal.”

This was in the mid-1950s in Alabama, when King and his family were the targets of constant, credible, specific death threats; after his home was bombed, King even applied for a concealed carry permit (and was rejected).

There’s not a lot of discussion of the reason that King owned guns. Gun advocates would like us to believe that King owned them solely because he had the right to do so or because he liked having them around, not because he lived under the sort of constant threat that exists today only in the minds of wingnuts who think our tyrannical government is out to get us. What’s more, here’s the most important part of the MLK story that gun advocates aren’t quite so interested in discussing:

Eventually, King gave up any hope of armed self-defense and embraced nonviolence more completely.

So, gun advocates, if you want to emulate Dr. King, then you’d better start working to highlight for us the constant, credible, and specific threats against you that require you to own guns for your personal protection. And then, of course, I’ll remind you that you’re not really emulating Dr. King, since he later gave up on the gun and embraced non-violence. Are you ready to do that? Why not? Worried that someone is going to bomb your house or assassinate you?

Of course, I’m not actually in favor of taking all of the wingnuts’ guns away from them. As I noted above, I think the Second Amendment pretty clearly affords Americans the right to keep and bears arms and I don’t think we’ll be doing away with the Second Amendment any time soon. I am, though, in favor of further regulations and of further limiting the kinds of weapons that citizens can own. And that’s why the civil rights meme going around is so foolish: It attempts to establish some sort of right to an assault rifle based on either a human or civil right to own every possible kind of gun (which is obviously false) or to defend oneself. But even if citizens had a human right to self-defense, which they don’t, such a right wouldn’t establish the right to own an assault rifle since those are terrible weapons with which to defend oneself.

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Just Who Built What

The piece to which I link this morning is, I think, an important one to read and reflect upon after Ann Romney’s stirring speech at the Republican’s “We Built This” national convention. So, first an excerpt from the piece, then my reflections:

I was living in Massachusetts when Romney first ran for the Senate, and remembered this interview with Ann Romney in the Boston Globe (by Jack Thomas, October 20, 1994; the abstract is here; the full text costs $4.95). Of her student days with Mitt at BYU, Ann said:

“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.

[…]

“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.

[…]

“The funny thing is that I never expected help. My father had become wealthy through hard work, as did Mitt’s father, but I never expected our parents to take care of us. They’d visit, laugh and say, `We can’t believe you guys are living like this.’ They’d take us out to dinner, have a good time, then leave.

[.. ]

“Remember, we’d been paying $62 a month rent, but [in Massachusetts], rents were $400, and for a dump. This is when we took the now-famous loan that Mitt talks about from his father and bought a $42,000 home in Belmont, and you know? The mortgage payment was less than rent ….

“Another son came along 18 months later, although we waited four years to have the third, because Mitt was still in school and we had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining. No, I did not work. Mitt thought it was important for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted.

I don’t begrudge the Romneys their success.

In some ways, I can really identify with their story. I grew up in the Metro Detroit area and I graduated from the same exclusive private high school. When I went to an elite graduate school to get my PhD four years later, my parents helped me buy my first house (where my mortgage payments were commensurate with local rental costs). I could make the monthly payments but — at 21 years old — I couldn’t have afforded the down payment on my own; it was a 900-square-foot, $70,000 townhouse in Durham, North Carolina and I used the proceeds from that sale to buy my next house, a much bigger townhouse in Virginia. I’m now living in suburban Omaha with my growing family in the fourth house I’ve owned … and it’s the biggest one yet by far.

But where I part ways with the Romneys, and where their rhetoric really sticks in my craw, is the idea that they’re promulgating: That if you scrimp and save and work really, really hard, you can do what they’ve done. Their experience stands in sharp contrast with the “We Built This” rhetoric of the Republican National Convention … and they seem unwilling or unable to recognize this fact.

It’s not that Mitt Romney didn’t build his fortune or accomplish a great deal by his talent and hard work. It’s that his experience — of barely getting by through the sale of stock given to him by his father and then buying his first house with his father’s assistance — simply isn’t the experience of the vast, vast majority of Americans. Most people don’t have the help that Romney and I had when we were younger. For me, this is something I think about pretty much every day. For Romney, it’s like a dark secret that’s best kept under wraps or ignored entirely because it doesn’t fit into the Republican rhetoric that needing (and God forbit accepting) the assistance of others is an obvious sign of moral weakness.

I wonder what our country would be like if more people could grow up the way that I did and have the kind of help that I had; Romney, on the other hand, continues to pretend that his young life was more like everyone else’s than it was like mine.

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Rigid Thinking

In an attempt to make clear that Todd Akin ran into trouble because he’s a moral absolutist and not simply because he’s a mysogynist, Matt Steinglass took to the Economist’s Democracy in America blog to write some truly bizarre things about morality and relativism:

Personally, I’m proud to be a moral relativist. In fact I’d go further: I think even the most moral moral absolutists cannot be as moral as the most moral moral relativists. Human beings, after all, aren’t computer programs, and the idea that a simple and consistent set of rules will get you to justice, optimal utility, virtue, or any other telos you could name seems absurd.

To begin, I suppose it’s important to note that Steinglass’ claim either makes no sense or is meaningless. What he’s claiming is that, when he creates the category of morality and fills it entirely with his opinions, the people with whom he disagrees on matters like abortion are clearly less moral than the people with whom he agrees.

To put this another way, Steinglass is incredibly proud of himself for reaching the conclusion that millions of college freshmen have reached, namely that there’s no such thing as morality, that everything we happen to believe to be right or true is wholly contingent, and that only good things can happen when we embrace the notion that everything is as good as everything else because that gives us space to just live and let live.

As he writes:

[B]eing a good person requires a certain comfort level with shades of grey. You need to be able to embrace propositions that are, at some level, potentially at odds with each other.

In other words, everyone’s a little bit different and so everyone has different opinions and beliefs. And who are we to say that one idea is right while another is wrong. They can both be a little bit right and a little bit wrong.

Except Todd Akin’s ideas, which are — in Steinglass’ words — “monstrosities.” What makes them monstrosities? Well, Steinglass doesn’t agree with them. And he doesn’t agree, apparently, because he thinks they are the products of absolutist thinking. I also happen to disagree with Akin’s ideas. But I could come up with a perfectly good absolutist reason for my disagreement [see below] rather than a wishy-washy non-argument that says, “Everyone’s beliefs are as good as everyone else’s because there’s no single truth out there … except for the people with whom I disagree; those people are just flat-out wrong.”

In any event, here’s how Steinglass “solves” the abortion debate:

Where exactly does the line fall between a clump of cells whose interests should count for very little compared to those of the full-fledged person it’s inside, and a nearly-developed human baby whose interests should count for a lot? I don’t know. There isn’t one. We have to draw some lines, for legal purposes, and they’re going to be arbitrary, relative, and non-absolute. People should be comfortable with that.

That’s a complete dodge.

There is a massive problem that affects millions and millions of lives. And the answer for how to address the problem that we get from Steinglass’ brand of morality is “I don’t know.” Let’s all get comfortable with completely arbitrary lines that we draw for no reason at all. Why? Because that’s not monstrous and it isn’t a fairy tale. Let’s allow a bunch of human lives to be taken. Why? Because of some belief I have for which I have no good argument. Or, let’s allow no human lives to be taken. Why? Again, because of some belief I have for which I have no good argument.

I happen to be of the opinion that the problem with Todd Akin isn’t going to be solved by exposing him to the grey shades that will help him to recognize when it’s appropriate to abort fetuses. Why not? Because the problem is that his understanding of morality is entirely uncritical: No fetuses should ever be aborted because every fetus is a rights-bearing human person from the moment of conception.

And why is that exactly?

<crickets chirping>

But this is also the problem with Steinglass’ embrace of relativism. He is so desperate to avoid any connection to the vices of the Todd Akins of the world — namely their problematic, uncritical certainties — that he thoughtlessly embraces the complete absence of certainty and calls it a virtue. But it’s not a virtue … because, if Steinglass was thinking carefully, he’d know there ought not to be any such thing as a virtue. The radical uncertainty of relativism should really be seen as no better and no worse than the complete certainty of Akin’s absolutism. A good relativist would just note that these are two different ways of thinking … and that there are probably a bunch of other ways of thinking too.

I’ve written at some length in the past about abortion (here and here, for example). At its core, the argument is that we can allow for virtually all of the abortions that currently happen and also limit some abortions that might be particularly troublesome. It’s based on the <gasp> morally absolutist notions of human dignity, human personhood, and human rights. I can’t say whether Steinglass would see my argument as a monstrosity or a fairy tale but I suppose he’d have to do so since it’s based on another absolutist notion, namely that truths about human biology give us insight into the problem of abortion.

And making a truth claim, a good moral relativist should tell you, is really just my way of trying to disguise my opinion as a fact; since it’s all really just shades of grey, after all, the truth is relative.

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With the penalties handed down by the NCAA today, it seems we can finally focus on what really matters to us … namely whether or not Penn State’s suffering is sufficient.

A great many people seem content, especially since these unprecedented penalties are actually a whole lot worse than the poorly-named “death penalty” that some thought would be levied against the football program. Indeed, Jason Whitlock — pleased the NCAA demonstrated that it has some integrity left — writes:

The sanctions cripple Penn State football. The four-year bowl ban, four-year scholarship reductions and the freedom granted to current players to transfer immediately without penalty or simply decline to play while maintaining their scholarships will make Penn State the Vanderbilt of the Big Ten. The reduction to Vanderbilt’s level of competitiveness is likely permanent. It’s going to take two decades for Penn State football to recover.

Others are not as pleased as Whitlock, though they are largely members of the Penn State community:

“By essentially taking away the main pillar of the university, you are almost pulling the university down,” former student Ujas Patel told CNN. What really hurts, he said, is taking wins away from Paterno, known affectionately by fans as “JoePa.”

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Originally Posted By kohenari

Gun Ownership, Stolen Guns, Criminals, and the 2nd Amendment

Here’s one more post on the Second Amendment and gun ownership, specifically whether or not we’d all be better off if more people carried guns, from June 2011; I wrote this one to respond to some comments related to the previous post about the AR-15 that was stolen from an unlocked car:

A thoughtful UNL Polisci Major responds to my most recent post — about a rifle that was stolen from an unlocked car here in Lincoln, Nebraska — and raises a couple of points that warrant further discussion since, admittedly, I was a bit flippant in my earlier post.

Here’s the first point:

Sure, there are bad people in the world will use a gun for evil purposes, but it’s not a coincidence that a lot of times the targets of violent crimes are areas where weapons are prohibited, because in those circumstances the potential attackers will expect less resistance. If more of the people attending Gabrielle Gifford’s constituent meeting at a Tuscon supermarket had a gun, would Jared have been able to kill six people? Probably not.

An armed population means any potential aggressor will think twice before acting. The Jared Loughner case taught us that we must work to curb gun purchases and gun access for violent criminals, the mentally ill, and children, while ensuring that that very right of every eligible citizen is guaranteed. This quote from Ron Paul’s new book, Liberty Defined, sums up the debate on the issue in and rightly defends the importance of the 2nd Amendment:

Gun-control advocates tell us that removing guns from society makes us safer. But that is simply an impossibility. The fact is that firearm technology exists. It cannot be uninvented. As long as there is metalworking and welding capability, it matters not what gun laws are imposed upon law-abiding people. Those who wish to have guns, and disregard the law, will have guns. Paradoxically, gun control clears a path for violence and makes aggression more likely, whether the aggressor is a terrorist or a government.(p 144-145)

While the statistic that households with guns are more likely to fall victim to gun-related crimes is a persuasive, emotional argument for disarming the public, it doesn’t change that fact that when people with guns come across those without, and a violent exchange takes place, those with the guns will typically come out alive while sadly, the same can’t be said for the unarmed.

I’ll begin by saying that earlier this year, as several states were considering whether or not weapons ought to be carried on college campuses, I wrote a short post on the matter. It’s relevant to this point, so I’ll take the liberty of quoting myself:

At last, we’ll be able to answer the pressing question, will students’ long national nightmare of not being able to bring a Glock to my office hours finally be over?

You know, for protection.

One thing I know for sure is that we ought not to listen to Anthony Daykin, the police chief at the University of Arizona. That turkey said that “his officers would be at a loss if they arrived at a shooting scene in a lecture hall holding hundreds of students and found scores of people pointing, and possibly shooting, weapons at one another.”

But, honestly, what does he know about situations like these?

You know who we ought to listen to? I’d recommend Ashlyn Lucero, “a political science student at Arizona State University who has served in the Marine Corps, is the daughter of a sheriff and grew up hunting”:

“I think that every person has the right to bear arms no matter what the circumstances” … Ms. Lucero carries her Glock pistol whenever possible and would carry it on campus if she could. “If I’m going out to eat somewhere, I usually have a gun with me always,” she said. “It’s just one of those things that you never know what’s going to happen.”

Going out for dinner is dangerous, yes. But far less dangerous would be a restaurant where everyone is armed to the teeth. I think we can agree on that.

It seems like a bizarre line of argument that if everyone had a gun and could wave it around, criminals would definitely think twice about their bad behavior. After all, criminals break into homes all the time, completely unaware of whether or not the homeowner is armed. Criminals rob convenience stores too, despite the popular portrayal in film and television of shotgun-wielding convenience store owners. How can this be? My suggestion, here, is that it’s probably not the case that a “potential aggressor will think twice before acting.”

But more likely the stronger argument runs in a different direction; that is, that criminals will always be up to their nefarious actions, but that a well-armed citizenry can stop them in the act by shooting them. First of all, let me say that it seems an unfair rhetorical strategy to assert that things would have been better if only there had been more guns, not fewer guns, at the rally where Representative Giffords was shot. We have no way to demonstrate the veracity of this hypothetical claim, so we might just as well assert that things would have been much, much worse. We might all be safer if everyone was carrying a weapon or we might be a good deal less safe. Hard to say.

But let’s presume, as the Polisci Major does, that more people carrying guns at a political meet-and-greet outside of a supermarket would mean fewer people shot by Jared Loughner. What this assertion presumes is excellent marksmanship from all of our run-of-the-mill gun-toting citizens; it suggests that, upon seeing Loughner’s gun, at least one citizen would pull out a gun of his/her own and shoot Loughner, thus preventing the deaths of innocent bystanders. But I wonder why we should make this assumption, rather than the assumption that a shoot-out would ensue that would take the lives of more people, that aiming at Loughner isn’t the same as hitting him, or that the police would be able to sort out which gun-wielder is the criminal and which the helpful vigilante. I wonder also, why we presume that it’s as easy to fire a weapon accurately as it is to own a weapon? Or perhaps we’re presuming that every gun owner also spends the incredible amount of time it would take to hone the craft of marksmanship? Personally, I presume none of these things. I’m like the police chief at the University of Arizona, quoted above.

Now, to the second point:

Despite the unfortunate reality that sometimes bad people get weapons, we mustn’t forget why our country’s founders considered the individual’s right to bear arms so basic and essential that they made it the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights. If you let fear get into the debate, one way or the other - whether the government is taking away our guns or making them overly available - you are a participant in the demagoguery; missing the point entirely that an armed population is more capable of defending itself than an unarmed one.

…

I wholeheartedly agree: 2nd Amendment 4 Life! Just not in the same, sardonic manner. The problem is bad people, not bad policy. The right to gun ownership ought to be considered a fundamental human right because the right to life is the most essential, and without adequate defenses people succumb to tyrants, both foreign and domestic. Even Hobbes, a big proponent of the supremacy of the sovereign, argued that individuals entering into a social contact retain a few rights, such as the right to self-defense and “the use of fire, water, free air, and a place to live in, and … all things necessary for life (Walzer, Membership p. 43).” And this is all coming from me, someone who chooses not to own a gun, but believes that people should know their rights, exercise them at will, and understand their underlying foundation(s).

My response is a straightforward one: I don’t propose changing or removing the Second Amendment, nor do I think that Americans don’t have a right to own a gun if they so choose. I might suggest that those Americans who want to exercise that right should necessarily also enroll in a local militia, as that’s a critically important part of the Second Amendment too.

After all, I think it’s a mistake to suggest that simply owning a weapon makes a person safe from tyranny (as Ron Paul seems to suggest in the quote above). If we’re really concerned about our government — and it seems that the Polisci Major and Ron Paul are indeed concerned — then joining up with other concerned citizens is probably our best bet. And probably most in line with the intentions of our Founders (who were also, of course, pretty concerned — and rightly so — that the British might come back).

I’m simply not someone who’s concerned that I’ll be tyrannized by my government, at least not to the point where I’ll need to take up arms against them. Indeed, I’m far more concerned about the people in this country who believe that they might need to take up arms against the government (or the British, or whomever). While our various elected officials might make policy choices with which I vociferously disagree, I prefer to exercise my rights to speak and vote rather than my right to bear arms, as I think that organizing the ouster of those who vote against my interests is likely both more reasonable and more effective than threatening them with violence. This is a democratic republic, after all, and I presume that my elected officials are accountable to me because I vote, not because I own guns.

But I suppose reasonable people can disagree about this point and I suppose it’s perfectly acceptable to argue both that gun ownership is preserved in our Constitution and that having a gun somehow ensures that one will be kept safe from violence. I agree with the former, but am skeptical of the latter … especially if one keeps one’s gun in an unlocked car. People like the gun owner in the article I referenced are irresponsible; they make the country less safe through the exercise of their right to bear arms and we can reasonable, I think, insist on restricting their exercise of that right for that reason.

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New Taxes!

My friend Jeff Miller has written an interesting response to my post about taxation and the individual mandate.

The crux of his argument is that I’m wrong when I agree with Chief Justice Roberts that the individual mandate’s tax/penalty is well within the federal government’s taxing authority:

Justice Roberts’ decision has, in fact, expanded the taxing power of the United States, and it does so in a way that ought to us feel uncomfortable. Even if you agree with the decision, it is not accurate to characterize this decision as ordinary.

My sense is that we’re probably at loggerheads here.

I think that the majority opinion is convincing in its interpretation of the Constitution. Miller disagrees. I’m eventually going to swtich from the example of the child tax credit that I used in my original post to illustrate why I think Roberts’ decision works but for now we’ll stick with the example of having children.

Here’s how I summed it up in my first blog post on the topic:

I have a child; I get a credit and thus pay less. You choose not to have a child; you don’t get a credit and thus pay more. Your inactivity results in a higher tax burden. Just like the inactivity with regard to purchasing health care.

For Miller, I’m mixing things up:

For Ari, the following two laws are the same:

1. You are required by law to have children, and will be subject to a financial penalty if you fail to do so.

2. You may take a credit against the income taxes you owe if you have children.

There is a very real difference in these laws, of course. Under one of them, failure to have children is a credit against taxes owed based upon one’s income. Under the other, you have to pay a penalty for failing to have children regardless of your income.

The first law is the new sort that Roberts’ decision has created, according to Miller, whereas the second law is the one that has existed for some time. This is the one that Roberts thinks corresponds to the mandate’s tax/penalty.

Having now read the decision a second time, I remain convinced that Roberts understands what he’s doing in the ACA opinion. Under Roberts’ understanding of the taxing power, the first law could be found constitutional. If Congress really wants to encourage having children, legislators could pass a law that assigns a tax/penalty for those who voluntarily elect not to have a child. A law like this would be massively unpopular, and I think it’s likely that all of the Justices would oppose it.

But whether or not absolutely everyone opposes it doesn’t actually speak to its constitutionality. And this is precisely what Roberts writes in his opinion: “Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”

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Here’s a particularly stunning example of what happens when we don’t have a thoughtful understanding of the concept of heroism, when we’re not even allowed to have a discussion about that concept, and when people are content to argue that any definition of heroism is as good as any other definition:

Republican Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), knocked his Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth — a veteran who lost both of her legs as a helicopter pilot in Iraq — for talking about her military career too much. Discussing her accomplishments, Walsh suggested, meant that Duckworth was not a “true [hero].”

Walsh said at a town hall meeting on Sunday that unlike Duckworth, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) rarely spoke about his military service during the 2008 presidential election — a claim that ignores the thrust of McCain’s campaign and his entire political career.

“That’s what’s so noble about our heroes. Now I’m running against a woman who — I mean, my God, that’s all she talks about,” said Walsh, in video posted by Think Progress. “Our true heroes, it’s the last thing in the world they talk about. Our true heroes, the men and women who served us, it’s the last thing in the world they talk about. That’s why we are so indebted and in awe of what they have done.”

[…]
Walsh released a statement Tuesday afternoon:
Of course Tammy Duckworth is a hero. I have called her a hero 100’s of times in the past four months. Just like every man and woman who has worn the uniform, her service demands — demands — our utmost respect. That’s why I recognize our veterans at the beginning of every one of my public town halls. However, unlike most veterans I have had the honor to meet since my election to Congress, who rarely if ever talk about their service or the combat they’ve seen, that is darn near all of what Tammy Duckworth talks about. Her service demands our thanks and our respect but not our vote.

More here.

Walsh sets up a bizarre dichotomy, between “true heroes,” who don’t talk about their military service, and heroes like Duckworth, who does. Duckworth, he claims, deserves our respect because she served in the military and she’s a hero — he doesn’t explain why, but I presume it’s because he thinks all soldiers are heroes — but she’s not a “true hero” because she talks about her service. He does not mention her injuries, sustained in the line of duty.

Walsh thinks he’s solved his problem by agreeing that every soldier is necessarily a hero, which is something Americans have lately decided it’s desperately important for everyone to believe. But he hasn’t, of course, because what irks everyone is that he continues to maintain a false dichotomy between his opponent, who lost both of her legs in Iraq, and other soldiers. That doesn’t really bother me, not as much as the insistence that every soldier is, by default, a hero.

It doesn’t bother me because, in fact, Duckworth wasn’t doing anything heroic when she sustained her injuries. She was co-piloting a helicopter that was hit by an RPG. This makes her a victim of violence, not a hero. Heroes are people who distinguish themselves in some way, usually through particularly impressive actions or by sacrificing for others.

Does that mean Walsh is right, that Duckworth is a hero but that she talks about her service too much? Not at all.

First, Walsh is wrong about heroes; it’s very clear that there are lots of soldiers who aren’t heroes. Some soldiers are heroes, some are victims, some are villains, and some are simply regular people who serve and don’t distinguish themselves in any way. And second, Walsh is wrong that Duckworth politicizes her service while “true heroes” don’t talk about it. Perhaps Walsh hasn’t met all the veterans who talk about their service, but he’s creating a new category when he refers to the “true heroes” who keep their service records to themselves. Some people are heroes and some aren’t; the idea that there’s a difference between heroes and true heroes is just ridiculous back-tracking.

Walsh obviously isn’t happy to be running against a veteran who is best known for sustaining life-altering injuries whereas he’s best known for shouting at President Obama and failing to pay child support. But there isn’t much he can do about this — apart from actually paying his child support — and he needs someone to explain to him that complaining about the fact that his opponent is a decorated veteran only emphasizes that he isn’t.

This general lack of clarity about heroism does point to one good thing, though: We’ll all be better off once my new book — which is on exactly this topic — is published!

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