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°21.11.02.Tue | Education, wealth, racism, and remedies

I’ve been skeptical of student debt forgiveness for the typical reasons: my own sense of frugality (e.g., going to a state school and paying off debt ASAP), concerns about moral hazard (i.e., increasing credential inflation and education costs), and even the ever increasing federal debt (i.e., a ponzi scheme that will one day fall).

That said, I know the world has changed since I was an undergrad. I also appreciate the U.S. has a stark wealth gap along racial lines that needs to be remedied. (And I recognize most conservatives seem to care about national debt only when social programs are being discussed, but lose that concern when considering military spending and industrial subsidies.) This discussion between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Louise Seamster in favor of student debt forgiveness gave me much to think about. This includes the policy issue of debt relief and the ethical issue of equity.

If equality is about ensuring equal opportunities, equity recognizes that neutral-seeming policies aren’t enough to counter historic and systemic biases: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (Kendi 2019, 19). I strongly support equality and removing that which perpetuates historic and systemic bias. But I dither on equity. I wish I could find a taxonomy of remedies, like those sketched below, with which to think about the ethics and pragmatics of remedying injustices.

I am a strong advocate of systemic reform: ethically necessary and practically achievable though distressingly difficult to achieve. On affirmative action, I am ambivalently moderate: cautiously supportive of the balance struck in Grutter v. Bollinger, though it is usually bureaucratically incoherent—often requiring doublethink—in practice. I am sympathetic to the obligation of reparations to those directly harmed (e.g., the internment of Japanese Americans), but the passing of time limits its utility in longstanding systemic bias. I dislike Kendi’s authoritarianism for many reasons.

I wonder if there is there a comprehensive treatment on this topic that attends to the ethics and pragmatics of these and other options?

References

Kendi, Ibram X. 2019. How to Be an Antiracist. One World.

°17.08.15.Tue | The paradox and pragmatics of intolerance

In What White Supremacists Don’t Want You to Know, Valerie Aurora highlights Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance and argues it is relevant to our response to neo-Nazis of today.

For his part, Popper was writing during the end World War II and was likely thinking about the tepid response to the original Nazis. Although they forced him to flee his home in Vienna, the Nazis are not mentioned in Open Society. Nonetheless, in a very long footnote, Popper consider the various “paradoxes” associated with open societies, including the paradox of tolerance.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. [@Popper1966, fn. 4, p.581]

Aurora applies this to the white-supremacy of today:

a tolerant society should tolerate protest marches in general, but it shouldn’t tolerate a white supremacist march advocating for the oppression and killing of people of color – like the march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 that ended with white supremacists beating and killing people who were opposed to their message of intolerance.

I think I first came across this notion by way of Aurora some time ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I had hoped it would help me resolve my dueling values of being tolerant but also defending tolerance. Unfortunately, when I think about particular cases, I fear its resolution is dependent on who gets to define what is intolerant. I can imagine both sides of a debate making claims of intolerance about the other side. For example, those wanting to suppress Muslim immigration can claim Islam is a religion of intolerance and should not be welcomed/tolerated. Those in support of immigration will claim that this position is intolerant itself.

This then sent me in search of a rubric for judging intolerant defenses of tolerance. For example, how should we judge the punching of a neo-Nazi? My thinking has been aided by Yonatan Zunger’s “Tolerance is not a moral precept”; he characterizes tolerance as a type of peace contract with worthwhile ends, not a moral precept.

Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

Even so, Zunger acknowledges that conflicts might be unresolvable.

If everything you have ever learned tells you that this is a real and present danger, and that certain members of the community — members of another religion, perhaps, or people of the wrong sexual orientation — are jeopardizing everyone’s safety, then a fundamental, existential conflict is inevitable. In a situation like this, there can be no peace treaty; only war or separation.

This is a useful framework, but I’m still in search of a rubric.

Perhaps the following questions about the initial act of intolerance and subsequent defense could serve as a start.

 

The initial intolerance (i.e., some exclusionary/hateful behavior)

  • Is it born of a deep or long-lasting culture? Germans feel differently about neo-Nazis than Americans, for obvious reasons.
  • Is it a significant or growing threat? A lone kook is less of a concern than an organized militia.
  • What is the balance of genuine vs possible harm? Advocating for white culture is less of a concern (even if a “dog whistle”) than calls for genocide and violence.

The intolerant defense of tolerance (i.e., suppression of above)

  • Is the response proportional?
  • Is it likely to be effective?
  • Is it applied fairly/equitably?
  • Is it narrow in scope?
  • Will it set precedent?
  • What other values (e.g., speech and religion) are implicated?