Unfreedom in Wisconsin

I always feel a certain dread when I have to return to Wisconsin after a break in Canada.  It’s not about the teaching (usually), but rather my sense that some further horrible decision will be made by the state government that will make life there even more unnecessarily unpleasant than it already is.

A New York Times piece from a week ago, “The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin” by Dan Kaufman, does a good job in summarizing the transformation of Wisconsin over the past five years under Governor Scott Walker and his henchmen within the Republican-controlled state legislature; the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) also is discussed.  (ALEC is one of my bêtes noires.)

Individual freedom is a central concern of mine, both politically and in my philosophical work.  So I find it fascinating, and at the same time deeply depressing, to see the ways in which pro-plutocracy organizations like ALEC, and the politicians that implement ALEC’s ‘model legislation,’ deploy the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ to justify their policies.  So-called ‘right-to-work’ laws are a perfect example of this: such laws, of course, do not ensure anything like a ‘right to work.’  Moreover, they do not remove a restriction on employment.  People always are free to accept or decline a job at a unionized firm.  Nobody is every ‘forced’ to join a union.  What ‘right-to-work’ laws do is restrict freedom of contract, encourage freeriding, and coercively (through the force of law) undermine the viability unions.  It’s an Orwellian term.

Having smashed the unions of Wisconsin – and thereby undermined the freedom of workers there – Walker and his minions have turned their sights on the state’s civil service.  Kaufman explains:

By adding the Civil Service bill [to previous ‘right-to-work’ legislation], Mr. Walker brings Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal “at-will employment.” Unlike union workers or state employees, whose collective bargaining agreements or Civil Service rules generally require employers to demonstrate “just cause” for them to be fired, at-will employees can be terminated at any time for any reason. At-will employment is promoted by the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which disseminates model bills to state legislators benefiting its corporate members and conservative private backers.

The ‘libertarian right,’ of course, interprets a law that permits ‘at-will employment’ as one that is ‘freedom enhancing’ in nature.  And at-will employment does increase freedom – but only the freedom of those individuals who already enjoy considerable wealth and power, namely, employers.  It increases their freedom to dominate others, by entitling employers to fire arbitrarily – and thus to threaten more generally – their employees.  The flipside of this kind of freedom for the powerful, of course, is unfreedom or subjugation for employees.   Employees are rendered even more vulnerable to the will of their employers under an ‘at-will employment’ regime. 

The less that employees are subject to arbitrary firing – and subject to ongoing threats of arbitrary firing – the more they enjoy what some political philosophers who write on liberty call ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘republican liberty.’  (The reference to ‘republican liberty’ by political philosophers such as Philip Pettit, it should be stressed, refers to the Roman Republic, where a freeman enjoyed a certain status under the law, and obviously is not a reference to the contemporary American Republican Party, which generally opposes republican freedom for most citizens.)  In contrast, the more that employees are subject to arbitrary firing – and thus subject to ongoing threats of arbitrary firing – the more they are subject to domination, and thus the more they are unfree.  

So while the libertarian right, and the contemporary Republican Party more generally, portrays itself as championing individual freedom through such policies, it in fact is championing only the freedom of the already powerful, whilst further restricting and undermining the freedom of most citizens. 

Professors such as myself hardly have been exempt from the Republicans’ assault on liberty within Wisconsin.  After all, the recent attack on tenure is precisely about undermining academic freedom and rendering academics more vulnerable to the will of the politically powerful. 

Sadly, the dark days in Wisconsin do not look to be ending any time soon… 

Some developments within the academic philosophy community

I thought that I would start the year with a rather lazy post (in keeping with my akratic nature).

First, the American Philosophical Association now has a blog.  I’ve added it to the blog roll at the bottom of the page.

Second, the number of high quality, free, online philosophy journals seems to be growing every year.  Recently, Prof. Kate Norlock put together a list of these journals.  I encourage all professional philosophers and students to support these journals, as they facilitate the dissemination of research and new ideas far more democratically and effectively than the current model of print publications.  (One of my articles has been published in one of these excellent online journals, the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.  I plan to submit more papers to such journals in the future.)

Happy 2016!

Piketty and Rawls on capitalism and inequality

I read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century last year.  In fact, I was involved in two reading groups on the book, an online group organized by my friend Christopher Robichaud at the Kennedy School of Government (summer 2014), and one ‘in person’ group at the University of Toronto Law School (autumn 2014).  It was the longest book that I’d read, I think, since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but well worth it.

In the book Piketty documents the long-term tendency of capitalist societies toward what he terms ‘patrimonial capitalism.’  A patrimonial capitalist society, roughly, is one in which the members of that society’s economic elite enjoy their privileged position primarily as a consequence of inheritance, not innovation or entrepreneurship.  Simplifying greatly, the reason for this tendency is that returns to capital (‘r’) generally grow at a higher rate than the overall economy (‘g’).  Consequently, the already wealthy within society tend to become wealthier at a much faster rate than anyone else, and, moreover, pass this advantage on to their descendants.  This economic elite becomes largely a class of rentiers.  The members of this class also are able to employ their wealth to influence the political decision-making processes of their society, thereby undermining the democratic equality of citizens. 

One thing that really struck my about Piketty’s book is how much it supports Rawls’s earlier, more speculative worries about the long-term tendency of capitalist societies toward growing inequality, decreasing political freedom for most citizens, and hence injustice.  Rawls’s preferred regime types – which are ‘realistic utopias’ that are to be created out of our existing societies (they are regime types that have never been realized) – are ‘property-owning democracy’ and ‘liberal socialism.’  Both of these kinds of societies counteract capitalism’s tendency toward ever-increasing inequality and plutocracy, despite being (to a great extent) market societies.  One way that these societies do this is by limiting the total amount of wealth that citizens can inherit.  This counter-acts the intergenerational concentration of wealth within a small portion of the population, and sustains the democratic equality of all citizens over time.

Anyhow, what motivated me to post something on Piketty now is that the blog Crooked Timber is wrapping up an online ‘seminar’ on Capital in the 21st Century.  I’ve only read Elizabeth Anderson’s piece so far, but the contributors are all impressive thinkers, so I look forward to checking out the other posts in the near future, as well as Piketty’s forthcoming response.

The Logic of Estrangement by Julius Sensat

The new book by my friend and colleague, Julius Sensat, is now out. It's entitled The Logic of Estrangement: Reason in an Unreasonable Form, and is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Here is the abstract:

The Logic of Estrangement conceives of estrangement as an irrational or unreasonable embodiment of reason in the social world, rather than as a self-alienation of the human essence, its more usual characterization. It undertakes a unified historical and systematic investigation of the idea of estrangement and its significance for the social role of philosophy and critical theory. It traces the development of the idea in major works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and it explores the idea's significance for a critical understanding of John Rawls's political philosophy. In so doing it provides a way of understanding Kant and Rawls as part of a tradition they are not usually associated with, and it thereby offers new insight into their thought. It also puts forward a generalized reconstruction of the idea of estrangement, using concepts from game theory and decision theory. This analysis enables an extension of the idea to applications beyond its usual domain as well as a deeper understanding of the works of the above philosophers.

I've read drafts of -- and been quite impressed by -- the material on Kant, Hegel, and Rawls. Now I look forward to reading the whole thing!

The anti-freedom Kochtopus

[Cartoon from here.] 

Ah the Koch brothers, America’s most famous plutocrats. They claim to love individual freedom and be ‘libertarians.’ But in addition to the usual right-wing economic causes to which they give millions of dollars (and which really are concerned only with the freedom of the wealthy, not the freedom of most citizens), are some distinctly anti-freedom organizations. Among them are organizations that oppose gay marriage and abortion rights (according to recent reports at the HuffPost and Politico). The Kochs’ ‘Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce’ also gave millions to the National Rifle Association, which champions turning the United States into a hellish Hobbesian state of nature.

Not content with pouring money into various right-wing political causes and politicians, the Kochs also have their own spy agency. Yes, a spy agency – because nothing says “I love individual freedom” quite like spying on people!

And for years now the Kochtopus has been spreading its tentacles into academia. (At least there is now a counter-movement called “UnKoch My Campus.”)

Whenever I read or hear libertarians praising the Kochs for their ‘virtuous’ commitment to liberty and their ‘enlightened social views,’ I invariably think of all the millions of dollars that they give to right-wing Republican politicians like Scott Walker. Whatever the Kochs may say about how much they love individual freedom, the fact of the matter is that they financially support causes and politicians that are anti-refugee, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-education, anti-environment, anti-voting, and so forth. Hence my loathing for them – and the headache that I invariably acquire whenever I encounter a libertarian ‘scholar’ trying to defend them. (But I’m sure that such defences have absolutely nothing to do with the money that so many of them receive form the Kochs. Oh no, nothing at all…)

[Cartoon from here.]

AAUP statement against campus carry laws

The American Association of University Professors has come out with a very strong statement opposing 'campus carry' laws (such as the one currently being considered in Wisconsin, which I mentioned in my previous post).

The statement emphasizes this key point:

Colleges and universities … regard the presence of weapons as incompatible with their educational missions. College campuses are marketplaces of ideas, and a rigorous academic exchange of ideas may be chilled by the presence of weapons. Students and faculty members will not be comfortable discussing controversial subjects if they think there might be a gun in the room.

For the full statement go here.

An armed society is an unfree society

[Image from here.]

Having decided that they haven’t quite ruined the University the Wisconsin system enough yet, the Republicans in Madison are now are considering a bill that would allow students (if they have ‘conceal and carry’ permits) to bring guns into campus buildings.  Students sitting in classrooms during lectures and seminars, or in offices meeting with professors, may soon be packing heat.

This is a horrible idea, one manifestly harmful to the educational mission of universities, including especially the free and vigorous exchange of controversial ideas and views.  Moreover, it is premised on false beliefs about the role of guns in reducing violent crime, and a misguided conception of the relation between guns and freedom in society.

It sometimes is claimed by American gun advocates (including the two legislators pushing this bill) that the presence of guns reduce violent crimes.  The reasoning seems to be that guns act as deterrents to criminals and/or can be used by ‘good guys’ to stop ‘bad guys’ (to use some technical terms favoured by the NRA) in the process of harming or killing innocent people.

That this claim is false should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look at other liberal democratic societies.  The United States has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and over fifteen times as many as Australia and New Zealand.  The reason for this is clear: “The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.”  An American gun advocate might acknowledge this fact, but claim that guns nonetheless reduce the overall homicide rate.  That is, perhaps once homicides not caused by firearms are taken into account, it turns out that the United States has a lower homicide rate than, say, Canada thanks to the deterrent effect of all those guns.  But this is not the case either.  The homicide rate of the United States is three times that of Canada.  Again, this should be no surprise.  It’s a lot easier to kill people with guns than with hockey sticks.  Simply put, the idea that citizens legally permitted to carry concealed firearms are an effective force in reducing homicides is a myth.

Guns are inherently threatening.  If students are allowed to bring guns into classrooms, many other students will feel less safe.  It already is quite difficult to help students feel comfortable enough to discuss freely – and disagree openly with each other over – contentious issues like race, gender, and economic inequality, or the moral permissibility or impermissibility of abortion and euthanasia.  The presence of guns lurking in the background of future such discussions invariably will make them even more difficult.

The debate over gun control, at least within the United States, often is cast as a conflict between the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘welfare’ (or security).  Even defenders of robust gun control frequently characterize the debate in this way.  This is a mistake.  The debate instead should be construed as one concerning the distribution of freedom.  Should the freedom of gun owners take priority over the freedom of citizens in general?

The science fiction author Robert Heinlein once famously declared, “An armed society is a polite society.” But the reason such a society is ‘polite,’ of course, is fear.  (The second sentence of the Heinlein quote is: “Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”)  The reality is that an armed society is an unfree society.

The threat of gun violence is coercive.  While easy access to firearms may expand the scope of (what the political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously called) the ‘negative liberty’ of those who like to carry around guns (such citizens can do something that they could not do, or not do as easily, in a society in which access to firearms was restricted), it restricts the scope of all citizens’ negative liberty.  It does so by introducing a coercive threat into all citizens’ public interactions.

To connect my discussion here with my previous post, a society in which guns are widely available is one that more closely resembles Thomas Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’ than do societies in which guns are rare.*  That is, making guns readily available creates a more miserable and insecure condition, one in which everyone becomes a potential threat to everyone else.  Such a society is less free overall; its citizens face a greater range of interferences (potential threats) than citizens in unarmed societies.

Of the four countries that I’ve lived in as an adult – Canada (where I’m from), England, Ireland, and the United States – I’ve felt the least free within the U.S., despite its self-conception as ‘the land of the free.’  And the prevalence of guns in the U.S. is one of the main reasons for this.  In Canada, if an argument breaks out in a coffee shop, a pub, or on a street, I think: “Ugh – How annoying.”  In the U.S., when the same sort of thing happens, I think: “Bloody hell! What if one of those idiots has a gun?!”  And I flee.

Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioural medicine at Stanford University, describes precisely this phenomenon: “In the U.S., whenever there is a angry argument, whether over a traffic accident, someone being fired from their job, or for that matter over nothing of any consequence, it always lurks in one’s mind that someone could have a gun and could start shooting.”  He describes this as “the oppressive psychological weight of America’s gun violence,” and explains how (perversely) this psychological weight “is part of what makes some gun owners scared of gun control (If I don’t have a gun, how will I defend myself against those who do?).”  (Notice the paradigmatically Hobbesian reasoning of the gun owner described by Humphreys.)

And now some Wisconsin legislators want to allow guns into university buildings, including classrooms.  Classrooms in which controversial ideas are debated, and feelings can become intense.  Classrooms in which professors sometimes have to give students bad grades.

Well, at least explaining Hobbes's version of the state of nature will be a bit easier in my political philosophy courses if the legislators who cravenly are doing the bidding of the NRA in Madison get their way…

[* Allow me address a potential nitpick for any Hobbes scholars who might be reading this.  The state of nature, according to Hobbes, is a state of complete freedom, as there is no political authority to establish and impose laws upon persons.  But if we employ Berlin’s notion of negative liberty – according to which, roughly, interferences to potential courses of action count as restrictions on one’s freedom, irrespective of whether they are brought about by the state or by non-state agents – then people are quite unfree within the state of nature, as they face all kinds of interferences on what they can do, namely, continual threats from others.  It is this fear of others that compels rational individuals within the state of nature to act in certain ways (namely, to take pre-emptive actions against others whenever possible).  This is why within the state of nature there is “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  If we employ something like Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, then, the Hobbesian state of nature is a radically unfree condition.]