Universal Education is a Right

In this post, I explore various philosophical justifications for why education—specifically universal (worldwide) education—is not a right. Then I argue for a reevaluation of our notion of rights that allows us to conceive of universal education as a right.

The Natural Rights position

“Education is not a natural right,” claim adherents of this position. (This isn’t to say that everyone who believes in natural rights thinks education isn’t one—just that some of them do.) These natural rights advocates believe that our rights (such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) derive from God or from Nature. And, they say, education is not one of those God-given or Nature-conferred rights.

Those who believe in God will treat their religions beliefs as nonnegotiable, and from such beliefs they can justify virtually any position (look to slavery advocates who used the Bible as evidence, for example). Because religious belief too easily precludes rational discourse, I will not try too hard to convince the theist. For those who believe that Nature confers negative rights, or that rights inhere naturally in humans, I say that such a position is extremely problematic for three reasons. First there is an epistemological issue: Hume’s “is-ought” problem says that we cannot derive normative claims from empirical claims; since empirical claims about the world are all that we can reliably know, we can’t determine the validity of normative claims (which includes rights claims). Second there is an ontological problem: What do natural rights look like? What are they made of? How can nature dictate laws about how we should behave? And are those laws really laws if they’re not enforced by nature? Third there is good evidence for thinking that our ideas about morality and rights result from cultural norms and evolved psychological adaptations (cooperating in repeated iterations of prisoner’s dilemmas, i.e. acting altruistically when it’s not immediately advantageous, is an evolutionarily stable strategy). There: three good reasons to reject the idea of natural rights.

The “Education is a negative right” position

“I think everyone has a right to education; I just don’t think our government is obligated to pay for it.” This attitude reflects the belief that education is a negative right—one that cannot be trampled on, but also one that no party has a duty to provide. For example, the right to free speech is often conceived of as a negative right: no one is allowed to take away your free speech, but no one is compelled to give you printing materials or a megaphone either. Taking education as a negative right, then, frees one from admitting that one’s government is obligated to ensure noncitizens’ education.

One problem with this position is that it’s unclear where the dividing line between negative rights and positive rights lies. In many cases, the government must treat a supposedly negative right as a positive one. For example, my right to be free from violence seems to be a negative right, but for that right to mean anything in practice, the government must provide a police force and a military. Another example is due process: we tend to think that the government is obligated to provide an attorney for indigent defendants, because doing so is the only way to ensure that defendants actually receive due process. Applying this to education, it seems meaningless to say that education is a right if there’s no practical way for a person to exercise that right, other than the government providing it or ensuring it some other way.

Another problem is that it’s little arbitrary to call education a negative right. What is the principle that explains which rights are negative and which are positive? I don’t think there can be any such principle. Please comment if you want to propose one!

The Social Contract position

Many Americans would say education is a right, one so important that our government is obligated to provide even to those who cannot afford it. But they hesitate to extend that right to those living outside our borders.

This attitude can be justified by appealing to social contract theory, according to which the rights of citizens and the obligations of their government are established through a social contract. The reason Americans have a right to education while noncitizens do not is that Americans consent to being ruled by their government in exchange for their government fulfilling certain duties—one of which is providing some degree of education to citizens.

I won’t argue that this social contract position is wrong (even though I think it’s fraught with problems), because I think the social contractarian is correct in believing essentially that rights are what we say they are. As a result, social contract theory allows us to extend rights to noncitizens if we so choose. For example, it’s okay for a social contractarian to demand that his government intervene in order to stop genocide in a foreign country—as long as the majority (or some supermajority) of citizens agree that such intervention is permitted by their social contract. Since social contract theory allows us to confer rights on foreigners, all that’s left to do is convince the social contractarian that he should want to confer the right to education to noncitizens. I save this for later.

The “Rights don’t exist” position

Those who agree with my response to the natural rights position might be inclined to conclude that rights don’t exist. But all that my arguments demonstrate is that our old conception of rights (as being derived from nature) is problematic. We can reconceptualize rights to be how we want people to be treated. What’s appealing about this approach is that it allows us to say that people do have a right to life and liberty. It allows us to criticize people who act in ways we find repulsive. And it restores structure to how people interact, giving us the means to craft a society we find tolerable.

Why education should be a right

Rights are what we want them to be. This is where we seem to be left after rejecting the traditional notions of rights, and where we ended in “The Social Contract position.” So I guess now it’s my job to convince you that you should want education to be a right for everyone, because that’s all it should take for you to then believe universal education is a right.

Luckily, I don’t think there’s much work to do. If you believe in liberty, then you should believe in the importance of removing barriers to liberty. (And you probably know that education is one of the best ways to do this.) If you believe in reducing suffering—and you recognize that educating a populace is the best way to eliminate cruel and outdated practices, to reduce the spread of disease, to ensure proper nutrition, and to raise the standard of living—then you should believe in the importance of education. If you believe in equal treatment of individuals, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion, then you should believe that the rights Americans have should extend to non-citizens.

Don’t let dumb philosophical positions dictate your stance on how people should be treated. Just be consistent and fair. Taking this more simplistic and humble attitude will mean better outcomes for everyone.

Thoughts from Junior Year

Introduction

Each blog entry I write, I feel tremendous pressure to do enough research to make sure what I’m saying isn’t nonsense. While this approach bolsters my credibility (at least I hope I’ve sounded credible), it limits what topics I can write about. It also narrows the scope of each entry. So I’ve decided that this time I won’t be as focused or comprehensive as I have in other posts. This entry is a survey of what I’ve been thinking about over this past year. These topics are important to me; they reflect who I am, or at least who I am becoming. And I hope you can gain something from reading it too.

Motivation

This past year has been my most intense period of reflection and research in pursuit of establishing a framework for understanding my existence. Who am I, and what should I be doing? These are the two questions I would like to answer before I die, and in my opinion they are the two most important questions each person must answer for himself or herself. Two rules will guide my pursuit. First, live deliberately. I must constantly reassess my priorities and make sure that how I spend my time properly reflects those priorities. Second, be relentless. I cannot afford to care about the opinions of others or the cost of my inquiry. I must fight laziness, apathy, and complacency. I cannot give up until I determine how to define myself, what to believe, and how to live.

Some of the following issues lie at the heart of my journey to discover who I am and what my purpose is. Other issues are less theoretical but more practical, and therefore offer useful guidance for how to live, regardless of what axiomatic beliefs I settle on. What each of these themes share is their profound influence on me over this past year.

Identity

What defines someone? What distinguishes him or her from other people? What makes that person valuable?

The best I can do is offer a working framework of identity, one based on layers. (And feel free to disagree with this model, but if you do, tell me how you would change it.) On the deepest layer, each person is unique and has inherent dignity and value. This layer is the primitive that grants each individual some intrinsic identity and self-worth by simple virtue of his being a human being. On the second layer rests that person’s capacity to define himself and his willingness to change. This layer gives each person agency over his own identity. The third layer is that person’s values and beliefs. The fourth layer is that person’s actions. Each layer is a reflection of the last. The purpose of including multiple layers is to emphasize that a man is not simply the sum of his actions; to fully understand someone we must examine all the layers and give each its due respect.

Right now, I define myself only as someone capable of change. I am willing to learn, to embrace new ideas, and to apply other people’s lessons to my own life. I’m also determined that I will eventually define myself. But as you probably can tell, I don’t yet know what to believe. I haven’t established the axiomatic values from which all my future actions will stem. I am incomplete, and this incompleteness drives me to discover—or create—the missing pieces.

People define themselves over a lifetime whether they do so consciously or not. If that’s the case, it’s probably better to do so consciously, so that you have no regrets about who you end up becoming.

Practical Epistemology

If you’ve read my last post, you’ll better understand what I wish to convey in this section. Essentially what I’ve concluded is that no amount of academic inquiry—at least given our limited knowledge—can settle the most important questions. Are there really ways we should or should not be acting? Can faith be rationally justified? Is the universe deterministic? Do we have free will? While a good understanding of what other people have to say on these topics is essential to deciding what to believe, other people cannot answer these questions for you. There just isn’t enough information. So what do we do?

We choose. We pick sides. How we decide which side to choose is another question (one that I’m working on). But it’s clear to me that for these important issues, I simply have to stake out a position.

Some issues I plan to contemplate regarding choosing sides:

• When should I be atheist or agnostic about a proposition? If there is no evidence for something, should I not believe it, or should I admit that I don’t know?
• If I decide to remain agnostic about something, when is it necessary to choose a position?
• How do I go about deciding how to choose sides?
• Am I willing to accept that life is devoid of value and meaning?
• Will my inability to accept this sort of life be enough to move me to action and self-sacrifice?

Faith

This section is a subset of “Practical Epistemology,” but one important enough to warrant its own treatment. I won’t go into any objective analysis of faith, but instead I want to share my understanding of faith and its role in my life.

Faith is one potential answer to everything I’m looking for. Faith in God can give me answers to who I am and what my purpose is. And I think faith is binary: either you have some faith, or you have none, because some is all you need. Willingness to take even the smallest leap is the axiom upon which all other beliefs can rest. The only question is whether I’m willing to take that small leap. I’d love nothing more than to have faith. But that is easier said than done.

Do I believe in God? I don’t know. I’d like to believe, but I don’t know if I really do. Isn’t it weird how much I don’t know myself? This paradox forces me to ask what the nature of faith is. Is it a blind leap? Is it an irrational conviction given as a gift by God? Can faith be an act of the will? I’ve asked many believers about the nature of faith, yet they can explain surprisingly little about what faith is or where it comes from. I guess I have to keep searching.

Another thing I’ve asked myself is why God would deliberately withhold faith from me. I believe I have been earnestly seeking God, and from everything I’ve heard, God answers the door for those who knock. So I am left with three possibilities: the first is that I am not looking hard enough, in which case I should do more to be a better Christian and further seek God. (Should it really be this hard?) The second possibility is that God has a reason for withholding faith. Perhaps He wants me to experience living without faith so that when I return, I will fully appreciate his presence in my life. The third possibility is that God does not exist. I think disbelief in God is the most rational course of action given the evidence and arguments we have. But the fact that I’m willing to say, “Fuck the evidence,” and turn to God (if only he would grant me the opportunity!) makes it even more frustrating that I still have not felt his presence.

I’ve talked to a decent number of people about this problem. The more I think about it, the fewer people I think can help me. But I won’t give up, and I’d be very grateful to hear your advice and be in your prayers.

Compassion

Everything I’ve said until now has been a little depressing. Something positive I have learned, perhaps the most important lesson of my year, is the importance of compassion. Specifically:

• The best way to live life (if there is one) is to care about something other than yourself.
• The best way to achieve happiness is to care about something other than yourself.

If these two things are true, how could there be any other key to living life? Near the end of my last post, I mentioned the possibility of two roads converging: different beliefs might lead to the same lifestyle. I truly think that whatever one’s beliefs are, caring about others more than oneself is the best way to exercise those beliefs. The most rational course of action for the hedonist is to lose himself in compassion. The same is true for the Christian. This has been one of my most important realizations.

If you need some convincing, check out these TED videos:

http://www.ted.com/talks/bob_thurman_says_we_can_be_buddhas.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html

One last thought: a guiding question I ask when pondering how to live is, “On my deathbed, would I be content with how I lived, to the extent that I could accept death gracefully?” One day over spring break, I realized that the only way I could knowingly end my earthly existence in peace was if what I cared about wasn’t my own life. What’s truly important is the relationship I have with others—the genuine investment in their well-being—in other words, love. I think love is the recognition that I alone am not worth dedicating an entire lifetime to.

Personal judgment

A few years ago I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. In one of the chapters, Lewis mentions that God wants all of us to be perfect. Any reasonable person knows this is an unreasonable goal. But why shouldn’t we all strive for perfection, even if true perfection is unobtainable?

Let’s approach this from a different angle: why is it ever the case that we sometimes do things we shouldn’t be doing, or aren’t doing the things we should? Frankly it’s intolerable that for any person there exists a discrepancy between what he is doing and what he should be doing.

There are two approaches to resolving this. The first is to discipline oneself to do what needs to be done. The second is to reevaluate what one should be doing and to discard unproductive or unreasonable expectations. Both are needed, but the second is often neglected—and that’s the point of this section.

What defines what someone should be doing? Throughout the school year, upon returning to my room with no clear agenda, I'd ask, “What should I be doing right now?” The inevitable answer would be “work.” So I would either study (grudgingly) or procrastinate (guiltily). Both sucked. I realized that the only person telling me what I should be doing at any given moment was myself. There weren’t any ethical implications of my doing work now as opposed to later, so really, there was no right answer. In fact the question would be better framed as "What do I want to do?" rather than "What should I do?" With this mindset, I didn't have to feel guilty for not doing work when I didn't want to. Moreover I still got everything done—just on a more comfortable schedule.

Recognizing when not to judge myself has been a big lesson of this year. Being responsible for myself means that I alone get to decide what's best for me, even when that goes against ingrained habits. As a result I am not only happier but also less dissatisfied with myself. In short, redefining what I should be doing has helped me reconcile who I am with who I want to be.

Success

I know little of true success, but I have a feeling that 100% of how my future unfolds will be a consequence of my own attitude: my confidence and my persistence. I recently asked my sister if she thought she'd make a good teacher (her prospective career). She responded with an assertive “yes.” I needed only that confidence to be convinced. And I believe this is true for everyone, so here is my advice (and if you decide to believe anything I say, let it be this): Have unshaking, even irrational faith in yourself. Live deliberately. And live relentlessly. You will own the fuck out of life.

How Should I Live?

This is the most fundamental question of human existence. To think that one can figure out the answer on one's own is ignorant and arrogant. Fortunately people have been studying this question for thousands of years, and some have even written down their thoughts, contributing to the branch of philosophy known as ethics.

Ethics is the study of morality. At the heart of morality in relation to our agency is the word “should” or “ought”: ethics addresses how we should act and how we should live. But if we are to rely on morality as a guide for living, we should know what morality is. We must engage in meta-ethics.

This post is about determining whether morality is real and objective. Do ethical statements (like “you should do X”) actually express truth, or are there no objectively right and wrong ways of behaving? Before beginning, I want to say two things. First, this entry involves only a subset of meta-ethics, so it is far from comprehensive. But I think the coverage is sufficient to address what I see as the central problem in ethics and various ways of responding to that problem. Second, the fact that this topic is philosophical in nature should not deter readers from considering it seriously. We often dismiss philosophy as high-minded and irrelevant to real living, but philosophy is simply the study of those questions most central to our existence that have not been answered. The reason philosophy makes little progress is that the answerable questions have been delegated to other academic fields, like the natural sciences. That said, let us begin.

What reason do we have for thinking that morality is real (a position called moral realism)? The primary reason seems to be our shared moral intuitions, like the intuition against murdering. But evolutionary psychology can likely account for these intuitions. Moral instincts are part of an evolutionarily stable strategy to cooperate in ways that seem disadvantageous to ourselves, because doing so aids our survival. (Oversimplified game theoretical description: cooperating is better than defecting in repeated iterations of a prisoner’s dilemma.) Genes coding for cooperative behavior (the “golden rule”) increased survival for organisms in which those genes resided, so those genes were passed down to us. In the end, then, what compels us to behave altruistically is merely an evolved instinct that arose via random processes to enhance genetic fitness. As a result, we need some other reason independent of our intuitions for being moral realists.

Here lies the central problem that plagues moral realism: if morality is real, where does it come from? Realists don’t have a good explanation for where normative grounding comes from. David Hume highlighted this difficulty when he said we cannot derive an ought from an is. If all we can dependably believe are propositions about existence (derived from our empirical observation and reasoning), how can we argue for the validity of normative claims?

One way to respond is to take the anti-realist position: there are no moral truths. It is never the case that we should or should not do X, because normativity does not exist. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluded. What motivates the anti-realist are the presumption that we should not believe in things whose existence we lack evidence for, and the apparent absence of evidence of moral facts. We seem to be justified in believing only material facts, like those describing the observable universe, so if there is no bridge from material facts to moral facts (Hume's is-ought problem), we must conclude that moral facts do not exist.

The opposite position is moral realism, which states that ethical sentences are either true or false. Thus there are objective moral facts. (One might be: “inflicting unnecessary suffering is wrong.”) Moral realism is intuitively appealing because it lets us say that some actions are simply wrong in themselves. But we should be careful not to conflate intuition with reason, especially since our moral intuitions are evolutionary in nature and therefore not evidence for realism. With that in mind, I present three defenses of moral realism.

Robert Nozick gives an interesting and plausible explanation for where morality comes from, one that rests on the concept of value. He argues that entities can have intrinsic value, and the degree of intrinsic value is measured by the degree of “organic unity” exhibited in those entities. Two things contribute to organic unity: the diversity of the material present, and the degree to which that diversity is unified. The greater the diversity, and the more unified that diversity is, the greater organic unity and thus value that entity contains. What makes this theory believable is that its conclusions are quite consistent with our intuitions of what is inherently valuable. For example, it says humans have greater value than other animals, which have greater value than plants, which have greater value than rocks. An entire ecosystem might have great value because some of its components (animals, plants, etc.) do; nonetheless, the ecosystem’s relative lack of unity among its constituents reduces its value (compared to, say, the unity among neurons in a brain). Nozick’s theory also explains how intrinsic value can arise without the existence of “value atoms,” or foundational bits of intrinsic value. Calculating the value of a whole requires accounting for the sum of the values of each of its parts as well as the degree of unity exhibited: V(X) = O(X) + ∑ V(parts of X), where X is the whole, V is the value function, and O(X) is the degree of organic unity exhibited by X. Thus even if all parts of X have no value, the relationship among those parts create O(X) value, giving X nonzero value.

Because some entities have inherent value, the natural corollary is that we should preserve and respect value, and perhaps even work to create value. Thus an “ought” is created once we have the capacity to affect, create, and destroy value. One might point out that Nozick’s ethical theory requires an additional axiom that says, “Value should be respected;” thus normative grounding actually comes from this axiom, not from value. Nonetheless, the nature of value already subsumes this axiom: we can define intrinsic value as that which should be respected for its own sake. This definition does not contradict our use of organic unity as merely the measure of intrinsic value.

Therefore, one way to be a moral realist is to subscribe to Nozick’s ethical model built on value. The existence of intrinsic value grounds all other value (intrinsic and instrumental), thereby creating normativity and giving truth to ethical propositions like, “You should do X.” We can even choose another metric for measuring value (besides organic unity) while maintaining the use of value as foundational for ethical behavior.

Other moral realists lack a comprehensive meta-ethical model while still arguing that the case against moral realism isn’t closed. Here are two more explanations for how “ought” statements can be true. Although these explanations sound plausible, strikingly absent is any reason or evidence for believing that they are actually true.

The first explanation deals with emergence. No one can deny that something amazing happens when sentience arises in a universe of elementary particles, each unaware of its own existence. If emergence can account for sentience, which didn’t exist for billions of years, then perhaps emergence can account for normativity. In other words the apparent gap between is and ought—the gap between nonmoral and moral claims—is not a conclusive refutation of moral realism, because it might be explained by emergence. This same inferential gap is present in many other fields of study: SEP says that we feel comfortable making biological or psychological claims even though we cannot derive these claims from nonbiological or nonpsychological premises. Perhaps once we understand how life, consciousness, and agency emerge from bits of matter that have none of these properties, we can see how obligations to exercise that agency in certain ways can similarly emerge.

The second explanation argues that we should treat ethics as we treat mathematics and logic. Math and logic, unlike science, can make true and false statements, but their connection to truth is a priori, not empirical. That is, we look within the system for truth, not outside the system for independent evidence or grounding. Nevertheless it’s difficult to identify what makes math true, because we don’t really understand the metaphysics of math. Platonists will say that a triangle is an eternal, unchanging, abstract but real entity. Logicists say that math is reducible to logic; but then the question becomes, “What is logic?” Empiricists say math is real, but its truths are obtained only via empirical observation, not deductive logic. (Other schools of thought in philosophy of mathematics refute the realism of math.) The point, however, is that IF morality is more like math than science, then it’s reasonable to be a realist about morality insofar as it’s reasonable to be a realist about math.

How do we make sense of the arguments and evidence before us? As stated earlier, evolutionary psychology poses a real threat to moral realism, because it says that our initial reason for believing in moral objectivity—our intuitions—is not a good reason. But there are other ways of defending moral realism, including the model proposed by Nozick and the two (less ambitious) explanations given above. Nonetheless, Nozick does little to justify the existence of value, and other explanations sound promising but remain too nebulous. Does this mean we must defer to being anti-realists?

I don’t know. It’s very difficult to analyze how convincing and how warranted the various positions presented in this post are, and what conclusion we should draw when putting them together. We must better understand the history, methods, biases, and assumptions involved in the human pursuit of truth. Figuring this out is a tricky matter, and our situation is nothing short of an epistemic crisis.

We have three things to do. First: we must continue studying the question of moral realism in hopes we might find a plausible answer. Second: we must take a step back and contemplate how we should pursue truth in life. It seems that adopting an empirical approach to truth leads to naturalism (the view that nature is all that exists), and that naturalism leads to physicalism (the view that only physical things exist). Within these viewpoints is a diversity of thought, but admittedly such theories feel constraining. Empiricism leads only to truths we can sense, but what if there are other kinds of truth relevant to our existence? How can we discover them in a reliable manner? Third: we must explore where the various realist and anti-realist positions lead (assuming each is correct). For example, as an anti-realist I might decide that the aim of my life will be to maximize personal happiness. Or as a realist, I might decide that value inheres in individuals, and as a result I should treat others as ends in themselves. Perhaps the roads of realists and anti-realists will converge, leading proponents of both to the same behavior.

I hope that no one underestimates the gravity of our situation or the work that remains to be done. Finding these answers is the single most important thing we can do, given our current situation (in which we understand almost nothing about ourselves or the life we should be living). This is precisely what our education was for. Let us not waste it.