Category Archives: John Dewey

“Justice as an Evolving Regulative Ideal”

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Journal article published in Pragmatism Today, Volume 6, Issue 2 (2015): 105-116.

Photo of the top of my paper, which links to the PDF file on the journal's Web site.

Logo for Pragmatism Today.I’m happy to announced that my latest paper, as of December 2015, has been published in Pragmatism Today, the peer-reviewed journal of the Central-European Pragmatist Forum. This paper is a step in the larger project of my book in progress, A Culture of Justice.

 

Title: “Justice as an Evolving Regulative Ideal.”

Abstract:

In this paper, I argue that justice is best understood as an evolving regulative ideal. This framework avoids cynicism and apathy on the one hand as well as brash extremism on the other. I begin by highlighting the elusive quality of justice as an ideal always on the horizon, yet which is nevertheless meaningful. Next, I explain the ways in which it makes more sense to see justice as evolving, rather than as fixed. Finally, I demonstrate the value of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of a regulative ideal for framing a pragmatist outlook on justice. Peirce helps us at the same time to appreciate ideals yet to let go of outmoded understandings of their metaphysical status. Ideals are thus tools for regulating behavior. Each of these qualifications demonstrates that justice is best conceived of as an evolving regulative ideal.

Uniting the States? Brainstorming a Trajectory

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When I was in graduate school, looking at the job market, I remember feeling perplexed at certain questions about the future of my career. Some colleges and universities ask you about your “research trajectory.” Finishing a dissertation prepares you with a stack of paper, but now it’s supposed to be nimble and fly like an arrow. I can just picture throwing an unbound dissertation from the top of some stairs, watching the pages fall in all directions. That’s one kind of a trajectory.

A photo of me reading at my desk in 2010, before I came to need glasses.

It wasn’t too hard to imagine things that I wanted to study next, but it’s a huge step in one’s academic career just to finish a major, final project. To be asked at that moment what your next one will be takes one aback. I’ve come to like that question, but somehow I hadn’t been expecting it at the time. It was exciting to think about what I might pursue over the course of my career, though. I had ideas about wanting to work on this or that topic, and some of them did come together.

I thought that I, like so many scholars you meet, would want to depart from the focus of my dissertation. While some steps have been diagonal or roundabout to this point, I have found myself actually returning to some of the issues and sources from that first project. I won’t get into that now, but the fascinating thing for me in writing has had to do with how each work builds on elements of the one before, even if in surprising ways.

Photo of the paperback and hardback editions of 'Democracy and Leadership.'My dissertation on John Rawls and John Dewey’s work focused on basic questions, after which my next project was much more centered on application. Then, Democracy and Leadership was a return to theory, especially to Plato, but with adaptations drawn from Dewey and some from Rawls. The last chapter of that prompted further focus on application, which resulted in Uniting Mississippi. While working on each of these earlier projects, I have had cause to return to Rawls and Dewey’s work, and noticed a concern that I believe is crucial, yet insufficiently explored in studying justice: especially the role of culture in enabling or impeding it.

So, I’ve been working in slow steps on A Culture of Justice for a few years now, longer than I expected. It is coming together, still needing work. That said, it is definitely a more theoretical project, even if I see and will note many possible applications. With my more applied writings, I’ve been striving to make them more and more accessible and publicly engaged. In addition, I’ve focused quite a bit on Mississippi, given that issues for democracy, education, and leadership are so striking here. At the same time, many of the issues I’ve studied are relevant beyond the South. Dean Skip Rutherford of the Clinton School highlighted that point for me. I thought it to be true, but he encouraged me to speak to a broader audience, beyond both Mississippi and the South.

Bust of Socrates.Given that, I’ve started rethinking some of the next projects that I want to pursue. In particular, I’m seeing a number of ideas come together for a next step after A Culture of Justice. The big picture challenge for democracy at the national level can be drawn from what I argued about Mississippi. That lesson was itself learned from Plato. Plato’s Socrates asked what could be a greater evil than that which makes the city many, instead of one? And, he continued, is there any greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one? Nothing and no. Unity is indeed vital for a good city.

For Plato, unity was important enough to trample on liberty. He thought leaders were justified even to lie to their own people for the sake of fostering unity. He was not democratic. In a democratic society, liberty is central. So how could a democracy be united, he wondered? Plato doubted that democratic societies could be wise enough to unite, to care about virtue, and to limit the will of the majority, when it wants vice and injustice.

John Rawls once noted that in many ways American democracy has been remarkably stable. I would suggest that he could only say that in a part of the country that did not fight for secession. We still have the scars of division from the Civil War showing in Mississippi. That said, I believe that Rawls was right when he explained that there are so many more things that unite Americans than that divide us.

A stack of newspapers.We focus so much on the latter, as that’s disagreement. It’s drama. It sells newspapers, or at least ads on their Web sites. The countless things I could mention that people accept as uncontroversial and obvious are so numerous that they would take entirely too long to list. Given that, we can say that in many ways, our hyper-polarized, divided society does live up to one key aspect of our nation’s billing. Indeed, it’s so easy to forget: the key virtue noted in Plato’s Republic is the one virtue mentioned in the name of our country: unity. Ours are the United States of America. Unity is primary. It is vital. But it is also not guaranteed.

So, I’m thinking about expanding from my project on Mississippi. I’ve adapted Faulkner’s line, and want to follow that next step. Faulkner said that to understand the world, you’ve got to understand a place like Mississippi. Ok, so I’ve given Mississippi a try. Next, I want to study the needs, forces, and factors Uniting the States of America. That may not be my title, but I’m working on it. Hell, I may go in a very different direction, but at present, this feels right.

The cover of 'Uniting Mississippi,' featuring University of Mississippi students participating in a 2012 candlelight vigil in Oxford, MS.While I’m an unabashed optimist — nothing ventured, nothing gained — I recognize that the “stability” that Rawls saw in the United States comes at a price of the massive incarceration of poor and otherwise disadvantaged people, the use of labor under the table, paid to people who do not have the protection of the police, and many other troubles that people face in the U.S. That said, a vision of progress takes recognition of our challenges, of what divides us. When we see the need for unity, for fighting problems like hyper-incarceration, we can fight for change. In that particular example, there is cause for hope, as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Koch brothers, powerful voices on the Left and Right, all believe that we desperately need to combat hyper-incarceration.

These are just some sketched thoughts about the big picture next steps for my writing trajectory. If you have thoughts or questions for me, send me a tweet @EricTWeber or post on my Facebook Author page.

The Progressive Case Against Public Schools, or, What Bleeding Heart Libertarians Should Say

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I’m not a libertarian, but some of my good friends are and I tend to think that there are lots of really promising areas of agreement with libertarians. The blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians was founded with just that goal in mind: to find the points of agreement between libertarian and progressive goals, and indeed (in my view) to argue for the superiority of libertarian perspectives for addressing some matters of mutual concern.

I often associate this libertarian caution at state over-reach to address the demands of social justice with F. A. Hayek but it’s a broad and puissant tradition in the literature. Basically, it’s entailed by the reality of unintended consequences and the perils of public choice: we don’t always fully know how our efforts will bear fruit and we do know that interested parties are often maneuvering to turn those efforts to their own advantage.

by Matt BorsAn example of a potentially promising direction for BHL is this recent Andrew Cohen post on abolishing state administration of schools. Though public schooling is a progressive shibboleth, I happen to think that that makes it a prime target for ideologically-blinkered reasoning by progressives: John Dewey’s vision of the public school is a far cry from what we’ve actually created (and indeed public schooling has long been a space of indoctrination and the active production of inequality) but through the miracle of equivocation we defend it all the same. Yet Cohen proceeds as if the case of public schooling is insufficiently strong according to his somewhat tendentious definition of the justifications for state action as a remedy for harms. But this seems to take up the weaker argument and ignore the stronger one!

Here’s the kind of argument I’d like to see from BHL:

  • Progressives should recognize that the ideals of public school and the realities are widely divergent. For example, many public schools play a role in the school-to-prison pipeline and other direct harms against–especially–African-Americans. (One can spin many other detailed and nuanced stories of this kind that highlight the harms to the least advantaged, the way some educational experiences actively dissuade intellectual curiosity, encourage students to think of themselves as incapable, or extend state coercion into families but only when those families are poor or non-white, etc.)
  • Public schooling produces much of the real inequality we experience in the world through the production of metrics for merit. Despite the fact that some propagandists for public schooling argued that it would act as a democratic leveler, this claim has been completely disproven by subsequent events.
  • Public schooling supplies an opportunity for the state to directly and actively interfere with children in politically motivated ways, as evidenced by the textbook controversies that come from Texas among many other examples.
  • Whites and the upper-middle class benefit disproportionately from subsidies and school boundary plans that directly and actively exclude non-whites and poor students. The evidence in many cities (including mine) is that private schools are better racially integrated than public ones, both demographically and socially. The evidence here is mixed, though, and worth teasing out: many private schooling options were explicitly designed to perpetuate segregation.
  • Yet even whites recognize that the latest efforts to test and measure the efficacy of public schools have further perverted the actual educational efforts to which schools are supposed to be devoted. Increasingly, schooling is designed to make testable pupils rather than democratic citizens.
  • There is a clear alternative: state management can be abolished while preserving (and indeed equalizing) state funding. From a libertarian’s perspective this may be second-best to purely privatized schooling, but let’s remember those public choice problems, eh?

Now, of course it may be that a well-informed libertarian (and progressives!) would have objections to some of these points. But it seems like the difference between “only remedy harms” and “first, do no harm” is one that should always favor the latter, and I can’t understand why a libertarian would choose the narrower path. I take it that we see this kind of approach in Radley Balko’s work and there’s been much more demand for it as Balko’s case comes to look a lot like those of Black activists and organizers: that’s precisely the kind of coalition I imagined BHL would champion. Of course, as an outsider to BHL it may be that I’m simply not understanding the internal motivations for this particular approach, which seems born of the kind of political philosophy that tries to exclude public choice considerations and empirical data and do its work through deliberately abstruse thought experiments. But I’d argue that both libertarians and progressives should move away from such arguments whenever other opportunities are present.