Are Young People Good Protesters?

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It seems as though there’s been a quite, but steady stream of complaints about the way young people protest.

Even among progressives who are supportive of the cause, I commonly hear remarks about how today’s protests – orchestrated by today’s young people – are ineffective, poorly executed, or even damaging to the cause.

Millennials Can’t Even Protest Right, declares a Daily Beast article reflecting on a successful 1976 Title IX protest. Forbes asks, Are Millennials Lazy Or Avant-Garde Social Activists? And, of course, there is ongoing debate about whether young people are real activists or just, in the words of the New York Times, Tumblr activists.

NPR is far more generous, detailing how young people near Ferguson, Mo. used social media as a tool to “plan and participated in the most recent large protest.”

So, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of today’s activism, but for the moment, let’s play a little game – let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that no, Millennials can’t even protest correctly.

If that is indeed, the case, it begs the question – why not?

Those who argue most fervently against the effectiveness of young people seem predisposed against the generation – and I imagine they might summon reasons like:

Young people can’t protest correctly because they think social media is all you need.

Young people can’t protest correctly because they are too self-absorbed to see how their actions will impact others.

Or perhaps: Younh people can’t protest correctly because they are so entitled, they protest stupid things without even knowing how good they’ve got it.

But let’s try out another option – if it is indeed the case that young people can’t protest correctly –

Is it possible this is because our parents have failed us?

In Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer his core argument is that the activism of the 60s and 70s was really launched by the white students who participated in 1964’s Freedom Summer.

In part, these young people were deeply radicalized by the experience – returning to their home states with a critical and politicized view of their lives.

But more practically, these young people were trained by their experience.

The movements of the 60s and 70s – those efforts which today’s elders declare so successful while sneering at the efforts of today’s youth – benefited tremendously and directly from SNCC organizing tactics developed in the 50s.

SNCC trained 1000 young people in their organizing techniques. Those young people used what they learned and became the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s liberation movement, and more.

Perhaps these movements were successful because someone had trained their leaders.

As a somewhat young person now looking back on this history, it seems that yesterday’s young people made a critical mistake –

After their battles were fought and their skirmish won, the thought the war was over.

We’re in a post-racial society. A post-sexist society. All our problems are solved.

There’s no need to train young people as organizers. No need to develop their skills in putting their passion for social justice to practical use.

We solved everything 40 years ago. And we figured it out ourselves.

No.

If indeed today’s young people are terrible protestors, it’s their parents, their mentors, their elders who are at fault.

It is yesterday’s leaders who have failed us. Not today’s.

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The Future of Civic Tech: Open Data and Open Gov’ts

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We recently saw a fascinating interview that NCDD supporting member Della Rucker recently published on her website EngagingCities that we wanted to share. Della interviewed the head of a key civic tech company, Accela, on the results of a recent paper on trends in civic technology, and the conversation is quite educational. We encourage you to read the interview below or find the original here.

How big is Civic Tech and where is it going? One on one with Mark Headd of Accela

engaging cities logoIn late 2014, Accela released a white paper with the International Data Corporation that quantifies the potential scope, value, and growth potential of the Civic Technology field.  Accela’s Developer Evangelist, Mark Headd, appears frequently at EngagingCities through his thought-provoking personal blog, civic.io.

I caught up with Mark a couple of weeks ago to talk about the present and future of civic technology.  We touched on the message that open data sends about a city, the unique challenges that smaller cities face in opening data, and the role of technology vendors in helping make that happen.

My thanks to Mark for the great conversation and to Accela for the white paper, which you can access here.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Della Rucker, Managing Editor, EngagingCities:  First of all, tell me a little bit, in your own words, about Accela and why it is that Accela commissioned the study that IDC did?

Mark Headd, Developer Evangelists, Accela:  Well, Accela is a company that provides software to governments in support of their business licensing, land management, permitting, food safety inspection, service requests, and so on, so we have a whole suite of software that helps government do the job of governing,

Our flagship product is the Accela Civic Platform. It’s used by hundreds of governments around the world. Several years ago, the decision was made to engineer it so that there was an API that would provide access to the platform so you could connect third party applications to it.

I think Accela very rightly could be described as a company that saw the potential of civic technology before it was cool. Before it was widely accepted as being cool.

We very much bet our hand on the fact that third parties, that civic software developers, civic startups, and others would want to build things on top of our platform. Because of the things that governments use Accela’s platform for, our platform is chock full of really valuable information. The transactions that our platform supports – business licensing, permitting, all of these things – are critical functions of government.

One of the things that attracted me to Accela was that the fact that we can open up this kind of data and support transactional interactions on our platform through an API and through publishing open data. It’s been really exciting.

The report is a complement to that earlier investment in the platform around civic technology. It looks at, where are we going? What does the future of civic technology look like?

We’re not the only ones who do this. The Knight Foundation did recently, too. The reason we did it was because we wanted to articulate one of the reasons why, several years ago, we started to position ourselves to be ready for this trend in civic technology. I think universally, the outlook for the development of civic technology is pretty bright.

Della: Was there anything in there that surprised you, that confirmed something that you were already sort of aware of but hadn’t fully seen documented? Was there anything in there that particularly was revelatory for you?

Mark:  Well, certainly the size of the impact, which is in the billions, to quantify that impact, I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s a really good outcome of the report.

Like anything else, predicting the future is difficult. To me, that’s the primary takeaway, that this is something we’re going to continue to see. Governments are going to start investing heavily in this area. It’s an area that’s going to start to mature.  To me, that’s something that I think will resonate with the people, that I think most of them innately had this sense that it was going to mature and going to really start to solidify.

Even to folks that aren’t in the civic technology field, I think this would probably wake some folks up and really help to shine a light on what civic technology is and how it’s changing what governments do and the potential future benefit for that.

Della: The report does a good job at a high level of identifying a lot of the broad factors that are driving governments’ need, their impetus to be investing in civic technology. That ranges all the way from demands on their own budgets and the need to increase internal efficiency, to how citizens increasingly prefer, and assume that they should be able, to interact with a government of any kind, whether local or state or larger.

What do you see as the current and near future barriers? What’s keeping this from being a full‑blown thing already, for lack of a better word?

Mark:  Well, I talked about this a little bit at the Code for America Summit last year. Open data is a really critical part of all this because it’s usually one of the core ingredients that we see in civic technology solutions. But, even where it’s not directly used, when governments publish even simple open data, the government is essentially saying, “We’re ready. We’re ready to collaborate.”

That kind of an expression is critical, because what’s unique about civil technology is that it’s something that’s not wholly in a government. It requires people outside of a government. It requires citizen engagement. It requires a new way of partnering.

Governments are able to articulate that they are ready to collaborate and willing to collaborate through opening data.  Open data is sort of the expression of that intent; without that you have a big impediment to the technology. The ability of government to collaborate in a new way, that’s what makes civic technology special.

If we look at who’s doing open data right now, it tends to be larger cities. More and more of the larger cities are doing it and fewer of the small‑to‑mid‑sized cities are doing it.

If you just look at the city level, there’s a stark contrast between big cities, the biggest cities in the country. If you look at the 20 biggest cities in the country, the 10 biggest cities in the country, I think nine out of 10 are doing open data.

If you look at the cities that have populations between 100,000 and 500,000, and there are a lot more of those cities in this country than big cities, the minority of them are doing any sort of work on open data. We need more governments, particularly municipal and local governments, to embrace open data, even if they’re not releasing vast troves of data because they may not have them.

If you’re a city of 75,000, you may not have a vast trove of data. But by starting down the road of open data, you have expressed a willingness to work with people. You’ve expressed a willingness to collaborate in a new way and that’s an essential ingredient to civic technology. In my mind, that’s one of the biggest impediments.

Della: That’s intriguing because there’s a technical component or maybe a functional component to that. First of all, a smaller city typically has relatively minimal internal staff. And often they’ve got less exposure to broader trends in the world because they’re trying to manage the issues of their community with a very shoestring budget.

But there’s also the issue of, do they have the technology? Can they find the technologists or the technology‑savvy people within their communities, or that they can access in one form or another, to help make that happen? Do you have any thoughts on how these smaller communities where this need is so prevalent may be able to start overcoming some of those barriers?

Mark: I think one of the things these smaller governments can and should do is they need to start insisting that their vendors are building open data – or the ability to support civic technology, if you want to think about it more generically – into their products. One of the things we do at Accela, we try and educate our customers on civic technology, what it is, and how they can publish data, how they can leverage our platform to support civic technology.

I think that’s critical that the vendor community start to do this more, but to some extent they’re not willing to do it unless their customers demand it. I think that’s something we’ll start to see.

Whether they’ll work with groups like ICMA and National League of Cities and others who pool their influence, I think we’ll probably start to see that as well.  But, that’s something they need to do.

Smaller governments, more than others perhaps, rely on outside vendors for technology expertise. It’s critical that vendors, and we’re one of them, start to walk the walk on civic technology.

Della:  But it’s not in the vendor’s self‑interest typically to push the clients to take on something that the client doesn’t have any clue how to do yet, and I’m overstating that obviously.

Mark:  Well, if we’re right that the market for government civic technology is north of $6 billion in spending, then even self‑interested vendors are going to see the benefit of that. They’re going to want to get with the program because it is in their interest to do it. I don’t think vendors who do that are acting in a particularly self‑interested way.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, right? Companies have shareholders and their responsibility is to maximize the return for their shareholders. Also the government is getting the benefit. I don’t think those two things need to be at odds.

I think we’re approaching the place where vendors are acting in a predictable self‑interested way, also providing a benefit to their customers. It’s in vendors’ interest to make their customers look good and be successful.

Certainly it’s in our interest to do that. I don’t think that’s at cross purposes with governments wanting to make their jobs easier by being able to leverage civic technology more efficiently.

I think we’re coming to a point here, where it is beneficial for governments to get involved with civic technology and support it more. I think it will actually be profitable for companies to do as well.

Della:  I appreciate you articulating that so clearly. Let me ask one more question and that is, we have here in this report a pretty concise picture of the existing and near‑term state of the broader market.

When we’re having a conversation like this two years from now, whether it’s at a Code for America summit, whether it’s a conversation like this, if you try to put on your prognosticator hat here, what do you think we might be talking about at that point, a couple of years from now?

Mark:  Well, I don’t know if I can give you an accurate prediction two years from now. I think we’ll still be talking about open data. I think we’ll be talking more and more about open standards, standards for data. I’m optimistic that we’ll have many more of them in two years because they actually make it easier for governments to adopt civic technology.

I don’t know all of the things we’ll be talking about, but I guarantee you in two years we’re still talking about open data and, increasingly, we’re talking about standards for open data that make it easier for vendors, civic start‑ups, and even civic hackers to build things for one government that can be easily ported to another government without a lot of difficulties.

Della:  That’s such a critical component. First of all, with the multi‑pronged ecosystem around this issue, there has to be a common language amongst them. Certainly, that’s starting to develop, but that’s something that, I think, is going to become more and more crucial.

That’s also, I suspect, going to take away some of the fear. Essentially, there’s a little bit of a fear of the unknown for a lot of governments and, probably, vendors for whom this is new territory.

I think that’s so insightful of you to put your finger on standards, which sounds boring, but that’s such a crucial piece for making this something that people from wherever within this system can transition into and make it effective. There’s a functional side, but there’s also a cultural side that

Mark:  I don’t know that I can emphasize it more strongly than to say that the standards are what are going to take civic technology to the next level. The recognition that open data is more than just this raw material, even though it’s that, it’s more than that.

It’s a way for a government to advertise that they are ready to collaborate in new ways. To me, that’s one of those foundational agreements for civic technology. You can’t do this without governments making that articulation.  Especially smaller governments.

Cities like New York and Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston – they’re big cities, so the data that they release, all on its own, is compelling because it involves so many people. Smaller governments don’t have that same kind of data. It’s more than just the data itself.

It’s a government’s way of advertising to the world that they’re ready to collaborate in a new way. If you don’t have that, I don’t think you can do civic technology correctly.

Della:  At some point, it would be interesting to have a follow‑on conversation with you, maybe we can pull in some other folks, to talk about what is starting to emerge in the smaller markets. We’ve all heard a lot about Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, et cetera. That might be a really interesting follow‑up conversation.

Mark:  Sure. Absolutely.

Della:  Thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time to talk.

Mark:   I look forward to chatting with you again soon.

You can find the original version of this EngagingCities interview at www.engagingcities.com/article/how-big-civic-tech-and-where-it-going-one-one-mark-headd-accela.

the Clinton Foundation and the new gift economy

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The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer [that] has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs.” (For additional coverage, see Jonathan Chait, “The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency” or Graham, “A Quick Guide to the Questions About Clinton Cash.”)

I don’t think the real issue here is potential bribery. According to the federal bribery statute, 18 U.S. Code § 201, “a public official” receives a bribe if she or he, “directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act …”

So bribery would have been committed if the Clinton Foundation accepted money “in return for” some favorable treatment by Secretary Clinton. That is the kind of quid pro quo that the Justice Department alleges in the pending case of Senator Menendez. But it isn’t how things usually work in power politics, and it isn’t the heart of our systemic problems with money in politics.

A New York Times’  news story, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” suggests how things actually work. A financier gives the Clinton Foundation $31.5 million. At an event with Elton John and Shakira to celebrate the gift, Ms. Clinton lauds the donor’s “remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination,” … adding: “I love this guy, and you should, too.” The same financier later on receives US State Department approval for a joint venture with a Russian uranium firm that affects control over this military/strategic commodity.

In a contract-based economy, parties agree to some kind of exchange before the goods, services, or money change hands. That has the advantage of efficiency and reliability. But when it comes to money and politics, such an agreement has the disadvantage of being a felony that can lead to imprisonment of no more than 15 years. There is an alternative, however–the older culture known as a gift economy. In a gift economy, goods circulate because A gives presents to B in the hopes that B will later give favors to A, but A studiously avoids any contract or explicit expectation.

The traditional reason is honor: it’s dishonorable in many societies to expect a return. In the current political environment, honor has the additional buttress of 18 U.S. Code § 201.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial, after raising “questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation,” hastens to acknowledge: “Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton.” However, the editorial warns, “accusations … will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public. [Hillary Clinton] needs to do a lot more, because this problem is not going away.”

I’m actually not sure what Ms. Clinton could do or say that would reduce criticism of the nexus between huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, favorable treatment of its donors by the US government, and personal benefits to the Clinton family. It’s a gift economy, and exhaustive investigation is unlikely to reveal a quid pro quo or lead to any legal action (or legal exoneration).

Donors to the Clinton Foundation don’t necessarily know what they want when they give; they may have a mix of motivations, including altruism. The Clintons don’t take specific actions for donors just because of the money. But they do accept their gifts at glitzy events with Shakira and express their love for the donors. As in Beowulf, “treasures will change hands and each side will treat /the other with gifts; across the gannet’s bath,/ over the broad sea, whorled prows will bring/ presents and tokens” (Heaney trans., lines 1859-63) The public can see what this amounts to, with or without additional disclosures. The question is whether voters should tolerate it.

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Manassas Community Resources App

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Case: Manassas Community Resources App

Apr 24 '15
Author: 
Kathryn Bussey
The "Your Manassas Community Resource App” combines the features of a standard "city hall" smartphone application with an integrated activities and events platform. This innovation allows for not only reporting issues to the city, but also better educates citizens as to the positive activities and events being offered city-wide.

San Diego District Attorney’s Youth Advisory Board

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Case: San Diego District Attorney's Youth Advisory Board

Apr 24 '15
Author: 
Kathryn Bussey
The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office engages diverse at-risk high school students to design public service campaigns for their peers that address difficult choices and issues their communities face daily. The DA’s Office establishes mentoring relationships with students and helps them develop leadership skills.

Reducing the Risks of Catastrophic Wildfires in Flagstaff

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This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how a cross-sector collaboration partnership created the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project (FWPP) to reduce the risks of wildfires in Flagstaff, Arizona.

From the Intersector Project

Years of extensive wildland fire suppression in the Southwest has left many forests with unnaturally high levels of forest fuels, like dense undergrowth and thick litter fall. This has changed the natural fire ecology from low, fast-burning wildfires, to much larger crown fires that kill trees and undermine landscape integrity. In 2010, a wildfire and subsequent flooding on the east side of the San Francisco Peaks, just north of Flagstaff, Arizona, caused over $150 million in combined suppression and recovery. A similar wildfire in either of the two Flagstaff watersheds could potentially flood much of downtown and/or disrupt 50 percent of the city’s water supply, resulting in significant long-term financial and life-style impacts within the community. Recognizing the need for preventative action, a partnership between the city, county, state, and federal governments, with support from local non-profit and for-profit organizations, has resulted in the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project (FWPP). With Flagstaff Wildland Fire Management Officer Paul Summerfelt coordinating FWPP activities, FWPP plans to mitigate the risk of potentially devastating wildfires in Flagstaff’s critical watershed areas by managing forest fuels and restoring natural ecosystem functions. This will include thinning out dense forests and reintroducing a low-intensity fire regime. To fund FWPP, Flagstaff passed a $10 million municipal bond with 74 percent approval rate, making FWPP the only forest restoration work on National Forests funded through municipal bonds.

IP_Flagstaff

“The strength of a management group is much better when it’s not just a single agency. When you get different people involved, they see things differently and everybody brings something into the collaborative process… If you want to go fast go by yourself, but if you want to make a difference, go with others.”— Paul Summerfelt, Flagstaff Fire Department’s Wildland Fire Management Officer

This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.

Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/flagstafffire_arizona/ (Download the case study here.)

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Time to Write

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A friend of mine recently asked for advice on finding time to blog – on taking the ideas that percolate around in your head and actually getting them down on (virtual) paper.

It’s possible that I’m not the best person to respond to this question – I have been writing most of my life, and I journaled daily long before I took to a more public medium. So it does take me time to write, but it doesn’t take me that much time.

I typically spend 30 minutes to an hour on each post. Sometimes longer – particularly if my writing is punctuated by interruptions from other parts of my life. Which is always. (I’ve already walked away from this post three times, and I’m hardly three paragraphs in!)

More broadly, though, I find the issue of “time” to be a red herring.

That is, “I don’t have time,” is often a cover – at least for me – for other issues. Sometimes it simply means, “I don’t have time…because I am prioritizing other things.”

But for me the issue with writing is different. I love to write. I am happy to find time for it and to prioritize it in my life. And yet for years I told myself that I didn’t have time to write publicly.

For me, I’d say, there are two things that are hard about blogging.

The first is what I called the ego of public life in my inaugural post. Acting publicly – speaking publicly, writing publicly, existing in any way within the public sphere – takes agency. It’s not only feeling like you have something to say, but…feeling like you have a right to say it.

Like there’s a value to saying it.

A lot of people don’t have that. I know I didn’t.

There’s no reason to make time for an activity that has no value.

The second challenge is that blogging, as I’ve taken to saying, requires a willingness to be imperfect in public.

Writing is such a personal act. It’s a quiet art that bears your soul and tries to express it through a powerful, but ultimately imperfect, means.

I’ve been a prolific writer throughout my life, but until recently, I shared relatively little of that writing with others. When I did share a piece, it was only those few which I had worked on extensively – which I had written and rewritten until I felt they truly conveyed what I was trying to say.

There’s no luxury to do that when it comes to blogging.

Then you really won’t have the time. You can’t spend whole days on one post when you’ve got other things to do in life. You have to just write what comes out and hope for the best.

In the nearly two years I’ve been blogging, I’ve written a few posts that I’m really proud of, and I’ve written a fair number of posts that that I’m not too terribly embarrassed by. But I’ve also written a lot of posts scraped together from reused text or other things I’ve stumbled across.

A lot of days are just mediocre, but…I’d rather accept those days than miss out on the good ones.

That’s really hard to do. It’s really hard to not put your best foot forward, to do what you can and accept whatever comes out. It’s hard to be imperfect in public.

Those may be my own challenges. I imagine other people have issues of their own.

So I guess my advice to anyone wondering how to find the “time to write” is this –

Make a commitment to how often you will write and stick with it. No matter how you feel about the writing, stick to your commitment.

And spend some time thinking to yourself – what does it mean to not have the time? What are you prioritizing instead? What ideas or concerns about the process give you pause?

Figure out why you don’t have the time…then get over it.

(Or not. You know, whatever you’re in to. I won’t judge.)

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On the Commodification of Human Discovery

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Not so long ago, the language of “intellectual property” (IP) was the only serious way of talking about creative works and inventions.  Copyright and patents provided the default framework for explaining how someone’s bright idea grew into a marketable product, and how that in turn contributed to economic growth and human progress. It was a neat, tidy, reassuring story.  It had an irresistible simplicity – and the endorsement of the ultimate authority, government.

And then…. the pluriversal realities of life came storming the citadel gates!  Over the past fifteen or twenty years, the monoculture narrative of IP has been attacked by indigenous cultures, seed activists, healthcare experts, advocates for the poor, the academy, and especially users of digital technologies.  It has become increasingly clear that the standard IP story, whatever its merits on a smaller scale, in competitive industries, is mostly a self-serving, protectionist weapon in the hands of Hollywood, record labels, book publishers, Big Pharma and other multinational IP industries. 

We can thank the authors of a new anthology for helping to explain how the standard IP narrative is profoundly flawed, and how an array of challengers are showing how knowledge-creation so often emerges through social commons.

Free Knowledge:  Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery, edited by Patricia W. Elliott and Daryl H. Hepting, provides a refreshing survey of the many realms in which corporations are enclosing shared knowledge -- and a sampling of commons that are democratizing the production and control of knowledge. (The book is published by University of Regina Press, and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

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job openings in civic renewal (9)

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This is the ninth in a series of occasional posts with lists of open positions:

Executive Director, Opportunity Nation: “Opportunity Nation is a bipartisan, multi-sector national campaign comprised of more than 300 employers, educational institutions, faith-based and civic organizations, community groups and nonprofits working to expand economic mobility and close the opportunity gap in America. As it moves to execute on an ambitious two-year strategic plan, Opportunity Nation seeks a skilled leader, influencer, storyteller, and champion to usher in a new era of growth and collective impact as Executive Director.”

Program Manager, Healthy Democracy: “If you’re passionate about political reform and civic engagement, this position is a unique opportunity to advance your values while making a lasting and positive impact on democracy. Healthy Democracy is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in Portland Oregon. Our mission is to elevate the voice of citizens in our democracy in order to give voters information they can trust.  Our signature program, the Citizens Initiative Review (CIR), brings representative groups of citizens together to fairly and thoroughly evaluate high-profile ballot initiatives for the benefit of all voters. It’s a new and highly effective approach to democratic reform.”

Research Director, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (soon to be led by the excellent Danielle Allen): “Working closely with the Center’s Director, faculty, and fellows, the RD will develop and manage a portfolio of collaborative projects and dissemination projects that would yield a stream of work outputs of interest to broad audiences, and support the intellectual work of grant development to sustain this portfolio of activities. The RD will participate in thematic seminars and conferences, and will work with the Director on their development. … The RD will assist with the development of the newly launched Fellows-in-Residency program, including helping to plan and oversee a weekly seminar, and evaluating its progress. The RD will assist with short and long-range planning to meet objectives, policy development and implementation, and other projects such as writing the annual report and other communications.”

Budget and Fiscal Administrator at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts (where I work!). See the Tufts Careers website, and enter requisition 15001129.

Program Administrator, Talloires Network (also based at Tufts). The Talloires Network is a coalition of universities — 340 institutions in 75 countries — that are moving beyond the ivory tower to tackle pressing societal problems. The Network is the primary global alliance committed to strengthening the civic roles and social responsibilities of higher education. It mobilizes its members to improve community conditions and, in the process, to educate students to be leaders for change. … The Program Administrator is responsible for organizing and managing conferences, workshops and other meetings; leading office management and systems; managing the annual MacJannet Prize Program; contributing to other core programs; and managing membership affairs. “

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Scanlon’s “Giving Desert its Due”

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A couple of years back Tim Scanlon did a blog post and comment-section discussion on PEA Soup. Here’s one bit:

In earlier work, including my Tanner Lectures on the significance of choice and Chapter 6 of What We Owe to Each Other, I rejected the idea of moral desert because I identified it with the idea that the fact that someone has behaved badly can make it a good thing that he or she should suffer some loss. I still find the latter view morally unacceptable. But it now seems to me that this rejection of desert is too quick. Desert should not be identified with this retributivist idea. There is, I believe, a distinct category of valid desert-based justifications. A desert-based justification for treating a person in a certain way claims that this form of treatment is made appropriate simply by facts about what that person is like, or what he or she has done. By simply, I mean without need to appeal to other factors such as the good consequences of treating the person in this way or to the fact that this treatment is called for by some institution or practice that is independently justified. Moral blame, gratitude, and some honors and distinctions can be justified in this way, and these justifications do not presuppose that the qualities that form the basis for justification are all under the person’s control. The responses are justified simply by what the person is like, or has done. By contrast, legal punishment, insofar as it involves forms of hard treatment such as fines or imprisonment, cannot be justified purely on the basis of desert, nor can significant differences in economic reward be justified in this way. I argue for these views in “Giving Desert Its Due,” which has just appeared in Philosophical Explorations.

I’m just today reading the article in Philosophical Explanations, and it has some interesting features that bear on some of my recent work with Daniel Levine. For one thing, he tries to argue that when we distinguish moral from legal blame–that is, when we distinguish blaming from punishment–we can start to justify withdrawing our personal willingness to have special relationships and obligations to a person based on what they are like or what they have done. For instance, if your male neighbor abuses his wife, it’s reasonable to find yourself less trusting of him, less willing to enter into friendship or shared projects, and less happy for him when things go well in his life… and thus less unhappy when things go badly. (page 11)

But what’s important is that these attitudes are all of the “special” designation: conditional attitudes which we cannot grant equally to all and thus appropriately deprive most people of–and now the neighbor as well. It is appropriate to “withdraw good will” towards a person if they act in certain ways. This is the distinction: everyone, regardless of their behavior, deserves certain unconditional kinds of respect. But conditional forms of respect are conditioned and thus winnable and loseable: esteem, deference, and honor; disesteem, disdain, and contempt.

So far, so good. Now, we know on Scanlon’s account that in some sense responsibility is merely a matter of attribution: so we blame and praise and engage in all the special interpersonal relationships because our actions are attributed to our character. We don’t just blame or praise an action, we blame or praise the person for being the kind of person who would engage in that action.

Now as it happens, I am not convinced that we need to so quickly conflate acting and being. Because what happens in punishment, at least in our society, is that everyone simultaneously withdraws good will towards the prisoner, while simultaneously we become willing to inflict suffering upon them. Scanlon focuses on this second element, and deplores it as not appropriate when we decide not just to acquiesce (by being less unhappy) to their suffering, but to actively visit it upon them, to act (often at our own expense, and obviously so in the criminal justice system) to make them worse off.

Interestingly, this rule-following punishment that Scanlon deplores is at the heart of the social production of norms in community. It’s at the heart of common pool resource management, including the management of the common pool of social reasons and thus our community and its mores, so there’s a strong practical sense in which Scanlon is probably wrong. More on this in moment.

Where Scanlon really seems to go wrong is in the special kind of deprivation in the widespread withdrawal of special relationships that Scanlon calls for in addressing the wrongdoer. It takes an odd kind of individualist contractualism to assume that the universal deprivation of good will and willingness to share projects is somehow unobjectionable. Shared projects are at the heart of human agency. They are the basis not just of the special respect of friendship and love, but of the shared practices that make dignity possible. We have ample evidence of this, that the conditional and unconditional interpersonal relationships are not as easily prised apart as Scanlon claims here.

I think we must probably accept that Scanlon has the wrong end of this problem. Probably it should work something like this: we deem it acceptable to visit suffering on another in a directed manner as a response to normative failures like wrongdoing. But we do so under the understanding that the punishment is a part of the restoration of the conditions of special interpersonal relationships–of good will. We punish so that we can go back to trusting and collaborating. Anything else is inappropriate. Thus we restore the priority of the conditional over the (allegedly) unconditional reactive attitudes, acknowledging as we do so that these never really were unconditional attitudes in the first place, that reactivity always trump unconditionality and honor always trumped dignity.

I need to think some more about what that means for the latter half of the paper, where Scanlon tries to tie these questions of punishment and moral blame to economic distributions and redistributions. I’m sympathetic to his conclusions there, but having undermined his foundations I’ll have to see if I can justify an alternative means to that end.