The proposed bill also requires that schools estimate the effect of educating students who are not citizens of the United States on the quality of education received by students who are citizens. Additionally, a provision of the bill permits law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of persons at a stop without probable cause and provides permission to the state to create a misdemeanor classification for immigrants who are unable to produce identification at the time of a stop.

The proposal of the bill is an invidious attempt at encroaching on the rights of immigrant children in public schools, and in a parallel vein, has deleterious significances for immigrant families. The implication of this bill is clear; it will result in the unnecessary harassment of immigrant children, subjecting them to unequal treatment and creating a classification doctrine that would lead to discrimination and fear amongst this population. The bill proposal also has the potential to subject documented students to arbitrary searches, investigations, and harassment by school officials. This is a plausible prediction, being that there is not an ideal avenue of determining a student’s immigration status whereby only illegal immigrant students are quarantined for document verification. Additionally, the same logic is applied to stop searches; even though law enforcement officers have a wide discretion while conducting stops and investigations, one cannot evade the inevitable occurrence of racial profiling as a result of an officer capriciously requesting persons to produce their immigration documents. I infer the possibility of racial profiling, as the determination of an officer to check a person’s immigration documents has to be based on a rationale—and that rationale will more than likely rest on the outward characteristics of that individual.

The only means of circumventing racial profiling would be for officers to request document verification of all persons they stop, and such an assumptions lies on tenuous reasoning and preposterousness. Hence, the Missouri bill proposal signifies that an officer may stop and search an individual based on his or her observed race and ethnicity— and the primary target of this profiling would be Hispanics; as of 2009, over 200,000 Hispanics reside in Missouri (PEW Hispanic Center, 2009). It is here that the 14th Amendment becomes crucial, as if this bill succeeds, this group and other immigrant populations will encounter discriminatory treatment by law enforcement officials. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law for all persons within their jurisdiction. Therefore, discriminatory targeting of undocumented students and/or immigrant persons would infringe on an individual’s 14th Amendment rights to equality.

There have been other similar bill proposals that have been raised in other states, particularly Arizona, Texas, and Alabama, and the US Department of Justice has already challenged some of these bills’ constitutionality. The most prominent example of an overturn of a similar bill is in the case of Plyer v Doe (1982), in which the majority opinion ruled that undocumented immigrant students must be allowed a public education (from kindergarten through 12th grades) equal to US citizens and permanent residents. This issue was brought to court when the state of Texas required local school districts to prohibit access to education to undocumented children and to withhold state funding to children not legally admitted in the United States. This landmark case remains precedent and has vital significance for the assurance of equal rights to immigrant children by prohibiting certain school practices that would engender discrimination.
Being that any decisions made by the SCOTUS become the supreme law of the land, the Missouri bill proposal, if it comes to fruition, cannot bar access of education to illegal children. However, the state can inject despondency and discomfort in the lives of these children through certain legislations that would weaken their rights without blatantly violating the Plyer decision. If the Missouri bill proposal takes effect, undocumented students and their parents would encounter fear. Being that at least one of these children’s parents may be undocumented, lack of knowledge of U.S. laws would possibly cause parents to suspend their children’s education (pulling them out of school), out of fear of these parents being prosecuted due to their status.

The effect of this is consequential, as education plays a vital role in human capital and largely determines one’s career attainment and earning potential. According to Passel and Cohn (2009), Senior Demographers at the PEW Hispanic Center, out of the 11.9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, 76% are of Hispanic origin, and roughly 6.8 million documented and undocumented immigrant students are enrolled in elementary and high schools. Being that such a sizeable portion of immigrant children are in the nation’s school system, care should be taken in ensuring equal access of education to these children without creating any situation that would infringe on their rights, single them out, or make it unbearable for any child to remain in school. It is clear by statistical evidence that immigrant children have a higher rate of ending high school prematurely than native born children. For example, immigrant Latinos are more likely to drop out of school than native born Latinos 52% in comparison to 25% respectively (PEW Hispanic Center, 2010). Because these immigrant children are already at a high risk of prematurely ending their school career; it is nonsensical to create any further constitutional restraints that would impede or affect their educational success, as the effects of doing has dire consequences for employment prospects and criminal engagement. For example, studies, including Lochner and Moretti (2001) have repeatedly demonstrated the effect of education on crime. From their study of prison inmates, arrest data, and self-reports, the authors have asserted that high school graduation and arrest rates are negatively correlated; likewise, participation in criminal activity is positively correlated with high school dropout rates.

Therefore, being that education has an impact on future engagement in crime and employment opportunities, the possible effects of the Missouri bill proposal would serve to injure undocumented students’ educational attainments and future prospects of social mobility. If the Missouri bill proposal (if enacted) causes even one child to be removed from the school setting, the suspension of that child’s education is “one child too much”. Senator Kraus needs to refocus his energy on ways to improve the education of children in the Missouri school districts instead of lobbying for a proposal that would achieve the opposite of what the SCOTUS intended and the Constitution guaranteed.

References
Hancock, J. (2012, January 12). Proposal would require missouri schools to verify
students’ immigration status. The Kansas City Star. Retrived from http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/12/3366206/proposal-would-require-missouri.html

Plyer v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982).

Passel, J.S., & Cohn, D. (2009). A portrait of unauthorized immigrants in the united states. PEW Hispanic Center.

Fry, R. (2010). Hispanics, high school drop outs and the GED. PEW Hispanic Center.

Lochner, L., & Moretti E. (2001). The effect of education on crime: Evidence from prison inmates, arrests, and self-reports. [No. 8605]. NBER Working Paper Series

Detail from James Gillray's 'New Morality'. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

‘Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.’ Thus writes David Brooks in a New York Times piece giving advice to the rebellious and dissatisfied youth of today. If you are one of these youth, Brooks’ advice is that your rebellion should be grounded in a past tradition:

‘If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.’

Many years ago Bernard Crick made a similar point in his book In Defence of Politics. Conservatives anchoring themselves in tradition, he argued, forget that radical, dissenting progressivism is just as much anchored in tradition. ‘The conservative’s choice of being traditional or anti-traditional is meaningless.’

This is a fine point for an Englishman to make. The Burkean conservative claims the mantle of the Parliament of 1688, yet even the most extreme radical has roots that go deeper, into the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Nonconformists of the Civil War decades. Conversely, it was Lord Melbourne, the spokesman for the party of progress, who gave Queen Victoria, the emblem of tradition, the most conservative advice ever given to a sovereign: ‘Never try to do good; you only end up getting into scrapes.’

And you hardly need to look to English history to find the meaninglessness of the conservative’s tradition/anti-tradition dichotomy. Bismarck, whom Frederick William described as a ‘red reactionary smelling of blood’, clung to his agrarian Junker roots against all the progressive influences of a privileged liberal education. Yet he went on to found the welfare state, half a century before the rest of Europe caught up, and to create a kind of nation the world had never seen before.

Radicalism, then, can be as sunk in tradition as conservatism. But should it be? Brooks does not say so, but the reasons radicalism ought to align itself with tradition concern moral philosophy.

Anybody hoping to do good in the world, whether by conserving, reforming, or revolutionising it, must have a clear idea of what it means to do good. There are only two ways of determining this – two metaethical theories – that have really influenced politics. One claims that doing good consists of making as many people as happy as possible. The other claims the concept of goodness cannot make sense apart from a notion of the proper function or end for things of a particular kind. To be a good person is to admirably fulfil the proper function, or serve the proper end, of a human life; a good society is one in which people are provided what they need in order to do so.

Of course there are other metaethical theories, but what political influence have they really had? G.E. Moore’s theory that goodness is a non-natural property, perceived through moral intuition, is said to have influenced John Maynard Keynes. And he definitely influenced politics. Certainly Moore’s reminder that people sometimes pursue intuited and intangible goals may have inspired Keynes’ attention to the so-called ‘animal spirits’ at work in the economy. And yet did Keynes need this reminder from Moore? It seems a historical extravagance to think so.

There are also various constructivist and social contract theories around, which some people might take offence at my having dismissed as not politically influential. But social contract theory in its authentic Hobbesian form is really a version of the first of the above-listed theories. It identifies the good with the maximisation of happiness, the social contract being the reliable mechanism for ensuring it. Alternately, in its corrupted Lockean version, it is a form of the second theory; the social contract and the natural rights of man flow out of the purposes our creator had in making us social beings. In its modern Rawlsian form social contract theory is not a metaethical theory at all, and anyway has not been massively influential over modern politics, not, at least, if modern politics is held to involve the governed as much as the governors.

Now out of the two main politically influential metaethical theories, the second leads very quickly to an emphasis on the importance of tradition. Where are we meant to learn the proper end of a human life, if not from some tradition? Looking at nature doesn’t help. The only purpose for which, according to our best science, nature has built us is to help enlarge the possibilities for a certain macromolecule to make copies of itself. That is not morally inspiring. Indeed to morally endorse the ends for which natural selection employs the human phenotype leads us down a very dangerous path. ‘That way’, to quote Alex Rosenberg, ‘lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism).’ There have been a few interesting attempts recently to arrive at more positive forms of moral naturalism, such as Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness. But it is possible to claim that these are underdetermined, if not undermined, by modern biology.

If nature doesn’t give any morally satisfying answer to the question ‘what is the purpose, function, or end of a human life?’ does that mean that only tradition can do so? Probably not. But being embedded within a tradition does give the only semblance of authority to our answers. This was the main point of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Novelists, artists, and philosophers often make guesses at what life is all about. But how we should determine which guesses are better than others is completely unclear. ‘We’re here on earth just to fart around,’ wrote Kurt Vonnegut. Well, why not? And then, at the same time, why?

The only real hope of convincing somebody not already convinced that your vision of the good life is the correct one lies in pointing out to her that she is already committed to that vision herself, following from her commitment to some shared tradition. As a liberal, as a democrat, as a Christian, as a socialist, she must think that this is what life is for – this is, it would seem, the closest one can hope to come to having right and wrong answers to questions about ultimate ends.

And yet, of course, it’s tremendously limited. This authority, or pseudo-authority extends only to the perimeters of a single tradition, and has only as much force as that tradition has internal unity and consistency.

This might push one to adopt what looks like the more natural and objective measure of goodness found in the first of the two metaethical theories listed above. Applied to politics, it places major demands on social science. It requires a policy, program, or revolution to be justified in terms of the happiness it is likely to provide, rather than in terms of its embodying some correct vision of ultimate ends. To make such a justification requires a social science with considerable predictive power, a social science that can predict when, under what conditions, and how much people will be happy. We seem a long way off having anything like this, as I’ve mentioned before. Indeed, a chapter of After Virtue is dedicated to arguing that predictions of even the near future of society are forever beyond our power to make.

Thus we might be pushed back again to the other theory, that what we do, both as individuals and as societies should be determined by beliefs about ultimate ends. But, again, agreement on these beliefs seems to require mutual embededness in a single tradition. None of the great moral conflicts of the future are likely to involve only stakeholders committed to a single tradition.

More than this, conservatives like Brooks and MacIntyre (I’m hurting somebody by putting them in the same sentence and I’m not sorry), perceiving that tradition hardly plays the role they would like it to play in people’s moral decision-making, recommend that we all actively embed ourselves into a tradition. The problem is that I suspect we all know deep down what a tradition is, namely a set of reasons for doing a set of things there are no good reasons to do. Once you’ve engaged your critical faculties, disengaging them is often impossible. Yet this is what would be involved in making the kind of uncritical allegiance to the moral authority of tradition that conservatives want us to make, whereby tradition would speak within us as a kind of second nature.

This, then, is the dilemma for the young people dissatisfied with the current order of things Brooks is addressing. If they – actually we – set up general happiness as our objective moral standard, we have no guarantee that our projects will help us to meet it. If we commit to some vision of ultimate ends, we have nothing but appeals to tradition by which to justify our commitment, and tradition won’t work the way we need it to. What, then, should we do? Create a new tradition, I suppose. That, however, might take a few centuries. For now just fart around.

I ended up calling the police. Within minutes an officer responded to the scene and issued a citation to the couple that had left their dog in the car. Having two older sisters that are veterinarians, I realized that the animal, while not locked in the automobile for too long, may have suffered from minor heat stroke and should probably have been taken to the vet as a precautionary measure. The dog’s owners, however, merely cracked open the window and went back into the gym to resume their exercise routines.

Such treatment of pets, and animals more generally, seems far too common; and most likely, this dog’s owners probably did not think their actions equated to animal abuse any more than Archie Bunker thought that his routine slurs were racist. In many ways, this entire situation speaks to the larger question of whether animals actually have rights. Lyle Munro’s recent examination of the animal rights movement “in theory and practice” speaks to the fact that our understanding of the issue is empirically poor. In the article, he recommends a greater working partnership between research scholars and animal activists.

As social scientists, we would undoubtedly benefit from a greater empirical understanding of the animal rights movement, although the underlying theoretical conundrum will persist: Do animals actually have rights? Perhaps Joel Best put it best when he once told me that the animal rights movement will never truly succeed because too many people like hamburgers. We do, after all, slaughter a wide variety of animals for a whole host of reasons: consumption, material goods, overpopulation, and the list could go on. Presumably if given their choice, these animals would have passed on their contributions to human survival and happiness. On a smaller scale, many pet owners like myself effectively keep their animals as captives of sorts, even if mine seem content with their full bellies and excessive sleeping. In my own research on zoophilia online communities (see Maratea and Kavanaugh for how this relates to new directives in deviance research), I found that many zoophiles posted statements that mainstream animal lovers like myself actually violate animals’ rights if we support the “Bob Barker approach” to spaying and neutering, and, more importantly, if we refuse to satisfy the sexual needs of our beloved animal partners. Like you (presumably), I scoff at such a ridiculous notion. Yet, this example, however distasteful, speaks to the difficulty in uniformly defining whether animals have rights (which they cannot possibly comprehend).

Most animal lovers will probably agree – to varying degrees – that we should protect animal welfare. Rights, however, are a tricky concept; they are purely human constructs that are applied in an entirely subjective manner. For example, the idea of universal human rights might exist on paper, but has certainly never been achieved in practice. How then, does a species that cannot objectively respect the rights of other human beings reconcile whether life forms that are largely considered inferior are endowed with similar innate rights?

Additional Readings:

The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature by Lyle Munro

Screwing the Pooch: Legitimizing Accounts in a Zoophilia Online Community by R.J .Maratea

Deviant Identity in Online Contexts: New Directives in the Study of a Classic Concept by R.J. Maratea and Philip R. Kavanaugh

Photo courtesy The Fairfield Bay Animal Protection League (www.ffbanimalshelter.org)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Achieving happiness is easy. I don’t mean eudaimonia – that oversophisticated happiness for Pinot-snuffling yuppies. I mean ordinary, practical happiness for ordinary, practical folk: utility. Achieving eudaimonia is definitely not easy; at your very approach it dances away like a will-o’-the-wisp on gossamer winds of pretentiousness. But utility? Utility is solid and graspable. In fact, Australians say ‘utility’ to refer to what Americans call a ‘pick-up truck’. A ute, we normally say. What’s more blunt and practical than that? Eudaimonia is a concept for sprinkling on your puy lentils to add that certain je ne sais quoi. Utility, on the other hand, is a concept you could change your sparkplugs with.

So, achieving ute is easy. Here’s how you do it. Start with the things you have. Now exchange them with people for other things you would prefer to have. People will participate in these exchanges whenever their preferences are different to yours. This will be often, since humans are psychologically diverse. Keep exchanging for as long as your preferences fail to be maximised, and you’ll always be getting closer to full happiness.

As long as there are free markets, the opportunity for exchange will be there. You may not like where you are, but you can always exchange your way to somewhere better. Suppose, for example, you inherit a large manor house from your parents, but you don’t like manor houses. Suppose, also, that you’ve always wanted to be a collector of comic books, but you don’t own a single one. Blast! But exchange provides the way out of this cruel trap. In fact, it provides the way out of all cruel traps. More money than sense? Buy yourself some education! All dressed up and nowhere to go? Exchange some of your clothes for invitations to exciting events! Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink? Find somebody who prefers non-potable water to potable water, and let the trading begin!

Why does it somehow happen, then, that markets are relatively free and yet people aren’t moving towards full satisfaction? There are three main explanations. Maybe people are already fully satisfied. Maybe they’re refusing to exchange on account of some perversion. Or maybe they’re screwing up. (There is a fourth possible explanation, which is that some factor external to the whole system of exchange is causing interference. This possibility threatens to undermine the whole theory by introducing untestable ceteris paribus clauses into its main principles. Let’s never talk about it again.) So, as I said, there are THREE explanations. The third requires the introduction of a new concept. It’s possible to screw up by being mistaken about your preferences or by forming false expectations. This is why we need the safety net.

The safety net is a familiar concept from the circus. The tightrope walker, for example, is meant to walk across a rope, but sometimes she makes mistakes. So, as she’s training, they put a net under her. Otherwise she would fall. See? Safety net. Likewise, a free market lets you exchange your way to happiness, but just in case you make mistakes and make yourself less happy, there’s the safety net, in the form of the welfare system. It keeps you from getting too unhappy as a result of your own maladroit exchanges. You could also call it ‘training wheels’. It’s for people who haven’t quite got exchange right yet – people whose hedonic balance is a little off. Don’t worry, little darlings. We’ll catch you. Now, back on the rope.

I said back on the rope! Yes, you see? The problem with the safety net is that it also catches the aforementioned perverts, who simply refuse to help themselves to greater happiness through exchange. Imagine a lazy circus student who doesn’t even try to walk the rope, tumbling straight off every time and using the safety net as a big hammock until somebody prods him off. That’s a good reason not to make the safety net too comfortable. Make it out of some kind of tough material so it chafes the skin, or, better yet, rig it up like the rope-beds in the hostel described by Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers: every morning the ropes go slack and oversleepers are dropped onto the hard wood.

The above should give you everything you need not only to achieve happiness but also to build the good society. So why is there so much debate about political economy? Because people don’t understand these simple principles. Maybe they didn’t read The Constitution of Liberty, because it was too long. Now they can read this blog post, which is much shorter with no loss in content.

Take Mitt Romney. He recently got into trouble for saying he wasn’t concerned about the very poor, because there was a safety net for them. That’s perfectly sensible, as I have proven. People like Paul Krugman might come whinging with their statistics about tax rates and poverty, but they ought to listen to Adam Smith, who said ‘I have no great faith in political arithmetic’ (Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V). The theory I’ve just fully outlined requires no reference to numbers; it’s a piece of folk psychology. Treating it as some kind of scientific theory, tractable in terms of quantitative laws with specific values for its variables runs it straight into the objection that all attempts to do so hitherto have rendered it either false or so generic as to be vacuous (see my previous post, which asserts the same point, also without evidence). Let’s never talk about that again either.

Back to Romney, who next said something even more sensible, which is that if there are holes in the safety net, he’s happy to repair them. Good thinking! Imagine if the circus school net-maker wasn’t vigilant! The real problem is the next thing he said, which is that he wants to focus on the middle classes, rather than the very poor or the very rich. Certainly focusing on the very rich would be silly and pointless. They’re miles above the safety net! They’re not just walking the tightrope; they’re flying over it, somersaulting off unicycles and pogo sticks with big goofy grins on their faces. The middle classes are also above the tightrope, leaping up to swing on trapezes at various levels. But that means Romney’s idea is foolish. If government starts trying to help the middle classes, this will involve putting safety nets at different levels above the tightrope instead of below it! But if you do that, the nets will get in the way of the performances! This is what economists call ‘crowding out’.

In conclusion, Romney’s views are horribly confused and show a basic failure to understand political economy, which consists, to recap, of the following two principles: (1) people make themselves happier by exchanging, and (2) government’s only role is to provide a safety net for people who suck at exchanging. Deviating from these principles, Romney will end up wrapping up the whole circus in safety nets like a crazy incontinent spider.

Perhaps, however, his social philosophy is not the one I have just outlined. Maybe he is applying some heretical social philosophy, one that draws from a stock of concepts going beyond those of exchange and safety nets. If so, he must tell us so, and what his new, deviant social philosophy is. But then he also shouldn’t confuse the matter by using a term like ‘safety net’, which immediately signals commitment to a classical theory admirable in its straightforwardness, if nothing else.