If there is anything that contemporary liberals agree about, it is that we ought to do more to fight poverty. In the richest country in the world, it is a scandal that more than one person in ten falls below the poverty line (even after food stamps, welfare, etc. is included in their income.) Despite massive increases in our nation’s wealth (measured by gains in Gross Domestic Product) over the past 40 years, the percentage of persons living in poverty has not changed much.

Liberals want to solve the problem of poverty by providing the poor with the same opportunities that middle class folks have through basic income support, public education, wider access to health care and child care, etc .

Conservatives, of course, argue that there is little we can do about poverty. If a person is poor, it is her fault for not working hard enough, or not making good decisions about getting an education or saving money. The best we can do is let the free market punish people for their bad decisions and, if they remain poor, so be it.

What both liberals and conservatives agree on is that the poor are irrational when they don’t take advantage of their opportunities. The poor tend to waste their money, fail to develop habits necessary to participate in the work place, drop out of school, or have too many children at too young an age.

Liberals and conservatives disagree about what explains the irrationality–conservatives believe the best explanation is individual moral weakness. Liberals believe it is lack of opportunity, a history of racism or some other form of discrimination that undermines self-respect, structural problems in the economy, etc.

Philosopher Charles Karelis argues they are both wrong about why the poor fail to make use of their opportunities. He argues that the poor are perfectly rational in declining to take advantage of opportunities, up to a point. I think he is right about this and his view indicates some new directions for liberal thinking on this issue.

Karelis’s recent article is behind a subscription wall. This article in the Washington Post provides a cursory explanation of his view.

The following thought experiment (similar to the one used by Karelis) illustrates the basic idea. Suppose you have to travel 10 miles to the market to get food for your family, you have no transportation available, and only 5 dollars in your pocket. Suppose someone offers to take you the first mile for 1 dollar. Karelis argues that it is irrational for you to accept the ride. The cost is too great given the fact that you have no guarantee that you can get a ride the rest of the way (and back) or have money to buy groceries when you get there. Only if someone offers you a ride most of the way to the market, leaving you with enough money to purchase groceries, is it rational to accept the ride.

The poor are in a similar situation. We give them welfare, some minimal job training, emergency health care, or access to student loans but none of this gets them close to escaping poverty given the obstacles they confront. Thus, they are not irrational when they spend their meagre income on booze or drugs, have children when they are 17, or drop out of school. The cost of putting off short-term pleasure for long term gains is too great when the long term gains are so distant and unlikely that they don’t appear to be live options.

The implication for liberalism is that prosperous liberals should not view the poor as being “just like us”–disposed to reason in the same way we do when presented with opportunities. When you have enough resources–good parents, good genes, a good education–the American Dream looks achievable and the path to it well trodden and well marked. But if one is not so fortunate, the light at the end of the tunnel really is more than likely an on-coming train. Its best to stay clear of the tunnel altogether. Giving the poor the same opportunities the rest of us have will not suffice–the ideal of equality is too thin to give us a  handle on this problem.

If we are going to do anything about poverty it will require more than a few liberal carrots and a big conservative stick. We might have to actually care about their fate (instead of engaging in a lot of cheap moralizing) and do whatever it takes to make our society genuinely inclusive.

Karelis has a book out on the subject. Its certainly on my reading list.

A hat tip to Nina for sending me the Washington Post article.

Philosophers are feeling the heat in France these days: The French finance minister Christine Lagarde (the Sarkozy administration) suggests the French should think less and work harder! This according to The New York Times:

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.” “France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

One might assume her point to be that excessive speculation may lead to a kind of action-paralysis (which may be true), but her comment seems to stem from a perception that if you work hard, you can accumulate wealth, but if you think hard, you can’t work hard. Ergo, if you think, you’ll stay poor, and wealth is good, so thinking must be bad. Huh? For one thing, I would suggest that it is probably a matter of priorities rather than an inherent flaw in the thinking process that most of us who think hard aren’t particularly wealthy. For another, thinking is hard work: the French philosopher and writer Alain Finkielkraut responds in the article that thinking is, in effect, a 24 hour job that you keep on doing even in your sleep. But Finkielkraut takes it one step further, which “sillifies” the entire debate: Not only does he find it offensive that the Sarkozy administration is anti-intellectual; the really offensive thing about President Sarkozy (whom he otherwise supports) is apparently that he is a jogger. Horror of horrors! Finkielkraut points out that all the great philosophers have been walkers, not joggers—a jogging French president is way too American! I hope this whole thing is tongue-in-cheek; otherwise I’d say that’s an excellent example of too much thinking right there…

            Getting back to Lagarde: What’s really amusing about her deliberate deselection of the philosophical tradition is that her appeal to being practical rather than theoretical in order to effectuate change is not new at all; who was it who implied that philosophers had done enough thinking, and the time had come to roll up one’s sleeves and take action? None other than Karl Marx himself: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”…But I’m sure this interesting similarity is unintentional; I doubt that a right-leaning administration such as Sarkozy’s would want to align themselves with Marxism…

Here is a fascinating discussion of Rawls’ senior undergraduate thesis and his early views on religion. It makes you think about how quirky and idiosyncratic the trajectory of intellectual development can be.

 (Rawls is perhaps the most highly regarded political philosopher of the 20th Century.)

I thank each correspondent.  Here are my replies to all (Thea and Charlette having been previously responded to) in order of receipt:

Dwight: I don’t think it is “hostility toward religion” to limit religion as Liberalism tries to.  Your “religious person [who] sees herself as bound to obey a set of overriding obligations imposed on her by God” is not the target of Liberalism’s limits on religious expression.  We want to restrict not her, a citizen in the private domain of the liberal society, and possessed of speech and religion rights, but persons in their public roles in the other, the public domain.  Thus, judges and legislators are to know that their religious duties are irrelevant to the discharge of their public offices –decider of cases or lawmaker.  But the citizen you instanced is not so restrained.   She has every right to her beliefs, and to cross the police line around the comatose Terri Schiavo’s hospital room in an attempt to bring the dying woman water.  The police, on the other hand, have a duty to arrest her when she does.  But no lawmaker and no judge and no chief executive may say, “I know the Supreme Court has said that Ms. Schiavo has a right to have her husband, Michael, represent her interests, and that he has said she would not want to live like this, but my God (Bible, church) disagrees, and this overrides our normal duty to obey the law.”  It is interesting to notice the actual result in that case: the nation acquiesced in the liberal notion of constitutional supremacy and hints of support for a theocratic solution did not catch on.  That was a success story for Liberalism, I should have thought.  

 David: No one would dispute your statement that “not all [people] are reasonable.”  “Reasonable” is a technical term in liberal political philosophy, especially with the late John Rawls (see his The Law of Peoples, Harvard, 1999).  Perhaps the term mainly means “the citizen’s disposition to act reciprocally,” or to offer “fair terms of social cooperation among equals” (Rawls, 87).  So, I cannot lie to you unless I am prepared to allow you to lie to me.  If a person or group repudiates reciprocity, she/he/it is not being reasonable and forfeits its right to the liberal society’s toleration.  So, as to your “religious group’s operational procedures [of] walking onto buses with women and children with the intent of murdering them in the name of their religion,” they do indeed “forfeit their rights and freedom” as you say.  But, Liberalism entirely agrees: Their principle will fail the reciprocity test.  We don’t have to tolerate them.  But Liberalism cannot accept your willingness to deprive of their protected rights any religion “as a whole” based upon what a “small percentage of the group” believes and acts on.  The liberal idea forbids guilt by association.

Amy: Your formulation of what I called above the liberal principle of “reciprocity” is a helpful instance of the principle: Beliefs and actions that don’t infringe on anyone else’s well being or right to their own lifestyle.  Would you agree to add “if and only if” as standing between the two disjuncts?  If so,  I think you’ve captured, in your own words, the essence of the principle.

 Evan: As I’ve suggested above, the principle of killing fails the test of reciprocity, and is thus unreasonable on its face.  No liberal society need suffer it, therefore.  The “right” we have to use the coercive power of the state in suppression of such things is not one likely to be seriously contested.  Moreover, we are entitled to hope for and duty-bound to pursue suitable discourse with such people and groups in the possibility that the reasonable view could come to be their own eventually.  Meantime, we must restrain them and defend ourselves by constitutional means.

Nina: You raise one of the most difficult questions about the moral theory of liberalism as per Kant and Rawls.  How, indeed, can tolerance quarrel with intolerance other than calling it unreasonable?  I tried to deal with that during my 2005 Occasional Lecture Series talk at Mesa as you’ll recall — but I didn’t do a good job of it.  There are people who would  assert, “Prevail over whomever you have to power to.”  Liberalism condemns that as unreasonable.  Perhaps what liberals like Kant and Rawls mean by the term is that, because the above imperative cannot be reciprocated, because it is unfair, there is something about the human reason that finds it impossible.  Not logically impossible.  Impossible to will while still being what we are: a being that has the natural inclination to want to cooperate fairly, and a capacity for the suppression of self interest for a principle.  If one hasn’t felt the pull of that, there is a sense in which he or she is not fully a person.  (Don’t we sometimes institutionalize such a being?)  There are limits, as Kant tried to show, to our understanding.  And, as the suggestive fragments of the pre-Socratics sometimes hinted at.  Thus Heraclitus: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of justice, will find him out.”  Perhaps what Kant meant is like that: The reason is limited in the principles it can agree to.  The principle urging dominance based only on power is beyond the limit.  If there is anything to this in a way that isn’t question-begging, it may help explain an important element in the liberal idea.  

“Atheism Cures Religious Terrorism”

– Bumper sticker observed in San Diego, 2007

I think that one attitude suggested by the above bumper sticker is probably this: Reasonable people should oppose religion because it spawns religious terrorism.  If some liberals are tempted to cheer on that view I would proffer a caution against it.  Not because religion is never associated with terror, of course.  On the contrary.  And not because religion is true (we cannot know that), or a necessary condition of morality.  Rather, because liberals must remember what fidelity to the concept of liberalism amounts to.

Liberalism implies the tolerant society and its companion idea, reasonable pluralism.

A tolerant pluralism will have to consider the place of religions.  These meet a need: The nothingness that preceded and will almost certainly follow our brief surfacing in the stream of time demands consolation.  (This remains broadly true even though some people are proudly Promethean on the point.  They heap scorn on that fate that makes ashes of all our hopes.  With Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, false comfort they disdain.)  Further, regret over our losses, our suffering, demands meaning, which must contain two parts: the first is an explanation for why things happen as they do; the second, a telos, a specification of the goal or end toward which everything is tending.  Religion, by giving life meaning in these senses, provides that comfort for our suffering, that explanation for why things happen as they do, and the specification of that final purpose which is the point of all the building up and eventual tearing down.  The sound and fury do not signify nothing.  This contribution of religion does not cease to be salient when religion’s periodic association with terrorism (and other wrongful acts) is noticed.  The society of justice does not have to tolerate any religion that endorses or encourages violence and is unreasonable.  So, pluralism and tolerance imply tolerance of religions, or at least those that will be reasonable.

To summarize: Religion services human need.  Institutions responsive to need will demand a place in modern pluralistic societies.  The just society will require that the tolerable place-holders in the civil society limit their own theological imperatives (their “laws”) to the direction and assuagement of their particular devotees; and agree that the binding law backing public policy in the democracy is to be formulated according to the constitution subsisting and demanding allegiance quite apart from their own bible or church.  The law of religion cannot be the law of the state, and if the religion agrees, it is deemed reasonable and takes its place at the constitutional society’s table.  At that point, liberals have a duty, I would argue, to tolerate religions, at least those that accept pluralism as a fact about the modern world and practice toleration accordingly.  So, if liberalism entails tolerant pluralism, and pluralism leads to tolerance of those religions loyal to the constitution, liberalism must tolerate religion.  If the San Diego bumper sticker suggests otherwise, then, though it may bring a smile to the lips of some who think of themselves as progressive, it may do an inadvertant disservice to the liberal cause. 

I have been known to advocate for a moral politics; but not a state-imposed morality. A.C. Grayling has it right.

“What is right is the closely allied idea that what those who run the state machine, whether as politicians or civil servants, and those who influence them materially through NGO and interest group activities, should always be constrained by ethical considerations, and answerable to them. What is wrong is the idea that this unexceptionable claim entitles us to think of the state itself as an agent possessed of moral duties. The state is not an entity separate from those who run it and those who influence them, and so the expression “a moral state” can only be shorthand for “a state run by morally responsible people”.