Mirror of Justice

William and Mary law professor, Jim Dwyer, has commented on our recent discussion on liberals, conservatives, and poverty with some provocative questions of his own.  For those familiar with his work, he focuses on the liberal and conservative response to poverty as it effects children.  Any thoughts in response to his questions?

"Hi Mike,

I am sorry I was away [during] the brief discussion of the “anthropological” account of children.  As an indirect way of responding to questions posed then, I thought I’d say a few words about the current topic of poverty.

My perception is that liberals and conservatives are insufficiently attentive to the ontological distinctness of children – that is, to (what I regard as) the fact that a child is a human being ontologically separate from his or her parents and other family and community members, a distinct and unique site of experience, perception, thought, feeling, etc. (all of which is consistent with a child’s sharing a life with parents, being dependent on parents, identifying him/herself as a member of a dyad or larger grouping with parents and others, emotionally identifying with parents, and having other sorts of experiences that individuals have in intimate relationships with others).  Both liberals and conservatives, in my view, tend to elide the distinction between child and parent in some contexts.

I see liberals do this, for example, in the child abuse context; they complain about the disparate impact of child protection laws on poor and minority adults, *without contending that the interventions are generally unwarranted from a child welfare standpoint*, and they contend that the disparate impact amounts to a harm against the poor and minority communities.  Their focus is on how adults are impacted and they overlook that fact that the disparate impact amounts to a special benefit for children in poor and minority communities (again, assuming the interventions actually help them), a benefit denied to children who are abused but happen to be in wealthy, white families (overlooked because state actors are, it is said, more deferential to wealthy white adults).  The liberal response to the perceived discrimination is to restrain child protection efforts in poor and minority communities, rather than to compel greater intervention in wealthy white families, because children tend to disappear from their minds and they see only adults suffering (from removal of their children, on top of their otherwise difficult lives).  From a child-centered perspective, I think they’ve got it backwards.

I see conservatives do this in the education context, where they oppose regulation of private schools on grounds (inter alia) of supposed self-determination and autonomy and support vouchers on grounds of private choice, as if oblivious to the fact that as a general matter private schooling is not a matter of individuals' directing their own lives and choosing what school they themselves will attend, but rather a matter of parents dictating the lives of children and parents choosing where children will go to school.  It is remarkable to me how often conservatives will invoke the oxymoronic term “parental autonomy” to defend an anti-statist position.

I bring this up in the context of the discussion of poverty because I think the tendency to conflate parents and children and to take an adult-centered focus to policies impacting families is an obstacle to long-term amelioration of poverty.  And the problem seems to me mostly on the conservative side.  Conservatives might plausibly believe that the best approach to helping adults who are living in poverty is to give them the opportunity to raise themselves up, rather than giving them handouts in perpetuity, and to let them succeed or fail based on their own choices.  This belief might reflect some plausible moral assumptions about what makes for a worthy life.  But inevitably many poor adults will fail, despite their best efforts or because they choose not to give their best efforts, and the consequence of that (in today's society) is a denial of equal opportunity for their children, a likely impoverished and dangerous upbringing for their children, and so another generation of adults mired in the dysfunction of poverty.  To a degree much greater than seems inevitable, in

America

Conservatives seem generally disinclined to view children of poor people as distinct persons who are in a moral situation different from that of their parents, and as a result seem generally unwilling to devote state-collected resources to programs aimed at improving the situation of those children, especially if any programs ostensibly targeted at the children might have a spillover benefit for their parents.  We could debate the efficacy of spending on specific programs endlessly and probably not come to agreement, so rather than invite that sort of debate I’ll just ask whether you think I am wrong in my overall impression that conservatives are generally disinclined to roll up their sleeves and apply themselves to the task of doing everything that can be done to help children in poverty have something approximating an equal opportunity in life?  And whether I wrong in thinking that such a disinclination stems in large part from a tendency, fostered by or at least consistent with some religious teachings, to view families as an ontological unit, all in the same boat morally, and so to apply the same sort of moral reasoning when thinking about any programs for “the poor” whether they are targeted at adults or at children?  Am I mistaken in my perception that conservatives, like liberals, do not generally reason along the lines of “okay, let’s put out of mind for the time being any thought about the rights and responsibilities of adults and just figure out everything we can do for kids who, clearly through no fault of their own, are born into the hell of urban poverty”?

Jim Dwyer"