More on the Possible Vouchers Analogy - and Then Some

This post is distinct from, but of course complementary to, that sequence of posts I began earlier today, the members of which sequence are to raise and preliminarily address discrete questions that Robby's and Sherif's Morals and Mandates seems to me to raise.

What I'd like to do here is a bit more fully to contextualize the reference to vouchers that I made in an earlier post (that on the 12th, titled 'Request for Clarification on the Revised HHS Mandate'), wherein I noted that I've often defended voucher programs on grounds that might - might - carry over to the insurance mandate context as well. 

In the aforementioned post, I noted that my ultimate hope was both (a) 'to come to an informed judgment of the HHS mandate,' and (b) somewhat more broadly, 'to ensure that I hold a coherent general account of how we as a nation might maintain our eclectic amalgam of mixed public-private social insurance and safety net provision on the one hand, without running aground on the Scylla of establishment or the Charybidis of curtailed free exercise on the other hand.'

What I wish to do here is preliminarily to schematize that general account referenced by (b).  If it's coherent, then the voucher analogy might be apt notwithstanding any equivocation on the word 'support' of the sort suggested by Sherif via Robby in his helpful post posted yesterday.  I'm a a wee bit less concerned with establishing the aptness or otherwise of the analogy, however, than I am with ascertaining whether the general account I am groping for is indeed coherent - though of course clarity in respect of the first might well be pre-required by coherence in respect of the second. 

I'm especially interested in the second matter, incidentally, because it figures essentially into a much bigger project on which I now am at work, with which I could use a bit of help and which also would seem to carry implications for the HHS mandate, voucher programs, and much else that concerns most of us here besides. 

So that's my reason for aiming here to 'contextualize' the voucher analogy, as I put it several paragraphs up.  The reason to contextualize is not to duck the question of the aptness of the voucher analogy, but to address it in a manner that might afford the conceptual resources needed to address both the analogy itself and many additional, cognate questions as well.

Here, then, is the schema I'd like to try out on all interested readers.  Suppose first that the state's principal function, hence the principal if not sole ground of its legitimacy, is its acting as a collective agent on behalf of us all in addressing collective action and coordination problems that by definition neither individuals nor substate groups of individuals can address. 

The hallmark of such problems is of course that multiple acts that are individually rational aggregate into outcomes that are collectively disadvantageous or even calamitous.  Asset price bubbles and consumer price hyperinflations are cases in point; it is rational for each agent to buy now rather than later in such cases, and then everyone's doing acting accordingly drives prices yet higher.  Much the same goes for needs of certain essentially 'public' or 'nonexcludable' goods like environmental, police, and military protection, in respect of which it is in a certain sense rational for each individual to 'free ride' on the contributions of others such that insufficient collective provision is made.  

Next suppose, I think plausibly, that distributive justice is itself an inherently public good of this sort - the sort of good that individuals and substate groups of individuals are structurally incapable of providing.  Such individuals and substate groups lack both (a) access to the information requisite to determining both what the current distribution of benefits and burdens in their full society is and what that distribution should be, and (b) the authority to work such redistributions as the findings reached under (a) end up showing in justice to be required.  Only the state - that collective agent which acts with the authority and in the name of us all - is constitutively able to do that.

Next suppose, again I think plausibly, that some version of the general libertarian 'luck egalitarian' ideal is the correct understanding of distributive justice.  The correct understanding, in other words, is one pursuant to which differences in citizens' material circumstances are attributable to their differential exercises of responsible behavior the fruits of which are differently valued or disvalued, socially speaking, in measures determined by free and fair markets (which terms, I promise, I have provided intuitively attractive technical definitions elsewhere), and not to endowments or deficits that are products of mere luck. 

Variations on this general conception have at various times of course been put forward by many philosophers and some economists, though it seldom seems to be observed that one of the very first to advance such a conception was James Gordley, whom I wish received more credit for it.

Now the luck egalitarian ideal, of course, is just that - an ideal.  It seems apt for as long as we remain mortal to be at best better and better approximated, never quite reached.  The reasons are manifold and many of them are obvious, embracing as they do demarcation (chance versus choice) and measurement difficulties, among others.  But the ideal can be intelligibly striven for and approached in certain obvious ways, and much of what states do, when acting legitimately, can be plausibly understood along those lines. 

Hence, for example, education seems an important benefit that can and ought to be spread widely, so as to ensure that even those born into impoverished families are not deprived on that account of any more material opportunity looking forward than they have to be.  Like remarks hold, of course, for the opportunity to insure against risks to life and limb against which individuals can only do so much to provide in the absence of risk-pooling.  So states that act in the name of societies who care about justice - as all civilized societies surely do - not surprisingly tend to act as to ensure that education and health-risk-pooling opportunities are spread widely enough as to reach all.            

Now, one way in which the state might do this is simply to provide all such opportunities directly, via its own facilities and employees, all of which is financed by tax revenues.  The redistribution inherent in such justice-advancing activity is of course worked through the tax codes, which in civilized societies that pursue distributive justice tend in the 'progressive' direction.  But one might retain this redistributive structure in a manner that does not drain the goods and services in question of all cultural or religious 'flavor,' or otherwise undermine the rich patchwork and network of substate institions that constitute what we call 'civil society.'  One can do so by permnitting or even encouraging the provision of the services in question by substate institutions, while financing citizens' choices among them through vouchers and other forms of citizen-choice-tracking state subsidy.  

And something like this is of course what we do in the US, to greater degree on the civil society scale than do our peer nations.  And that is of course all to the good in an abundance of ways.

One risk to which the American system of pulling this off gives rise, however, is that of state's becoming non-neutral in respect of distinct institutions offering comparable goods or services. 

To finance parochial schools without regard to their pro rata share of freely choosing students and families, for example, can offend non-establishment concerns both formally and materially, by both appearing to 'endorse' and effectively advantaging with a better than pro rata share of funds.  By the same token, to require that students not attend non-parochial schools, or to permit it but not distribute to students their pro rata shares of tax revenues collected from all to finance education, can offend that imporant contributor to civil society known as 'free exercise' formally and materially as well - by on the one hand seeming to 'disfavor' or 'dis-endorse,' and on the other hand rendering relatively more expensive, parochial education.

Like remarks hold for health and health-insurance provision, and of course all manner of social service provision.  The guiding idea in all such cases is somehow to make of the state nothing more than a limited purpose wealth-redistributor, which executes this function solely in the name of justice in the distribution of certain basic goods that we all tend to agree ought to be spread more or less equally over all, because the want of them is unattributable to the responsibility of any who are wanting.  And the only way to ensure that the state is indeed 'nothing more' than this - i.e., that it does not formally or materially advantage or disadvantage any particular cultural or faith-traditional 'flavor' in which these basic goods might come - is to keep severed certain links that the goods might under some circumstances have to the state or to the non-state provider. 

If we keep those possible links severed in the right ways, we ensure that state remains in a sense 'colorless' and neutral, and that facts on the ground more or less replicate the baseline condition in which the distribution of goods- or service-provision among providers is precisely what it would be were the state to do nothing more than tax and redistribute to individual citizens for specific justice-redolent purposes and those purposes only.

Now on the state side of this 'severence imperative,' as I'll call it, the severence seems readily effected by voucher arrangements.  The state cannot reasonably be taken for formally endorsing, nor will it materially advantage relative to the baseline just mentioned, any institution that ends up serving more people than other institutions simply because more vouchers were freely spent upon that instituion by freely selecting citizens.  And so it seems to me that school voucher programs are quite in keeping with the ideal as thus far articulated.  And so would be, surely, health insurance vouchers that might be spent upon policies offered by various insurance companies - some perhaps 'parochial.'  And so, of course, would similar vouchers that might be spent upon health services offered by various medical facilities - including religiously affiliated ones.

Now for some reason quite beyond me, we don't seem to have gone the voucher route when it comes to affording health insurance on a more or less egalitarian basis to all Americans.  I suppose that would have amounted to 'single payer,' which for some reason turns out to be more offensive and idea to some Americans than does single payer in respect of public schools through direct finance and private and parochial schools through voucher finance.  Instead we've decided to induce, through a combination of 'positive' and 'negative' incentives (primarily tax-based), the pooling of risks and provision of pool-based insurance by employers.  And of course some of these employers are themselves religiously affiliated. 

The question, then, is whether there is some way of protecting such institutions from (a) formally and (b) materially endorsing and aiding practices that are fundamentally contrary to their, as it were, constitutive 'flavors' in providing that pooling and insuring service, and thereby avoiding the state's doing any formal or material harm to those 'flavors' themselves, that is the full counterpart to the voucher-based means of preventing the state from formally or materially benefitting such 'flavors.'

I think that there might be a way to do this, even if single payer and vouchers would be a much simpler and intuitively attractive way of doing the same thing.  Another way of saying this is that I think it might be possible to design a rendition of what I've in other posts called version '2.0' of the HHS mandate that fits the bill.  I'll try to do that in a subsequent post that attends carefully both to the intentional considerations implicated by formal involvement in perceived wrongdoing, and to the causation considerations implicated by material such involvement.  

More, then, tomorrow.  Thanks to all those who've had the patience to read.