I am thankful that Jim Dwyer is graciously participating in our discussion on poverty, children, education, and anthropology. Here is Jim's response to Rick, Rob, and I:
"Thanks, Michael and Rick, for your comments. Michael is correct that I have not directly answered his question as to what my views are of the nature of the human person. I have never presented such views in my past writing because I believed my views on the subject were irrelevant to my analysis. What I’ve written about children’s education and children’s family relationships has been political theory, and the relevant question for that sort of analysis is what is the state’s view of the beings it governs. As Rob V. suggested, I think the state’s view of what a person is must be relatively thin. The view currently reflected in the law of western societies is not much more than that a person is a living, post-birth human being. And the state has conferred certain basic rights on all persons, at the most basic level a right to have one’s interests taken equally into account in state policy decision making and a right not to be treated instrumentally to serve the aims of other people. From those two basic rights, I have developed arguments about more specific rights of children in the contexts of education, parentage, termination of parental rights, non-parental claims for visitation with a child, etc..
Michael might believe that even the state (and not just individuals in their private moral lives) should adopt a thicker conception of persons, and I would be interested to read an argument for that view. It might be that giving some additional content to the state’s notion of what a person is would be consistent with the personal moral, religious, or metaphysical beliefs of most citizens and would be innocuous. For example, I’m not sure anything would follow as a legal or policy matter from state actors’ assuming that people have souls. But if state actors adopted any more specific assumptions about souls – in particular, what is in people’s spiritual interests, that would be a problem for a liberal society. (And note, the state cannot sensibly say even that conferring rights to self-determination in religious matters or rights to control children’s lives furthers spiritual interests, without its assuming an awful lot about what people’s spiritual interests are.)
There is, however, a substantial body of literature in the field of moral philosophy on what a person is and, more fundamentally, on what gives rise to moral status for any beings – that is, what makes any being “entitled to life, autonomy, respect, etc.”. No one in the field, though, has focused just on children and developed a full account of what their moral status is, whether they should be regarded as “persons,” and what follows from their moral status. I am now finishing a book manuscript on this topic, tentatively entitled “The Superiority of Youth: Moral Status and How We Treat Children.” As the title suggests, I present a case for concluding that children have a moral status not inferior to adults, as some philosophers (e.g., Kant) have contended and as many social policies seem to assume, and not even equal to that of adults (as most legal scholars and philosophers assume today), but in fact higher than that of adults. Even in this work, though, I am not operating from some personal view of the nature of the human person or of the child, and I am not developing a foundationalist account of children’s nature and status, but rather I am teasing out the implications of widely shared views of what gives rise as a general matter to moral status for any beings.
There is no disputing Rick’s point that humans are social beings. In all my writing, I have directly addressed the fact that at some point children become deeply immersed psychologically and emotionally with particular caregivers (typically, their legal parents). In writing about education, I noted that this, coupled with the need for parents to have some space/freedom/privacy in order to operate effectively as parents, counseled against state efforts to regulate parental teaching/speech in the home beyond what it already does (e.g., in making emotional and psychological abuse and neglect bases for child protective agency action). In writing about child abuse and neglect, I have noted that once children form a bond with certain adult caregivers, that bond, assuming there is something positive to it for a particular child, provides a reason for attempting parental rehabilitation rather than rushing to terminate the relationship (nothing novel about that point). Significantly, though, attachment to particular adults does not develop until a few months after birth, and so I contend, in the book that just came out, that it is preferable to terminate parental rights (or not bestow them in the first place) to a much greater degree with respect to newborns than currently occurs – that is, try to identify the biological parents who are almost certain to end up losing their children ultimately anyway, and terminate immediately after birth so that the child never does bond with them but instead forms an attachment to adoptive parents who (hopefully) will never abuse or neglect the child and therefore never require state agency workers to come into the child’s home.
I don’t agree, though, with Rick’s contention that “when we are talking about children, we are *always* talking about the relative moral weight of the claims of parents and the state, respectively, to make decisions about children's education, welfare, and upbringing,” if by that he means competing moral rights of parents and the state to make decisions. I have presented lengthy arguments against the idea that any adults are entitled to control children’s lives and for the idea that allocation of a decision making privilege between private adults and the state should be based on rights of the children themselves, as is done with incompetent adults. That said, Rick and I agree at a basic level about vouchers – in fact, my second book argued that voucher programs are constitutionally and morally mandatory, not merely permissible, though also that substantial regulatory strings must be attached. I guess the point of our disagreement is that I don’t think there is a sound argument for concluding that “the character, identity, and private-ness of the school” trumps what the state concludes is necessary for the secular educational interests of children, though certainly the state should have good, research-supported reasons for the educational aims it imposes. And so, we might disagree about some specific regulatory strings. But we might not.
Jim"
Any reaction?
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Jim Dwyer's work has been discussed recently on MOJ here, here, here, here, and here.
Jim, thank you for weighing in on poverty, and I am still hoping that you will favor us with your views about the nature of the human person – its origins, purpose, and destination. In other words, I would like you to make your anthropological assumptions explicit. Who or what is the human person that she is entitled to life, autonomy, respect, etc.? It seems to me that we cannot begin a discussion of rights of human children until we have a clearly articulated hypothesis of what a human being is.
I think your answers to these questions might sharpen our focus and help us at MOJ to address the critics of CLT who wonder what CLT is good for.
Thanks in advance, Michael
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
today children's prospects turn on the fortunes of their parents.
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"
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Who are “the poor” being written about in previous posts about Conservatives and the Poor? A stereotypical liberal lumps “the poor” together into one category and says their poverty is a result of various forms of oppression stemming from structural and institutional defects. A stereotypical conservative lumps “the poor” together into one category and says their poverty is the result of personal defects of various forms. These stereotypical liberals and conservatives (to the extent that they exist and are not merely caricatures created by their opponents) suffer from common defects. They both fail to see the humanity of individual poor people and the complexity in which their lives are lived out. There are no doubt institutional causes of poverty – racism, xenophobia, poor schools (with my meager brain, I still fail to see the liberal argument against school vouchers to help alleviate this problem), lack of quality medical care, lack of cheap transportation, etc. And, there are no doubt individual causes of poverty – alcoholism, out of wedlock births, lack of personal discipline (the ability to show up on time and consistently), lack of personal hygiene, etc. Many people are truly poor through no fault of their own or their family (but in many cases, these folks –through a combination of individual initiative, private help, and public help - can change their status over a couple of generations.) And, there may be a few people who are poor only through the fault of themselves or family. But, I suspect that many are poor through a combination of institutional factors and personal decisions, which inevitably will be influenced by the broader culture and, in turn, influence the culture.
Do conservatives care about poor people? Some do and some don’t. I just came back from a conference attended mostly by conservatives and one of the battle cries of the conference was that your money is not your own, it is a gift from God to be used in the service of others. Do liberals care about poor people? Some do and some don’t. When I suggested to a liberal colleague years ago that one way to solve the Social Security crisis is to means-test benefits, her response was “hell know, I put in, and I will demand that I receive my share of the benefits.” I grew up biased in favor of the liberal democratic responses to poverty and the poor assuming that they conformed to Catholic Social Teaching. As I started to study CST, I realized that many of the liberal democratic responses to the poor were actually contrary to CST. My metaphor (which may be overly simplified) for much of the democratic response is that it treated the poor like dogs who were put in kennels in the form of high rise housing projects. These measures might have provided minimum material needs but at the cost of poor people’s humanity.
My hope is that we can get beyond the caricatures of liberals, conservatives, and the poor to address real human needs, including the needs of poor people in the complexities of their situations. I suspect that we will differ as to the proper mix of individual initiative, private charity, and public welfare to address this and other problems. But, hey, that makes life interesting…
Friday, July 28, 2006
Thanks Rob for your comments on Dwyer. The discussion about Dwyer’s views of child-raising overlaps nicely with recent discussions about a) the human rights, revelation, and natural law, and b) the destruction of embryos to harvest their stem cells.
Point 1. Rob says that Dwyer’s “project does not necessarily ignore the nature of the human person, but recognizes the multitude of divergent anthropological premises to which Americans cling.” My response is: who or what is a “human person” that she is entitled to respect even if she holds anthropological premises divergent from the prevalent norms. A Catholic anthropology has an answer to this question, but I don’t think secular liberalism (including Dwyer) has an answer to this question. Rorty and Arthur Leff expose the nakedness of the secularist’s response. In other words, Dwyer’s conception of the human person is so thin that it doesn’t provide a firm foundation for protecting society’s weak and marginalized, including the children he would like to “protect” by his radical shift toward a statist model for child-rearing.
Point 2. Dwyer says that “moral rights and duties emerge from perceiving an overlapping consensus among people holding diverse conceptions of the good.” Journal of Catholic Legal Studies (vol. 44 at 225). Are religious voices –whether expressed in terms of faith or reason – excluded from the development of Dwyer’s consensus? Dwyer’s whole project seems aimed at eliminating religiously grounded conceptions of the good from informing or forming the consensus. Like Leiter, he rules faith-based arguments out of bounds. (And, if his plan for a secularist takeover of childrearing is successful, one would expect that the ranks of the religious would diminish over the generations). Dwyer also dismisses natural law arguments: “An argument somewhat akin to, and often ‘code’ for, an argument based on divine command is one based on natural law or natural rights. Many people, recognizing that no one will be persuaded if they base a claim on an assertion that ‘my god says so,’ translate that assertion into one that ‘nature says so.’” Id.
at 219. Unless I am mistaken, Dwyer, with his extremely thin conception of the human person (which I said in Point 1 doesn’t even provide a firm foundation for his own project), would exclude all of us on MOJ from participating in the development of an “overlapping consensus” unless and until we renounced the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (rooted in faith and reason) as the foundation for our work.
Am I overreacting? As to point 1? Point 2? Jim, I’d still love for you to weigh in.
Michael S.
William Castle, a MOJ reader and former student of Jim Dwyer, responded to our recent discussion of Dwyer's work:
“I took Professor Dwyer for jurisprudence while a law student … While our class covered more than jurisprudential issues related to his specialty, we did spend a good deal of time covering his ideas ... And time was spent on the pre-political nature of man which revealed that the thing called “family” was, of course, a mere social construct. This sort of thing was a real eye-opener at the time to a Catholic.... I realized how radically different a place many on the left were coming from, particularly jurisprudentially, whether they knew it or not, and how claims of “attacks on the family” were hardly overreactions by Bible-banging lunatics. I owe Professor Dwyer a debt of gratitude as he was eminently fair-minded, engaging and decent as a professor and person, and his directness was refreshing in contrast to his like-minded colleagues and truly enlightening, even if that light shed revealed only how much I disagreed with him.”
