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Over at the NY Time's "Opinionator," Seyla Benhabib took on Obama's decision not to deport a certaion groups of undocumented immigrants. It's really quite interesting.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/stone-immigration/

To lay my cards on the table, I happen to believe that most of our laws on immigration are unjust laws. While a country certainly has a right to keep accurate tabs on who comes into a country and even to limit who comes in, either individually or as groups if there's a legitimate reason to do that, I think our laws often go too far. ("This man is a known narcotics trafficker" would be one such reason, as would "This group is too large or too poor for our society to reasonably support them." I'd even say many countries could give a third type of reason, "We cannot absorb them into our culture without losing our own identity," though I wouldn't put a melting-pot-based society like America in that group.)

My real beef with American immigration policy is that we depend on the illegal immigrants out of one side of the mouth and label them as criminals in who they are, not what they do out of the other. As this article points out, California agriculture depends on cheap labor. So do any other number of other businesses. These jobs are typically sub-minimum wage and paid under the table (so no taxes paid by the business). I'd argue we all rely on cheap labor that's denied legal recourse for whatever bad things are done to them. It basically sets up two classes of citizens (and I do consider immigrants – people who permanently join a society, legally or otherwise – to be citizens in the philosophical sense if not the legal one), and I'm not crazy about living in a society built on that. Not that any other society is really any better here, and not that there's a whole lot I can do about it, but it does make me feel complicit in something I don't like.

So I'm predisposed to be in favor of this argument. My main qualm with Obama's DREAM-like action is that it affects so few immigrants, and siphons off the most sympathetic immigrants from the larger community. But still, I find Dr. Benhabib's argument confused. She seems to be drawing on two different philosophical traditions and acting like they're compatible. Since I'm going to be teaching these two approaches to justice with my students in just a few hours, I thought it might be interesting and useful to lay them out here, and apply them to this particular argument.

(By the way, this discussion of communitarianism vs. voluntarism is taken more or less from Ch. 9 of Michael Sandel's book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do; I highly recommend it.)

Dr. Benhabib appeals to Kant's "duty of hospitality." She writes:

If conditions in a person's native country so endanger his life and well-being and he becomes willing to risk illegality in order to survive, his right to survival, from a moral point of view, carries as much weight as does the new country's claim to control borders against migrants Immanuel Kant, therefore, called the moral claim to seek refuge or respite in the lands of another, a "universal right of hospitality," provided that the intentions of the foreigner upon arriving on foreign lands were peaceful. Such a right, he argued, belonged to each human being placed on this planet who had to share the earth with others.

I've never heard of this particular bit of Kant's philosophy, but it does sound like him. I've proved over the last several weeks how hard it is for me to speak authoritatively about Kant's moral philosophy, so here I'll rely on Sandel's summary of the relationship between Kant's account of freedom and communal obligations:

To be free is to be autonomous, and to be autonomous, is to be governed by a law I give myself. Kantian autonomy is more demanding than consent. When I will the moral law, I don't simply choose according to my contingent desires or allegiances. Instead, I step back from my particular interests and attachments, and will as a participant in pure practical reason. […] Kant's idea of an autonomous will and Rawls's idea of a hypothetical agreement behind a veil of ignorance have this in common: both conceive the moral agent as independent of his or her particular aims and attachments. When we will the moral law (Kant) or choose the principles of justice (Rawls), we do so without reference to the roles and identities that situate us in the world and make us the particular people we are. (Sandel pp. 213-214)

What Sandel's getting at here is that we are only Americans or Britons or whatever, by virtue of a historical accident. There's no reason I had to be born in the American South, with all that carries with it as far as the way I view the world and my moral obligations. So while I may think I have a duty to put other Americans first – "buy American," monitor the border, care more about the lives of American deaths than Afghani deaths or however you want to put it – I don't really have any obligation here. And it may make sense to have communities and develop them, at a practical level. But I think Kant would be hard-pressed to explain why those communities are morally relevant, certainly to the point that they outweigh someone's right to preserve their life. (Someone who's a better Kant scholar than I am, could perhaps offer an explanation of why communal obligations are morally relevant and not just based on a hypothetical imperative, perhaps, but I can't see it based on what I understand of him.)

Anyway, so far Dr. Benhabib's on solid footing as far as I can tell. The trouble is she then makes a very un-Kantian move. She writes:

We do have special obligations to our neighbors, as opposed to moral obligations to humanity at large, if, for example, our economy has devastated theirs; if our industrial output has led to environmental harm or if our drug dependency had encouraged the formation of transnational drug cartels.

These claims of interdependence require a third moral principle – in addition to the right of universal hospitality and the right to self-government – to be brought into consideration: associative obligations among peoples arising through historical factors.

This sounds very much to me like the communitarian approach to ethics that Sandel outlines. Kant (according to Sandel) basically thought we only have two kinds of obligations: natural duties, that we owe to everyone just because they're human, and voluntary obligations, things we agreed to ourselves. So there's really no sense in talking about making up for what your ancestors had done, or feeling proud of it. As Sandel explains:

If, in thinking about justice, we just abstract from our particular duties, it is hard to make the case that present-day Germans bear a special responsibility to make recompense for the Holocaust, or that Americans of this generation have a special responsibility to remedy the injustice of slavery and segregation. Why? Because once I set aside my identity as a german or an American and conceive myself as a free and independent self, there is no basis for saying my obligation to remedy these historic injustices is greater than anyone else's. (Sandel p. 214).

The thing is, the way I understand these points, they can't both be true – at least not for the reasons pointed to. If I have a Kantian duty to hospitality because it's a Kantian duty, can I also have special obligations to those living near me? Particularly since I wasn't alive when America enacted the drug policies that encouraged the cartel (so any special obligation I have to help these peoples because I'm an American is distinctly non-Kantian). Unless I'm missing something about Kant?

I've really enjoyed teaching Kant's and Aristotle's accounts of freedom and justice, and I find the whole contemporary debate utterly fascinating. But the way I read things, the two sides aren't really compatible; if you're a communitarian, you seem to be rejecting some pretty crucial claims made by Kant, and vice versa. That Dr. Benhabib tries to draw from both sides is a bit frustrating, because I think a lot of what she's saying individually works pretty well but put together it just undercuts itself. It's actually a problem I see a lot in student papers, where they will just take bits from different theories, without worrying about whether the foundations for those ideas make sense together. Given that this is a full professor writing this, and given that I'm really and truly not a Kant expert, I'm hoping I'm missing something in Kant's thoughts that makes this move possible.

Regardless, it's good to see professional philosophers working on this issue. Personally, I tend to think if an immigrant is willing to throw his lot in with a society, said society needs a damned good reason to exclude him – particularly in a society built on immigration, as is the case with America (and really, if you go back far enough, is the case anywhere). But that's probably coming more out of my own Christian tradition more than anything you'll find in philosophy. You know, Abraham keeping his tent open on all four sides and all that.

(P.S., I started this before class this morning and only finished it now, nearly twelve hours later. So any odd wording, seeming obsession with certain books, etc. may be explained by that.)

Whatever else the recent blowup over the ACA contraception mandate might have shown, it's that Americans need a better epistemology. The news story has interested me on many levels and will probably pop up in blog posts from time to time. But one philosophical idea kept seeming to float to the forefront, at least in my mind as I read the different news stories. Namely, that the people participating in this debate seemed to be using concepts in very different ways. They weren't even consistent within the different sides.

This becomes clearer if you think about different groups. There was a lot of talk in left-leaning circles about "the 98%" – a statistic that 98% of sexually active Catholic women had used contraception at least once, and that a high number (I think in the neighborhood of 70-80%) used it regularly or were currently using it. The implication was that this meant Catholicism no longer had a major problem with birth control. I previously argued that religious institutions like the RCC don't operate like unions or PACs, where all you need for a position change is a new consensus view. The RCC, like all religious institutions represents its tradition, not the current view of all its members; and the members get to vote by agreeing to be a part of it or not.

So it's in the church's best interest to make its positions relevant to its members, through education and dialogue. I may not agree with the position (in point of fact I don't), but it's not my opinion – or any Catholic parishioner (which I'm not), or the majority opinion of those parishioners – that decides here. Here, what it means to be a Catholic is controlled by those people charged with interpreting and guarding Catholic tradition. The bishops and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy.

The liberals have it wrong here. I say this as a liberal! But on this particular point, they're off base.

Interestingly, they're also wrong on a related issue but for exactly the opposite reason. This one came up in the context of hearings on this same mandate. There was a bit of a brouhaha over the fact that there weren't any women on the first panel that appeared before the committee, and specifically that one witness who had been denied contraception by her Catholic employer that she needed for non-reproductive reasons wasn't allowed to testify. The charge of "Where were the women?" was pronounced immediately by Nancy Pelosi and soon went viral. I wasn't convinced even at first, because this particular hearing was over whether the mandate posed a challenge to religious freedom, and the woman they wanted to testify didn't have any comment on that particular issue. Do I wish the various religious groups had highlighted some of their female leaders (which do exist)? Yes, if only to drive home the point that religion is not all male-dominated, and that the lashback was tempered by an awareness of the reality women live. But the proposed witness was none of these things, and so I didn't feel excluded on those grounds.

It's what came next where things got really interesting. See, as it turns out there was a woman on the second panel that testified before the hearing (two in fact), but they didn't testify in favor of the mandate. So the idea that no women had testified was revamped a bit to say no women had testified for women. This irked me in the same way that the line that anti-abortion access laws are somehow a war against women. I don't like those laws, I find them insulting in their insinuation that women's decisions couldn't possibly be well-reasoned and I think some of them (like the recent narrow miss down in Virginia) are awful assaults on women and turn the doctor-patient relation on its head.

But I don't think attacks on them are a war on women, because lots of women do resent having reproduction labeled as an illness. Women tend to be among the most ardent pro-lifers, and they probably see abortion as an assault not only on a child but also on their way of life. I don't agree with them, but it is disenfranchising to them to suggest that unless you hold a certain view, you are not speaking for women or you're not a real women. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are women, and as much as I hate what they stand for on nearly every issue, they represent the viewpoints of many women.

The difference here is that "women" are not an institution like a church is. So here, you can't say you are protecting the institution of womanhood. If you were talking about a specific institution organized along gender lines (NOW, for instance) then, yes, we have a right to say that such-and-such a legislation is anti-NOW or against the interests of NOW. But the larger issue that a legislation is anti-woman? That only makes sense if you think of women as a monolithic group. We aren't that, and again the Democratic party is on the wrong end of it to suggest we are.

I've made my feelings on this mandate clear in recent posts, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize sloppy sentiments when I see them. Ironically, the left-leaning blogosphere is contradicting itself when saying on the one hand the RCC must take every member's position into account with no regard for history when determining the RCC's position, and then on the other hand that "women's issues" should only be decided by the "right" kind of women. Ironic that they get it wrong in both cases, really.  

I've been following the debate over health care mandates, freedom of conscience, and religious exemptions pretty closely. It's really very interesting and (for me at least) very personal.

For those of you who aren't American or, you know, have lives to live that don't involve watching the news, the new health care bill basically requires everyone to carry insurance. If you can't afford it, you get a tax-paid subsidy to help out; if you refuse, you pay a penalty to cover the cost of health care if you get sick. The problem is that many companies only offer very minimal coverage – either really high deductibles (the amount you have to pay before insurance kicks in) or low caps (after which you're responsible for the bills). So to help with that problem, Congress said that each eligible plan – meaning, the plans that will let you avoid the penalty – have to provide a certain level of coverage in several defined areas.

And one of those areas was reproductive health for women. Anyone familiar with American politics and the *erm* heightened interest anything to do with sex seems to draw.

Even before the law passed, it was on record that no taxpayer money could go to fund abortions. I wasn't crazy about that decision, but at the time I accepted as the price of doing business. Personally the thought of people with money deciding what medically-necessary health procedures I should have access to (yes, even if they're footing the bill) really bothers me. This is basically because I recognize that yes, capitalism is great at encouraging innovation and hard work and all that, but it really and truly sucks at distributing resources in a fair way. I think that middle- and upper-class people are generally overpaid, meaning that we should give up our money to fill the actual needs of the poor. I see this as a moral duty, and I don't think I should get to say how that money is actually used. So I don't think I should be able to tell a poor woman she can't have an abortion or buy a soda out of their food stamp money (another personal bugabear, brought to you courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg) or whatever, any more than I should be able to tell a rich or middle-class person. But whatever. As I said, with the abortion provision, I do think the ends justified the means there, even if I wasn't totally comfortable with it.

Now the government is trying to work out just what insurances should have to cover. One of those areas, as I mentioned above, is reproductive health. Basically, the government wants to force all health insurance plans to cover health insurance – including plans paid for in part by employers who have traditionally opposed birth control, like the Roman Catholic Church. There are conscience clause exceptions, which basically let people whose jobs are suitably religious in nature (think pastors and priests) buy insurance plans that don't cover birth control. Sometimes the groups oppose birth control on principle, like the Catholics whose natural law ethics condemn any ejaculation that doesn't have the goal of procreation. Other times there's a concern that the some of the birth controls can act as abortifacients, opening up a back door to taxpayer-funded abortions. Still others, usually conservative Protestants, point to the connection between birth control and extramarital sex and don't want to subsidize promiscuity.

But whatever the reason, these groups don't want to limit the conscience clause to clergy and church employees. The conscience exception wouldn't apply to people whose work wasn't devoted to religious ends. Like social workers and nurses employed by Catholic charities, for instance. And plans for students at religious universities would have to cover birth control.

This is where it gets personal for me, because I am a graduate student on stipend at attend a Jesuit (Catholic) university, and I was very much surprised to discover that my health insurance (purchased through my school) doesn't cover birth control or really anything reproduction-related besides OB-GYN exams. I'm not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, nor do I think I accepted a "Catholic" ethic because I decided to study and teach here. Jesuits just happen to produce the best scholars in my corner of philosophy. As it happens, I don't need birth control because I'm not sexually active, and I actually think most premarital sex is immoral for various reason. But that's my decision, based on my moral choice. And for the majority of the culture that disagrees with me, that's there moral choice, too. To be perfectly honest, I really resent the idea that some group I never joined up with should decide what kind of health choices I'm able to access.

(To be clear: this "joined up" idea can be hard to nail down. If you were born into a church and your whole family belonged, staying on the church rosters could just be inertia at work. Or maybe you joined because you agreed with most of the beliefs but not this one. Or maybe you took a job at a Catholic hospital or teaching Spanish at an evangelical high school because it was the only or best opening in your area. None of these should take away your access to medical procedures. But this is doubly so for college students, given how little emphasis students put on the school's ideology when choosing to go there.)

This, right here, is why the whole idea of relying on charity for basic needs doesn't work. The Catholic Church (and the other groups taking similar stances) are saying it's an affront to their freedom of conscience if they have to pay for my birth control (if I decided I wanted it). I would maybe be okay with that (maybe) if not for the refrain I keep hearing in politics. We're told that government is inefficient, that it's wrong to make people give up their money to support people who didn't earn it. That Americans are the most generous nation and to just let people hold on to their money so they can donate it willingly. But many, many charities have religious ideologies. Those that don't tend to have their own ideologies, and many attach requirements to people using their money. That doesn't sit right with me.

Think about an analogy. Say someone proposes we slash the budget for Section 8 housing. [for Non-Americans: government $$$ paid to private landlords, to provide lower-income housing for the poor] This is in exchange for a taxcut, with the assumption people will turn around and donate that money to private charities working in their local area. Only those charities have their own ideology, as most do. Say a certain charity has a strong ideological position against smoking. (Perhaps it's Mormon-backed, whose church considers tobacco use a sin; perhaps the group's founder just lost a favorite uncle to emphysema and hates smoking.) What would we say if that charity only took people who pledged not to smoke in their apartments? I can't help thinking low-income people would be less free under this system than the current one.

I guess it all comes down to this for me: you can only use those rights you have the power to exercise. I'm all for personal responsibility and saying that if you have enough money to meet your needs if you were smart about it and you squander it, that you're responsible for. Maybe those people need to suffer, or maybe there's room for honest-to-goodness charity there. But if someone isn't making enough to have a basic standard of living, if they're trying to find a job and can't or if the jobs available pay too little, that's not what charity's for. They need public funds – yes, taken from my tax $$$ – and it's really not up to me how they spend it. That's justice.

Your thoughts?