Government obligations

We talk a lot about rights, needless to say. If we begin our training as debaters with basic philosophy, we learn pretty quickly what we mean by that. My favored validation of individual rights is that it is advantageous for humans to accept that there are fundamental rights inherent in humanity, and to act accordingly, and disadvantageous not to accept their existence and act accordingly. That is, I don’t have to base my possession of inherent human rights on some complex philosophical or theological premise, but simply on the idea that having these rights is more beneficial than not having them, so whether or not they are inherent, they are nonetheless a good thing. So, let’s presume their existence, because we’re better off with them than without them, at which point, it doesn’t really matter where they came from.

We are nothing as philosophers if we are not practical. After all, mostly what we are interested in is ethics, the practical application of morality, i.e., doing the best we can. Balancing angels on the head of a pin is for other scholars altogether.

Basic human rights are fairly few. We have the right to be alive, which means that our existence is self-warranted and therefore cannot be abridged by others. We have the right to do what we want to do, provided that we do not harm others or somehow interfere with their right to do what they want to do while they are not harming us. And we have the right to our stuff, the legitimate ownership of possessions and the benefit of the fruits of our labors.

As far as basic human rights are concerned, I wouldn’t want to go much further than these fundamentals of life, liberty and property because, already, they raise questions of the protection of these rights. Ownership of property and the fruits of our labors is hardly as simple as it sounds, for instance. There are varying cultural definitions of property that undermine to some extent the apparent universality of property rights, for instance. As for conflicting claims of liberty, when what I want to do comes in conflict with what you want to do, we can imagine problems here almost from the point when any two people happen to come in contact, ever. And one can always ask the simple question, does a murderer cede his or her claim to life by abridging someone else’s claim of life?

You can see that as soon as we have populations of people, rather than just one person hanging around in some metaphoric Garden of Eden, we have various rights claims that need to be adjudicated, and rights that need to be protected. To handle this business, we create governments and empower them to do that job. We establish law and order and processes of law and order, and to maintain them and make them viable, we have to give up a little something. If nothing else, we have to give up a little property, because governments cost money to run. We could go a lot further in explaining how rights are abridged for their own protection, but my point here is something else altogether.

Here’s what bothers me, and it bothers me a lot. We have a lot of systematic philosophical thinking on rights and their protection and the establishment of governments, and we can draw on that thinking pretty easily. That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, when he paraphrased John Locke. (If you’re reading this in Texas, Jefferson was a President of the United States and the chief author of the Declaration, but unfortunately for you, he is in your no-fly or, I guess, no-think zone. Sorry about that.) (If you’re not in Texas, I’m not referring to any characters in “Lost” when I mention John Locke. Sorry about that, too.) We can argue handily about natural rights at a lofty, philosophical level, if we are so inclined. But government, especially government in the year 2010, is way more complicated than merely rights protection. We’ve got people literally marching in the streets complaining that government is going to hell in a tea bag, and that somehow it needs to be minimized because it just does too damned much. I’m hardly a deep commentator on the whole Tea Party movement, but it is clearly composed of a lot of complaints about the way things are in the present day, positing much of the blame on the government. Absent any political aspects of this—that in reality this is often one party trying to undermine another party, or in many cases racially motivated—it does play on fears and frustrations that real people really have. These real people aren’t at your local debate tournament, so for just one weekend, instead of hanging out in a high school cafeteria on a Saturday afternoon, hang out at the mall. Take a peep out of the cocoon for a moment. See what’s out there.

What we don’t have, unfortunately, is a handy, readily available theory of government that goes beyond basic rights protection. And this is a problem, because in reality, government does go beyond basic rights protection—way beyond—and we don’t have an acceptable, accepted ethical shorthand for discussing it. We have no ethical road map for how far governments can justifiably go beyond rights protection. We tend to have mostly opinions rather than metrics.

Let’s look at one example of government obligation beyond the protection of rights: roads. Literal roads. Individuals do not build roads, but roads are a requirement of our society. If all the roads in the US were immediately shut down and removed, we could not function. Goods could not travel very far, and if we did not have access to our own family farm, we’d be in serious trouble. (One could look at the history of roads in the US, and find that, with the invention of the car, roads became very much within the purview of government, because at the point where you need paving, a horse galloping across the fields or on a trodden path doesn’t work anymore. Additionally, in the 1950s, Eisenhower embarked on a system of interstate highways, transcending even local governments’ road-building in aid of a national system, reflective of the ubiquitous ownership of automobiles after WWII).

Roads are an example of government doing what individuals cannot do. Because individuals cannot do these things, and because they are required by society, we obligate government to do them. That is my basic premise for understanding extended government obligations. And the things that are necessary but beyond the scope of individuals are not limited to roads. International protection is another obvious job the government does that I cannot do alone. I look to the government to set up the parameters of discourse with other governments, up to and including the conduct of war. I may have opinions on the subject of whom we should fight, just as I have opinions on the subject of where a road should lead, and in a free government I have avenues for expressing those opinions, but ultimately it is the job of the government that I support, and which I am inherently a part of as a citizen, to conduct that business.

The question that is raised is the determination of the limits of what government should do that individuals can’t do. Additionally, one must consider in the mix what can be done neither by lone individuals nor the government but by non-governmental groups of individuals, be they corporate or otherwise. That is, there are jobs that religions do, for instance, that we believe are outside the scope of government (or that most of us believe should be outside the scope of government, but now we’re back in Texas where there is no separation of church and state because Jefferson, by not existing, never raised that pesky issue). There are jobs that corporations should do that we consider to be outside the scope of government. But the question is, which of these jobs are which? How do you argue that providing health care, for instance, is a government job? Or providing broadband? Or welfare? Or anything, even roads?

What you probably need to do is view the issue, first, from the perspective of what only the government can do, and assume that because only government is capable of it, government is obligated to do it, if we agree that it is an important enough benefit to society. Keep in mind that all government works have a cost, so if we consider that the government engage in a particular chore, we have to be willing to pay for it, which means that we need a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to do it. Still, this is the easiest sort of obligation to fulfill, because there are no competing claims on filling it. If only government can realistically take it on, if we decide we need it, the government is obligated to get it. Our roads are a good example of this. Costs of roads are not insignificant, and in some odd vision perhaps some corporation could be created to provide them, but when all is said and done, it is worth it to pay for them and reasonable that the government be the agency to build them. Not a hard call.

Education is an interesting example. Our government has taken on the obligation of educating the young. We tend to make this an obligation of local governments rather than the vaster national government, but that’s an insignificant distinction. We are obligating our governments to do this. Why? I mean, there are plenty of people who believe in home-schooling. There are people who prefer religious-based instruction in at least primary education and often secondary education. Because we believe strongly in government-supported education, we allow for those not availing themselves of this education to get at least a share of it by also supporting home schools and parochial education, at least to some extent. And on top of this, we draw the line at providing college education to all as part of the basic education package, but still we provide state institutions underwritten by the government to compete with private institutions, and we provide government-underwritten loans. The thing seems to be, we value education enough to warrant obligating the government to provide it because, for the most part, if government doesn’t provide it, it will not be fairly accessible to all. If the government stopped providing public education, a lot of people would still be educated, but not all, and we consider this wrong.

From the education example we can begin to draw an idea of what government ought to do beyond the absolute essentials. Or, if you will, to draw an idea of what the absolute essentials are. One big thing seems to be not that only government can do it, but that only government can do it fairly. If it were not done, a lot of individuals would suffer harm as a result.

How about housing? Housing is obviously essential to our lives. Does the government have an obligation to provide us all with some sort of housing?

The difference between housing and education seems to be that, with the latter, the government provides an open door through which citizens can avail themselves of the service of education, whereas with housing, we would actually have to provide some sort of literal, physical object, a house or an apartment. What, exactly, would comprise a fair house for a family of five? Tough one. So while we believe, in a humanitarian sense, that people need a roof over their heads, we don’t literally set a claim that the government will give them one. Instead, we provide general funds through which people who are homeless can find some sort of shelter. We subsidize them, in other words. If you lose your job you get unemployment insurance, at some point you can get food stamps and things like that. We don’t get you an apartment, but we help you to pay your rent. Not much, though. You might end up moving in with family or something. You might lose everything. We grieve for you, but we don’t solve the problem for you in any specific way.

So what is the underlying reason we support education and not housing, the reason we have decided that education is a government obligation and that housing is a personal obligation, aside from the specificity of the property involved? I would suggest that we connect housing to something beyond and aside from the government. Our homes are a reflection of our lives as a whole, our income and spending, our jobs, our position in society. Housing is, to a great extent, tied into the capitalistic system of working for profit and taking a share of that profit to support ourselves. That’s what people do with jobs, and jobs are considered the fabric of the corporate capitalist system. To be a member in good standing in this system, you work. (Those who have lost their jobs in the recent recession talk a lot about the anomie that results from losing their positions in society.) If you don’t work, you are not a member in good standing, unless you are actively job hunting and therefore presumed to be simply on hiatus, a member in good standing in absentia. So if you don’t have housing because you don’t work, your position as a non-member of society in good standing deprives you of any potential entitlement to housing. Why should the government provide you with what you should be providing for yourself? This could also be tied into the idea that providing housing is in conflict with property rights. Government protects the property you have, but it doesn't get you property. Maybe housing cuts too close to the core of individual rights?

Mostly I think the difference between housing and education does, in fact, seem to point to a difference of fairness. While it would be unfair not to provide education to all, we do not perceive it as unfair not to provide housing to all, because while the former would be impossible for many to obtain, the latter, housing, would not be impossible if people just got a job and worked. Maybe, also, the numbers would be smaller. Not providing housing to all affects a small number, whereas not providing education to all would affect a vast number.

Because it is so difficult to establish meaningful parameters, we argue endlessly about what the government should do just about everywhere. Libertarians want the least amount of government possible, leaving life to one’s own devices. Socialists want the most amount of government, creating a system of the most achievable fairness. Most of us are somewhere in between. If we could only devise a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, we would have a reasonable blueprint for action, and a reasonable guide to when those actions are obligated.

And that is how I would address a resolution calling for the government to take on the burden of any action above and beyond protecting basic human rights. That is, I would, in my case, set up a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, compared of course to the results of not taking those actions, and I would use those results as the tool for mandating or not government actions. Yes, it is absolutely consequential, but one can reasonably argue that virtually all government actions must be weighed consequentially, since they exist in the real world and not merely in philosophical papers. More to the point, the government “must” inherently do only a handful of things that are intuitively obligated, or if you prefer, deontologically obligated, at least by the definitions of government we use in basic political science. But as I say, all government actions are, by definition, real world, and therefore subject to real world analysis. They must satisfactorily meet the criteria of desirability and achievability according to a real world test (there can be no absolutes in politics, only presumptions based on reasonable data).

This is not relevant to CatNats and "soil rights,", but mark my words: these resolutions will come. If not in LD, then every time you turn around in PF. Unfortunately, people in PF rounds often don’t provide the underlying thesis analogous to LD’s V/C, giving judges little to go on. (See my PF notes, elsewhere.) If at the very least you can begin with a political model of some sort, and then measure how action plays out in that model, you’ll give me something I can follow and understand and, as a judge, measure. It’s worth a try. But the bottom line is, when you venture out of protecting basic human rights, you venture alone, without the body of literature to support you, that is, without an accepted ethical framework forged over centuries. You are forced to provide your own ethical framework, your own rationale why this must be done, not because it's good but because it's obligated. Plenty of things are good, but that doesn't make them government obligations. Constructing and deconstructing government obligations is a big job. But as government gets bigger and bigger, somebody's got to do it. Often, that somebody is us.

Have fun.