ACCOUNTING FOR VALUES AND FACTS

This blog has dedicated itself to describing and explaining a mental construct of governance and politics – the liberated federalism construct. This construct is presented as a guide in selecting the subject content for civics and government education.

Through the postings of this blog, I have developed what the tenets of this construct are. I have made it clear that the construct presents a moral view. In doing so, it is my responsibility to address how a moral perspective should be presented in public school classrooms. As I have indicated in past postings, to utilize a view of social reality that is based to some degree on moral claims, one needs to justify such a choice. The reason for this justification emanates from the reasonable concern that such a choice can be seen as an attempt to propagandize a view of politics to a captive audience. My argument to date has been that, to some degree, any curriculum has to be built on some view of not only reality, but also some conception of morality. Prevalent in our public school classrooms today, I have argued, the prominent construct guiding the choice of content in civics classes is what I have called the natural rights construct. Within that construct, I have pointed out that there is a moral outlook. A review of past postings will provide you with the particulars of this view. Let me just say here that it is impossible to present a civics curriculum without taking a moral perspective. I will concede, though, that the liberated federalism construct, the construct promoted in this blog, has a more robust moral view. Despite this robustness, I firmly believe that its use is not amenable to indoctrinating our secondary students. This posting aims at explaining why this is so.

To address this concern, I believe that one approach is to explain how liberated federalism treats the relative importance and roles of values (central to moral considerations) and facts. Their relation to each other has been a subject, in one way or another, that has garnered the interest of many philosophers. By reviewing what two philosophers had to say, this posting will help explain why liberated federalism presents a responsible way to address the moral concerns with which effective citizens must deal.

Values and facts; how do they relate? The philosopher, David Hume, made an extensive case for forming a dualism between these two. To him, we cannot derive values, what we believe to be good and, by contrast, what we believe to be bad, from facts. Values cannot be reasoned. They are instead the product of sentiment – our emotions. They are products of the “gut.” Let us use an extreme case to illustrate the point: most of us value life and, therefore, we find murder as immoral. Do we believe this because the facts surrounding murder lead us to conclude that murder is bad or immoral? Let's analyze this question.

One could cite the fact that murder will not only hurt the victim, but also disrupt the lives of that person's loved ones. Of course, murder, in terms of the victim, deprives him or her of everything he/she has. These are facts. We might say that murder disregards the value of human life and if left unsanctioned, the results would be that such incidents would generally increase the likelihood that any one of us could be victimized. Our own lives might consequently be more in jeopardy. These are conjectured truths or facts. Or one might simply state that we are beings who empathize and that incidents of murder just make us sad for those directly affected. Since we don't like being sad, we should establish the conditions, such as policing and setting up judicial courts, to arrest and punish murderers. All of these conclusions are, at least in part, based on factual claims, but do they lead us to valuing life and finding murder as immoral? According to Hume – and many thinkers – the answer is no.

Hume argued that all of these facts gain importance only because they relate to something we prize emotionally – that is life, in general, or our individual lives, specifically. All of these facts don't matter one bit unless we have such a sentiment. In general, Hume argues that our knowledge of facts is derived from experiences. He had a sporadic view of experience. He saw our self-awareness as being the product of a succession of experiences in which one experience did not have to necessarily or in fact have much relation to other experiences. This view has been described much like a movie in which each instance is captured by a separate, individual exposure. We, for example, see the facts that constitute ourselves (our ego) as changing constantly. We are not in a meaningful way the person we were yesterday and we will not be the same person tomorrow. The nature of this “sporadic-ness” doesn't end with how we view ourselves. By limiting what we can consider a fact – to those things we directly experience – Hume argued that we cannot experience causes per se, and so, therefore, we cannot reasonably attach a cause to any effect – such as one billiard ball striking another and causing the second ball to move. We make such connections because we want, for practical reasons, a certain degree of predictability in the world in which we live. We want to survive and to do so, we believe recurring phenomena will continue to occur, just as the chicken develops the habit of viewing the farmer who feeds it every day as a welcome experience until the day the farmer wrings its neck. Though the chicken cannot experience cause and effect, it apparently makes such a connection of farmer-food due to the recurrence of the farmer's daily appearance. The influence that such a recurrence has is derived from the predisposition of the chicken to want to eat and survive.¹

The philosophy of John Dewey helps us out here. His view points out that despite the fact that such a sentiment for life is essential in establishing the immorality of murder, facts are important in our attempts to analyze moral or ethical questions generally or, in the case of murder, specifically. Dewey was, in his writings, put off by dualism such as value/fact, cause/effect, ends/means, body/mind. He agreed with Hume on the notion that all knowledge is derived from experience. He was very concerned, though, with a qualifier: experience has to be reflected upon within the context in which it becomes known to us in order for us to make sense of the experience. Dewey's view, as opposed to Hume's sporadic view, is that experience has more of an on-going quality whereas context is very important in giving meaning to any phenomena we experience. In terms of cause and effect, for example, Dewey writes about causes leading to effects and then effects being new causes for other effects and so on. As one of the founders of pragmatism, Dewey is very much into what works. While both Hume and Dewey argue against absolute values or absolute morality, they both arrive at such a claim from different origins. For Dewey, morality exists in factual results. While Dewey didn't argue against the bases of values or moral beliefs being sentiment, he seems to upgrade the role of facts or experiences as being important in the formulation of our values. For example, facts present us with conditions that limit alternatives or fix outcomes, and this reality has a great influence on which values we develop. As Philip Selznick writes about Dewey's thinking: “… it is reasonable to say that the norms are to that extent based on facts and even 'derived' from facts. [On the other hand,] They may also, and at the same time, reflect quite arbitrary interests and inclinations.”²

Of course “interests and inclinations” are sentiments - things that we merely want. But even with these sentiments, consequences of our value choices are subject to inquiry - to factual realization. How our choices affect our personal well-being and the social well-being around us are not events occurring in our psyche, but are actual conditions in our world.

By Hume saying that values are the product of our “gut,” he implicitly delegates them to having an arbitrary essence. They are subject to a behavioral mode of development. More in line with Hume's thinking, we adopt values through conditioning (reactions to rewards and punishments) and this, in turn, is arbitrary. While this very well might be the case for some individuals or for all individuals concerning certain values, Dewey would claim that values can also be learned through problem-solving and, as such, can be purposeful and not arbitrary. He distinguished between “behavior” and “action.” Behavior is derived from conditioned experiences – resulting from rewards and punishments and little reflection – as opposed to action which is derived from purposeful experiences in which students, through cognitive awareness and reflection, actively seek those results that are intrinsically self-rewarding and self-fulfilling.

The mental construct this blog promotes, the liberated federalism construct, is based, to a great degree, on Dewey's thoughts outlined above. It is a normative view of governance and politics based on reflection. As such, the construct would rely on presenting students with instructional strategies that involve them in reflective activities. My personal bias is to favor progressive strategies, but the use of the construct does not preclude other types of strategies as long as whatever is used does not exclusively count on students merely committing to memory those facts, generalizations, and beliefs contained in the content. The construct insists that students reflect on the content, in an open manner, regardless of whether the material is presented through problem-solving activities or taking lecture notes or whatever else the instructor presents or has the students do.

1For a delightful account of Hume's philosophy see Gaarder, J. (1991). Sophie's world: A novel about the history of philosophy. New York, NY: Berkley Books.

2Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Citation on p, 21.