The Moral Argument for Limiting Social Contact

The citizens of many countries in the world are engaged in a large-scale project of self-isolation, putting up with individual hardships to promote the common good. I don’t put this project in the same family as other participatory efforts to improve things, and it seems important to make some distinctions – conceptually important, because this crisis helps us to see something about different kinds of large scale moral projects, and practically important, because different projects have properly different motives, different sources of energy, and, therefore, different kinds of resilience.

I missed the memo on participation. When someone encourages me to join with other people to work in some good direction, I always ask, “If I don’t, what difference will it make?” And, when the answer is, “By itself, your action won’t change anything,” I put that request in a “non-urgent” folder. It isn’t my highest priority, though it might be worth doing.

I see this reflex as partly a personal quirk. I grew up in a situation in which I had little opportunity to participate in movements or group actions. The example through which participation was introduced to me was the war effort in World War II. My father had enlisted in the army. My mother had interrupted college to work in defense industries. Both were proud of doing their part to beat the Germans and the Japanese. Even before the Vietnam conflict raised questions about the wisdom of U.S. choices to go to war, I balked at the idea of being a small contributor to a vast killing machine. I might be happy to take a shot at someone like Hitler, but this other thing, this slaughter of draftees by draftees, seemed kinky to me.  This made a difference with my parents that persisted for decades. They were eccentrics and rebels, but I was an outsider.

When I came to study moral philosophy, and met some passionate participants in unions and political movements and boycotts, I tried to understand more about my peculiarity (as Hannibal Lecter might try to understand his idiosyncratic food choices). I admired vegetarians for being vegetarians. I admired people who took trouble to go vote. I admired people who marched. Those actions and commitments seemed to me part of beautiful ways of going at the world. So was my mother’s gardening, my father’s reading binges, my sister’s engagement with raising prize hogs. A life, I decided, is composed of lots of projects and decisions, not all of which immediately change anything. Having a life of a certain richness and intensity and coherence allows one to work in the world in good ways, to make good differences sometimes. Participation is part of some people’s character. 

I held on to one idea from my ‘outsider’ past: participation is a moral option. The right thing to say to non-participants is, “You may be missing out on a dimension of life that matters” but not “You are doing something wrong.” I think it is good for people to have gardens. I would encourage people to have gardens. I would never criticize someone for not having a garden.

Partly, I was drawn to this view by the thought that there are many possible movements, and that the most participatory people only engage with a few of them. United States citizens, contemporary people in 2020, are downstream from an incredible mass of cruelty, exploitation, pure evil. The economy rests on exploitative relations, and its foundations were dug in the time of slavery. The land many people live on is stolen land. Animals have been degraded into meat machines. Resource allocation decisions have privileged the current generation over all future generations. If one is to opt out of all that - doing, in every instance, that which, if everyone did it, would make things better, one will have a life that is pure participation. The most ardent participators I know stop well short of this.

Here is an example. The Black Hills were stolen from native peoples, and the descendents of the victims have never consented to the theft. The ‘compensation’ money remains unclaimed. Suppose someone decided not to travel through that country, not to support any enterprise based there – to treat the Black Hills as private property, its inhabitants as criminal intruders. Clearly, the only immediate external effect of that would be that the person would lose a wonderful vacation option. But it would not take all that many such decisions to make white economy in the Black Hills unviable. It is surely no more of a stretch to support such a movement than it is to support ‘going vegan’ as a way to transform the livestock industries. 

If someone were to decide to skip the Black Hills, to take the boring route west instead, I’d respect that: that is, I’d see it as part of an interesting and beautiful way of going at the world. I would consider it as an option for myself, but only as an option, one way of living an upright life.

The proposal for social distancing and self-isolation provoked by the coronavirus is a different case. Most of the rules are not readily enforceable, so, in one sense, compliance is a matter of choice.

However, this choice is in a different category from voting or enlisting or recycling, because any individual might be a super-spreader and any gathering might be a super-spreading event. One cannot know whether one will, by oneself, cause great harm, or whether an encounter will cause great harm. Most important, so far as I can tell from reading the stories of the major “superspreader events” (the Westport soiree, the Biogen conference, the Skagit Chorale rehearsal, the Mitchell funeral), there is no clear common element, and so no way of estimating the risk that one will spread the disease. There are two aspects to risk here: (1) my own actions may spread the disease; and (2) my obvious carelessness may encourage others to be similarly careless, and their actions may spread the disease. Since nobody knows how widespread the virus is, these risks have to count decisively, where-ever the virus has established a foothold.

This is a situation in which participation is not morally optional, because it is wrong to risk causing great harm (in a way that it is not wrong to opt out of good practices). The central moral argument is not: “If everyone does this, we will all be safer and the vulnerable will be protected.” The central argument is: “If you do not adopt these practices, you risk causing great harm.” It is an individual and particular causal argument.

How great is the risk? We can’t tell, without testing. And we can’t test.

Duolingo for Difficult Times

I learned what German I know in the best way. In high school, a teacher who cared about my mind used a German tutorial as a way of introducing me to literature, art, philosophy, politics, music. The German language became a doorway to a new life, and I more or less inhaled it. Later, I tried other languages: I got a little way in, but never found the magic.

A couple years ago, in January, I was sitting in Keefer Court, my favorite Chinese bakery and restaurant, listening to Chinese being spoken all around me and wanting to understand some of it. I decided to try a language again, but maybe French first, to warm up. For a few of months, I dabbled in the French Duolingo course. It was easy and mindless, and a few bits stuck. Then, I had to spend a long time away from home, visiting family, and I began to get compulsive about the thing. Normal progress is maybe 80 points a day. I got up to 1000 points a day.

After that, predictably, I lost interest, did other things, forgot about it. When I returned a few months ago, Duolingo French had introduced little stories, not just exercises, as before, stories good enough to keep my attention. I quickly ran through all of them (hundreds), then went back to actually learn them and to get them located in my memory. I became conscious that I now had a lot of available vocabulary, and that my pronunciation was improving. Now, I try to ration myself to 150 points a day; during a recent illness, I didn’t miss a day.

A few lessons from this, for the current lockdowns:

1.     I like their modest educational goal: just do some, every day. Don’t worry about it being systematic. It will come together. I think that might be the best we can hope for, for lots of online learning in the next while.

2.     It comforts me to have a useful and simple activity available in endless quantities, when I have seemingly endless time.

3.     It is very helpful when my mind wants to do painful or stupid things to be able to ‘go to French’ and rehearse vocabulary, try to remember the story about the grandmother and the police officer. 

4.     The sense of a structure building in the background, of a language coming together through dream processing and familiarization and practice, encourages me. It is different from going out and attacking a subject, mastering it.

I have extended my practice a little, turning on French captioning for things I want to watch anyway, beginning to read children’s books. I don’t know whether I will ever be proficient enough to teach in French or to have the conversations I want to have, but the exercise shows me things about good teaching and about how I take up new things that are useful in their own way.

I’d recommend Duolingo as one resource for these times. It’s still free, works best on a computer. 

Teaching Ethics Online

 

As schools of different kinds require their faculty to move instruction online, I remember my early encounters with this request, back when it was just a request. I was hostile, at first, because my whole way of teaching depended on the spontaneous interactions of a class. There was no meaningful content to my courses, apart from that. Anything they read or watched was intended as a provocation to build something together, to take their own responsibility for a question or concept or project. So, online teaching betrayed all my commitments.

When a class-dependent course worked well, it was splendid. But I found that many students were not willing to participate. They insisted on “the delivery of material in digestible pieces” (think ‘feeding a baby owl’) and waited me out, when I tried to make different rules. Also, many students had so many higher priority commitments, like football practice from 6 to 11 am, that being alert in a classroom at the same time each day was just too much to ask. 

When I was finally forced to teach online, I found some surprising advantages. For those with limited time, the mechanics of going to class eats up a substantial part of their time-budget. In an online class, it is possible to make the reading and writing the whole story, and have more hope that the reading is completed and the writing is worried over.  Also, I had more time to revise assignments, to make lectures clear and short, to give the course a simple structure.  

I was never able to replicate online the interaction I valued in the classroom. That would have required much more attention to guidelines for online discussion boards and to technologies for virtual meeting. I was just beginning to experiment with those tools when I stopped teaching. 

I came away with a few ideas, from my early experiments:

1.     The online format requires short, tight, high-energy lectures – at 20 minutes maximum. One cannot do such things without a lot of work, polishing and editing a script, practicing delivery. Each semester, I would try to add a couple more good pieces to the mix. It was not possible to do it right the first time, at least for me. Here is one piece I did, to give you an idea of the cope and limits of my ambitions. (The context is a review of one central argument in Plato's Republic.)

2.     I came to think that lectures made sense mostly as set-up for writing assignments. I designed the assignments to build directly off of ideas in the lecture, so that people would see the point of watching the lectures carefully.

3.     I decided that almost every paper I read should begin with a personal story, and that the assignment should encourage students to think about that story. This was partly because I think that ethics is primarily about being thoughtful about one’s own life, a project not well honored in other college classes. But, likely more important, it was almost always possible for me to like a paper that began with a story. I looked forward to hearing about unjust principals, bad coaches, acts of true friendship, saints, mistakes, perplexities and dilemmas. Even when the analysis had problems and the writing was shaky, I loved the stories. This was important because my main teaching mode was to assist with the revision of papers, which meant I had to spend a lot of time with each one. If I couldn’t like a paper, couldn’t see it as a project with room for improvement, I was stopped dead. The stories kept me reading the assignments and thinking about them.

4.     Online quizzes are magic. The classroom management programs do quizzes so much better than one can do other ways, taking over the record-keeping and grading. Making quizzes helps teachers figure out what is important in the readings or in the lectures, and what distinctions they want students to make – how closely they want them to read or listen. Taking quizzes stirs up students’ memory in useful ways; there’s research on that. Also, taking quizzes gives people comfort in a philosophy course where they are sometimes puzzled. They can secure some kind of a reasonable grade by being conscientious and careful, and they can evaluate their progress by their quiz scores. (This matters especially if a course has few other checkpoints, or if those checkpoints happen toward the end of the course.)

I never had a chance to fully explore this teaching medium. I know that colleagues can make magic happen in online discussions and that meeting tools are good enough to allow a lot of small group work. I was never very satisfied with my own experiments in that direction. In that way, my teaching became much more ‘teacher-student’ than it had been in the classroom, where my hope was always that people would take each other seriously and begin conversations independent of me. I hope this new wave of experiment, this massive shift in how education is done, prompts many new discoveries about how to invite students to take their own responsibility for questions and issues.

Limited Outreach

In 2014, I started a short-term blog, thinking about what it was like to revisit Vienna, Austria after 40 years away. I like this form: a bounded blog, responding to something specific, from different angles. This is first page of that early effort.

I'd like to try this again, with this "hunkering down" exercise imposed upon us by the novel coronavirus. As the state and the society impose or suggest new limits on how we all can move, to keep the herd safe, I notice new things and have new thoughts. I am guessing that there might be an audience for these impressions. I have been teaching ethics and trying to establish video as a medium of education most of my adult life, and this new era reminds me of old questions and gives me new things to think about. Also, I am so curious about how other people are responding. Perhaps my postings will provoke similar efforts at outreach.