Compulsory Schooling and Preventative War
Tonight, I am headed to Pittsburgh to give a paper entitled, “Compulsory Schooling and Preventative War: A Comparative Analysis” at the American Educational Studies Association annual conference. I originally wrote it for a summer seminar in ethics (in the analytic tradition of normative ethics) and, since then, I find it to be a fun side-project. Coming from a continental tradition of philosophy it amuses me to play at being an analytic philosopher. Maybe you will be amused too. I would post the whole paper, but, as I plan to publish it at some point, I can only post my abstract. If it interests you feel free to request a copy by providing your e-mail in comments.
Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I will be using the language and resources of analytic political philosophy to say something like the following: Forcing people to do things before you have present reasons to do so may or may not be a good idea, but it is most certainly not an innocent thing, to be sure. Since compulsory schooling does this non-innocent thing, we should always be aware of the guilt of the thing in question when we try to analyze it. This argument will be bolstered by an analogy to preventative war (in the abstract) and the Iraq War (in the concrete). I will claim that compulsory schooling is the moral equivalent to preventative war. In other words, that forcing custodians—who may or may not be parents or guardians, and may even be the students themselves—to relinquish custody in advance of an actual offense is the moral equivalent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: It may be justified, all-things-considered, but it is certainly unjust.
Comments are closed.
“Compulsory schooling is the moral equivalent to preventative war?”
Schooling a person possibly against their will and waging a preventative war are two totally different things. What determines the morality of any action is the act itself (what it is), the intention of the person doing it (why it was done), and the circumstances in which it is completed (where/when it was done). In comparing preventative war and compulsory schooling, one will find that all three of these dimensions differ. There’s no way they are morally equivalent.
“It may be justified, all-things-considered, but it is certainly unjust.”
Is it fashionable to openly contradict yourself? I understand that sometimes contradictions can help bring the truth into focus but this is just inane.
That’s said for the sake of argument I would like to read your paper – can you email it to me?
Thanks
Zach, I will send it and think you will find it very unobjectionable. Unlike other philosophical work I do, the basic issue of compulsion-in-advance will be quite clear and spelled-out, I think.
Sam,
You’ve piqued my interest as well. Although admittedly I’ll have no time to read until the end of the semester, being that I am a former teacher and an opponent of preventative war… I’d like to see what to say.
1) A piece of feedback that I didn’t like at all at the time, yet in the long run found very helpful, was on a paper I wrote which came back with a single comment on the first page: “You have argued very elegantly, but I am not clear why you have wasted so much energy arguing for a position you know is not true.”
2) It’s a matter of style, but I would strongly advise removing the “to be sure” at the end of the first sentence, and midly advise removing “all things considered” in the last sentence. Over qualification breaks up your prose rhythm while adding nothing in meaning.
Is your point that both preventative war and compulsory education are attempts to fix problems before they arise?
The preventative warrior engages in conflict to prevent his enemies from gaining the ability to attack him. . . which assumes that his enemy was going to atack.
Whereas forcing parents to educate their kids assumes that they weren’t going to do so anyway.
This is the only analogy I can see.
Darwin: As a matter of style, I too dislike the analytic way of putting things, but I want to make my point in their court, so to speak. As a matter of truth, this is an exercise of trying to see a basic point that may open up discourse to be more sane and less assured—as you point out that this prose happens to be stylistically.
phosphorious: You’re very close to my point.
We’ll how it goes tomorrow afternoon…