Shutting Down Racial Bias Education in Oklahoma? The Chilling Impact of HB 1775 and Recent OSBE Decisions

On July 28, 2022, the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to lower the accreditation status of both Tulsa Public Schools and Mustang Public Schools to the status of “accredited with warning.” In both cases, it was because of an alleged violation of Oklahoma’s new (as of 2021) law, HB 1775, originally developed in order to preclude the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools (although what the law specifically prohibits—enumerated below—is not what critical race theory, a field of legal study developed in law schools, actually says).

I would like to spend a few minutes reflecting on this law and the recent OSBE decisions, with an eye towards the likely future impact of HB 1775 given these decisions—and what implications that has for the state of Oklahoma.

 

What Does HB 1775 Say?

The crucial section of HB 1775 is the “General Prohibition” section, which begins with these words: “No teacher, administrator or other school employee shall require or make part of any Course offered in a public school the following discriminatory principles.” It then enumerates the prohibited principles as follows:

(1) One race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,

(2) An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,

(3) An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex,

(4) Members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex,

(5) An individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex,

(6) An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,

(7) Any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex, or

(8) Meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.

Many—included Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Joy Hofmeister—have commented that the wording of the law is vague, meaning that even if we have the law in front of us it may be less than clear what the law actually prohibits.

One immediate problem of this sort has to do with what it means to “make part of any Course” one or more of the prohibited principles. The charitable part of me would like to assume that the intent here is not to prohibit bringing up these principles for the sake of critical discussion in a classroom, but rather to prohibit endorsing them (and encouraging students to endorse them). But the wording could go either way. And that creates some serious worries.

Consider the first prohibited principle: one race or sex is inherently superior to another. This principle was accepted by many Americans in history and was used to justify the institution of slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc. A history teacher who did not call attention to this racist ideology and how it shaped historical institutions and events would be failing to provide a proper understanding of our history. But to call attention to this ideology, to make it explicit and look at how it shaped American history, would clearly involve making principle (1) “part of” a history course in one obvious meaning of that phrase.

And so, the wording of the law leaves open the possibility that a history teacher could be found guilty of violating the law simply because they are doing a good job of teaching history.

Or take prohibited principle (6): ”An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Suppose a high school history teacher wanted to consider the issue of reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre. There are lots of interesting and important arguments here. Property ownership is one of the most significant ways that wealth is passed down from one generation to another, and in the Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street was burned down—and with it, the property of its citizens. We can reasonably infer that the descendants of those who were killed and dispossessed by the massacre would have been financially better off today had white Tulsans not committed brutal murder and destruction, or had the state compensated the victims at the time. In short, past injustices reach into the present, affecting people alive today. Does Oklahoma as a community have an obligation to try to remedy the injustice that current Oklahomans are experiencing because of the misdeeds of people in the past?

Suppose a history teacher decided to explore this question and consider arguments on both sides of it. Let’s suppose no one is arguing that the students in the classroom are guilty of the crime that was committed by people long dead. No one is arguing, absurdly, that they are responsible in that sense of the word. But some are arguing that the current generation has a moral responsibility to remedy existing injustices in our state, and that the crimes of past generations have cast a long shadow into the present, one which means current Black Oklahomans are worse off than they would have been had the massacre never occurred.

If a teacher in Oklahoma leads a discussion on this question, taking seriously arguments of the latter sort, are they then “teaching” principle (6) in violation of HB1775? Or are they only violating it if they dub their students morally blameworthy for crimes committed before they were born (something no thoughtful person would actually claim)?

 

Straw-Manning

Setting aside problems of vagueness, there are other serious problems with HB 1775, problems that have the potential to hamper excellence in education and impede efforts to fight racism in Oklahoma. These problems arise because HB 1775 emerged out the 2020 culture wars surrounding racism and so-called “critical race theory” in America—and those culture wars featured a lot of straw-manning of views, straw-manning that continues to cause enormous misunderstanding.

If a law is regulating what people are allowed to say, and if we are in the habit of grossly misunderstanding what people say (especially across the culture-war battle lines), then the law is in serious danger of being used to condemn people who didn’t actually violate the law.

To see what I mean, let’s consider principle (2): “An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” This principle is worth thinking about with care, because it’s the principle that takes center stage in the complaint against Tulsa Public Schools.

Given its wording, I have no objection as such to prohibiting the teaching of this principle in public schools, since it is clearly false: the idea that people are inherently racist because of their race is nonsense. Simply having certain physiological features, such as pale skin, has zero impact as such on what you believe about human beings and how you act towards other. How we think about and treat people who look different from us is a function of upbringing and life experiences, education and cultural influence—things that might be influenced by our skin color, but only because we live in a society where skin color impacts life experiences.

That I am racist by nature because of my innate “whiteness” is also problematic because it assumes that race is an actual thing, a biological reality that can have actual effects on what a person is like all by itself. But we know now that race is a cultural construct: it has no biological foundation. Instead, human cultures pick out certain physiological traits that in themselves are meaningless and treat them as if they were significant, grouping people into different categories based on these traits, treating them differently because of them, etc. Race is very real in the sense that it impacts people’s lives and experience, but it is a reality created by culture, not by nature.

Principle (2) supposes that race is a “natural kind” rather than a social construct. As such, it conflicts with everything we now understand about race. Teachers should not be in the business of teaching nonsense to kids, not when public tax dollars are paying their salaries.

But I know, based on carefully following recent public discussions around what has been dubbed “critical race theory,” that the nonsense that is principle (2) is being routinely attributed to people who don’t hold it—people who agree that it is nonsense, who would never endorse principle (2), but who are being treated as if they endorsed (2).

In philosophy, we talk about something called “the straw man fallacy.” This is where, instead of critiquing what a person actually thinks or holds, you attribute to them a distortion of their view, some mischaracterization of it that is clearly false. You then show that this view (the one they don’t actually hold) is false, and condemn them for holding it. It’s called the straw man fallacy because what you’ve basically done is set fire to a straw effigy of someone and then behaved as if you set fire to the actual person.

Some people engage in such “straw-manning” on purpose. If you’re really clever (and unprincipled) you can get lots of people on board, condemning someone you don’t like—a political opponent, say—for an absurd view they don’t hold. This is especially easy to do when your targets express their views using technical terms, terms that are not well understood and take some time and effort to explain. The person engaged in straw-manning can then just attach a false meaning to the term. If they do that loudly and persistently enough in public platforms, the target of straw-manning (who is trying to use the term properly to explain their view) will end up routinely misunderstood—and perhaps mocked or scorned or condemned for views they don’t actually hold.

Relatedly, it can be disturbingly easy for unscrupulous pundits to straw-man ideas that emerge out academic research. Often, understanding those ideas requires studying the body of research, something most people don’t have the time or energy or training to do. And so it can be especially easy for an unprincipled pundit with an audience to mischaracterize the target’s views, express horror about those views, and get the audience to be equally horrified. By the time people who understand the research and are good at explaining it realize what is going on, it may be too late. People don’t like to admit they’ve been duped.

The Straw-Manning of Implicit Bias

In the public debates about so-called “critical race theory,” there’s been a lot of straw-manning going on. And one of the victims of that straw-manning is the concept of “implicit bias” and the research surrounding it. The basic idea of implicit bias is this: all of us develop, based on our socialization and life experiences, certain short-cuts for decision-making that we aren’t conscious of, short-cuts that lead us to prefer some things to others based not on a careful examination of the evidence but just kind of…automatically. Given how many decisions we need to make and how much information is out there, a certain level of automation is essential if we’re going to live our lives and not be paralyzed. But the necessity of implicit bias explains why it is a universal feature of the human condition. It doesn’t entail that implicit bias is always unproblematic.

Some of these automated preferences a pretty odd—such as the fact that the order in which things are presented to us influences our judgments about them. A bias like that can be harmless if you’re choosing which t-shirt to buy, but it’s more serious when it comes to making judgments about which job candidate had the best interview. Since implicit biases are implicit—that is, unconscious and automatic in their operation, like our breathing—we can miss when a bias that really has no bearing on which candidate is better is influencing our judgment.

But also like breathing, we can make ourselves aware of the operation of our biases. And so we can try to control for them in some way. It may not always be easy to figure out how—we can’t exactly interview all the job candidates simultaneously—but knowing that these biases could be at work will allow us to explore ways to minimize their influence.

Most often, “implicit bias” is used to refer to such unconscious/automated preferences as they relate to classes of people. Shawn Marsh, in addition to offering an accessible overview of the research, offers the following helpful definition of implicit bias in this sense: “Implicit bias is a preference—positive or negative—for a group based on stereotypes or attitudes we hold and that tend to develop early in life. In contrast to explicit bias, whereby we are aware of our biases toward a group, implicit bias operates outside our awareness: we don’t even know it is there.”

As noted above, implicit biases emerge because there’s just too much information and too many choices for us to be able to sit down and figure out the best choice, based on all the available information, every time we have a choice to make. We’d be paralyzed. So our brain is designed to automate a lot of things, shaping our split-second judgments.

The process of forming implicit biases starts very early and is shaped by lots of social forces and personal experiences: who raised you and what they looked like, whether they were loving or abusive, what kinds of people you were surrounded by, who your earliest friends were, who scared you, what stories you were told, what kinds of TV shows you watched, how people in your community talked about or reacted to different sorts of people, etc.

Unfortunately, the automated preferences shaped by these experiences can influence our responses to people of different races and sexes, leading to discriminatory treatment that we aren’t even aware we’re engaging in. Some implicit biases take the form of automated trust or automated fear: if some stranger you meet on the street looks like the caretakers who nurtured you, you are likely to give them the benefit of the doubt automatically, to assume they have your best interests at heart until they prove otherwise. So, if that person pulls out a cell phone, you’ll probably assume it’s a cell phone and be shocked when it’s actually a gun and the person is an evil assassin sent to kill you.

In contrast, if someone doesn't look anything like the friends and family you grew up with, your brain will automatically be more cautious—seeing them more truly as a stranger rather than as a friend you haven’t met yet. And if, by contrast, they look like someone you’ve only ever seen on TV, generally in the role of the gun-slinging gangster, they may pull out a cell phone and you’ll swear it’s a gun.

The point is that our split-second judgments about the people we meet are shaped by our personal history and our socialization. Personal experience and culture shape who we find trustworthy at first sight and who we don’t, who we feel at home with and who we are uncomfortable around, etc. Often, this bias is slight and easily corrected with more information. But even that slight unconscious bias could be the reason the black candidate for the job didn’t give white interviewers the same warm feeling as the white candidate and so didn’t get the job—or the reason why police officers slightly more often mistake cell-phones for guns in the hands of black men than in the hands of white women, leading to tragic outcomes in the former case more often than the latter.

And to the extent that the prevailing culture shapes implicit biases, one could have a society where far more people have these small unconscious biases against black people than white people. And the cumulative effect could be more than small. It could make life significantly harder for black people than white people, all else being equal—even when nobody is consciously being racist.

The evidence suggests that the US is such a country. See, for example, here and here. What does that mean? It means that if people do not investigate their own biases and recognize them and work on mitigating them, and if institutions do not control for them, the cumulative impact of these biases is likely to make it harder for blacks than whites to succeed in life, even if no one is overtly racist. When something like a widespread unconscious bias has such a cumulative effect, it serves as a dimension of what is called “systemic racism”: the social system makes life harder for one race than another, even if no individuals are setting out to do this or are actively supporting it based on racist beliefs, etc.

That implicit bias exists is a well-establish fact about human psychology. That white people raised in the US are, in general, likely to have implicit biases that collectively lead to social patterns that disadvantage blacks, is well-supported by the social-scientific evidence.

Someone might sum up these well-supported claims by making the following implicit-bias claim: “In general, white Americans are likely to harbor unconscious or implicit racial biases that disadvantage black people or, in other words, contribute to systemic racism.”

In saying this, is the person saying that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”?

 No.

Implicit bias is an established fact of human psychology, but “inherent racism”—which I assume means racism as a matter of one’s very nature—does not exist. Implicit biases are acquired, not “inherent.” No one has them “by virtue of their race or sex.” We have them by virtue of our lived experience and social environment. My race and sex will surely influence my lived experience and social environment, and hence which implicit biases I have. But nobody is born racist just by virtue of their race. Those who say white Americans are likely to harbor implicit racial biases that disadvantage black people are not claiming otherwise.

So, the implicit bias claim above is very different from prohibited principle (2).

But teachers and trainers and scholars who have made the implicit bias claim above, based on their understanding of the research, have routinely been mischaracterized, accused of asserting the prohibited principle (2) as well as some of the others, such as (5). These accusations are often repeated again and again, loudly, by pundits who benefit from doing so. And since the general public is not always very familiar with the exact meaning of terms like “implicit racial bias” and “systemic racism,” it is easy for pundits who don’t care about truth but only about silencing and discrediting their political opponents to shut down discussions of implicit racial bias and how to overcome it by straw-manning the people who are trying to lay out the problem and identify solutions.

And so, when I first saw HB 1775, my immediate worry was that the law would be used to penalize those who are doing this kind of work—the work of calling attention to the way implicit biases generate systemic racism even when people consciously reject racism; the work of trying to raise consciousness about this problem and promote solutions, thereby helping promote greater racial equity in Oklahoma.

 

Bias Education and Defensiveness

Some social problems can only be fixed when people are willing to introspect honestly—when they are prepared to be vulnerable enough to see how they might be part of the problem, and thereby see how they can work to be part of the solution. Implicit bias education is aimed at inspiring that kind of honesty and vulnerability, but for that very reason it can also inspire defensiveness.

Few of us want to admit that we are part of a problem that hurts people. We might feel guilty about it. And in our defensiveness, we might be motivated to embrace mischaracterizations of those whose words are the occasion for our discomfort. We might be inclined to too-quickly believe uncharitable accounts about the trainer’s or teacher’s intentions—accounts that free us from the responsibility that comes with admitting we contribute to such a problem. We might blame the messenger for making us feel guilty, instead of seeing the messenger as inviting us to take responsibility for making our society a better place, starting with ourselves: looking for ways we can shake off harmful social programming and help others do likewise.

The point here is this: predictably, those doing the work of teaching implicit bias are going to sometimes be accused of trying to make people feel guilty or uncomfortable for being white. The teachers aren’t actually trying to do that, but because the insights they have to share hit home, exposing ways we might be unwittingly contributing to a serious social problem, they sometimes inspire feelings of discomfort and guilt. And so, when I looked at HB 1775, I am immediately struck by principle (7): “Any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Of course, implicit bias teachers/trainers are not out to tell people they should feel guilty for being white. First of all, you don’t have implicit bias because you’re white. Everyone has implicit biases because that is part of human nature. The precise biases you have are not a function of your race but a function of your social environment and life experiences. Your race will influence those things, because people of different races have different social experiences. But a white person in one culture may have very different implicit biases than a white person in another.

Second, implicit bias isn’t something you should feel guilty about, because implicit bias is something you are unaware of and that is wired into you by social and environmental conditioning. It’s not something you have consciously chosen out of bad motives. It’s more like catching a cold: something in your environment is responsible, not you. The trainer is trying to make you aware that you’ve been affected in this way, not to make you feel guilty about something you didn’t choose. Awareness means you can choose to make helpful changes. More often than not, feeling guilty just leads to wallowing or hiding from the thing that makes us feel guilty.

The response implicit bias trainers are hoping for is not guilt but something more practical. Again, the cold analogy is helpful. If I find out I have a cold, it doesn’t make sense to feel guilty. What makes sense is to treat the symptoms, take steps to promote recovery, and try not to spread the cold.

Likewise, while I’m not responsible for having the implicit biases I have, I am responsible for how I respond to discovering my implicit biases. While I shouldn’t feel guilty about having a bias, there might be a reason to feel guilty about attacking the messenger and rebuffing the message with a knee-jerk response of “You’re just trying to make me feel guilty for being white!” That kind of distortion of what is happening may make me feel better in the moment: if they’re just out to get me, then I don’t have to do anything about my implicit bias. I’m off the hook! Whew. But I’ve gotten myself off the hook by attributing false motives to the teacher who’s trying to help me discover ways to improve myself.

That's something that, if I did it, I should maybe feel guilty about.

 

False Accusations and the Chilling Effect of HB 1775

HB 1775, however, enables this defensive response to go a step further: once I’ve shaken off the message and the responsibility it brings by blaming the teacher for the bad feelings I have about it—once I’ve falsely accused the teacher of trying to make me feel bad just because I’m white—there’s now a law that says it’s illegal for them to do this thing (the thing they’re not actually doing but which I have accused them of doing in order to defend my ego). And so, in addition to storming away from the training or the class, fuming because the message challenged me in ways I don’t want to be challenged, I can take the further step of striking back. 

Legally. 

I can file a complaint that accuses the trainer or teacher of violating HB 1775.

In short, it is entirely predictable that those who teach and train about implicit bias, while not in fact guilty of teaching principle (7), will occasionally inspire defensive responses that lead to them being falsely accused of (7). And if decision-makers assessing whether the law has been broken have been primed to misunderstand the relevant ideas by our culture wars’ straw-manning pundits—or if they are psychologically prone to feel defensive themselves—then you can easily see how the law might end up shutting down important work whose aim is to make our society a less racist place.

It doesn’t even have to actually happen for the law to have a chilling effect on these important discussion. It is enough if it looks like it happened. And this brings me back to the recent decisions made by the Oklahoma State Board of Education, in a vote of 4-2, to slap two Oklahoma school districts with warning and threats to their accreditation based on supposed violations of HB 1775.

In the case of Tulsa Public Schools, this penalty was based on a supposed violation of HB 1775 that took place during a required bias training for Tulsa schools staff. It was the result of a complaint by a single teacher who attended this training. Now maybe there really was a violation. Maybe the trainer completely misunderstood implicit bias, and said something like the following: “All white people have implicit bias just because they are white. Their race alone makes them inherently biased against black people. White people are born that way!”

But it strikes me as highly unlikely that someone chosen to lead a training on this issue for a school district would so radically misunderstand the concept of implicit bias. And I’ve also seen sound explanations of implicit bias routinely mischaracterized as statements like the one above. And so I find myself immediately suspicious of the claim that any of the prohibited principles in HB 1775 were actually taught.

And here’s the problem: the grounds for reaching the decision that HB 1775 was violated haven’t been made public. The thing that might allay my suspicion—a transcript of the recording of the training, or copies of the recording itself, showing that the trainer was not misunderstood or mischaracterized or uncharitably interpreted but really was saying that people are innately racist just because of their race and should feel guilty for being white—are not available.

The person who lodged the complaint against Tulsa Public Schools claimed that in the training, she was made to feel guilty about past wrongs by white people and that she and others were told that white people “are implicitly racially biased by nature.” But were the words “by nature” actually spoken, or was that the accuser’s take-away, their own misunderstanding? Again, since implicit bias is a matter of social conditioning—nurture, not nature—it seems unlikely that anyone leading a training on the topic would make such a claim.

Apparently, there is audio recording of the training. It was reviewed by a team investigating the complaint. But not only has it not been made available to the public; it appears to have not been made available to all the board members who were supposed to vote on the matter. In fact, one board member who voted against the downgrade—Carlisha Williams Bradley—complained that she had not been given theopportunity to review the audio for herself.

That said, part or all of the transcript of the audio was presumably made available, since during the meeting Bradley pointed out that OSDE general counsel Brad Clark “had to make an inference based on the audio that never explicitly said that an individual by virtue of his race or her race or sex is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive. None of these things were ever said.”

So, we have the public testimony of one board member who presumably has seen a transcript of the most relevant parts of the training audio—and according to that public testimony, the prohibited principles were never asserted. Instead, the judgment that HB 1775 was violated was based on an inference or an interpretation.

This is not comforting for anyone who is working in or for Oklahoma’s public schools and who cares about racial bias education. Given how our culture wars have led to straw-manning of people’s views and arguments, especially in relation to implicit racial bias, and given how defensiveness can lead to misrepresentations, we find ourselves in a social climate in which people are routinely accused, mistakenly or wrongly, of saying things prohibited by HB 1775. And now, school districts in Oklahoma have been penalized for violating HB 1775 based not on anything that was actually said in clear violation of HB 1775, but based on an inference.

In a social climate so littered with straw-manning and defensive misrepresentation, such inferences are always suspect, because they are so unreliable. How, then, can anyone working in the public school system have any confidence, based on the results of the Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting, that they will not incur penalties for violating HB 1775 even when they take pains not to do so? How can they be sure that if they take up the important conversations about reducing racial bias in our culture, they won’t have their words misinterpreted to mean things that, according to HB 1775, one is not legally permitted to say as a teacher or trainer in Oklahoma’s public schools?

In short, given the recent OSBE decisions, I cannot see how HB 1775 can have any effect other than a chilling one: keeping important research and information out of the hands of teachers who could use it to promote greater inclusivity and fairness in their classrooms, and keeping high school teachers from having some really important conversations with their students (out of fear that they’ll lose their jobs based on a straw-man mangling of their words).

Racism is bad. We need tools to fight it. Among those tools are challenging conversations about implicit bias in our high school classrooms, and training for teachers aimed at helping them avoid unintended bias in their interactions with a diversity of students. When HB 1775 is combined with the recent OSBE decision, the effect is to make our schools and teachers afraid to take up these crucial tools.

And our state will be the worse for it.

Based on all of this, I can only conclude that either HB 1775 should be rescinded, or new and more exacting guidance on its use be issued that prohibits penalizing schools, school districts, teachers, or trainers for contestable interpretations of what they said or meant to say.

Addendum--Added 8/19/22

Originally, OSBE spokespersons indicated that while the slides for the Tulsa Public Schools training did not violate HB 1775, elaborations found on the audio did. Since then, there has been a revelation:the Tulsa World has reviewed the audio and found it to be identical to the slides. Despite this revelation, OSBE stands by their ruling because, apparently, the impact of the words on the slides being read aloud gave them the impression that the spirit of the law had been violated. And that justified a legal penalty.

So, are we to infer from this that someone's tone of voice can change whether they are found to be in violation of HB 1775, and hence whether a school district will be legally penalized or a teacher fired?

This revelation drives home further the fact that the trainer did not in fact say anything explicitly prohibited by HB 1775. Instead, the judgment that a violation occurred is based on some perceived meaning beyond what was explicitly said--and/or some "spirit" of the law beyond what is explicitly prohibited.

The former option is that the trainer meant something by their words that's not only different from what they actually said but opposed to what they actually said. Recall that OSBE took the trainer to be violating the rule against saying that people are inherently racist because of their race. But implicit bias is a matter of nurture not nature (hence, implicit bias is not inherent), and implicit bias research understands biases to derive from personal experience and socialization, not because of their race. An implicit bias trainer knows this, and so it seems highly implausible to claim that the trainer meant to say what HB 1775 explicitly prohibits, even if they didn't explicitly say it.

The more plausible interpretation of the OSBE decision, then turns on their explicit invocation of the "spirit" of HB 1775--something that the law prohibits even if it doesn't come right out and say so. But what do they take this "spirit" to be?

The trainer presented research findings about bias that--while true and important to disseminate if we want a more equitable society, and while not in violation of anything that HB 1775 explicitly prohibits-- are uncomfortable truths: truths that many don't like to hear, because it means they might be unconsciously contributing to racial inequity even if they don't mean to be, and even if they denounce racism.

Is OSBE saying here that they take the law to mean it's illegal for any teacher or trainer in Oklahoma schools to say anything about race that, even if true and not included in the list of prohibited "principles", makes someone uncomfortable? Because if that is what they take the law to mean, they are treating it as prohibiting way more than what it says it prohibits--probably ruling out any effort in public schools to share research that could help reduce racial inequity (since such research is sure to make someone uncomfortable).

Remembering Rune Engebretsen

Today, at Emmaus Church in Northfield, Minnesota, a service was held in memory of my Uncle, Rune Engebretsen, who died a few months ago. In his memory, I share the following reflections.

In Memory of Rune Engebretsen

My much-loved uncle, Rune Engebretsen (always “Onkel Rune” to me), passed away last week. A Scandinavian Studies professor and a skilled translator (from Norwegian/Danish into English), his special interest in Kierkegaard created a distinctive intellectual connection between us that I didn’t have with other members of my family. To oversimplify it, he was the relative I could always count on to talk philosophy with me. On a deeper level, I enjoyed his enthusiastic interest in deep questions about truth and meaning and values, about God and Christianity. When my first book came out, he was one of its loudest cheerleaders (at one point hyperbolically calling it “essential reading for all humanity”—which I took to mean he was proud of me).

He was also a collector of books. Apparently it got a little out of control.

But these are not the things I will most remember about him. Perhaps one of the best ways to capture his essence is to say that his personality made him quite naturally and easily one of the best Jule Nisses my family ever had. 

That may require a bit of explanation. In our family, we’ve always followed the Norwegian Christmas Eve tradition of having a visit from Jule Nissen: the Christmas Elf. He’d sweep into the home, distribute presents, and dance around the tree with the family. As I was growing up, we had neighbors and family friends don the Nisse outfit to help out with the task. As an adult my sister and I have often enough taken on the job, and in recent years my daughter has been eager to put on the beard, Norwegian sweater, and knit stockings.

But Rune, during one of the Christmas Eves we spent with him and his kids, stands out in my memory as being one of the most delightful. Bantering in English and Norwegian as he stomped into the house, telling jokes as he distributed gifts from his sack—I can’t remember details so much as the way he made us feel: full of joy and laughter. 

To say he always had a twinkle in his eye is a bit of a cliché—but when I think of Onkel Rune, the expression “a twinkle in his eye” comes to mind with such force that he’s who I’d want to point to if anyone hadn’t heard that expression and wanted to know what it meant. He had a way of smiling at you that invited you to share in his personal delight at the world. And he was charming. It wasn’t something he turned on in order to achieve some end, bust something he was: a charming man, in large measure because you really got the sense that he wanted the best for everyone.

This does not mean, of course, that he never disappointed those around him. All of us are imperfect in our own ways. My sense is Onkel Rune always meant well, but wouldn’t always follow through. My mother frequently said to me, “You’re just like my brother!”—especially at moments when despite my initial good intentions I failed to follow through. She’s right about me, so I’m not one to hold this too much against him.

More importantly, there’s the fact that at key moments in my life when I needed him, he had more than just good intentions to offer. One time in particular stands out. The summer after my freshman year in college, my friend Lou and I decided to drive across the country to Washington State (where Lou was from) to work at a fruit orchard for the summer. We started out the journey in an old AMC Spirit whose road-worthiness was a bit sketchy—and which, while paid for, was not yet legally registered in any state (Lou’s plan was to take care of that in Washington once we got there). Needless to say, this journey did not go smoothly. A breakdown and emergency repair, followed by a police stop, took all the cash we’d saved up for the journey and most of our spirits (except, of course, for the AMC Spirit, which we were stuck with).

The good news is that we were a few hours drive from Northfield, Minnesota, where Onkel Rune lived at the time. When we limped into town, Rune gave us safe haven. He offered rest, food, and a renewal of our spirits. And he gave us enough cash to make the rest of the trip to Washington (with no expectation of repayment). As a fan of the Lord of the Rings books, I felt like the hobbits arriving in Rivendell.

One final memory of Onkel Rune also relates to a road trip—this one from when I was a teenager, and our families traveled together on a summer trip to Washington DC and Philadelphia. I remember little from that trip, but what stands out is this silly little mantra that Rune had created, and which he repeatedly offered up to eye rolls and laughter. The mantra went like this:

Are you happy now?

Happy go lucky, you know.

Happy as a flutterby!

Yes, sir, he said. Do you know him?

On the day I learned he’d died, as I was driving my daughter Izzie home from school, I spoke those words to her—finding it a bit difficult to finish the whole thing, because I was starting to cry. But I finished it, and I told her that this silliness came from her Great Uncle Rune, and I was sharing it with her in his memory, because he had died.

Izzie hesitated, then said, “So that’s where that stupid saying comes from.”

Apparently, Rune’s silliness made enough of a long-term impression on me that, without even really realizing it, this bit of delightful nonsense made its way into my own repertoire of dad jokes and absurdities that I’ve used through the years to elicit eye rolls in my kids. 

All of this is to say that Rune’s spirit lives on in those who knew and loved him; that his life has touched and changed the world for the better; and that, since I find it hard to imagine the world without him out there somewhere offering his twinkling glance, his charm, his intelligence, and his silliness, I refuse to do it. Instead, I will believe that he lives on in some different way, a way we may not fully know or understand, a way that—whether wholly metaphorical or metaphysically real—makes the world a better place.

Abortion Prohibitions, Rape Exceptions, and Roe v Wade: Is it feasible to prohibit abortion while making it available to rape victims?

Roe v Wade and "Middle-Ground" Approaches to Abortion Law 

Roe v Wade has essentially guaranteed for the last half century that any woman who wants to have a legal abortion can have one--and by extension, all rape victims who find themselves pregnant with their rapist's baby. Roe v Wade has not just precluded absolute bans on abortion, but also what many would call "middle ground" policies: legal policies that outlaw abortion in general, but allow for it in some specified range of justifying cases.

For fifty years, such middle ground approaches have been just as hypothetical as outright bans. But with the very real possibility that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v Wade, they're no longer just hypothetical. And many Americans are drawn to some kind of "middle ground" position: they are uncomfortable with abortion on demand, thinking that it shouldn't be allowed under "ordinary" circumstances; but they think that a sweeping prohibition is just as troubling, because there are special cases in which abortion should be legally permitted. 

The special cases most commonly mentioned are rape and threat to the life of the mother. What I want to focus on here is the former. In other words, I want to here consider the idea that we can outlaw abortion in general but still make it available, legally, to rape victims (including incest victims). I’ve been teaching the ethics of abortion for about thirty years, and to say that this idea is popular among my students would be an understatement.

The Philosophical Argument for the Middle-Ground View

I can understand why. Most of my Oklahoma students, along with many Americans, see the fetus as a human life with a person’s right to life. But they also recognize the force of arguments from bodily autonomy. The whole idea of the state forcing people to make their bodies available to be used by other people—even to save their lives—makes them uneasy. For example, nobody should be able to force me to donate a piece of my liver, even if it is the only way to save the life of another person (even an innocent person who did nothing to put themselves into this situation, a person with a fully-intact right to life).

But, argue the supporters of this middle ground view, the robust right to bodily autonomy doesn’t apply if the person has intentionally done something that they know will make another person dependent on them to stay alive. Sure, the state shouldn’t be able to force me against my will to donate my body or part of it to keep another person alive. But if a woman has consensual sex, she does so knowing she could get pregnant. She knows that by doing this, she risks a fetus becoming dependent on being connected to her body for nine months in order to stay alive. Supporters of this view argue that if, knowing that risk, the woman chooses to have sex anyway, she’s forfeited her right to refuse to sustain the resulting life.

But in rape cases, the victim didn’t choose. And so her right to bodily autonomy remains fully intact. And so no one can require her to make her body available for the fetus to use, even if the only alternative is abortion and the death of the fetus.

Supporters of this middle ground view don’t usually formulate their thinking quite this explicitly. It usually takes some reading and reflection and Socratic questioning for those of my student who favor this view to lay out their case for it in the terms sketched out above. But I think, even so, that most people who adopt this view are thinking along something like these lines.

If you start by assuming the fetus is a person with a person’s right to life, combine it with a general support of the right to bodily autonomy, and add a compassionate awareness of the ways in which that right has been profoundly violated in the case of rape victims, the resulting view seems quite sensible.

...at least if we're thinking of it in purely hypothetical terms. But today, as already noted, the view is no longer just hypothetical. So we need to ask: given the realities of the law and American society, could we actually protect the right of rape victims to have abortions in the face of a more general prohibition?

To answer this, let’s try to envision how this rape exception would work.

What Would a Rape Exception Look Like?

Would you grant an exception only in the case of a “confirmed” rape victim? And if so, how would you confirm that someone was raped? The most obvious answer is through the criminal conviction of the person who raped them. But that’s not going to fly. First off, the baby will likely be born before anyone is convicted. Secondly, securing a rape conviction in this country is hard. If there is a list of crimes that includes an unusually high number of people who are guilty as sin but have avoided conviction, rape would be at or near the top of that list.

So maybe the law could look to some less decisive confirmation than a criminal conviction. But what would that be?

Keep in mind that most rapes are acquaintance rapes, many cases of rape rely on intimidation or drugs or other means where there is no overt violence or infliction of physical injury, and victims are routinely so traumatized or ashamed (or both) after their violation that they retreat into seclusion and don’t talk about what happened to them, let alone go to the hospital for a rape kit or go to the police to make a police report.

Those who have been violently raped by strangers are more likely to seek medical care and police intervention in the immediate wake of the crime. But when the rape is at the hands of a friend or loved one, someone trusted by the people the victim knows, the confusion and sense of betrayal and self-questioning make the sort of timely actions likely to produce evidence far less likely.

Is it reasonable to expect rape victims to hold themselves together enough—in the wake of the worst thing that’s ever happened to them—to gather evidence of whatever sort they can manage in the horrifying event that they might end up pregnant? Or maybe we should just expect them to--what?--call the police? File a police report? Go on record that they've been raped?

Remember that many rape victims are children. Can we reasonably expect children to engage in this kind of forward-thinking action in the wake of traumatic violation? Recall that many of these child rape victims were raped by their own fathers or uncles or grandfathers or dear family friends. Perhaps they have been groomed carefully and warned of the horrible consequences if anyone ever finds out. After being victimized, they cower in fear of anyone learning the truth—until they discover they're pregnant.

Given these realities, how likely is it that, in general, rape victims will have anything more than their word to support the contention that they’ve been raped?

And then there are the cases in which women grow up and marry within deeply patriarchal cultures and find themselves without any sexual autonomy in their marital lives. Their whole culture and community reinforces the message, and enforces the norm, that their consent to sex with their husbands is irrelevant. It is their duty to quietly endure whatever their husband wants to do to their bodies, and they live in stark terror of being saddled with yet another child. These women are raped not just by their husbands but by a culture that normalizes and enforces the idea that consent doesn’t matter.

In such cases, it is hard to credit the idea that they have made a free choice to have sex and so are responsible for any pregnancy that results. But it also hard to credit the idea that they would file a police report every time their husband has sex with them, or that--if they are able to slip out of their husband’s grasp long enough to visit an abortion provider--they would be able to do so in possession of legally-compelling evidence of rape.

And then there are abused wives whose lives are very similar to what I just described, although instead of being immersed in a subculture that aids and abets the domination of wives by their husbands, the husband just relies on the more ordinary sexism and gender socialization of American society, combined with patterns of domestic tyranny and secrecy, to maintain control. Perhaps such an abused wife is able to slip away to an abortion provider—but can she do so with proof-in-hand of what is happening to her? Could we reasonably expect her to file a police report every time she submits to unwanted sex with her abusive husband?

Of course, one might say that she should be going to the police, pressing charged, leaving home, etc., for all kinds of reasons other than securing legal access to abortion. But anyone who has studied patterns of domestic violence knows just how hard it is to take these kinds of steps. Among other things, it is a well-known fact about cycles of abuse that the most dangerous thing an abused wife can do is leave her husband, because that is when he is most likely to turn to murder. To minimize the risk of death, timing in taking these steps may be everything--and the timing for escaping an abusive husband may not match up with the kind of timing needed to get an abortion. 

Should we tell abused wives that in order to secure an abortion for a pregnancy that resulted from months of routine rapes in a terrorist marriage, they have to first take the kinds of steps that magnify their chances of being murdered?

The obvious thought at this point is this: their word should be enough. But what does giving your word look like? Swearing under oath? Signing some form at an abortion provider? And would it just be some vague statement that one was raped or a specific accusation?

Right now we live in a world where false accusations of rape are extremely rare. There’s just nothing good that could come from it in most cases, given the ways in which rape victims are treated and given the frequency with which rapists get away with it. Far more common than false accusations is silence in the face of sexual assault.

All of that could change if a rape accusation became the only pathway to a legal abortion. But the implications are worse than a possible proliferation of false rape accusations. Because real, traumatized victims, unready to come forward and talk publicly about the horrible thing that’s happened to them, may still be unable to push themselves to take that step even if legal access to abortion depends on it.

So instead of providing abortion access to those victims whose right to bodily autonomy has been so egregiously violated by an assailant, a law like this would be making it most readily available to those who find it easiest to say they were raped, whether they were or not.

Strong criminal penalties for false claims of rape may sound like a partial solution, but how does one go about such a thing? How do we avoid punishing a real rape victim because they’re not judged credible, or because friends of the rapist come forward to discredit her—all the same ugly things that rapists use to ruin the lives of their accusers, but this time used by rapists as a way not to avoid prison but to get their victim thrown into one? If there’s even a hint that this could happen, the fear of prison may encourage many rape victims to choose to stay silent—and pregnant—rather than tell the truth and risk being criminalized.

To avoid the potential for such weaponization of the law to target rape victims, we might require that women seeking abortion via the rape exception simply sign a form attesting to being raped, without any policies aimed at corroboration or penalizing abortions sought under false pretenses. But then we're essentially back to abortion-on-demand, at least for anyone willing to lie.

I could go on, but I think my point is clear enough: it is extremely hard to envision any law that could give rape victims ready access to abortion while withholding abortion access from others.

And so, unless I’m missing something obvious, implementing this middle ground view at the level of the law is untenable. While a general prohibition on abortion might be able to accommodate other kinds of exceptions such as life-threatening pregnancy cases (whether this is true or not I leave my readers to explore on their own), it does not seem it can plausibly accommodate a rape exception.

And so, if you think that rape victims have a moral right not to be forced by law to carry a pregnancy to term (equivalent to the kind of right I have to not be forced by law to donate an organ to save another’s life), the only realistic legal way to guarantee that right is to make abortion legally available to any woman who seeks. 

And if you support a general prohibition on abortion, you will likely have to live with denying legal abortion access to fourteen-year-olds raped by their uncles, battered wives raped by their abusive husbands, all the young women betrayed and raped by young men they trusted, and all the other sexual assault victims who end up pregnant with their rapist's baby.

Masking Up and Getting Vaccinated: My Rights vs What's Right

The Rise of the Delta Variant

Earlier today I read an article by the by the chief of the Pathology and Laboratory Service for the Central Iowa VA Health Care System. Dr. Stacey Klutts. He is a health care expert, and his expertise is not just in medicine generally but in the very area of medicine that gives one a deep understanding of the virus, the vaccines, and the benefits of masks. He explains clearly why it is so, so important both to get vaccinated and to wear a mask as the Delta variant of the SARS-COV-19 virus surges across the country. He has no political agenda. He simply wants to help keep people alive and healthy.

In briefest terms, his point is this: the COVID vaccines offer robust protection against serious illness and death, but does not prevent the virus from getting an initial foothold on the surface of the throat mucosa. This means that a vaccinated person might be infectious for a couple of days (significantly shorter than the infectiousness of the unvaccinated), but is unlikely to get very sick (or sick at all) since the virus meets a primed immune system as it tries to spread beyond that initial infection point. Beyond this, his focus is on the Delta variant, which is many times more infectious than earlier strains--as infectious as the measles, meaning it is as infectious among humans as any disease we know. This Delta variant is sweeping through the south and heading north fast. He likens it to a tsunami, with vaccination as the high ground of safety. Getting as many people to safety as possible is critical--and mask use by everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated, helps disrupt the rate of spread enough that we can get more people to safety.

Individual vs Collective Decision-Making

The question is what we should do, individually and collectively, with this information. And here, I want to focus on the phrase "individually and collectively." The first question is about what is the right thing for me to do, what is the right thing for you to do, what is the right thing for all of us as individuals to do granted this information. The second question is about public policy--and questions about public policy are generally about what we as a society will require and what we will permit.

These are different questions. When we are talking about public policy, individual rights loom large and often clash with matters of public welfare. The aim of public policy is to promote the public welfare, but individual rights impose constraints on how we do so. But how much do they constrain? How important does the public good at issue have to be in order to justify a constraint on liberty? These are hard questions, and they are the questions that become front-and-center when our conversation turns to mask mandates and vaccination mandates: does the individual have a right to refuse to wear a mask or get a vaccine, or does the state have the authority, given the urgent public health needs during a pandemic, to require these things?

My purpose in this blog post is to set aside those collective questions altogether and focus on the individual question: "Given the medical information currently available and the situation we are currently facing, what ought you and I to do?" That individual question often gets obscured or lost amidst the debates over the collective, public-policy questions.

What I Have a Right to Do vs. What is Right for Me to Do

In most of my moral philosophy classes, at some point I have to talk about the distinction between what we have a right to do and what is the right thing for us to do. Suppose I'm planning to go to a philosophy conference but learn that my sister will die without getting a liver transplant, meaning she needs a piece of someone else's liver--someone who's compatible. Let's suppose I'm a compatible donor, and it will be very hard to find another in time to save her if I don't volunteer. But if I do volunteer, I'll miss my conference.

I have right to refuse, given that it's my body. But what is the right thing for me to do? That I have a right to refuse really just tells other people what to do. It tells them they can't make me go under the knife to save my sister's life. It means, probably, that it would be wrong for the government to legally require me to donate a piece of my liver to my sister. So, it probably follows that is it wrong for the state to implement public policies that in any way, even with certain constraints, require people to donate organs to dying relatives.  But that doesn't settle what I should do. Should I miss a conference to save my sister's life? Absolutely I should. Her life matters more than a philosophy conference.

Sometimes the question of what we have a right to do is clear, but the question of what's the right thing to do is muddy. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes--as in the case above--both questions are easy to answer: because it's my body I have a right to refuse even if it means my sister's death; and if I exercise that right by heading off to the conference and letting her die, I've done something seriously morally wrong. You'd be justified in thinking less of me. Doing that would, morally speaking, make me a pretty bad guy--even though I have a right to do it. Because the right thing for me to do in this case is clear as day: I should forego the conference and save her life. That's the right way for me to exercise my rights.

So let us assume that the information in the linked article is correct. There's excellent reason to do so. The author, Dr. Klutts, is an expert on precisely the matters at issue. He has studied all the evidence and explains it clearly. And he appears to have no reason to lie. Furthermore, what he's saying is endorsed by every competent physician whose expertise and character I trust--even if a few stray physicians in fields other than epidemiology and virology, whom I otherwise know nothing about, express a contrary view on YouTube videos. (I looked at one such video a few months ago and was able to google some of the claims as I was listening to uncover research studies that flat-out refute what she was saying and, in one case, makes it obvious that she was confused about some key distinctions--Thanks, Google Scholar!)

If you assume this, then the question of what we should do, what's the right thing to do, is pretty darned clear even if the question of what we have a right to do is a matter of major ongoing public debate. The question of whether the government can mandate vaccination and mask-wearing pits public health against individual liberty in ways that can make things muddy very quickly. But that doesn't mean that the question of what each of us should do is equally muddy.

The No-Brainer Moral Question

If the information contained in this article is correct, there isn't a lot of room for controversy about what the best choice is based on concern for your own health and the health of your loved ones, your neighbors, your fellow citizens, and the health care workers who are exhausted and, in many cases, at an emotional breaking point. Getting vaccinated promotes your own health and makes you less likely to infect others. Wearing a mask promotes your own health to some extent, and to a greater extent makes you less likely to infect others. The Delta variant is so transmissible that it will sweep through the unvaccinated population very quickly unless we slow it down with masks and other mitigating measures. Slowing it down gives us more time to get more people vaccinated--and the more people who are vaccinated and the slower the spread, the more likely it is that our healthcare system will be able to handle in the influx of seriously ill COVID patients.

In the light of this information and looking at things from the standpoint of consequences, masking and getting vaccinated are pretty clearly going to have better consequences than not. Of course, something might be immoral even though it has good consequences if doing it violates someone's rights. But my getting vaccinated doesn't violate others' rights. My wearing a mask doesn't violate others' rights. So if we're looking at the question of what I should do, the better consequences of masking and vaccinating win the day. The same is true if we look at things from the standpoint of the ethics of care: If I care about myself, about my loved ones, about the people in my community and the health care workers who treat them, I will want to show that by taking steps to make their lives better. Masking and vaccinating do that. 

When our focus is on the question of what is the right thing for individuals to do, rather than what the law can rightly mandate, there's little room for moral argument. It is one of those no-brainer cases where it's hard to come up with an argument against masking and getting the vaccine. 

My Plea

So here is my plea: Please don't let the controversies about the morality of health care mandates get in the way of seeing what's the best choice for each of us to make as individuals. I understand why people are concerned about legal mandates to get vaccines (and, to a lesser extent, mask mandates), even though I also believe that there is a legal place for public health-related mandates. But that's a debate about what people have a right to do or not do and what the government has a right to require. The question of what's the right thing for you and me to do is a different question. And while there is some variability in answers based on individual life circumstances (I know someone for whom mask-wearing triggers tachycardia), for most of us the question of what's right to do in this situation is far less muddy that the question of rights and government authority, at least when we think clearly enough to separate out the two questions.

So if you think the government shouldn't mandate masks or vaccines, by all means make that case in the public sphere (and be prepared to engage honestly with arguments for the opposing views). But don't confuse that argument with the question of what is the right thing for you and me to do.

In other words, it makes perfect sense to wear your masks, get your vaccine, defend the right of your neighbors to refuse to do likewise...while arguing that the right thing for them to do, the right way for them to exercise their rights, is to follow your example and get vaccinated and wear masks.

And whatever you do, please, please don't do something that hurts you and your loved ones and your neighbors and your community and the health care workers we all depends on just as a way to assert your right to do it. We have a right to do things we shouldn't do. But in making decisions, it's the "shouldn't do" part that defines our moral character.

How the COVID Delta Variant Changes the Stakes

 As I tend to do when I'm worried about something, I've been reading up about the Delta variant of COVID-19. What does the emergence of this variant, which is outperforming all others today in terms of spread, mean for us? I have drawn two chief lessons. I share them here in case they are helpful.

LESSON 1: Not If but When.

The high transmissibility of the Delta variant means it is largely no longer a question of if you will get infected with COVID, but when. The remaining question is this: When you are infected, will your immune system be primed to fight off the disease quickly and efficiently—likely so quickly and efficiently that the virus is licked without you ever realizing you were sick? 

 It you are vaccinated, then the answer will be yes. If not, then the first time the virus enters your body, your immune system will be scrambling to figure out how to fight it. It may succeed--or, as has happened to too many people, it may flounder and go haywire in ways that jeopardize your life.

You will meet the Delta variant sooner or later. Its spectacular transmissibility pretty much guarantees that.

This means we are now in the situation of comparing head-to-head the health risks associated with getting the vaccine with the health risks of getting COVID. That didn’t used to be the case, at least not quite. Before the Delta variant came along, someone could reasonably say, “If I get the vaccine, I’m sure to face the risks associated with that. But if I don’t, I might never get COVID and so never face the risks associated with either one.” 

That is no longer true, unless you are capable of total isolation.

Of course, no vaccine is totally risk-free, but in a head-to-head comparison of vaccine vs. COVID risk, there really is no comparison. Both have been intensely studied by medical experts. For ordinary citizens, the chances of serious health complications from the vaccine is one in millions. The chance of serious health complications from COVID, if you're unvaccinated, is one in hundreds.

Put simply, from a health-risk standpoint getting COVID is many thousands of times worse.

There are few medical decisions these days where the difference between the options is so stark—similar in clarity to the choice between whether to have ice cream or someone else’s vomit for dessert. The only difference is that in the case of the ice cream vs. vomit, we don’t currently see loads of people playing up the risks of lactose intolerance while trying to make the vomit more appetizing by sprinkling hydrochloroquinine over it.

LESSON 2. We Mitigate Through Mandates or Face a Health Care System in Crisis

You might ask, if the Delta variant is so transmissible that everyone will be exposed eventually, why slow down the inevitable with mitigation measures like social distancing and mask-use? 

There are two answers. First, slowing down the rate at which people are exposed gives us more time to get more people vaccinated. It gives us more time to convince the vaccine-hesitant to get the shot before exposure—something that may save their lives. And it gives us more time to finish researching the impact of the vaccine on children under 12—potentially enabling us to protect our children with safe and effective vaccines before they catch COVID.

Second, given just how transmissible Delta is, if we do not collectively and consistently pursue mitigation measures in settings where transmission is likely--something that will likely only happen if we implement mandates on mask-use and social-distancing wherever transmission rates are significant--the virus will sweep through the vulnerable (that is, unvaccinated) population so quickly that we risk completely overwhelming our healthcare system. 

Delta spreads a LOT faster than earlier variants. A substantial vaccinated population--even as low as 50%--might have slowed the spread of other variants down enough to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. But Delta is a different animal. Unless we take active steps to mitigate spread, it will find the unvaccinated quickly. It will spread among the unvaccinated quickly--especially if we bring bunches of them together in one place (such as grade schools where all the kids are under 12 and so cannot be vaccinated). The most vulnerable among them will need to be hospitalized. Some will need ICU care. Some will die. 

In states that actively preclude mitigation mandates, like Texas and Florida and Oklahoma, ICU beds (including pediatric ICU beds) are already at or near capacity. And that’s before the impact of the school year starting up (here in Stillwater, public schools started up two days ago and the university starts on Monday). Once schools are back in session, if we don’t implement mitigation measures like mask mandates things will get a lot worse a lot more quickly. 

And if you think mask-use will be extensive  and consistent if it is done on a wholly voluntary basis, without mandates, you might want to look around here in Stillwater, Oklahoma, today--and compare what you see with how things looked back before the mask mandates expired in May. Despite efforts to get the word out about the Delta variant and the new CDC guidance, mask use is...spotty.

Spotty masking won't do much good--especially if there is significant overlap between the unvaccinated and the unmasked. Remember, Delta is sweeping through the unvaccinated population, sickening the unvaccinated population, hospitalizing the unvaccinated population, killing the unvaccinated population. Those who are vaccinated can carry Delta to others...but are far less likely to. They can get seriously ill...but are far less likely to. 

Here's the problem. We've got two classes of people: those who take the pandemic seriously and trust the medical experts; and those who either don't take the pandemic seriously, don't trust the medical experts, or both. The former are very likely to have already been vaccinated--and they are very likely to take seriously a strong CDC recommendation to begin masking up in indoor public spaces. But it's the latter who, being unvaccinated, are vulnerable to the current wave of the pandemic--and hence the ones we really need to mask up to avoid a health care crisis. Unfortunately, it is also the latter group that is least likely to mask up voluntarily based on guidance from medical experts--because, for whatever reason, they don't trust those experts.

Of course, some of that latter group will resist mask use even if it is mandated. But mandates still have an effect. Last academic year, all my students wore masks in class, even those who didn't believe it was necessary. They wore the masks because that was the rule. Mandates increase mask-use, and widespread and consistent mask-use--especially among those who are unvaccinated--is a crucial tool in slowing the spread of Delta through unvaccinated populations and thus keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

An overwhelmed health care system means everyone has less access to lifesaving treatment—whether they’re sick with COVID or something else. An overwhelmed health care system means that doctors and nurses who are already overworked and emotionally exhausted find themselves pushed past the break point.

We’re talking about a health care system in which the human beings who are called to fight this war suffer such serious burnout they can’t continue. And like a kind of feedback loop, an already overburdened system becomes even more overburdened as people burn out and the weight falls heavier on those who remain.

This was a risk before the Delta variant came along, and was a major basis for the decision to shut the country down. Now the Delta variant is in play, with viral loads a thousand times higher than earlier strains and transmissibility rates many times higher. Unless we mandate mitigation measures like indoor mask-use, we will quickly reach a healthcare crisis once Delta starts to spread in schools. 

If the crisis gets bad enough, we won't be talking about mandating masks in schools. We'll be talking another shutdown. And we'll be burying too many beloved dead.

Love your unvaccinated neighbors--by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask.

Love your local health care workers--by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask.

Love yourself--by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask.

The Campaign to Get People Vaccinated: Manipulation vs. Reasoned Persuasion

I've seen the following meme recently on social media, and given the timing of its spread it presumably relates to current efforts to convince Americans to become fully vaccinated against COVID. Here's the meme:

(In the event of any difficulty reading the image, it says the following:

How Manipulation Works

1. FEAR--Do this or something bad will happen.

2. FLATTERY--Do this and you're a good person.

3. BRIBERY--Do this and I will do something for you.

4. VIOLENCE--Do this or else...

By the way...We're at step 3.)

Looking at the meme as a philosopher, there are numerous problems with it. One problem relates to "steps" 1 & 2, and involves the failure to distinguish between what Plato called "mere persuasion" and persuasion that proceeds via "instruction"--or what I'm inclined to call the distinction between manipulative persuasion and reasoned persuasion.

The point is that we can persuade people through a kind of trickery in which we bypass people's rationality and responsiveness to evidence and arguments, instead appealing directly to irrelevant feelings and emotions to shift a person's view in the desired direction.

Or we can persuade people by give reasons and evidence that support the truth of the view we are asking them to accept. 

The former is a kind of manipulation. The latter is not.

So, consider the so-called "step 1" of manipulation in the meme above, labeled "Fear": 

Do this or something bad will happen. 

Consider this step in relation to what the meme was surely intended to be a commentary about: the ongoing COVID vaccination campaign. Suppose that I point out that while COVID infection often has only mild health repercussions, in a significant number of people (much higher than for viruses like, say, the flu), it can lead to serious long-term health problems and even death. We've been able to isolate some of the risk factors for serious illness, but not all--and many apparently healthy people have died from the disease. 

Suppose, furthermore, that I point out that the vaccines for COVID have been shown to be very safe and effective--and especially effective at prevent serious illness.

And suppose, furthermore, that I note that with widespread vaccination, we will be able to return to our normal lives without either seeing a surge of COVID-related deaths or whole classes of vulnerable people being forced to isolate themselves to avoid infection. But without widespread vaccination, we'll continue to face the tough choices we faced before vaccines were available: either we radically altar our collective way of life to protect the vulnerable (with the economic, social, and personal costs that this brings), or we don't, in which case vulnerable people will either be dying in frightening numbers or forced into seclusion.

And suppose I conclude on the basis of all of this that if we don't collectively make a commitment to vaccinate as widely as we can--which at a minimum means vaccinating ourselves and may also mean urging friends and family to do likewise--then the circumstances in our country will be far worse for many people than would be the case were we to make that collective commitment to vaccinate.

Suppose I lay out that argument. What I've effectively done here is given reason to think that it is true that "bad things will happen" if we don't collectively commit to vaccinating--bad things that won't happen if we do. But the argument above is based on sound evidence, and it logically supports the conclusion. In other words, it is a good argument for reaching the conclusion that if we don't do this, bad things will happen (or keep happening); and if we do this, those bad things will be avoided.

An argument like that is not manipulation. If you are about to drive without a seatbelt and I point out the differential accident survival rates of those who do and don't wear seatbelts, I'm engaged in reasoned persuasion, not the manipulative kind. Likewise with the vaccine argument above.

Of course, reasoned persuasion is open to criticism and response. It evolves through dialogue, through considering objections  and responding. Reasoned persuasion, because it is oriented towards uncovering the truth, is open to being tested in the light of critical questions and the like. The point here, however, is that reasoned persuasion, which is not manipulative, can have the form of saying "Do this or something bad will happen." What distinguishes it from manipulation is that it is backed up by reasons and has an orientation towards speaking the truth.

The same can be said about "step 2." What are the characteristics of a good person? There is no universal consensus, of course, but there are still things we can and do agree about: virtues, or good character traits, that are typical of the people we call "good." 

They care about others. They care about the public welfare. They are willing to mildly inconvenience themselves for the sake of helping others avoid major sacrifices, and they are willing to take small personal risks to help others avoid dire ones. 

Given all the facts laid out in my argument above, you can see that it is easy to construct an argument for the conclusion that, on this broad portrait of a good person, someone who gets vaccinated against COVID is acting as a good person would. (Of course, there are cases of individuals who face a greater-than-typical risk from vaccination, and so might be very good people but choose nevertheless not to vaccinate; but generally, for the vast majority of us, the risk of vaccination is very low.)

In short, everything I said about step 1 applies to step 2: there are non-manipulative arguments for the conclusion that getting a vaccine is the sort of thing a good person as described above would do. Or, put another way, there are moral arguments for getting vaccinated that are good arguments for most ordinary, healthy people. Of course, these arguments are again open to critical examination, questions and objections. People with good motives may be misinformed about salient facts, and so they are unconvinced that they should get vaccinated absent a deeper investigation of those facts. But it is also the case that good people are open to being persuaded by an honest investigation of the evidence.

The point is that there can be good reasons to think that getting vaccinated is the sort of thing a good person, fully and properly informed, would do.

Of course there is manipulative persuasion that appeals to fear, and manipulative persuasion that appeals to flattery. What distinguishes these manipulative forms of persuasion is that they do not invoke evidence and reasons to support their conclusion. Instead, they paint a scary picture without offering clear, sound evidence for the view that the desired behavior contributes to preventing the scary picture from becoming reality. Or they pander to the egos of their audience, making the audience feel good about themselves, and then just trust that those good feelings will spill over onto the desired behavior without offering any solid moral arguments in support of the behavior.

Manipulation is about creating associations between feelings and views through building subconscious connections. You hold up an idea you want someone to believe, and you stoke certain emotions (fear or pride, etc.)--and you hope that those emotions will latch onto the idea in the right way. Fear will be associated with not doing X because of the vivid association created, even though you have done nothing to support the conclusion that failure to do X will have the fearful results. Or that gushy feeling of being a great person is associated with doing X, even though no reasoned moral argument is offered in support of the view that doing X is the kind of thing someone motivated by virtuous character traits would do.

When it comes to steps 3 & 4 in the meme, things are a bit different. 3 & 4 are not forms of persuasion in the sense of convincing you that something is true--either manipulatively or instructively. 3 & 4 are about behavior modification through rewards and penalties. But in labeling 4 "VIOLENCE," the meme ignores the fact that there are a wide array of penalties that are imposed to modify behavior that don't typically fall under the heading of violence--at least not violence in the typical overt form that we usually have in mind when we use the term (there are some less conventional understandings of violence that see all coercive pressures as violent, but I'm not going to dig into those understandings here).

Behavior modification through rewards and penalties is a widespread human practice. Parents do it when they reward and punish their kids. Teachers do it with gold stars and time in the thinking spot, or with A's and F's. Governments do it when they offer tax breaks and tax penalties. Laws are built on negative consequences for disobedience.

It is hard to imagine a functioning society that does not use rewards and penalties when the behavior at issue is important for the sake of social health and success. Of course, there are always pressing questions that we need to wrestle with when we are considering the imposition of rewards and penalties: is the matter important enough to try to shift people's default behavior by adding incentives and disincentives? And if so, what is the best approach: incentive-based, or penalty-based? 

3 is often employed when reasoned persuasion of types 1 & 2 are insufficient. Milder (not-overtly-violent) forms of 4 are sometimes employed when 3 fails, without an overtly violent form of 4 ever being deployed. Many times we stop at 3 because we conclude that the most effective way to proceed is to push on with a combination 1-3. Sometimes the matter is so serious (murder), that we implement a violent (forcible arrest and incarceration) form of 4 immediately without waiting to see whether 1-3 alone, or a milder form of 4, will work. In terms of social tools for getting people to behave civilly and beneficially with one another, we use a mix of 1-4 in ways that don't follow some clear, inevitable pattern.

What is troubling about this meme is that it does not present 3 & (milder forms of) 4 as inevitable features of civil society, where 3 & 4 are employed variously in various situations, in various combinations with 1 & 2, based on assessments of social needs, individual rights, and pragmatic questions about what works. And it does not recognize that the "penalty" side of behavior modification comes in a range of forms, most of it not overtly violent. Instead, the meme represents 4 as violence, and 1-4 as this inevitable progression of increasing severity, with violence the final frightening stage in government population control. And then it ends with saying that we are just about to enter that final stage.

The meme offers no evidence, no reasoned argument, for the view that this is how our nation's campaign to get people vaccinated is evolving. It simply lays out this ominous set of stages, with VIOLENCE (in all caps) about to come hammering down.

So, based on the distinction made above between manipulative and reasoned persuasion, this meme appears to be a case of manipulative persuasion. In that respect, it is distinct from prevailing arguments about the troubling outcomes of large-scale failure to vaccinate, and moral arguments in favor of vaccination, since these arguments (at least the ones I've seen) most often take the form of reasoned persuasion.