On the Right (and Responsibility) to Learn

So I was at a lecture this past Monday. Bill Talbott (a University of Washington philosophy professor) was addressing the question “Which Rights Should Be Universal?” (his title was “The Discovery of Universal Human Rights: How to believe in universal human rights without being a moral imperialist”). While Talbott was only indirectly concerned with citizens and active learners, he spoke rather directly to what I’m blogging about here these days. He noted that the topic of human rights is a topic “made for under-grad education.” At the center of his talk was an argument about how humans arrive at an understanding of moral issues. He senses, rightly I think, that in his tradition (one that finds its roots in Greek and Roman thinking), people have attempted to start from universal principles. The problem with this approach is that it is almost always possible to find exceptions to moral principles (he offered some spiffy examples), and so the tradition finds itself in a bind: I might want to argue that genocide is wrong, but I may not be able to defend that principle from all challenges, so I am left unable to defend my moral belief, I find myself at risk of holding a contradictory position or deciding that I can’t hold moral positions. Talbott argues that the problem isn’t that we have identified the wrong principles but that we are using the wrong method: we don’t start from principles; instead, we make moral judgments and then try to discover the principles that explain our judgements.

What does this have to do with facilitating the growth of citizens? A lot. If we take Talbott at his word, then citizens are obligated to develop and exercise their own judgment. They have to engage in conversations about what is good for them without resorting to some sort of “paternalistic justification” (you just have to do this because it’s for your own good). Every human has a right to this kind of development and, I would add, an obligation to engage in and protect this kind of development. Learners who are fully human can’t enter a class and say, “Just tell me what I need to know for my own good” or “Entertain me!!” Rather, they have to enter a class and wonder, “how do I need to develop in order to be more able to make judgments.” If a teacher isn’t ready to help learners understand what development is on offer and how to go about developing, it’s a bad class. But the teacher cannot do the development for the learner.

I’d like to live in these sorts of classrooms.