Works in Progress

Immigration rights literature is littered with thought experiments, offering us an up-close view of their use, cogency, and occasional failure. By methodically contrasting well-received thought experiments with controversial ones, we can discover what makes them effective instruments of persuasion and why they are sometimes found wanting. This paper argues that even if a thought experiment avoids problems like bias, ambiguity, and pitfalls of figurative language, it will be unpersuasive if it asks the reader to make controversial inferences. To illustrate, I examine well-known thought experiments including Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “Violinist”, Peter Singer’s “Drowning Child” and contrast them with Michael Huemer’s “Marketplace” story that is purported to support the right to immigrate. These contrasting examples illustrate that popular and well-received thought experiments enjoy the success they do in part because they avoid asking us to accept iffy postulates. In contrast, the failure of unpersuasive thought experiments is often due to their reliance on premises that the uncommitted reader finds implausible.

Can teachers cultivate personal autonomy in their students without thereby promoting controversial values? This is a pressing question for classical liberals, most of whom consider personal autonomy of consummate importance for the stability of the liberal democratic order. Among those who hazard answers, two opposing conclusions emerge which originate in two contradictory views of autonomy defended by perfectionist and anti-perfectionist liberals, respectively.

     This paper suggests that whether autonomy-promoting education requires allegiance to any controversial moral doctrine depends on one’s conception of autonomy. My discussion is nested within and takes its cue from the debate among classical liberals about the nature of personal autonomy who, in virtue of this debate, reach contradictory conclusions about the aptness of political perfectionism as a liberal ideal. More specifically, I respond to the disagreement between John Christman and Natalie Stoljar about whether public education is consistent with the anti-perfectionist’s commitment to state neutrality. I defend Christman’s answer in the affirmative. To buttress my defense, I develop an internalist view of the educational process based on Christman’s extensive discussion in The Politics of Persons about the nature of the self. I contend not that education can maintain strict normative neutrality but that, whether it can or not, it need not do so—not even for the anti-perfectionist liberal, because liberalism as such is grounded in values like empathy and individual accountability. 

     Thus can an anti-perfectionist liberal like Christman, who conceives of autonomy as a psychological feature of the self, defend the need for public education as the avenue to personal autonomy. Education is how one activates and develops one’s capacity for reflexive self-assessment. It is the second-order evaluation of the pre-given commitments of one’s native I-self. To be educated according to this conception of education is to be able to identify and then affirm or disavow the pre-given attitudes and normative commitments that are part of every person’s socio-historical self. Moreover, such is to be not only educated but also an autonomous member of a liberal democratic order.