Salon Discussion, December 5

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. The thoughts in this post came from a recent Salon, but are not an accurate reflection of the dialogue.

My first two discussion topics for the Salon fell flatter than a philosopher down a well. But we end up with more interesting discussion on changes to MIT’s rush and on government morality.

When can an institution be said to have morality or a responsibility to some group? The question of MIT rush hinges on to whom MIT is responsible: either to worried parents, or to MIT’s alternative community. How one answers this question also has implications for the role of morality and responsibility for individuals under MIT and other institutions.

For those who haven’t heard the debate a million times, we reiterated it at the salon. Until recently, MIT had a long rush period before the start of classes, in which all incoming freshman took part. Students coming to MIT had temporary housing until the end of rush, when they rank-ordered their dorm choices (or pledged an off-campus living group). Dorms could not reject students, but they informed their self-selection with a dense calendar of activities. Recent changes have eliminated off-campus pledging, secured the selections incoming students make before arriving, and halved the length of rush.

MIT student culture laments these changes and has fought the administration for years. They claim that the immediate and important lifestyle decision incoming freshmen were expected to make benefits the students, and this self-selection process helped foster the intense communities that form the MIT experience for many people. Now, we worry, students will make uninformed decisions and not bother to ever look for the communities that will make them happy, thereby weakening both the groups they find themselves in and those they never found.

MIT appears to be motivated by parents who don’t understand the process and complain, by a view of the student as not capable of handling this responsibility, and by an interest in unifying the MIT community to increase alumni donations.

So the student’s argument is that MIT as an institution has a responsibility to the interests of its most attached constituents. MIT should serve its students, not their parents. Specifically, it should serve the students who took advantage of this feature of student communities, not those who felt inconvenienced by its bugs. And, it’s said, MIT alums’ low contributions are a direct reflection of their disapproval of these and similar changes that have plagued the MIT community for dozens of years.

But institutions like MIT are constructs; if they are said to have responsibilities, those responsibilities can be defined in any way. I don’t know what MIT’s constitution says, but I suspect it wasn’t written to protect the rights of the communities that spontaneously arose under it. This is the contract view of morality: MIT’s sole responsibility is to fulfill the terms of it’s constitutive contract, to which students gave implicit consent by enrolling; if we don’t like it, we can leave.

The old debate between Rawls/Hobbes and Nozick/Locke returns. But this view on the dichotomy offers some outs.

We discussed whether the value of a policy be determined objectively. For example, a government does what a majority of its population selects. It seems relatively straight-forward to ask, once the policy is in place, how well-satisfied the population is with the change. Each person’s judgment is based on individual values, but, it’s claimed, we don’t have to ask what those values are to judge the policy.

Except that policies come out of Lakoffian paradigms of values, and their effects go beyond the satisfaction of their stated criteria. Policies are values embodied. Among their unspoken effects are the propagation of a particular view of the world. This also means that policy-making is not a rolling of so many uniquely weighted dice; it is a working out between powerful frameworks of values, and people’s allegiances to the battling frameworks matter more than their interests in the policy outcomes.

So consider the role of individuals under the two value frameworks: the contract-motivated and the people-motivated models. Individuals under the contract view are not expected to take responsibility the way they are under the people view. In a world of contracts, a person’s sole responsibility is a negative one: to not break their contracts. And correspondingly, MIT has grown more suspicious of student responsibility in recent years. Under the people view, however, the effects of policies are conceived in terms of students’ potential for growth, rather than their potential for breaking contract.

Which is all to say that the conception of the individual itself is different (as a moral grower or a contract term), and if the people who run MIT had any respect for the people who are living under it, they would define us better by defining themselves better.