Fairness,autonomy,and a right to higher education

A concern about autonomy

Martin’s central claim is that there is a moral right to lifelong access to a set of expanded and reformed higher educational institutions. The core argument for that central claim has two steps: (1) If something x is a necessary condition of autonomous flourishing, then each person has a right to x; and (2) having lifelong access to higher education is a necessary condition of autonomous flourishing. The first step expresses the claim that there is a link between the rights we have and our most fundamental interests – for example, our interest in autonomous flourishing. The second step expresses the claim that there is a link between our autonomous flourishing and higher education. The link, in short, is that access to higher education is needed to preserve the social conditions of autonomous flourishing.

Much more could be said about the support for each step of this argument. But the barebones reconstruction above is enough to frame my first concern. As this reconstruction emphasizes, Martin takes himself to be offering a liberal case for a right to higher education. And it certainly is a familiar liberal thought that moral rights are tied to our interests in being autonomous or being free. But it is natural to wonder whether any version of liberalism will be compatible with Martin’s argument. Some political liberals, for example, think that we can only permissibly have those institutions that are favored by reasons shareable by any reasonable person. And – crucially – they take there to be reasonable disagreement about even whether an autonomously chosen way of life is worth having. ¹ As a result, they think that only a much more restricted conception of so-called ‘political autonomy’ generates shareable reasons. Martin sometimes seems to suggest that, even if his core argument were revised to rest on such a restricted kind of autonomy, it would still establish a right to higher education. ² That may be doubted; it may be that access to higher education is not required to secure political autonomy, strictly understood. But, even if access to higher education is necessary to secure political autonomy, there is a further complication. One would expect that an argument grounded in a more restricted conception of autonomy would yield a right to higher education whose content would concomitantly also be more restricted. So it seems to make an important difference – perhaps to whether there is a right to higher education at all, but at least to its content – whether Martin’s argument rests on a more restricted (political-liberal-friendly) conception of autonomy or on a more expansive (perfectionist-liberal-friendly) conception of autonomy.

A concern about overgeneralization

The second concern is about the idea that access to higher education could be a right – that is, a non-negotiable moral reason that enjoys a certain kind of moral priority relative to other worthy policy aims. Martin’s core argument, recall, grounds the right to higher education in the fact that access to higher education is necessary for autonomous flourishing. But, plausibly, very many things are necessary conditions of autonomous flourishing – for example, having good health care, living in a healthful environment, having access to quality childcare, not living in conditions of gender injustice, having reliable and affordable housing, and redress of historical injustices. The concern is that Martin’s argument, if sound, apparently generalizes to establish moral rights with respect to each of these things. And that might plausibly be thought to be a problematic overgeneralization. It may seem on reflection implausible that every necessary condition of autonomous flourishing corresponds to a moral right. Perhaps these are very significant goods – ones that are not easily outweighed by other worthy policy aims – but goods that it is ultimately fitting to weigh and trade off against others.

Moreover, even if there are moral rights to many (or all) necessary conditions of autonomous flourishing, the overgeneralization concern might still arise. Given limited social resources, we will still face trade-off questions when we can secure only some, but not all, of people’s rights. And that yields another version of the concern: If the argument generalizes, then so many other things would also be rights that a right to higher education would fail to make a significant net difference to our reasons for action. (Martin might reply that, nevertheless, his argument would still be an important corrective. It would stop us from mistakenly downgrading the relative importance of higher education vis-à-vis other rights. But even this might be questioned. Granted that there is a right to higher education, it is questionable whether it could plausibly be claimed to be a right that is as morally significant as, say, the right to freedom of conscience or to vote.)

If Martin’s core argument does straightforwardly generalize, then, there is a concern about either the plausibility of the claim that there is a right to higher education or about that claim’s net practical significance. So a more promising line of response to this concern would be to try to block the overgeneralization. For example, one might point to some special feature of higher education – something over and above its merely being a necessary condition for autonomous flourishing – that explains why it (and only it) is an autonomy-related consideration that generates a right. But it is not, I think, yet clear what such a special feature might be.

A concern about unfairness

Suppose that, as Martin further plausibly argues, if there is a moral right to higher education, higher educational institutions ought to be publicly funded. ³ The heart of the third concern is that such an autonomy-supporting system of higher education could require some people to subsidize others in a way that would be unfair. And, if we are confident that a just education system could not allow such unfairness, that puts indirect pressure on Martin’s case for a right to higher education. (Of course, one of Martin’s goals – as noted in the preamble above – is to move discourse about higher education out of the domain of fairness and into the domain of rights. Nevertheless, I take it to be legitimate, in evaluating the claim that people have some right, to test that claim against our considered moral judgments – including judgments about whether such rights would yield objectionable unfairness.)

Here is an artificially simple case to illustrate the concern. Suppose the status quo is a higher education set-up that offers some standard mix of courses. And suppose that P, on the basis of informed reflection about what matters to him, decides to go in for a life plan that centrally involves quantum supercomputing design. Suppose further that quantum supercomputing design is (non-contingently) something that would be massively resource-intensive to support in our higher educational system; it could be offered only if we devote the lion’s share of our resources to higher education, say by increasing taxes in a way that significantly worsens how well others’ lives go. Importantly, P could have flourished to a decent degree under the standard mix of courses; the only reason he in fact will not do so is because of the results of his informed reflection. If there were a right to higher education, then others would have no complaint about their taxes being raised in this way. Doing so would be, after all, what it takes for someone’s rights to be vindicated. But this may seem implausible; even if P certainly will be significantly worse off unless we raise taxes, we may think that P has no call on the rest of us to accede to the tax raise and that to accede to it would be to allow some to take unfair advantage of, or impose unfair costs on, others. ⁴

Martin might respond in either of two ways. First, he might deny that there would be unfairness in the case above. Drawing on his response to related concerns about so-called ‘expensive tastes’, he might propose that education has a special feature that immunizes it from such unfairness-based objections. ⁵ It is special because, without (lifelong access to) education, one would not be in a position to autonomously set and pursue goals at all. But if it is only fair to hold people responsible for the goals that they autonomously set and pursue, then apparently people could not appropriately be held responsible unless they had (lifelong access to) education. Subsidizing P in this case would be what it takes for him to be the sort of person it is appropriate to hold responsible in first place. Alternatively, Martin might accept that a system that allows P to impose these costs on others would be unfair, but he might suggest that, with sensible institutional design, an autonomy-supporting system of higher education could discourage people like P from in fact making such demands.

The first reply above strikes me as unpromising. Common sense suggests that, in the stipulated circumstances of the case above, P could properly be held responsible for forming and adopting the quantum supercomputing design life-plan. And while sensible institutional design might certainly help, in practice, to obviate difficult tradeoffs, this reply would not be responsive to the objection that, in principle, no one has rights that could stand in such stark opposition to what fairness requires. So I think the fairness-based concern is a serious one for Martin’s view as it stands. But I want to conclude, in more positive vein, by proposing for consideration a possible amendment to Martin’s view. The amended proposal would be that we have a right to access to a fair set of higher educational resources. Whether something counts as part of a fair set of educational resources would be determined by some (appropriately neutral) benchmark effect that access to the resource has on people’s autonomous flourishing and by the costs that access to the resource would impose on others. (This is analogous to a view about health care provision, according to which we have rights to access a fair set of health care treatments but not rights to just any treatment, no matter the costs it would impose on others. ⁶ ) In the hypothetical case above, access to the educational resources that would in fact maximally conduce to P’s autonomous flourishing would not be part of the content of P’s right. The amended proposal, in short, is to dampen tension between a right to higher education and fairness by building fairness considerations into the content of the right. Such a view – which seems to answer to Martin’s underlying motivations while avoiding concerns about unfairness – strikes me as worth further consideration.