Motivation

Quite interesting, and not quite sure what to make of it. Seems to completely clash against everything we discussed in class last week.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022903397.html

One tension in much of the reading we have done is how to amend the over-simplified rational actor model without creating models that are too complex and unworkable.

Kahan, for example, modeled the “variability of preferences across individuals” by presenting five collective action dispositions – dedicated free-riders, intolerant reciprocators, neutral reciprocators, tolerant reciprocators, dedicated cooperators.

Bowles and Gintis, on the other hand, present only three dispositions: reciprocators, cooperators, and selfish actors. But their model of preferences is more complex along a different dimension – punishment. The dispositions do not only reflect preferences for cooperation but also the likelihood that they will punish others. This additional factor, lacking in Kahan’s model, does a lot of work. But of course Bowles and Gintis’s model present less variability of preferences another way because they present only three dispositions.

Which model of preferences is better for rule and system design? Would a model with five or more dispositions that accounted for the degree of free-riding and the degree of punishing behavior be too complicated?

As the Supreme Court would rule in June 1996, just three months before T.Y.W.L.S. opened, the legality of single-sex schools depends on context. In United States v. Virginia, a case regarding females’ exclusion from the all-male Virginia Military Institute, the justices found that the male bastion was in fact violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and that the state of Virginia’s proposal to open an all-girls school wasn’t a sufficient remedy because V.M.I. gave its students not just a good education but powerful connections within Virginia’s military and political elite. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who earlier in her career had been a founder of the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project (a group that has been active in suing single-sex public schools), wrote the majority opinion, composing what some people consider a condensation of feminist thinking up to 1996. Ginsburg’s opinion states that in some contexts, single-sex schools might be legal, as long as those schools worked to “dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications.” “The two sexes are not fungible,” Ginsburg wrote, quoting a 1946 decision; the physical differences between the sexes are “enduring” and “cause for celebration.” Yet, Ginsburg warned, those differences cannot be used to place “artificial constraints on individuals’ opportunity.”

Single-Sex Public Education – Children and Youth – Schools – Gender – New York Times

Blogged with Flock

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door.

The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent.

Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors – New York Times

I think that she might. Selma James argues that “our identity, our social roles, the way we are seen, appears to be disconnected from our capitalist functions, . . . identity caste is the very substance of class” (Sex, Race, and Class). Identity castes, for James, impose divisions of labor that are neither necessary nor natural. “Racism and sexism train us to develop and acquire certain capabilities at the expense of all others. Then these acquired capabilities are taken to be our nature and fix our functions for life, and fix also the quality of our mutual relations. So planting cane is not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for men and beating children is not violence. . . . The work you do and the wages you receive are not merely ‘economic’ but social determinants, determinants of social power” Id. MacKinnon claims that James’s theory sees women as “exploited because they do work–housework” (525). But that doesn’t seem to really be what James is saying. Women, says James, end up doing housework because capitalism makes housework a job for women–and it does so because of their identity-caste. This isn’t exactly treating race and sex as a lesser included problem with capitalism. For James, identity castes and the capitalist division of labor are mutually reinforcing. It isn’t true, then, that “sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality” (MacKinnon at 533), but rather that sexuality is an important part of a constellation of forces that divide up what people do into different tasks. If we don’t think about the role that sexuality plays, then we won’t be able to address the problems of oppression, which is part of why the tactics of trade unionists and the white male left in the 20th century often left sexism intact.

OK, I admit, this should maybe have been in the reading, and no one can now read all of this. But here at least is one paragraph, and a link.

Rachel Croson and Ury Gneezy, Gender Differences in Preferences

After reviewing experimental literature of the type we have read a good deal of, but oriented toward eliciting gender differences, the authors conclude:

“We believe, as suggested by Gilligan (1982), that men’s decisions are less context-specific than women’s. Participants of both genders are likely maximizing an underlying utility function, but the function that men use is less sensitive to the conditions of the experiment, information about the other party, and (even) the other party’s actions, than the function that women use. This causes what appear to be inconsistent results in our experimental studies; sometimes men appear more altruistic than women and other times, women appear more altruistic than men. But primarily what we see is women’s behavior is more context-dependent than that of men.”

This is another way of beginning to answer Steve’s question of, what do we do with “difference” as a driver of policy?

Last week I mentioned that there was a move to recruit more female peacekeepers for UN missions given the incidents of sexual abuse by peacekeepers and that I thought there was a place patrolled exclusively by female peacekeepers. While there is an all-female unit of peacekeepers in Liberia, not all peacekeepers there are women. The units main goal is to support the local police force. They also hope their presence will encourage Liberian women to join the police force so that at least 20% of police officers are female. All female police-units are common in India, the home state of this group of peacekeepers. Reading the article, I think its interesting how people are quoted as noting the “natural gifts” women have to be caring will make them better peacekeepers. At the same time, MacKinnon’s argument that sexuality defines women and is the source of female subordination is also illustrated by the reporters patronizing comments at the end of the article. I also have more thoughts on the intimacy/independence distinction as it relates to the military but I’ll save that for a later post or class.

To what extent is Ruddick’s “maternal approach” to ethics at methodological odds with MacKinnon’s feminist ethics? One difference is clear: whereas Ruddick takes a naturalistic account of mothering as the starting point, Mackinnon claims that “nature, law, the family, and roles” should be seen as “consequences, not foundations” of women’s situation. But does this difference in approach result in, or arise from, radically different theories of the nature of truth claims? While our summary of Ruddick’s theory does not directly address this issue, it seems to me that she is advocating “maternal thinking” as just one way of knowing/relating to others—just as Mackinnon concludes, “Feminism… questions the universality imperative itself. Aperspectivity is revealed as a strategy of male hegemony.”

This week’s readings (and last week’s much-discussed gendered punishment) are very interesting, but I wonder how we can and should use these insights in shaping law and institutions. When we learn that men and women are simply different, with different modes of communication and lenses through which to see the world, what should our response be?

Suppose we had only Tannen’s insights at our disposal. Women see connection; men see competition. What does it mean for law when all communication between men and women is cross-cultural? We could try to design a corrective legal framework, to the extent that we believe that difference is detrimental and remediable. Or we could take the accommodative extreme and have a set of rules for women and another for men, tailoring both the rule formulations and punishments to speak most directly to gendered views of the world. Even setting aside the objection that a bi-gendered legal system might fail to account for diverse gender types, I think many of us would oppose such accommodation on liberal grounds. People may be different, but the law ought to treat them as equals.

MacKinnon pushes back on this liberal objection: Yes, the law should be even-handed, but our default “neutral” laws happen to be 1) men’s laws and 2) imbued with a vision of sexuality that has been created by men for the subordination of women, who become men’s objects. MacKinnon’s views, unlike Tannen’s, readily lend themselves to application—whether it be changing the meaning of consent in rape law or drafting an Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance. But difference alone does not provide the impetus for change, subordination does. Thus, again, one is left to wonder what to do about accounts like Tannen’s.

One obvious response is procedural: assuming that men and women are different in important ways, and given that the law will apply to both men and women, men and women should equally be part of the lawmaking process. Another response is more psychological, and it comes from MacKinnon’s account of feminism: we should participate in consciousness raising. Even if women are merely different from (rather than subordinated to) men, an appreciation for gender differences can only improve things.

Kahan (whom we read earlier in the semester) has suggested that cultural differences (including, perhaps, gendered differences) shape our views of the world, and that our moral views shape factual accounts. He perceives these differences to be a problem, at least insofar as we operate under an illusion of liberalism and cultural cognition undermines the liberal ideal—a phenomenon he calls “cognitive illiberalism.” His solution: dispose of the norm of “public reason” in favor of “expressive overdetermination” so as to multiply the available cultural readings of the law, thereby accommodating a variety of perspectives.

Ms. Sheffer, a pediatric nurse, even paid a police officer to drive with Kelsey to previous accident sites and graphically explain what had happened.

“This is in hope of instilling an element of fear,” Ms. Sheffer said. “Cars are lethal weapons, and I want to make sure she has the experience she needs, and knows what can happen when you don’t pay attention.”

Kelsey, who will turn 17 in June, said she had lost the motivation to pursue her full license.

Fewer Youths Jump Behind the Wheel at 16 – New York Times

This reminded me of our discussion about how people underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to them.