Impartially speaking, what we’re aiming to balance are the autonomy claims made by a tide of autonomous agents. Having an historic connection to a land obviously gives someone a claim to that land. However those actually living there have much stronger claims. Security and livelihood also strengthen an autonomy claim. What I think is interesting about thinking impartially in this way is that there is no necessary derivation from these autonomy claims of a requirement for a unitary state.

The German peoples needed a Germany; the Italian peoples needed an Italy; the Greek peoples needed a Greece. And, of course, the Jews needed a homeland. The problem with such a perspective, what some cultural theorists would call a binary perspective, is that it doesn’t settle competing autonomy claims over a disputed territory. The history of political self-determination is littered with the consequences of disputed realms: Northern Ireland, Kashmir and Israel being three bloody examples.

No less than three faiths consider the territory as a site of considerable significance to their conceptions of the good life. Historically, the Jewish people have suffered egregiously and as a cultural and ethnic group we can say that there are weighty desert claims owed to them. Yet the Palestinians suffer terribly through their own moral luck of being born a Palestinian and so there are claims arising there, too.

Israelis (who are not identical to the Jewish people and so do not have as strong a claim as we might have given to the Jewish people) have claims arising from the insecurity they suffer from extra-state terrorist organisations along their frontiers and from belligerent and unfriendly policies of some of their neighbours. Yet these claims are weakened by the relatively threat advantage they have over their opponents: Israeli has a well-supplied, technologically advanced and nuclear armed force.

How do all these claims balance up? Weighing these autonomy claims impartially, much of the Israeli position is unjustifiable.

It holds a threat advantage over negotiations and I would argue is thereby morally required to be the first to make concessions, so that the claims on both sides are treated more equally. In spite of this it doesn’t appear that Palestinian statehood is the answer – the autonomy claims are too heterogeneously distributed across the Palestine-Israel territory for this to be a solution. There are (weak) claims of the Israeli settlers in the disputed areas and there are claims of Palestinians who live in Israel. Then there is Jerusalem.

Much of the focus of peace negotiations for the Arab-Israeli conflict is upon a two-state solution. Israel would retreat to its pre-1967 borders and the gap would be filled by a new Palestinian state. This is based on the model of single, unitary states. I do not think the complex distribution of claims can be answered by dividing territory up amongst single institutions. Therefore we should also reject a simple transfer of sovereignty to Egypt and Jordan (especially when the former doesn’t have the most democratic credentials). A population transfer would be just as unpalatable as this would involve coercion.

What solution would be acceptable? It would need to meet the varied and conflicting autonomy claims as equally as possible. To my mind this points towards a community-federal model based on mixed sovereignty. Firstly, it might need a supra-national Court of Human Rights, similar to the European model. A supra-national Ministerial Council co-ordinating matters of common concern and making common laws also seems integral to any proposed solution.

There would have to be a peace treaty enforced, again, by a supra-national Court.

And for Israel-Palestine itself one possible solution is binationalism, “sharing the land” as Edward Said called it. It suggests a federal state where powers are given to different devolved entities operating at the same level, with no one entity taking precedence over the other. Citizens would be free to identify themselves as a member of the Palestinian community, Israeli community or Non-Aligned community. There might be three Community Assemblies running education, cultural services, passports etcetera across the whole of Israel-Palestine. Those who opted to be Non-Aligned would, presumably, receive UN passports as has been the case elsewhere.

Another requirement would be for a federal parliament that covered the whole territory. Such a parliament would probably have to be designed to promote co-operation and consensus; for instance through STV, super-majorities and lotteries.

Finally, Jerusalem would be removed from the equation. As many have recommended it seems to me the only way to meet the competing autonomy claims is to make the territory a neutral city-state administered by an international trust.

So there we have it. I imagine that there will be people who find some of the recommendations of this brief article unacceptable. My aim was to merely think through the problem in a philosophical manner in order to arrive at a “reasonable” solution.

The main message, I believe is that Israel must make concessions regardless of Palestinian actions and a two-state solution is not necessarily the best outcome morally.

A longer version of this piece is at Dan’s blog here.

Interestingly it doesn’t seem to be a criticism from the left (i.e. that there should be no market in public services) but from a more libertarian perspective – that the choice isn’t a real one.

Those on the traditional free-market right would have “choice” in public services no matter what happens to equity. The argument goes something along the lines that choice would drive up standards everywhere benefiting all. Those of the traditional social democratic/socialist persuasion think equity is too great a thing to be sacrificed in the name of choice.

But if you take the starting point of all humans deserving equal respect then I, as a good Rawlsian, would argue that you derive two main principles. The first is the equal liberty of all individuals – the liberty to pursue their own ideas of the good life. The second is a requirement for social justice – a fairly heavyweight egalitarianism.

In both health care and education, there is a difficult conflict between these two principles. In healthcare I have suggested on my blog a hybrid between the NHS and a social insurance system, alongside supplementary insurance and state-aided medical savings accounts. And in education I suggested that we might have something like the Dutch system of “free schools.

To start, then, I think we can reject Mr Brittan’s (and similar) arguments for unrestrained choice in public services. Also we should probably reject arguments that any market-like policies in public services are good in themselves. The only reason to accept parts of the choice agenda, then, is because of the basic human right to pursue one’s own conception of the good.

A new system
Now for something radical: I say, scrap foundation schools and academies. Get rid of them. Instead, reawaken the much older mechanism that the British state used to meet this right: the voluntary aided school.

To side-step, in the Netherlands there is a special category of school called the bijzonder onderwijs. These emerged as a result of the religious and political conflicts of the 19th and early 20th century. This meant that individuals had the right to attend or send their children to a school that reflected their educational, religious or philosophical convictions regardless of the position of the state.

Pacifists could send their children to schools that emphasised co-operation or student democracy. Certain faiths would be allowed to have their own institutions. It meant that individuals could attend or send their children to a school that followed certain pedagogic methods whether Steiner, Montessori, liberal arts, alternative or otherwise.

These special schools in the Netherlands are administered by an independent board, separate from the Government and reflect the convictions of the founders of that board. They are an elaborate compromise. The requirements of freedom of conviction and freedom of pedagogy and organisation have led to a key right guaranteed by the Dutch constitution: the right for anyone to found a school. This led to further conflicts over funding and so, eventually, another constitutional guarantee was included: the right to parity of funding between municipal schools and special schools.

Voluntary aided schools in the UK are relatively similar. They are run by an independent trust or organisation, which employs the staff and owns the buildings and appoints a majority of the governing board. However, their freedoms are limited.

They cannot opt out of parts of the National Curriculum; they cannot adopt new qualifications that the state does not approve of; and they don’t have specially enumerated rights concerning the determination of school-wide pedagogy and organisation. Crucially, an individual’s right to establish a school according to their own convictions is severely limited and nearly non-existent.

Under this scheme there would be no point to foundation school or, importantly, academies. All of the freedoms (and more) given to those schools would be included under the provisions of becoming a voluntary aided school.

Recently, I even wrote a Charter to this effect.

Related
Sadie’s Tavern – Mystic Sadie

This is interesting for one major reason: it sounds very much like an extreme version of policies suggested by David Cameron, a whole suite of policies that might be labelled “soft paternalism”.

The idea is simple; the government shouldn’t constrain the moral autonomy of individuals but can exploit people’s inertia as well as “encouraging” them through the dissemination of information. In pursuit of the latter, Cameron has explicitly said that he wants the government to articulate a specific conception of the good and to therefore be a moral standpoint for society. The position he wants a future Cameron Government to take on marriage is a case in point (click here for a good article in The Economist about it).

For instance, the Government is going to introducing a national savings scheme for retirement from which people can “opt out”. Similarly, there has been recurrent discussion of introducing a national organ donor scheme that individuals can opt out of on matters of conscience. In a different vein, some wonks have put forward the idea of sin licenses. In order to smoke, drink or gamble individuals would have to purchase a license – just as they do when they want to drive. Individuals with problems of addiction can voluntary opt out by signing up to a registry that prohibits them from purchasing such a license if, in their darkest hours, they seek to return to their addiction.

Apparently the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness has been an important influence on Cameron and Osbourne in the development of these ideas. There is a blog and website here. The argument is to construct “choice architecture” an environment where individuals, exercising moral autonomy, are free to make the right choices.

The authors, Richard Thaler and Cass R Sunstein, characterise their approach as libertarian paternalism, which they claim is not an oxymoron. A “nudge” is the “tool of choice” for libertarian paternalists being an “opt out” rather than opt in scheme, or an incentive or a market mechanism that nudges people to make the right choices.

This is all very lovely but there is the question of whether this is acceptable. For Cameron, it is clearly a way to unite the libertarian and socially conservative (paternalist) wings of his party. But it doesn’t sound all the more consistent because of that.

The key is the notion of “moral autonomy”. The Kantian system requires that all moral maxims are compatible with everyone treating everyone as a self-legislating moral agent. Do “nudges” treat other individuals as autonomous moral agents? Or is a “nudge” equivalent to the Beijing civility drive, which doesn’t appear compatible with a Kantian ethical conception.

Some nudges seem permissible: for instance, the sin licenses actually enhance an individual’s moral autonomy. The ability of an individual to exclude themselves from receiving a license to overcome an addiction seems morally praiseworthy under the Kantian system – a very real example of one’s overcoming the heteronymous pull of addiction. In fact, sin licenses seem more acceptable than sin taxes. (Another good Economist article about soft paternalism can be found here.)

Opt out clauses rather than opt in clauses appear to be just about acceptable. Kant did think we should be worried about the happiness of others and so maybe flipping the default like this is no bad thing.

But then we get to the incentivising bit. It’s a maxim among economists that governments shouldn’;t choose winners. Betamax or VHS, Blu-Ray or HD DVD – that is up to the choices of autonomous individuals and governments shouldn’t distort the market by intervening too heavily. For Kant, an individual who is incentivised to act in a morally right isn’t morally praiseworthy. Were the government to intervene and distort the market of moral choices, then the actions of individuals would be less praiseworthy.

What government action would a Kantian permit? People often make wrong choices because they are not fully informed and individuals are often disadvantaged so that they cannot access the full spread of information that other moral agents can.

In an earlier post I discussed the success of marriage and relationship education programmes. Here is a nudge that is more than palatable for the Kantian. These nudges we might label, “autonomy enhancing” (AENs). AENs should acceptable to the libertarian wing and might suit the “rights and responsibilities” brigade.

But as for libertarian paternalism – sorry guys, it’s still an oxymoron.

Related:
Guardian – From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?