The morality of school choice reconsidered

Abstract

I reply to the more philosophical critiques of How Not to Be a Hypocrite (2003), published in this volume of Theory and Research in Education. Against Elizabeth Anderson, I claim that unequal chances are unfair, and unfairness is bad, but acknowledge that its badness can be outweighed by other values. Distinguishing principled from empirical disagreements, I argue that even where rules permitting private schools are justified on productivity grounds, we should still consider those rules to be unfair, and parents who use them to favour their own children to be exceeding the bounds of legitimate partiality. I agree with much of Matthew Clayton’s and David Stevens’ discussion of the burdens of injustice, but suggest that they underestimate the weight of partial reasons, a weight which may be acknowledged even from the impersonal standpoint. Sympathetic to Colin Macleod’s discussion of partiality-constituted goods, I doubt that school choice qualifies as something the personal monitoring of which destroys spontaneity, and offer other reasons why it is worse not to vote for abolition than to send one’s child to a private school. I end by distinguishing two ways in which the current choice situation facing affluent parents may be unjust, and explain why Hypocrite took a strategic decision to leave that distinction unbroached.