Student election season is here again, which means it is time for everyone on campus to be confused about Special Fees. Special Fees is an amorphous vat of money outside of general fees to fund student groups that can’t be funded through normal bureaucratic channels. Because of the opacity of student group finances, groups take advantage of the system and stretch the boundaries of Special Fees legitimacy for their own benefit.

The Stanford Flipside, a weekly satire publication, exposed this issue when it requested $7,000+ in Special Fees to buy a Segway scooter. The Flipside’s satire attracted a fair amount of attention and made clear that the Special Fees process has enormous, easily exploitable loopholes. It seems obviously immoral for students to game the Special Fees process at the expense of other students. But why?

I believe it is possible to create a coherent moral justification for awarding Special Fees money. There are right and wrong actions for student groups requesting Special Fees to take, independent of other student groups’ actions or the rules of Special Fees. Just because the law does not prohibit an action does not make it morally justifiable, nor does the fact that other groups are acting immorally condone one’s immoral actions.

We should base the morality of a Special Fees request on the principle of universalizability. Universalizability, in its simplest interpretation, states that an action is moral if you would support everyone taking that same action under similar circumstances. In other words, if a student group is requesting funding for a specific item, it would only be moral if it would be willing to support every other group requesting funding for the same item given similar conditions. Or, from the perspective of a Special Fees voter, voting to support one’s group’s Special Fees request is only morally justified if the voter is willing to support every other group that has similar requests and faces similar constraints.

A maxim of universalizability is attractive because it allows for flexibility and differing moral judgments between individuals. Students will apply universalizability in different ways: some will be willing to deem more requests as universalizable and therefore acceptable; others will draw a more stringent line.

Unless a person believes in complete moral relativism, however, universalizability will lead to certain requests being roundly agreed upon as immoral. Let us take again the example of the Flipside: now that the members of the Flipside have pointed out the flaws in the system, they have continued their request and are actively campaigning for Special Fees approval (including both printing costs and a Segway).

I find this action immoral because it is impossible to universalize that expense. I cannot speak for the members of the Flipside, but it seems hard to believe that these students would be actively willing to fund Segways, parties or clothing for any other group. Most students, I believe, would be very hesitant to pay for some group’s personal expenses or fund anything that does not directly and irreplaceably contribute to the goal of the student group.

The problem with Special Fees, though, is that as average students we cannot tell what funds are irreplaceable and what funds are not. It is impossible to fully understand a group’s finances and budget requests unless you are deeply enmeshed in that group. Groups often request items like airfare for tournaments, which, depending on whom you ask, could be universalizable: some say that groups that spend all year preparing for a big tournament and could not easily fund the travel expenses in other ways should be allowed to ask for those costs in Special Fees; others would argue that these are personal expenses and should not be.

In these situations, the moral onus more prominently falls on the student groups. Are these groups asking for money that they would consider universally supporting for other groups in similar situations? If the answer is no, then according to the idea of universalizability these student groups should not be requesting those Special Fees. So long as we agree to act morally to our fellow students and community members, loopholes won’t matter and we can begin to restore the validity of the Special Fees system.

Josh Freedman ‘11

Editor’s Note: Josh Freedman is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Unofficial Stanford Blog. An extended version of this article can be found there at tusb.stanford.edu.