March 2021 - The Prindle Institute for Ethics

March 31, 2021December 14, 2022

The Value of Secrecy in Congress

photograph of C-SPAN floor vote TV coverage

During both of the most recent impeachments, an old argument resurfaced. Afraid of retribution, many spoke out to advocate a way Republican members of Congress could get rid of Trump and keep their own seats. They suggested that the impeachment vote in the House and the Senate should be done in secret. Republican voters would know some Republicans voted to convict, but the blame would be diluted, spread across all 50 or so Republican senators. And so each Republican senator would individually be unlikely to lose his or her seat.

But this raises a question: if it would be good to convict Trump secretly, why not make the votes on all sorts of controversial issues secret? The people would know what laws were passed of course, but no one would be allowed to see committee meetings. No congressional sessions or votes would be broadcast on TV. You would vote in your representatives and then for two, four, or six years, you would simply trust that they voted in the way that was best. Members of Congress could pass legislation that might be unpopular to their constituency, but important for the nation at large. And neither ordinary citizens nor lobbyists could influence the legislative process after election day.

Many, however, are horrified by this idea. Making acts of Congress secret would be akin to government by aristocracy, rule by the elites, not democracy. Transparency is vital because it allows citizens to accurately judge whether their elected representatives are actually representing them instead of simply voting their own interests.

Let’s consider the arguments on both sides here and see if we can develop a better understanding of the issue. What are the benefits of congressional secrecy? And, are the costs to democracy too severe?

The first reason why one might think congressional votes should be secret is because this secrecy would allow Congress to stop acting only along party lines. Congress is extremely partisan nowadays and this hasn’t always been the case. Furthermore, this unwillingness to cross the aisle leads to difficulties in Congress achieving popular political ends. For example, nearly 60 percent of Americans supported Trump being convicted and removed from office after the second impeachment trial. Even more Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, support stimulus checks. But, no Republican members of Congress voted for Biden’s stimulus check, despite voting for Trump’s. And finally, a majority of Republicans support increasing the minimum wage, but Republican members of Congress vote against it when the issue is raised by Democrats. Voting against political opponents seems to be more important to members of Congress than passing popular legislation.

The fact of the matter is that Congress isn’t beholden to your average voter. Nor even the average voter from their party. Members of Congress are beholden to the partisans of their party because of the primary system. According to a study from the Social Science Research Council, primary voters tend to prefer politically extreme candidates. And if candidates can’t make it past the primaries, it doesn’t matter how popular they would be in the general election. (Some have suggested primaries are responsible for Trump’s nomination.) In any case, if Congressional votes were more often secret, congresspeople could give lip service to extremism in the primaries while looking to what’s best for the country when they actually vote. Those extreme partisans wouldn’t know who betrayed them. Thus, legislation that is broadly popular, but not popular among extreme partisans, could be passed and perhaps we’d be better off.

But, partisans and primaries aren’t the only reason Congress doesn’t pass popular legislation. Another problem congressional secrecy, especially in committee meetings, could solve is the influence of lobbyists and donors. As I have written elsewhere, money in politics is a seriously corrupting influence. Lobbyists and donors frequently control the legislative agenda. But, again, this hasn’t always been the case. The number of lobbyists skyrocketed in the 1970s with the passage of so-called “Sunshine Laws” meant to improve government transparency. Some of these are good: Freedom of Information Act requests allow the people to have access to a great deal of information about the operation of government that would be otherwise hidden from them. But, they also allowed lobbyists to flow in from the lobby through the previously closed doors of committee meetings. As is argued by the Congressional Research Institute (a think tank, not part of Congress), these laws “enormously enhanced the ability of ‘outside’ lobbyists and powerful entities to influence the legislative process,” and so they claim “all legislative transparency overwhelmingly benefits special interests and the powerful.”

Think of it this way: before, lobbyists and donors could monitor how congressional votes shook out. If particular members of Congress voted how the donors wanted, they would get more campaign donations, and if not, they wouldn’t. This influence has always been around. But since the passage of the Sunshine Laws, lobbyists can monitor the entire legislative process: they can write the legislation, follow along with congressional committee meetings to make sure no revisions are made they don’t like, and display their approval or disapproval to members of Congress throughout the process. Of course, ordinary citizens can do this too, but they tend not to have the resources to lobby as powerfully as massive corporations or billionaires. If the relevant “Sunshine Laws” were reversed, many of these problems would go away, and if congressional votes were made secret too, lobbying would become a very bad investment. Donors could spend money on lobbying and campaign donations and hope that the legislator feels pressured by it, but they would never be sure if it worked. Thus, the influence of money in politics would be diminished.

However, there remains an enormous counter-argument to making the acts of Congress secret. I have been making a very utilitarian case for secrecy. It would achieve better results for the American people. But that may not be the only thing that matters. One might argue that the ends aren’t the only things that matter; the means do too. Making the acts of Congress secret would allow lawmakers to ignore the interests of the people in favor of their own opinions and values. It would allow members of Congress to lie to the people about how they voted with little to no consequence. Perhaps transparency should be considered a virtue such that if maintaining transparency means lobbyists and donors get their way, so be it.

One might say getting something they consider important, like removing Trump from office, or getting stimulus to the people, or raising the minimum wage, isn’t worth the cost of allowing Congress to be unbeholden to voters. Is a democracy led by representatives who can ignore the voters really a democracy at all? Many political philosophers, like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, have argued that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. One might hold that doing what the people want, even if it’s wrong, is more important than doing right, if it means ignoring the will of the people. A government that doesn’t act for the people may not be much of a government at all. And why should we think representatives know better than the population at large? They are only human. And more than that they are an unrepresentative sample of the country, being more white, more male, older, and wealthier than the American population.Thus, on this view, making the acts of Congress secret is untenable: it is valid only according to a consequentialist framework and anyone who disagrees with such a framework will abhor the fact that legislators will be incentivized toward dishonesty and away from democratic principles. As Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, to act “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue,” nothing more, nothing less. This is a far higher standard than simply weighing the consequences and one we should strive for.

Making the acts of Congress secret would be an enormous change and not one to be taken lightly. As I have shown, your thoughts on this issue can vary significantly based on which moral framework you follow. The case, at least in the short term, is clear for the consequentialist. But for the virtue ethicist or deontologist, things are far murkier. Answering this question, as with many moral questions requires us to consider which of our values cannot be crossed? Which do you value more, if one has to be sacrificed: transparency and democracy, or the people’s welfare? In any case, something needs to be changed so that the problems of political partisanship and the influence of money in politics are resolved. Making the acts of Congress may be one solution but there are surely others. Perhaps we should reform the primary system. Perhaps we should overturn Citizens United to diminish the power of donors and lobbyists. The number of ethical solutions is only limited by our creativity, something which must be trained by continual practice and reflection.

March 30, 2021December 14, 2022

Why Anti-Vaxxers Are (Kind of) Like Marxists

On February 26th, the second-oldest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the United States issued an official statement warning church members about their COVID-19 vaccine options; in particular, it labeled the recently approved, single-dose vaccine from Johnson and Johnson “morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing.” In the following days, numerous representatives of Catholic dioceses around the country chimed in to agree, not actually forbidding the pious from being vaccinated, but rather advising that “If one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson’s.”

To those unfamiliar with Catholic dogma, this warning is likely peculiar: what do abortion practices (which the Roman Catholic church officially, if not pragmatically, opposes) have to do with vaccinations? But this critique of vaccines is far from unique to conservative Catholic clergymen: for some time, critics of vaccines in general have lobbied pro-life sentiments as anti-vaccination arguments: my goal here is not necessarily to respond to abortion-based anti-vaccine rhetoric, but rather to demonstrate what else that kind of thinking might require someone to believe.

In short, it’s kind of Marxist.

Let’s back up and explain some things first. The “vaccinations-are-pro-abortion” (or even the less severe “some-vaccines-are-tainted-by-abortion”) argument is rooted in the fact that several vaccines, including Johnson and Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 treatment, have been developed, in part, by using celluar tissue taken from an aborted fetus in the 1960s. Understandably, biomedical research often requires human tissue samples for many reasons, but it can be difficult to collect and store cellular material in a way that is both efficient and effective for long-term use; typically, human cells die too quickly to be used in long-term experiments, but fetal human cells are not only inherently capable of reproducing themselves indefinitely, but scientists have developed techniques to intentionally grow them in cellular cultures in a way that effectively “immortalizes” them. So, medical researchers studying how to cure ailments ranging from Alzheimer’s Disease to spinal cord injuries to multiple kinds of cancer to, yes, diseases susceptible to vaccinations will typically rely on several immortalized cellular lines that have been cultivated for decades in order to test their experiments.

It is not the case that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine — or any other vaccine, for that matter — contains aborted fetal tissue (that is to say: absolutely no one is receiving literal fetal cells in their arm when they get their COVID shot). Nor is it the case that abortions are being done in order to develop vaccines today (each of the cell lines now in use, such as the MRC-5 and WI-38 cultures, originate in abortions performed in the mid-20th century — often for separately tragic reasons, such as the rubella epidemic of the 1960s).

But this is not to say that there are no moral questions that arise about the use of fetal cell lines (or any other human culture) in contemporary research contexts. For example, the HEK-293 line used in the development of several COVID-19 vaccines may have come from an abortion in 1973, but its exact origination is unclear and it is entirely possible that the original cells were collected from the remains of a spontaneous miscarriage. Either way, despite the fact that HEK-293 cells have been used to develop a wide variety of medical advances and medications (including many of the various antipsychotics today used to treat diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), the original donor of those cells (or their family) has never been compensated for their contribution to an industry enjoying billions of dollars of profit. Similarly, the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer in 1951, is a terrible example of how biomedical research can be built on a blatant injustice: after doctors collected a sample of Lacks’ cells without her knowledge, they discovered that the cells unexpectedly possessed the same kind of propensity for “immortalization” that makes fetal cells so useful, so they patented and commercialized the “HeLa” cell line. Despite never receiving Lacks’ consent for her cells to be used in this way (much less compensating her for her donation), the HeLa line has developed into one of the most useful (and lucrative) cell cultures on the market today; Lacks’ family never even knew the cultures existed until two decades after her death.

Setting those issues aside for now, what can we make of the claim that the conditions under which a commodity is manufactured can irrevocably taint the commodity itself with immorality? This is, I take it, a core complaint of the pro-life critic of vaccine development practices: the goals of vaccine deployment might be laudable enough (namely, reducing the spread of disease), but the methods of doing so are, arguably, associated with something purportedly inexcusable. For some, the difference between contemporary abortions and contemporary immortalized fetal cell lines originating in initially-unrelated abortions a generation ago might be sufficient to distinguish morally between pro-life commitments and vaccination acceptance — that is to say, someone could easily be a critic of elective abortion and consistently still believe that modern vaccination programs are morally acceptable. (It is worth noting that several outspoken pro-life American religious leaders, including Robert Jeffress, Al Mohler, and Franklin Graham have spoken out recently in support of COVID-19 vaccination programs.)

But let’s suppose that this is inconsistent (as many of Graham’s fans argued after he publicly surmised that Jesus would be pro-vaccine); what might we be committing ourselves to if we affirm that the use of fetal cell lines in their development hopelessly entangles vaccines within a morass of morally unacceptable problems?

Firstly, it seems like we would also need to reject many additional medical advances made over the last five decades. Anyone who rejects a vaccination against the novel coronavirus (or any other disease) because of the abortion-based critique of vaccinations I’ve been discussing will seemingly also need to reject treatments for conditions ranging from various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and macular degeneration to Alzheimer’s, paralysis, strokes, organ transplants, and medications for a wide variety of conditions. Without some special reason to think that vaccines are uniquely susceptible to being morally tainted via their tenuous association to past abortions, it is unclear why one could be an anti-vaxxer and not also a critic of many other elements of modern medicine.

Secondly, this whole conversation reminds me of the broader Marxist critique of capitalism in general. In his essay “Estranged Labor,” Marx introduces the idea that, under capitalism, workers are alienated from multiple things, including the products of their labor, their fellow human beings, and even themselves. A society split into different class-divisions, Marx says, necessarily prevents certain people (workers) from being able to live lives as fully realized human beings, creating and enjoying both cultural artifacts and the other people within our cultural relationships. In later works, like the first volume of Capital, Marx would develop the further critique that capitalism is not only alienating but exploitative because it, by design, transfers the value created by the labor of workers to the pockets of business-owners; for one example, consider the connection between Jeff Bezos’ wealth and the often-cataloged, but rarely-prevented dehumanization of workers in Amazon distribution centers (another is the dangerous abuses regularly perpetrated against both human workers and nonhuman animal victims in factory farms). Nowadays, this critique is sometimes summarized in the sloganized observation that there exists “no ethical consumption under capitalism” — although Marx himself never wrote those words, it is a (somewhat oversimplified) distillation of his broader point: the conditions under which capitalism operates necessarily spreads a taint of moral corruption throughout the entire line of commodity production in a manner that should provoke us to rethink the structuring of that productive system as a whole.

Of course, if someone is apt to think that products are, in a sense, insulated from the moral conditions of their production, then they would be able to quickly reject the Marxist critique of capitalism. Notice that there is at least one person who can’t do this, though: the person who accepts that vaccines are necessarily morally tainted because of the conditions of their production.

In short, if someone is inclined to believe that their pro-life commitments require them to think that vaccines are morally tainted, then they are seemingly required (upon pain of inconsistency) to believe that their anti-abuse commitments will require them to believe that many additional products, including anything produced on a factory farm and, perhaps, even all products produced by capitalists, are morally tainted as well.

March 29, 2021April 10, 2024

A Chicago Suburb Tries Reparations

aerial photograph of Chicago lakefront skyline

Last week, the Chicago suburb of Evanston, home of Northwestern University, introduced the nation’s first government reparations program for African Americans. It was a momentous event regardless of one’s political views, and advocates hope that it will have a “snowball effect” on proposed federal legislation that would create a national commission to study potential reparations. Nevertheless, Evanston’s program, and the broader subject of reparations, remain extremely controversial.

Evanston’s $400,000 program, approved to acknowledge the harm caused by discriminatory housing policies, practices, and inaction going back more than a century, will issue grants up to $25,000 directly to financial institutions or vendors to help with mortgage costs, down payments, and home improvements for qualified applicants. The program will be paid out of Evanston’s $10 million Local Reparations Fund, which will disburse funds collected through annual cannabis taxes over the next decade. Qualifications for the payments include sufficient proof of “origins in any of the Black racial and ethnic groups of Africa,” proof of residency in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or direct descendance of someone who meets that criterion, or proof of having experienced housing discrimination due to the city’s housing policies or practices after 1969. Beyond repairing past wrongs, the program is also designed to address the declining Black share of the population of Evanston, which fell from 22.5% in 2000 to 16.9% in 2017 according to U.S. census data.

Critics of the program say that it’s little more than an insubstantial gesture and that it benefits the very financial institutions that engaged in discriminatory practices in the past. Perhaps the most damning criticism is that, by denying Black families direct cash payments and the opportunity to decide how to manage their own money, the program is, in the words of Evanston alderwoman Cicely Fleming, a “prime example of white paternalism.” Although a supporter of reparations, she was the lone dissenting vote against the program on Evanston’s City Council. “We have prioritized so-called progressives’ interests in looking virtuous rather than reversing the harm done to Black people for generations,” she wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “I voted ‘no’ as an obligation to my ancestors, my Black family across the nation and my own family in Evanston.” She also pointed out that the program may be under-inclusive in not covering those who may be due reparations but either don’t own a home or don’t plan to purchase one.

There are also potential legal challenges. In a 1995 case called Adarand v. Peña, the Supreme Court held that strict scrutiny applies to all racial classifications imposed by federal, state, or local governments. “Strict scrutiny” means that the program must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. In a March 18 letter to the Mayor and members of the City Council, a Washington, D.C. attorney representing the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative not-for-profit legal defense foundation, argued that Evanston’s program fails on both counts: it neither serves a compelling interest nor is narrowly tailored. Only time will tell whether Evanston’s program will actually face a serious legal challenge in the years ahead.

Whatever the particular shortcomings of Evanston’s program, there are more general philosophical objections to reparations that are worth addressing. First, there is what I will call the “anti-classification” argument, ably articulated by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote that “there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.” Why is there this equivalence? Because, say the proponents of anti-classification, both kinds of law classify people by race for some purpose. But there is an obvious reply to this objection: while both kinds of law classify people by race, they do not do so for the same purpose, and this difference in purpose is morally relevant. Even if reparations programs are ultimately futile or wrong for some further reason, the notion that there is no intrinsic moral difference between laws that aim to oppress people based on their race and laws that aim to uplift them seems morally obtuse at best.

The second argument is based on the very plausible premise that individuals living today do not bear moral responsibility for the misdeeds of their ancestors. If this is true, and if reparations programs were premised on the idea that they do, then reparations programs would be morally indefensible. But it is important to note that the Evanston program does not rest on the premise that any single individual is responsible for the unequal treatment of Blacks in the past, but rather that the city as a corporate entity bears this responsibility. And this seems much more plausible: a corporate entity can persistently bear moral obligations even if the individuals that make up that entity change over time. For example, if corporation A pollutes a river, then — putting aside the statute of limitations — it may be legally responsible for cleaning up the river even if, by the time it is held to account, no member of its board was alive when the river was polluted.

The final, and perhaps strongest, argument against reparations is based on the fact that nationally, the idea of reparations continues to be extremely unpopular. This is a particularly difficult problem for advocates who would like the federal government to open its vast coffers to reparations programs. Given their unpopularity, reparations programs have the potential to stoke white resentment which, while not grounded in any good argument, has the potential to set back racial progress more than reparations programs would advance it. Yet the possibility of racial backlash was also cited as a reason for activists to moderate their demands and tone down their tactics during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a fact that should make us wary of invoking this concern again. In any case, the Evanston program will be a good trial balloon to see if white residents of that college town are truly as progressive as they claim to be.

In sum, Evanston’s program is a small step forward for the cause of reparations in America. Nevertheless, the program itself, and reparations proposals more generally, face serious challenges from critics on both sides of the aisle.

March 26, 2021December 14, 2022

Renewable Energy and Local Autonomy in Indiana

Indiana House Bill 1381 establishes new standards for wind and solar farms across Indiana. HB 1381 gives wind and solar companies the power to install new projects even if they conflict with local property and zoning plans. In an effort led by the Association of Indiana Counties (AIC), more than 2/3 of county governments in Indiana expressed their opposition to HB 1381, arguing that it violates the autonomy of local citizens and county governments to make their own decisions about local infrastructure.

Should state legislators listen to local citizens when it comes to renewable energy? Is NIMBYism a right afforded to those living in a community? Does the reason for not wanting solar or wind power in a community matter when assessing these questions?

According to local community activists, the fight against House Bill 1381 is not about renewable energy or climate change, but instead about property rights and local autonomy. According to Susan Huhn, a Hunt county councilor, the bill fundamentally usurps power that is supposed to belong to local government and is therefore “dangerous regardless of what was in it.” Huhn is not off-base in her belief that HB 1381 attempts to take control of decision-making typically left to local governments. Renewable energy projects stand to generate revenue and increase employment for Indiana, and the state legislature is attempting to open Indiana up to renewable energy in order to take fiscal advantage. However, many are asking: at what cost? Wayne County Commissioner, and president of the AIC, Ken Paust stated that the bill “removes a County’s ability to negotiate on behalf of the community” and argued that “Citizens who live and work in these communities are the best ones to make the decision and will have their county’s best interest in mind.”

State government decisions to override local preferences in pursuit of perceived economic is typically an issue discussed on a fairly local level. However, in this case, many environmentalists might perceive the state as making the right decision, since the switch to renewable energy is overall a more environmentally responsible decision. Regardless of the potential outcomes, should the state’s decision to override the clear and expressed desire of so many counties across the state be considered unethical?

HB 1381 could be viewed as a violation of the rights of individuals and communities. On an individual level, the theory of property rights implies that each individual should be able to determine how their property is used. If the state government decides to claim private property to build wind or solar farms, they certainly have a legal duty, and many would argue an ethical duty, to justly compensate the owner for such a taking. Under an individual theory of property rights, it is wrong to take any person’s private property without their permission, regardless of compensation or benefits. In simple terms, this is basically the definition of stealing, a widely recognized moral wrong.

HB 1381 could also be considered unethical under a communal theory of property rights. One might argue that the communities which bear the burden of changes to the land where they live, should ultimately have the most say over what happens to their environment. The communal right to the environment does not belong to the state, but rather to the people who live on the land itself. This line of argument is often emphasized by grassroots movements, which typically prioritize the preferences of local and relatively powerless individuals and communities over powerful decision-makers who have little at stake in an issue. This point about prioritizing the desires of local communities is especially relevant in the case of wind and solar in Indiana, considering the fact that giant multinational corporations own and operate the existing wind farms present there.

Though these are compelling ethical reasons to oppose HB 1381, taking the value of private property too far can lead to further ethical conundrums. Weighing private property over social values can lead to NIMBYism and environmental racism. NIMBY, or “Not in My Backyard” is shorthand for allowing private property rights to take precedence over activities necessary to the economic or social welfare of the community. As environmental scholars such as Robert Bullard have noted, NIMBYism typically leads to PIBBY, or Put in Black Backyards, as the prioritization of certain property rights often leads to disproportionate burdens. While many instances of NIMBYism and PIBBYism typically involve environmentally threatening activities, such as coal power generation, this case does not involve infrastructure that is comparable in its environmental detriments. Though there exists a plethora of conspiracy theories relating to the environmental impacts of wind and solar on surrounding communities, the measured impacts are far less than any comparable source of energy generation. For this reason, perhaps we should not prioritize the desires of local communities and private property owners over the clear benefits gained from investing in clean energy generation in these communities.

The social benefits of investing in clean energy do not only derive from the lack of overall pollution exposure to communities across Indiana, but also to the global environment as a whole. In the face of climate change and environmental pollution, clean energy generation is a necessity to ensure a habitable planet for future generations. Clean energy is also proven to generate far less negative environmental and health impacts than alternatives. Even if one sets aside these consequentialist justifications for enforcing a regime of clean energy, HB 1381 is ethical because the democratically elected legislators have decided to implement this policy. The democratic representation in the legislature might be enough to justify that the people of Indiana ultimately have endorsed this use of private property, and our democracy should have the final say.

While there are many competing economic, social, and environmental values at stake in this issue, there are many clear stakeholders opposing HB 1381. Even Hoosier Environmental Council, the preeminent grassroots environmental organization in Indiana, is supporting AIC’s bid for local control. It is now up to Indiana legislators to decide if the benefits of renewable energy are worth the potential infringement on individual and community autonomy.

March 25, 2021December 14, 2022

What Is Cancel Culture?

There has been much bemoaning of “cancel culture” in recent years. The fear seems to be that there is a growing trend coming from the left to “cancel” ideas and even people that fall out of favor with proponents of left-wing political ideology. Social media and online bullying contribute to this phenomenon; people leave comments shaming “bad actors” into either apologizing, leaving social media, or sometimes just digging in further.

It’s worth taking some time to think about the history of “cancellation.” For better or for worse, cancellation is a political tool that can be used either to entrench or to disrupt the dominant power hierarchy. Ideas and people have been “canceled” as long as there have been social creatures with reactive attitudes. Humans aren’t even the only species to engage in cancel behavior. In communities of animals in which cooperative behavior is important, groups will often shun members who behave selfishly. In other cases, groups of animals may ostracize members that do not seem to respect the authority of the alpha male. What we now call “cancel culture” is just one form of the general practice of using sentiments such as approval or disapproval or praise and blame to influence behavior and shape social interactions.

One of history’s most famous cancellations was the trial and execution of Socrates, who was “canceled” in the most extreme of ways because the influence that he had over the youth of Athens posed an existential threat to those with the power in that community. The challenge that he presented was that he might encourage the younger generation to reassess values and construct a new picture of what their communities might look like. At his trial, Socrates says,

“For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, my influence is ruinous indeed.”

For this, he was made to drink hemlock.

Galileo was canceled for the heresy of advancing the idea that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around. This view of the universe was in conflict with the view endorsed by the Catholic Church, so Galileo’s book of dialogues was prohibited, and he lived out the rest of his life under house arrest.

In the more recent past, Martin Luther King Jr. was canceled — not only on his assassination, but prior to that, when many of his former compatriots in the struggle for civil rights broke ranks with him over his opposition to the Vietnam War and his battle to end poverty.

Through the years, people have been “canceled” for being Christian, Pagan, Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, Gay, Female, Transgender, Communist, and Socialist. They’ve been canceled for speaking up too much or too little, for being too authentic or not authentic enough. Books have been burned, ideas have been suppressed, people’s reputations have changed with the direction of the prevailing winds. Cancellation belongs to no single political party or ideology.

Nevertheless, “cancellation” in the 21st century is presented to us as a new and nebulous phenomenon — a liberal fog that has drifted in to vaporize the flesh of anyone who harbors conservative ideas. But what does it mean, exactly, to “cancel” a person? Perhaps the most common use of the word “cancel” in an ordinary context has to do with events. If I get a cold and I cancel my philosophy courses for the day, then those courses are no longer taking place. Similarly, in the most extreme cases, to “cancel” someone is to get rid of them forever — to kill them. Socrates, Hypatia, and even Jesus were “canceled” in this way.

There are other cases of cancellation which are pretty extreme, even if they don’t result in death. Instead, the person or group might be imprisoned or otherwise punished by the government. For example, during World War II, many Japanese Americans were “canceled” and put in internment camps just for being Japanese during a time when Americans were prone to xenophobia against that particular group. Then, of course, there was the McCarthy era, when people all across the country had to worry about their lives or livelihoods being destroyed if it were discovered or even suspected that they were sympathetic to communism. This cancel culture witch hunt affected the careers of stars like Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, and Orson Wells. Positive proof of membership in the party wasn’t even necessary. Of one case Joseph McCarthy famously said, “I do not have much information on this except the general statement of the agency…that there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections.”

Thankfully, when we use the word “cancel” these days, we are usually referring to something less extreme. We tend to mean that a certain segment of society will no longer support the “canceled” person in various ways — they will not consume their products, enjoy their art, listen to their thoughts, or otherwise support their general platform. The most common cases are those of politicians and artists of various types. Many people no longer watch Kevin Spacey movies after learning that he frequently engaged in sexual harassment of co-workers.

The linchpin — and the feature that makes it tricky — is that cancel culture is one of the consequences of the display of people’s reactive attitudes. It is these very reactive attitudes — guilt, shame, praise, blame — that are involved in moral judgments. Such judgments also involve assessment of harm. People often point out, when attempting to hold a bad actor responsible, that the bad actor’s behavior is resulting in a serious set of bad consequences for their community. These kinds of considerations are important — they make the world a better place. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater; we don’t want to give up holding people morally responsible for their actions because we are too afraid of “canceling” the wrong person. There are cases in which cancellation seems like precisely the correct course of action. We shouldn’t continue to hold in high regard rapists and serial harassers like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. We shouldn’t support the platforms of racists and child molesters.

For these reasons, cancel culture shouldn’t be depicted as the emerging new villain in the plot of the 2020s. This culture has always been around and always will be, though, granted, it is amplified by social media and the internet. Sometimes it does some real good. The reality is that this has all been so politicized that it is unlikely that they’ll be much ideological shift on these issues. If we allow Socrates’ ancient ideas to “corrupt” our minds, we’ll keep asking questions: “Is this a power play?” “Should this behavior be tolerated?” “Is this a case that calls for compassion and understanding?” Improvement of the soul calls for nuance.

March 24, 2021December 14, 2022

The Broader Moral Issue Behind the Filibuster

black-and-white photograph of U.S. congress in session

This week, the American Rescue Plan became law after being passed along party lines despite overwhelming bi-partisan support from state and local figures as well as voters (according to opinion polling). The massive stimulus measure has been taken as an indication that “the era of big government” is back, and indeed given the challenges faced with COVID-19, the threat of climate change, the urgent need to rebuild crumbling infrastructure, it isn’t particularly shocking that a significant share of voters now want government to be more proactive. It should be no surprise then that the Senate filibuster continues to be a lightning rod of controversy as more Democrats have called for reform. But is this just politics or are there more subtle moral concerns at stake when it comes to changing the filibuster?

Those who oppose getting rid of the filibuster tend to point to three general reasons to keep it. The first is that the filibuster is in keeping with the general philosophy behind the Constitution, specifically to prevent swift passage of laws. The second is that the filibuster protects minority rights. The third reason is more political-practical in nature; warning of the dangers of what would happen if the other side were able to do as they wish, and nothing could be done to stop it.

In response to the first reason, two important points need to be noted. In a 1995 article defending the filibuster, Bill Frenzel notes, “The Framers created our system based on their profound distrust of government […] Their intention was to prevent swift enactment of laws and to avoid satisfying the popular whimsy of each willful majority.” However even if slow government was the goal of the Constitution, it isn’t clear that the filibuster was a good means of accomplishing this. James Madison argued requiring more than majority support would reverse “the fundamental principle of free government,” while Alexander Hamilton argued that such requirements serve to “substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

What is more important, however, is that the Framers of the Constitution were influenced by 18th-century political philosophy and were responding to 18th-century problems. So, the question is whether such conditions still hold today, and if we should be bound by what the Founders wanted? The answer appears to be no, as even Thomas Jefferson argued that the Constitution should be revised and updated to meet the needs of new generations. While it is tempting to think about political philosophy in a-temporal terms as establishing stable institutions to protect an invariant set of fixed human rights, we might instead consider political institutions the instruments that allow the public to conduct its business.

In response to the second reason — the protection of minority rights — the question is always one of which minority and which rights we are talking about. If we are talking about the rights of a minority of citizens against the tyranny of the majority, then we already have a solution to that; it’s called the Bill of Rights. If we are talking about the rights of a minority of Senators, then we need to ask how far those rights should be extended. The right to review and debate legislation is important for any legislator in the minority, but whether there is a right for a minority of lawmakers to effectively veto legislation is another. Senator Raphael Warnock, for example, recently posed this very question, asking whether the minority rights of Senators should outweigh the voting rights of citizens.

If we put aside the first two reasons, as, by themselves, they aren’t reasons to keep the filibuster specifically, we must address the actual perceivable consequences of making changes to lawmaking policy. For example, Mitch McConnell recently warned of a “scorched earth Senate” where Republicans would use every rule at their disposal to halt the chamber and once returned to the majority would pass all manner of laws unacceptable to Democrats with “zero input” from them.

First, it is worth noting that most other legislative chambers do not have a filibuster rule like the Senate, despite hailing from nations which rank high on the democracy index. For example, prior to the 1990s the Legislative Assembly of Ontario was far more permissive about the length of speeches, allowing one member to tie up the legislature for weeks, culminating in a 17-hour long speech. The rules of the legislature were later amended to limit the time for members to speak, but even after this filibuster was eliminated, there were plenty of opportunities for obstruction. For example, one member was able to tie up the legislature for hours by introducing a bill whose title included every lake, river, and steam in the province. The title had to be read aloud by the member and the clerk.

Despite eliminating the chance to filibuster, the sky did not fall in Ontario. Just as McConnell has threatened to tie up the Senate using tactics like having bills be read aloud, legislators in Ontario resorted to new tactics and procedural moves to obstruct which were only permitted until they also became a nuisance. Yet, what follows from jurisdictions that allow for the easy passage of legislation based on a majority vote? Firstly, it means that administrations are far more able to enact the platforms they run on. Thus, voters more often see their political preferences be reflected in law.

But this also means that a newly elected government can always repeal and replace what came before far easier. This can be problematic because it creates greater instability and uncertainty. Sometimes this happens as a major piece of legislation can be repealed in short order by a new government who may choose their own policies. Good examples in Canada include a national childcare program that was almost enacted before a newly elected Conservative government cancelled it. In Ontario, the Liberal government’s cap and trade program was abolished quickly by a new Conservative administration.

While the swinging pendulum of political winners does mean that laws and programs can be enacted and repealed more frequently, it is rarely a free-for-all either. Certain programs, policies, or laws simply have too much public support to allow new governments to wipe the slate clean. For example, even when Conservative governments enjoy large majorities and could easily do so, you don’t see them repealing programs like public healthcare because the public would not stand for it.

So would a filibuster-less Senate be a disaster? Certainly McConnell is right that even if Democrats pass all the legislation they want, Republicans can just as easily repeal it next time they’re in power and further enact all sorts of reforms that would be objectionable to Democrats. However, in the long term the back-and-forth of major legislative reforms, repeals, and replacements would not be sustainable. It is in the public’s interest to have some degree of stability even if it takes voters a while to realize this. However, this kind of legislative experimentation might make it easier for the public to connect policies and ideas with real-life consequences. It’s one thing to vote Republican if you know little can get done, it is another thing to vote Republican if you know they can and will take away your healthcare. And if they do, your future voting preferences might change. In essence, eliminating the filibuster reveals how important it will be for voters to be more informed advocates when it comes to policy and to be less inclined to knee-jerk defenses of ideology.

Reforming the filibuster may not be merely a matter of exacerbating political problems, but rather it reveals and identifies a moral one. In a time where political reform is easier without the filibuster, what kind of changes to political culture should result? What are our responsibilities to be informed when we vote? Given that fellow citizens may not agree with all of our policies and may have the option to repeal them in the future, are we obligated to seek input from opponents in order to ensure that policies have enough support not to be undone after the next election? Would a scorched-earth approach with “zero input” from the other side ever be a good thing? In essence, are we not forced to ask how we can better “get along” with opposing voter blocks and what would that look like? Could this actually lead to more compromise and less polarization? And in our present political culture, where is the line drawn between pure obstruction and a meaningful challenge from the voting minority? And if some obstruction is welcome to protect the rights of the minority, how far should those rights go?

As I said, even if you eliminate the filibuster there are other tactics that can be used, just as they were in Ontario. The issue will not just go away. The debate for the nation is not whether a legislative tactic should stick around, but about the kind of political culture we should have.

March 23, 2021December 14, 2022

Facebook Groups and Responsibility

image of Facebook's masthead displayed on computer screen

After the Capitol riot in January, many looked to the role that social media played in the organization of the event. A good amount of blame has been directed at Facebook groups: such groups have often been the target of those looking to spread misinformation as there is little oversight within them. Furthermore, if set to “private,” these groups run an especially high risk of becoming echo chambers, as there is much less opportunity for information to flow freely within them. Algorithms that Facebook uses to populate your feed were also part of the problem: more popular groups are more likely to be recommended to others, which led to some of the more pernicious groups getting a much broader range of influence than they would have otherwise. As noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, while it was not long ago that Facebook saw groups as the heart of the platform, abuses of the feature has forced the company to make some significant changes into how they are run.

The spread of misinformation in Facebook groups is a complex and serious problem. Some proposals have been made to try to ameliorate it: Facebook itself implemented a new policy in which groups that were the biggest troublemakers – civics groups and health groups – would not be promoted during the first three weeks of their existence. Others have called for more aggressive proposals. For instance, a recent article in Wired suggested that:

“To mitigate these problems, Facebook should radically increase transparency around the ownership, management, and membership of groups. Yes, privacy was the point, but users need the tools to understand the provenance of the information they consume.”

A worry with Facebook groups, as well as a lot of communication online generally, is that it can be difficult to tell what the source of information is, as one might post information anonymously or under the guise of a username. Perhaps with more information about who was in charge of a group, then, one would be able to make a better decision as to whether to accept the information that one finds within it.

Are you part of the problem? If you’re actively infiltrating groups with the intent of spreading misinformation, or building bot armies to game Facebook’s recommendation system, then the answer is clearly yes. I’m guessing that you, gentle reader, don’t fall into that category. But perhaps you are a member of a group in which you’ve seen misinformation swirling about, even though you yourself didn’t post it. What is the extent of your responsibility if you’re part of a group that spreads misinformation?

Here’s one answer: you are not responsible at all. After all, if you didn’t post it, then you’re not responsible for what it says, or if anyone else believes it. For example, let’s say you’re interested in local healthy food options, and join the Healthy Food News Facebook group (this is not a real group, as far as I know). You might then come across some helpful tips and recipes, but also may come across people sharing their views that new COVID-19 vaccines contain dangerous chemicals that mutate your DNA (they don’t). This might not be interesting to you, and you might think that it’s bunk, but you didn’t post it, so it’s not your problem.

This is a tempting answer, but I think it’s not quite right. The reason is because of how Facebook groups work, and how people are inclined to find information plausible online. As noted above, sites like Facebook employ various algorithms to determine which information to recommend to its users. A big factor that goes into such suggestions is how popular a topic or group is: the more engagement a post gets, the more likely it’s going to show up in your news feed, and the more popular a group is, the more likely it will be recommended to others. What this means is that mere membership in such a group will contribute to that group’s popularity, and thus potentially to the spread of the misinformation it contains.

Small actions within such a group can also have potentially much bigger effects. For instance, in many cases we put little thought into “liking” or reacting positively to a post: perhaps we read it quickly and it coheres with our worldview, so we click a thumbs-up, and don’t really give it much thought afterwards. From our point of view, liking a post does not mean that we wholeheartedly believe it, and it seems that there is a big difference between liking something and posting it yourself. However, these kinds of engagements influence the extent to which that post will be seen by others, and so if you’re not liking in a conscientious way, you may end up contributing to the spread of bad information.

What does this say about your responsibilities as a member of a Facebook group? There are no doubt many such groups that are completely innocuous, where people do, in fact, only share helpful recipes or perhaps even discuss political issues in a calm and reasoned way. So it’s not as though you necessarily have an obligation to quit all of your Facebook groups, or to get off the platform altogether. However, given that otherwise innocent actions like clicking “like” on a post can have much worse effects in groups in which misinformation is shared, and that being a member of such a group at all can contribute to its popularity and thus the extent to which it can be suggested to others means that if you find yourself a member of such a group, you should leave it.

March 22, 2021December 14, 2022

More Than Words: Hate Crime Laws and the Atlanta Attack

photograph of "Stop Asian Hate' sign being held

There’s an important conversation happening about how we should understand Robert Aaron Long’s murder of eight individuals, including six Asian women (Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Yong Ae Yue) last week. Were Long’s actions thoughtless or deliberate? Is the attack a random outburst at an unrelated target, or “a new chapter in an old story”? Is the attack better explained as a byproduct of anti-Asian American sentiment left to fester, or merely the result of a young, white man having “a really bad day”? Behind these competing versions lies a crucial distinction: in judging the act, should we take on the point of view of the attacker or his victims?

In the wake of the tragedy, President Biden urged lawmakers to endorse the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act aimed at addressing the rise in violence directed at Asian Americans. The bill intends to improve hate crime reporting, expand resources for victims, and encourage prosecution of bias-based violence. As Biden has emphasized, “every person in our nation deserves to live their lives with safety, dignity, and respect.” By publicly condemning the Atlanta attack as a hate crime, the president hopes to address the climate of fear, distrust, and unrest that’s set in.

Unfortunately, hate crime legislation has proven more powerful as a public statement than a prosecutorial tool. The enhanced punishment attached to those criminal offenses motivated by the offender’s biases against things like race, religion, and gender are rarely sought. Part of the problem stems from the legal difficulty in demonstrating motive. This requires going beyond mere intent — assessing the degree to which one meant to cause harm — and instead considering the reasons why the person acted as they did. We’re encouraged to judge the degree to which prejudice might have precipitated violence. Establishing motive, then, requires us to speculate as to the inner workings of another’s mind. Without a confession, we’re left to try to string bits of information together into a compelling narrative of hate. It’s a flimsy thing to withstand scrutiny beyond a reasonable doubt.

This trouble with motive is currently on clear display: Long has insisted that race and gender had nothing to do with the attack, and the police seem willing to take him at his word. On Thursday, FBI director Christopher Wray deferred to the assessment by local police saying that “it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.” Instead, Long’s actions have been explained as the consequence of sex addiction in conflict with religious conviction; Long’s goal has been described as the elimination of temptation.

How this explanation insulates Long’s actions from claims of bias-inspired violence is not clear. As Grace Pai of Asian Americans Advancing Justice suggested, “To think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women […] and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd.” The theory fails to appreciate the way Long’s narrative fetishizes Asian American women and reduces them to sexual objects. Rather than avoiding the appearance of bias, the current story seems to possess all the hallmarks. Sure, it might prove a bit more difficult to establish in a court of law, but as Senator Raphael Warnock argued, “we all know hate when we see it.”

So what makes politicians run toward, and law enforcement run from, the hate crime designation? In addition to the difficulty in prosecution, hate crime laws have a shaky record as a deterrent, made worse by the fact that they are rarely reported, investigated, or prosecuted. Despite all but three states now having hate crime laws on the books, rates of bias-inspired violence and harassment over the past several years have remained relatively high. (Many attribute this trend to the xenophobic and racist rhetoric that came out of the previous White House administration.)

But perhaps the value of hate crime legislation can’t be adequately captured by focusing on deterrence. Maybe it’s about communication. Perhaps the power of these laws is about coming together as a community to say that we condemn violence aimed at difference in a show of solidarity. We want it known that these particular individuals — these particular acts — don’t speak for us. Words matter, as the controversy regarding the sheriff’s office explanation of the attacker’s state of mind makes clear. Making the public statement, then, is a crucial step even if political and legal factors mean the formal charge is not pursued. It’s a performance directed at all of us, not at the perpetrator. The goal is restoration and reconciliation. Failing to call out bias-inspired violence when we see it provides cover and allows roots to take hold and to continue to grow unchecked.

Still, the importance of signalling this moral commitment doesn’t necessarily settle the legal question of whether hate crime legislation can (and should) play the role we’ve written for it. Hate crime laws are built on our belief that bias-inspired violence inflicts greater societal harm. These crimes inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and send a specific message to particular members of the community. Enhanced legal consequences are justified, then, on the basis of this difference in severity and scope. Punishment must fit the crime.

Some critics, however, worry that hate crime laws reduce individuality to membership of a protected group. In a way, it’s guilty of a harm similar to that perpetrated by the attacker: it renders victims anonymous. It robs a person of her uniqueness, strips her of her boundless self, and collapses her to a single, representative label. Because of this, hate crime laws seem at once both necessary for securing justice for the victim — they directly address the underlying explanation of the violence — and diametrically opposed to that goal — the individual victim comes to be defined first and foremost by her group identity.

The resolution to these competing viewpoints is not obvious. On the one hand, our intuitions suggest that people’s intentions impact the moral situation. Specifically targeting individuals on the basis of their gender or ethnicity is clearly a different category of moral wrong. But the consequences that come from the legal application of those moral convictions have serious repercussions. Ultimately, the lasting debate surrounding hate crime legislation speaks to the slipperiness in pinning down what precisely justice demands.

March 19, 2021February 20, 2023

QAnon and Two Johns

photograph of 'Q Army" sign displayed at political rally

In recent years, threats posed to and by free speech on the internet have grown larger and more concerning. Such problems as authoritarian regimes smothering dissent and misinformation campaigns targeting elections and public health have enjoyed quite a share of the limelight. Social media platforms have sought (and struggled) to address such challenges. Recently, a new insidious threat posed by free speech has emerged: far-right conspiracy theories. The insurrection of January 6th unveiled the danger of speech promoting such beliefs, namely ones the QAnon theory embraces. The insurrection demonstrated that speech promoting the anti-government extremist theory can not only engender violence but existentially threaten the United States. Such speech so threatens harm by manipulating individuals into believing in the necessity of violence to combat the schemes of a secretive, satanic elite. In the days following the insurrection, social media platforms rushed to combat this threat. Twitter alone removed more than 70,000 QAnon-focused accounts from its platform.

This bold but wise move was met with resistance, however. Right-wing media commentators were quick to decry this and similar policies as totalitarian censorship. Legal experts retorted that, as private entities, social media companies can restrict speech on their platform as they please. This is because the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from legal restrictions on free speech, not the rules of private organizations. Such legal experts may be perfectly correct, and unequivocally siding with them might seem to offer a temptingly quick way to dismiss fanatic right-wing commentators. Nevertheless, caring only about government restrictions on speech seems perilous: such a stance neglects the great importance of social restrictions on speech.

The weight of social restrictions on speech (and behavior, more generally) is very real. Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to such social restrictions as moral laws. He even seemed to regard this class of laws as more fundamental than the constitutional, civil, and criminal classes. Moral laws are inscribed in the very “hearts of the citizens” and include “morals, customs, and especially opinion.” Violations of these laws are typically penalized with either criticism or ostracism (or both). The emergence of “cancel culture” provides conspicuous examples (for better or worse) of this structure in action, from Gina Carano to John Schnatter. First, an individual (typically, a public figure) violates a moral law (frequently, customary prohibitions on racist speech). Then, the individual receives a punishment (often, in the form of damage to reputation and career). The prohibitions on QAnon-focused Twitter accounts are a form of ostracism: those promoting QAnon beliefs have been expelled from the Twitter community for transgressing moral laws, namely peace (by promoting violence) and honesty (by promoting misinformation). As Twitter has become an integral forum for political discourse (politicians, like former President Trump, heavily rely on the platform to both court popular support and bash their rivals), this Twitter expulsion amounts to marginalization within, or partial expulsion from, general public discourse. Upon considering this, the real restrictiveness of such prohibitions on speech should now be evident.

Once the real strength of social restrictions on speech is acknowledged, a certain tension becomes apparent: that between our liberties concerning speech and our liberties in regard to property. To elaborate, there appears to be a tension between Twitter users and Twitter shareholders (particularly, the right to set and enforce private restrictions on the speech shared over the platform they own). Efforts to balance the two can perhaps be aided by the wisdom of two great Johns: John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their writings offer some thought-provoking perspectives on the grounds and scope of each of the parties’ freedoms.

John Locke believed that rights are derived from nature. He thought they were contained in what he called the Law of Nature: “no one ought to harm another in [their] Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.” Certainly, this general rule implies the rights to free speech and property. Moreover, it follows that those particular rights extend only so far as they accord with that rule. Locke’s theory can thus affirm both natural rights and natural limits to them. Stated in Lockean terms, then, the now-removed QAnon accounts apparently promoted speech which transgressed natural limits on the right to free speech (by promoting violence).

Unlike Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that rights are derived from social agreement, not nature. He held that this social agreement takes the form of continuous negotiation by all members of the “body politic:” manifold “individual wills” are boiled into an all-binding “general will.” In this perspective, the rights to free speech and property extend only so far as social agreement allows. Rousseau’s theory can thus recognize the value of including diverse individuals in social discourse while also recognizing the validity of socially-established regulations on that discourse. Understood in this perspective, Twitter expelled the QAnon accounts for violating regulations on social discourse (namely, by supporting violence and thus threatening the process of discourse itself).

Locke’s and Rousseau’s perspectives can provide a useful guide to assessing the issues related to free speech and the internet. Each perspective offers a framework which seems reasonable and yet is opposed to the other. Considering both, then, should allow for multi-sided and nuanced discussion. Employing these two frameworks (and other conceivable ones), as well as considering the opinions of more recent thinkers, can potentially enrich public discourse surrounding free speech and the internet.

March 18, 2021December 14, 2022

Acknowledging a Violent Past: Disney’s Racist Fairy Tales

photograph of Walt Disney Statue with Disney Castle in background

After months of protests by the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death some white people in the U.S. began to notice that perhaps the world is not as equal as they once thought. They also began to notice that this inequality was perpetuated by their lack of education on race in the U.S. This became obvious as book sales about race began to skyrocket from May to June with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility topping the list. This gave way to the Anti-Racist movement, where white people take it upon themselves to unlearn their inherent racist behaviors that they have been educated in since childhood. People began to acknowledge that the history we learn in school is drenched in the long legacy of white supremacy that this country was built on.

Debate was sparked about how to teach a history that highlights, rather than hides, the violent and racist past of the U.S., and how to deliver this material in a form suitable for children. It’s necessary to have these conversations early on with kids as studies show that children as young as three begin to associate certain races with negative stereotypes, while most adults tend to think they should wait until their children are at least five to begin discussing race. Since children are visually recognizing not only physical race, but the behaviors attached to different groups of people made up of different races, it is important to start teaching children about the history of race, rather than shy away or leave it up to a school curriculum that will likely only perpetuate racist stereotypes and histories.

This debate has arisen again recently with the decision by streaming platform Disney+ to restrict the ability of children to watch certain films. Disney+ placed a warning of racist depictions on certain older films last year, but has now blocked those films from Kids Profiles, which include the ages of seven and below. Some of the films include classics like “Dumbo” (1941) because of depictions of racist minstrel shows and “Peter Pan” (1953), which includes racist stereotypes of Native Americans. On their website, Disney acknowledges the roles that stories have in shaping perspectives in the world and makes a pledge to review the films it provides in an attempt to spark conversation on history. Certainly, these moves by Disney are a step in the right direction, but perhaps the billion-dollar company can afford, and even has a responsibility, to do a lot more than take just a step towards conversation.

Disney is considered a blockbuster powerhouse by the film industry, and it certainly has an enormous cultural impact in America, as well as internationally. Children for generations have grown up watching their dark-folk-story-turned-romantic-fairy-tales, with young girls longing to be princesses in search of their long-lost knight. Now that screens have become even more accessible, children can sit with their own iPads at home for hours watching these films. A summer trip to Disneyland or Disneyworld is considered a rite of passage for tens of millions of families. Disney has literally become its own world with all of its theme parks combined taking up as much land as the entire city of San Francisco. Now that Disney has also developed a streaming service, its reach only widens as 55 percent of their subscriptions belong to families with children. Disney obviously plays a large part in a lot of American children’s lives by way of the education they provide through storytelling.

Given the formative power Disney wields, when these stories contain racist histories it is necessary to acknowledge and discuss that history. While Disney mentions “negative depictions” and “mistreatment” in their advisory statement that appears before certain films, they never once mention racism or white supremacy. Instead, it seems like they are trying to walk a fine line of appeasing new voices critical of not-so-hidden racism and a consumer base that is unwilling to believe that such a thing as white supremacy still exists in the U.S., or believe children are old enough to read its signs. Considering both the enormous fan base and amount of content made by Disney that children consume, they should be more aggressive in their policies towards rooting out their white supremacist past by using educational tools on their streaming platform.

Realistically, there are two different types of education regarding race that happen in America. For white children, race is evidently something that they notice at an early age, and then they begin to unknowingly recognize, learn, and perpetuate racism, perhaps without even noticing what they are doing. For children of color in America, especially black children, race is something that they become aware of through macro- and microaggressions they experience as a result of the white supremacy that encumbers and constructs life in America. When students of color start their schooling, they are immediately placed in an environment that is built against them.

If Disney is willing to acknowledge that stories matter, then they perhaps need more than just an alert regarding “negative depictions” in order to address the problematic actions and behaviors shown in their films. By recognizing stories matter, they must also recognize the influence they have in teaching children, often without any parental interference, as Disney is a most often considered a kid-friendly source. They owe the children of color watching these films more than an acknowledgement of the harm that they perpetuated for so long. They could use their platform as an educational opportunity to spread anti-racist awareness to the millions of children and even adults using this platform.

Starting these conversations is a helpful step, but Disney has both the money and influence to be able to help spread awareness and education through a far more extensive system. It is important to remember that it is not Disney’s sole burden to undo the racist history that is perpetuated in history books and through word of mouth, nor would it even be possible for them to do so as that is a task people have struggled with and will be struggling with for decades. Ideally, schools and parents would be able to have truthful and as unbiased as possible conversations about the racist history of America, but realistically this does not seem to be possible for most American children. As can be seen from the protests and politics of 2020, white adults struggle to talk about race or even accept that racism is systemically ingrained in life in America. If adults struggle to talk about racism with each other, how can they be expected to have productive conversations with their children?

If talking about racism in America is normalized for this generation of children, then perhaps a productive cycle can begin for future generations about reckoning with a white supremacist past. This is not yet the reality, therefore, Disney has such a reach and connection with families that they might have a better opportunity to recount accurate histories of peoples in America. And they may have a moral obligation to do so given their not insignificant contribution to the problem.

March 17, 2021January 23, 2024

In the Limelight: Ethics for Journalists as Public Figures

photograph of news camera recording press conference

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

Journalistic ethics are the evolving standards that dictate the responsibilities reporters have to the public. As members of the press, news writers play an important role in the accessibility of information, and unethical journalistic practices can have a detrimental impact on the knowledgeability of the population. Developing technology is a major factor in changes to journalism and the way journalists navigate ethical dilemmas. Both the field of journalism, and its ethics, have been revolutionized by the internet.

The increased access to social media and other public platforms of self-expression have expanded the role of journalists as public figures. The majority of journalistic ethical concerns focus on journalists’ actions in the scope of their work. As the idea of privacy changes, more people feel comfortable sharing their lives online and journalists’ actions outside of their work come further under scrutiny. Increasingly, questions of ethics in journalism include journalists’ non-professional lives. What responsibilities do journalists have as public-facing individuals?

As a student of journalism, I am all too aware that there is no common consensus on the issue. At the publication I write for, staff members are restricted from participating in protests for the duration of their employment. In a seminar class, a professional journalist discussed workplace moratoriums they’d encountered on publicly stating political leanings and one memorable debate about whether or not it was ethical for journalists to vote — especially in primaries, on the off-chance that their vote or party affiliation could become public. Each of these scenarios stems from a common fear that a journalist will become untrustworthy to their readership due to their actions outside of their work. With less than half the American public professing trust in the media, according to Gallup polls, journalists are facing intense pressure to prove themselves worthy of trust.

Journalists have a duty to be as unbiased as possible in their reporting — this is a well-established standard of journalism, promoted by groups like the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ). How exactly they accomplish that is changing in the face of new technologies like social media. Should journalists avoid publicizing their personal actions and opinions and opt-out of any personal social media? Or should they restrict them entirely to avoid any risk of them becoming public? Where do we draw the lines?

The underlying assumption here is that combating biased reporting comes down to the personal responsibility of journalists to either minimize their own biases or conceal them. At least a part of this assumption is flawed. People are inherently biased; a person cannot be completely impartial. Anyone who attempts to pretend otherwise actually runs a greater risk of being swayed by these biases because they become blind to them. The ethics code of the SPJ advises journalists to “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.” Although this was initially written to be applied to journalists’ professional lives, I believe that that short second sentence is a piece of the solution. “Disclose unavoidable conflicts.” More effective than hiding biases is being clear about them. Journalists should be open about any connections or political leanings that intersect with their field. It truly provides the public with all the information and the opportunity to judge the issues for themselves.

I don’t mean to say that journalists should be required to make parts of their private lives public if they don’t intersect with their work. However, they should not be asked to hide them either. Although most arguments don’t explicitly suggest journalists hide their biases, they either suggest journalists avoid public action that could reveal a bias or avoid any connection that could result in a bias — an entirely unrealistic and harmful expectation. Expecting journalists to either pretend to be bias-free or to isolate themselves from the issues they cover as much as possible results in either dishonesty or “parachute journalism” — journalism in which reporters are thrust into situations they do not understand and don’t have the background to report on accurately. Fostering trust with readers and deserving that trust should not be accomplished by trying to turn people into something they simply cannot be, but by being honest about any potential biases and working to ensure the information is as accurate as possible regardless.

The divide between a so-called “public” or “professional” life and a “private” life is not always as clear as we might like, however. Whether they like it or not, journalists are at least semi-public figures, and many use social media to raise awareness for their work and the topics they cover, while also using social media in more traditional, personal ways. In these situations, it can become more difficult to draw a line between sharing personal thoughts and speaking as a professional.

In early 2020, New York Times columnist Ben Smith wrote a piece criticizing New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow for his journalism, including, in some cases the exact accuracy or editorializing of tweets Farrow had posted. Despite my impression that Smith’s column was in itself inaccurate, poorly researched and hypocritical, it raised important questions about the role of Twitter and other social media in reporting. A phrase I saw numerous times afterwards was “tweets are not journalism” — a criticism of the choice to place the same importance on and apply the same journalistic standards to Farrow’s Twitter account as his published work.

Social media makes it incredibly easy to share information, opinions, and ideas. It is far faster than many other traditional methods of publishing. It can, and has been, a powerful tool for journalists to make corrections and updates in a timely manner and to make those corrections more likely to be viewed by people who already read a story and might not check it again. If a journalist intends them to be, tweets can, in fact, be journalism.

Which brings us back to the issue of separating public from private. Labeling advocacy, commentary, and advertisement (and keeping them separated) is an essential part of ethical journalism. But which parts of these standards should be extrapolated to social media, and how? Many individuals will use separate accounts to make this distinction. Having a work account and personal account, typically with stricter privacy settings, is not uncommon. It does, however, prevent many of the algorithmic tricks people may use to make their work accessible, and accessibility is an important part of journalism. Separating personal and public accounts effectively divides an individual’s audience and prevents journalists from forming more personal connections to their audience in order to publicize their work. It also prevents the engagement benefits of more frequent posting that comes from using a single account. By being asked to abstain from a large part of what is now ordinary communication with the public, journalists are being asked to hinder their effectiveness.

Tagging systems within social media currently provide the best method for journalists to mark and categorize these differences, but there’s no “standard practice” amongst journalists on social media to help readers navigate these issues, and so long as debates about journalistic ethics outside of work focus on trying to restrict journalists from developing biases at all, it won’t become standard practice. Adapting to social media means shifting away from the idea that personal bias can be prevented by isolating individuals from the controversial issues, rather than helping readers and journalists understand, acknowledge, and deconstruct biases in media for themselves by promoting transparency and conversation.

March 16, 2021December 14, 2022

Scarce Goods and Rationalization

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook asking for insight into “the ethics of (1) getting vaccinated as quickly as possible for the common good and (2) not using privilege to be vaccinated ahead of vulnerable people.”

Many responded with arguments along the lines of, “by getting a vaccine you are contributing to herd immunity, so it is a good thing to do.” Others linked to this New York Times ethics column in which Dr. Appiah argues that the advantage of easy management means that people should get vaccines when they can get them (and not worry too much about whether others might need them more), and further that by getting the vaccine “you are contributing not just to your own well-being but to the health of the community.”

Another friend recently mentioned in a group chat how she was able to get a vaccine that, technically, she did not yet legally qualify for (since Florida is only officially vaccinating K-12 educators, and not college instructors). I demurred, saying it’s important as healthy youngish people to wait our turn, and a third friend argued that even if you are not the ideal person to get the vaccine, you should still get it if you can since more vaccines are better than fewer and you can help protect others by getting vaccinated.

Assessing the Arguments

The Herd Immunity Argument — The thing that unites all these replies is the thought that by getting the vaccine you are helping to protect others. But in these cases, that is probably wrong. I want to be clear. I am not denying that more people being vaccinated contributes to herd immunity. What I am denying is that my friends getting a vaccine contributes to more people being vaccinated.

Right now the vaccines are a scarce good. If I do not get a vaccine, someone else will get that particular injection. As such, in getting a vaccine I have not actually done anything to increase the percentage of the population that is vaccinated, I have simply made sure that I, rather than someone else, am part of that vaccinated percentage.

The Waste Rejoinder — Some commenters on Facebook mentioned that some vaccines go to waste. But for the most part the vaccine distribution process has sorted itself out. While a good number of vaccines were being wasted in January, we are now in mid-March and the number wasted is utterly tiny in comparison to the number used. The odds that if you do not get a vaccine that the vaccine will end up in the trash is extraordinarily small.

So sure, if you happen to be in a situation where the alternative to not getting a vaccine is throwing it away, then get the vaccine. But unless you know that to be the alternative, you should not think that in getting the vaccine you are heroically contributing to solving the problem.

Speed of Distribution — While no one in the threads mentioned this argument, there is something that could be said for skipping the line. Even if someone else would have gotten that same vaccine, it’s possible it would have taken longer for the vaccine to get in someone’s arm. Now, it’s true that at this point the states are not sitting on nearly as large a vaccine stockpile as they were originally. But it is still the case that some vaccines, while they are not being wasted, are taking longer than ideal to end up in someone’ arm. Indeed, this seems to be happening where I am in Tallahassee.

But the problem is, this was not the situation either of my friends were in. Sure, this situation might be more common than the wasted vaccine situation. But it will still be rare (and indeed, markets are such that this waste usually does not last very long; soon after that article about Tallahassee was published demand at the site increased).

The Lesson

Now, I don’t want to argue that it is wrong to get the vaccine if you have the chance to do so. Probably sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong. As is often the case, it all depends on the details.

Instead, I want to suggest that we need to be careful to not convince ourselves that our selfish acts serve an altruistic motive. I think it’s probably ok to be somewhat selfish. It’s reasonable to care more about saving your own life than the lives of a stranger (even Aquinas agreed as much). But I think when you are prioritizing your own good over the good of others, it’s important to recognize that that is what you are doing.

So if I get the vaccine perhaps that is ok. But I should recognize that if I get the vaccine someone else will not. I should also recognize that since I am young and healthy, that other person probably would have gotten more value from the protection than I did. The question, as far as altruism goes, is how do I compare to the average person getting a vaccine these days? Am I younger than the average person who would get the vaccine instead of me? Then probably it is better that the other person gets it. Am I healthier than the average person who would get the vaccine instead of me? Then probably it is better that the other person gets it.

The thing is, we have strong biases in favor of rationalizing our own selfish acts. Thus, we often look for reasons to think doing the thing we want is also good in general. This is a very dangerous tendency. People often accept really bad arguments, if those really bad arguments help them think well of their own selfish activity. This should scare us, and make us all a little more self-critical about our moral reasoning anytime we come up with plausible reasons for thinking the thing we want to do is also the best thing for the world as a whole. Remember, we all have a tendency to think that way, even when the act is merely selfish.

March 15, 2021December 14, 2022

Sarah Everard and the Politics of Fear

photograph of palm protecting candle at vigil

In early March of this year, 33-year old marketing executive Sarah Everard vanished while walking alone at night through a neighborhood in south London. Days later, her body was found about fifty miles away in Kent. There was an instant outpouring of grief and rage from women around the world, many of whom shared their own stories of being assaulted or victimized while walking alone at night. Their collective rage only grew stronger when the police arrested Wayne Couzens, a London Metropolitan Police officer, for the kidnapping and murder of Everard. Couzens was still an active member of the force when he committed the crime, despite previous allegations of indecent exposure.

However, it isn’t just police corruption or misogynistic violence that make this case so troubling. In an article for The Cut, Angelina Chapin explains her perspective on this case as a Black American woman, and explains that this tragedy should make us question “how white women’s deaths are emphasized and whether fear is a logical response to random acts of violence.” Chapin argues that the media tends to focus on “good victims,” meaning attractive white women who are middle-class, often well-educated or members of the professional class, and not sexually promiscuous. Their deaths are certainly no less tragic, The but the deaths (and sexual assaults) of women of color tend to receive far less attention in the press. Furthermore, the state often uses collective anxiety as an excuse to increase police presence and resources, a move which always has an overwhelmingly negative impact on people of color.

Chapin also points out that sensationalized cases like these tend to draw our attention away from other arenas where women more commonly experience sexual violence. She writes that

“what’s bothering me in the discourse around [Everard’s] death is the way that some people seem to universalize the feeling of terror women have being out on the street at night . . . While women do get attacked by strangers, it’s relatively uncommon. Women experience more risk in domestic settings than in the streets. So if this hypervigilance is warranted anywhere, it should be in the home.”

Data on sexual assault is notoriously tricky to gather, and conclusions will vary wildly depending on when the study was done, sample size, and demographics, but the existing body of research does seem to support Chapin’s assertion. The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, cited by the Rape, Incest, & Abuse National Network, reveals that only 7 percent of assaults committed against children and teens are perpetrated by a stranger. Another study conducted by the NSA claims that about 23 percent of assaults were committed by strangers. While this is not an insubstantial amount, it certainly feels less pressing than the 70 percent of assaults which were committed by people known to the victim. But at the same time, a recent study conducted by UN Women UK shows that a whopping 80% of women from all age groups have experienced street harassment, which can range from catcalling to verbal threats. For women walking home alone at night, verbal harassment (while also being deeply dehumanizing) may very easily become a precursor to physical harassment.

Women have every right to mourn Everard’s senseless death, but it’s also important to treat this less as an act of random violence and more the result of a rotten system. When we view violence as random and unavoidable, our fear increases, but if we acknowledge the well-substantiated link between police officers and violence against women, we have the power to address and eventually end structural violence. As the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party in Britain, Catherine Mayer, wrote “We can best honour the victims of violence not only by demanding their assailants face justice, but by challenging the systems and cultures that enable violence and pin the blame on victims.” The tension between systems of power and individuals are becoming more and more apparent; at a recent vigil held in Everard’s honor, protesting women were arrested after confrontations with members of the Metropolitan police force, which is especially jarring given that the offender the women were protesting against was himself a cop. Hopefully this tragedy will bring positive rather than negative change, and everyone, regardless of gender or race, will be able to feel safe in their communities.

March 12, 2021December 14, 2022

The Ethics of Digidog

photograph of german shepherd next to surveillance robot dog

On February 24, the New York City Police Department employed a robot “dog” to aid with an investigation of a home break in. This is not the first time that police departments have used robots to aid in responding to criminal activity. However this robot, produced by Boston Dynamics, and affectionately named “Spot,” drew the attention of the general public after New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a critique of the decision to invest money in this type of policing technology. While Digidog’s main purpose is to increase the safety for both officers and suspects during criminal investigations, some are concerned that the implementation of this type of technology sets a bad precedent, contributes to police surveillance, and diverts resources away from more deserving causes.

Is employing surveillance technologies like Digidog inherently bad? Is it ever okay to monitor citizens without their consent? And which methods should we prioritize when seeking to prevent or respond to crime?

In the United States, an estimated 50 million surveillance cameras watch us, many escaping out notice. The use of these surveillance cameras, formally called Closed Circuit TV’s (CCTVs), have dramatically expanded due to the interest in limiting crime in or around private property. Law enforcement often rely on video surveillance in order to identify potential suspects, and prosecutors may use this footage as evidence during conviction. However, there has been some debate about whether or not the proliferation of CCTV’s has really led to less crime, either through deterrence or through successful identification and capture. This lack of demonstrable proof of positive effect is especially concerning given the pushback against this type of surveillance as potentially violating individuals’ privacy. In a 2015 study by Pew Research Center, 90% of Americans ranked “not having someone watch you or listen to you without your permission” as very important or somewhat important. In a follow-up question, 2/3 of respondents ranked “being able to go around in public without always being identified” as important. Considering the clear importance of privacy to many Americans, increased surveillance might be considered a fundamental infringement on what many see as their right to privacy.

Digidog is a police surveillance tool. Equipped with a camera and GPS, the robot dog is capable of allowing officers to monitor dangerous situations without risking their lives. However, many are skeptical that Digidog’s use will be limited only to responding to crime and could soon instead become a tool to patrol the streets. In one particularly alarming example, an MSCHF Product Studio armed their robot dog with a paintball gun and demonstrated how easy it was to shoot the gun from a remote location. If police departments began arming these robot dogs, the potential for violence and brutality stands to increase. As yet, these uses have not been explicitly suggested by any law enforcement agency, and defenders of Digidog point to its limitations, such as its maximum travel speed, usage in many fields other than policing, and its lack of covert design. These features suggest that Digidog is not yet the powerful tool to patrol or surveil the general public that critics fear.

In terms of Digidog as an investment to combat crime, is it an unethical diversion of money, as Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has suggested? In the past year, calls to decrease or reallocate police funding have entered the mainstream. The decision to invest in Digidog could be considered unethical because its benefits to the public can’t justify its significant cost. Digidogs themselves cost around $74,000 each. Considering that they are only intended for use in extreme and dangerous situations, their usage is rare, and they do not appear to improve the life of the average individual. However, by serving as a weaponless first responder, Digidogs could save both the lives of officers or those suspected of engaging in criminal activity. Human error and reactivity can be removed from the equation by having robots surveil a situation in place of an armed officer.

Whether or not the Digidog represents an ethical use of public funds may turn on the legitimacy of investing in crime response rather than crime prevention. As previously noted, “Spot” is primarily used to respond to existing crime. Because of this, critics have suggested that these funds would be better aimed at programs that seek to minimize the occurrence of crime in the first place. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet, for example, makes reference to those who suggested resources should go to school counseling instead. In fact, some criminology experts argue that investing in local communities and schools can drastically decrease the incidence of crime. Defenders of Digidog are quick to point out that the two goals are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to invest in both crime response and crime prevention, and we need not pit these two policy aims against one another. It is unclear in this situation, however, whether similar funds were directed at preventing crime as were spent in purchasing Digidogs.

This investment in Digidog could also be seen as unethical not just in terms of its lack of efficiency in addressing crime, but also in terms of the lack of similar treatment in other areas of social concern. In a reply to her original tweet, Ocasio-Cortez retorted “when was the last time you saw next-generation, world class technology for education, healthcare, housing, etc. consistently prioritized for underserved communities like this?” In a time when so many have called to defund the police following centuries of police violence against Black people, it seems an affront to invest money in technologies designed to aid arrest rather than address systemic injustice. Highlighting this disparity in funding shows that urgent social needs are being unjustly prioritized last. Again, defenders of Digidog might respond that this comparison is a false one, and that technology can be employed for both policing and social needs.

Together, these concerns mean that Digidog’s usage will continue to be met by skepticism, if not hostility, by many. As police and surveillance technology develop, it remains especially important that we measure the value these new tools offer against their costs to both our safety and our privacy.

March 11, 2021December 14, 2022

Climate Services, Public Policy, and the Colorado

What does the Colorado River Compact of 1922 have to do with ethical issues in the philosophy of science? Democracy, that’s what! This week The Colorado Sun reported that the Center for Colorado River Studies issued a white paper urging reform to river management in light of climate change to make the Colorado River basin more sustainable. They argue that the Upper Colorado River Commission’s projections for water use are inflated, and that this makes planning the management of the basin more difficult given the impact of climate change.

Under a 1922 agreement among seven U.S. states, the rights to use water from the Colorado River basin are divided into an upper division — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — and a lower division — Nevada, Arizona, and California. Each division was apportioned a set amount with the expectation being that the upper division would take longer to develop than the lower division. The white paper charges that the UCRC is relying on inflated water usage projections for the upper division despite demand for development in the upper basin being flat for three decades. In reality, however, the supply of water is far lower than projected in 1922, and climate change has exacerbated the issue. In fact, the supply has shrunk so much that upper basin states have taken efforts to reduce water consumption so that they do not violate the agreement with lower basin states. As the Sun reported, “If it appears contradictory that the upper basin is looking at how to reduce water use while at the same time clinging to a plan for more future water use, that’s because it is.”

To see how this illustrates an ethical problem in philosophy of science, we need to first examine inductive risk. While it is a common enough view that science has nothing to do with values, a consensus among several philosophers of science has formed in the past decade which suggests that not only does science use values, but that this is a good thing. Science never deals with certainty but with inductive generalizations based on statistical modelling. Because one can never be certain, one can always be wrong. Inductive risk involves considering the ethical harms which one should be aware of should their decisions turn out to be wrong. For example, if there is a 90% chance that it will not rain, you may be inclined to wear your expensive new shoes. On the other hand, if you are wrong about that 90% chance, your expensive new shoes will get ruined in the rain. In a case like this, you need to evaluate two factors at the same time: how important are the consequences of being wrong, and, in light of this judgment, how confident do you need to be in your conclusion? If your shoes cost $1000 and ruin very easily, you may want a level of confidence close to 95% or 99% before leaving home. On the other hand, if your shoes are cheap and easy to replace, you may be happy to go outside with a 50% chance of rain.

When dealing with what philosophers call socially-relevant or policy-relevant science, the same inductive risk concerns arise. In an inductive risk situation, we need to make value judgments about how important the consequences of being wrong are, and how accurate we thus ought to be. But what values should be used? According to many philosophers of science, when dealing with socially-relevant science, only democratically-endorsed values are legitimate. The reason for this is straightforward; if values are going to be used that affect public policy-making, then the people should select those values rather than scientists, or other private interests, as that would give them undue power and influence in policy-making.

This brings us back to the Colorado River. A new area of climate science known as “climate services” aims to make climate data more usable for social decision-making by ensuring that the needs of users are central to the collection and analysis of data. Typically, such climate data is not organized to suit the needs of stakeholders and decision-makers. For example, Colorado River Basin managers employed climate services from state and national agencies to create model-based projections of Lake Mead’s ability to supply water. In a recent paper, Wendy Parker and Greg Lusk have explored how inductive risk concerns allow for the use of values in the “co-production” of climate services jointly between providers and users. This means that insofar as inductive risk is a concern, the values of the user can affect everything from model creation, the selection of data, and even the ultimate conclusions reached. Thus, if a group wished to develop land in the Colorado basin, and sought the use of climate services, then the values of that group could affect the information and data that is used and what policies take effect.

According to Greg Lusk, however, this is potentially a problem since if any user who pays for climate services is able to use their own values to affect scientifically-informed policy-making, then this would violate the need for the values to be democratically endorsed. He notes:

“Users could refer to anyone, including government agencies, public interest groups, private industry, or political parties …. The aims or values of these groups are not typically established through democratic mechanisms that secure representative participation and are unlikely to be indicative of the general public’s desires. Yet, the information that climate service providers supplies to users is typically designed to be useful for social and political decision making.”

It is worth noting, for example, that the white paper issued by the Center for Colorado River Studies was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the USGS Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, the Utah Water Research Laboratory, and various other private donors and grants. This report could affect policy maker’s decisions. None of this suggests that the research is biased or bad, but to whatever extent values can influence such reports, and to whatever extent such reports affect policy-making, is the extent to which we should question whose values are playing what roles in information-based policy-making.

In other words, there is an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, climate services can offer major advantages to help users of all kinds prepare for, mitigate, adapt to, or plan development in light of climate change. On the other hand, scientific material designed to be relevant for policy-making, yet heavily influenced by non-democratically endorsable values, can be hugely influential and can affect what we consider to be good data-driven policy. As Lusk notes,

“According to the democratic view, then, the employment of users’s values in climate services would often be illegitimate, and scientists should ignore those values in favor of democratically endorsed ones, to ensure users do not have undue influence over social decision making.”

Of course, even if we accept the democratic view, the problem of defining what “democratically endorsable” means remains. As the events of the past year remind us, democracy is about more than just voting for a representative. In an age of polarization where the values endorsed may be likely to swing radically every four years, or where there is disagreement among various elected governments, deciding which values are endorsable becomes extremely difficult, and ensuring that they are used becomes more impactable. Thus, deciding what place democracy has in science remains an important moral question for philosophers of science, but even more so for the public.

March 10, 2021December 14, 2022

Dispatch from the Monument Wars

photograph of Ulysses S. Grant Monument in Chicago

The nationwide protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder that roiled the nation this summer provided additional impetus to a process that has been ongoing since 2015: the dismantling of Confederate monuments. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported that at least 168 Confederate symbols in public spaces — including statutes, institution names, plaques and markers — were removed or renamed last year. Increasingly, however, other monuments have come under activists’ and community leaders’ crosshairs.

Chicago’s experience is emblematic of this new trend. Over the summer, statues of Christopher Columbus became focal points of demonstrations across the city, leading Mayor Lori Lightfoot to remove the statues in the middle of the night. Lightfoot also formed a committee composed of community leaders, artists, architects, scholars, curators, and city officials to conduct a thorough review of other public works of art to assess if they should be removed or changed, promising an “inclusive and democratic public dialogue” about the future of Chicago’s internationally acclaimed public art collection.

A few weeks ago, the Chicago Monuments Project Advisory Committee released a list of 41 “problematic” artworks slated for review. The list included numerous statues of Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus, as well as statues of Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and William McKinley. In an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times, the co-chairs of the Committee suggested that the reason for Lincoln and Grant’s inclusion concerned their roles in the forcible removal of Native Americans from their land.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the Committee has not said what will be done with the monuments, the reaction in the local media has been mostly negative, with concerns about the transparency of the Committee’s deliberations — the Committee’s meetings during the first six months of work were kept secret — mingled with general alarm about the inclusion of great men on the list of works scheduled for review and possible removal. (No one seemed to shed a tear for the Italo Balbo Monument, which was gifted to the City of Chicago by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini). It is likely that those process concerns will be at least partly allayed by the Committee’s recent shift to a more public-facing posture, inviting feedback on its website, hosting a number of interactive speaker events, and soliciting proposals from artists for new monument ideas.

Still, an editorial in the Chicago Tribune is fairly representative of the local media response. “Take down Chicago statues of Lincoln? No.” makes two arguments. The first is that the moral standards of those who wish to reassess the commemorative landscape are too demanding: “some critics think every person we memorialize must be perfectly blameless by the standards of modern America.” The editorial sensibly replies that if this is the standard, then there will be no (or at least, very few) monuments. Because this is an obviously (?) undesirable result, those high standards ought to be abandoned. Instead, we should “weigh the good done by those who have been honored against their shortcomings, and in the context of their generation, not ours.” The second argument is that critics of the monuments are guilty of arrogance, believing that they are morally superior to “yesterday’s heroes.” Presumably, however, everyone has feet of clay, particularly by the standards of future generations. To avoid arrogance, then, we should not presume to stand in judgment of our forebears.

The Tribune’s arguments have the flavor of straw men, although it’s impossible to say whether they are right about at least some activists. At the heart of the Tribune’s argument is the assumption that activists are primarily interested in whether the subjects of monumental representations are blameworthy for what they’ve done by the standards of our own time. However, the much more relevant consideration seems to be what effect publicly expressing admiration for these men has on members of marginalized groups, regardless of whether they are to blame for what they did. Philosophers would distinguish these two considerations by calling the blameworthiness consideration backward-looking, concerning the basic desert of the subjects of monuments, while the consideration of effects is forward-looking, concerning the present and future consequences of honoring these individuals.

I have argued elsewhere that honoring individuals who either took part in, or expressed approval of, the oppression of currently marginalized groups can undermine the assurance of members of those groups that their basic moral and constitutional entitlements will be respected in their everyday interactions with others. Imagine for a moment living in a society in which individuals who approved of, or took part in, rights violations against members of the group to which you belong are the subjects of honorific monuments. Surely, this would make you doubt whether your society took your rights seriously. In my view, this is the primary, though not sole, reason why there is a strong prima facie moral case for modifying monuments to such individuals, and it has nothing to do with whether those individuals are blameworthy for what they did. Put another way: the movement to change the commemorative landscape should be about upholding the dignity of those who are currently marginalized, not punishing historical figures for past injustices. We need not stand in smug judgment of these figures in order to be concerned about the effects of honoring them.

If I am right about why we should care about these monuments, then there is good reason to consider how we honor figures like Lincoln and Grant. It’s not just that they were both morally flawed; more importantly given the considerations highlighted above, both of them played well-known roles in the oppression of Native Americans. Those roles should be emphasized in any honorific representation of these men in order to convey a properly balanced admiration tempered by acknowledgement of the injustices to which they contributed. This does not, it should be said, entail removal of the monuments. Various forms of recontextualization are possible and perhaps preferable, including the addition of signage or other monuments and artworks.

Another conservative argument against modifying or removing monuments goes like this. We owe a debt of gratitude to people like Lincoln and Grant for helping to build a more just society. We express that gratitude through honoring them. Thus, we are positively obligated to honor these individuals by creating and maintaining honorific representations of them. The problem with this argument is that even if we concede that we have a gratitude-based obligation to our illustrious forebears, there are many ways we could conceivably discharge that obligation other than creating monuments to them. Furthermore, even if creating monuments were the only way to discharge the obligation, there is no reason why those monuments could not be properly contextualized so as to avoid the damaging effects highlighted above.

It must be conceded, however, that there is an inherent tension between the goals of honoring an individual and providing proper historical context for understanding that individual’s attitudes and actions. The former goal aims at having an emotional impact; the other aims at encouraging a less emotional, reflective attitude. Again, the former goal aims at encouraging admiration and appreciation for an individual; the latter aims at tempering that admiration. Perhaps my preference for a properly balanced appreciation reflects an intellectual cast of mind that does not fully appreciate the role of emotion in civic life.

Nevertheless, for the reasons set out above, I believe that the attitudes of admiration and esteem that monuments encourage us to develop towards their subjects can be dangerous, and should be kept within their proper bounds. I would rather live in a world in which there is less unqualified admiration for Christopher Columbus or even Abraham Lincoln, if that meant that members of marginalized groups had greater assurance that their rights would be respected.

March 9, 2021December 14, 2022

Testimony, Conspiracy Theories, and Hume on Miracles

abstract painting of two faces without eyes facing away from one another

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume reports a local rumor from a town in Spain conveyed to him, with a healthy amount of skepticism, by a cardinal. The story was about a man who had undergone a rather miraculous recovery from an ailment. As Hume describes it,

“He had been seen, for so long a time, wanting a leg; but recovered that limb by the rubbing of holy oil upon the stump; and the cardinal assures us that he saw him with two legs.”

The townsfolk were all ardent believers in the miracle, and it was accepted by “all the canons of the church.” The story spread and was believed on the basis of testimony, and was able to pass and be sustained as easily as it was, in part, because of a shared trust among members of the community. Nevertheless, the cardinal himself gave no credence to the story. Despite the fact that many people were willing to testify to its truth, a story about such an event is just not the kind of thing that has any meaningful likelihood of being true. The cardinal “therefore concluded, like a just reasoner, that such an evidence carried falsehood upon the very face of it, and that a miracle, supported by any human testimony, was more properly a subject of derision than of argument.”

Hume relates other stories, common at the time he was writing, of people offering and accepting accounts of miracles. He argues that to adjudicate these matters, our evidence consists in our set of past observations. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature. When we consider whether we ought to believe in miracles on the basis of testimony, we must weigh our past observations of the workings of the laws of nature against our observations regarding the veracity of testimony. The former will always win. We will always have more evidence to support the idea that the laws of nature will remain constant than we will to support the belief in eyewitness testimony which reports that those laws have been broken. As Hume himself states, “the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.”

Hume is not just reporting historical fact but is also prescient (though he might object to that characterization) when he says, “men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind.” More than 250 years later, we’re contending with elaborate conspiracies such as shape-shifting reptilian overlords, 5-G towers that transmit coronavirus, vaccines that implant microchips, and wild accusations of widespread voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election. The Q-Anon conspiracy theory even has representation in the House of Representatives. Believers in this conspiracy think that a powerful cabal of pedophilic baby-eating democrats is secretly running the world, and a child-sex ring. A secret whistleblowing governmental agent — Q — is conveying all of this information to true patriots on internet chat rooms. Q-Anon spread in much the same way that the story about holy water being used to grow new limbs spread — through testimony.

Hume points out that the practice of coming to know things on the basis of testimony depends on certain enduring features of human nature.

“Were not the memory tenacious to a certain degree, had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood: Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be qualities, inherent in human nature, we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony. A man delirious, or noted for falsehood and villainy, has no manner of authority with us.”

Society couldn’t function if we couldn’t rely on testimonial evidence. The present political climate elicits feelings of impending existential dread — a sense that truth and meaning are bleeding off the page like amateur watercolor, leaving no visible boundaries. The characteristics that Hume describes are being worn down. We’ve been told not to rely on our memories; it is unpatriotic to pay too much attention to the past. There are no behaviors that should make anyone feel shame; to suggest that someone ought to feel ashamed for deceiving and misleading is to “cancel” that person. In an environment immersed in “alternative facts,” there is no inclination toward truth or “principle of probity.” It is little wonder that in this environment people favor the likelihood of the existence of liberal pedophilic cannibals over the likelihood that anthropogenic climate change is occurring.

With the possible exception of the lizard people who can transform into humans, these conspiracy theories aren’t violations of the laws of nature. That said, a similar kind of inductive argument is possible. Most of these conspiracy theories require a level of seamless complicity among many, many people, who then leave behind no compelling evidence. Election fraud conspiracies, for example, require complicity across states, political parties, and branches of government. So, we’re left with two broad options. Either every person played their role in this flawlessly, leaving behind no trace, or the theory is false, and it arose from “the knavery and folly” of human beings as has so often happened throughout human history. There is a much stronger inductive argument for the latter.

All of this has a moral component to it, but it is difficult to know exactly how to identify it. As Hume points out, humans have certain dispositions that incline them toward truth. On the other hand, they also have strong tendencies to believe nonsense, especially if that nonsense is coherent with what they already believed or might otherwise make them feel good. We could say that everyone ought to have higher epistemic standards, but ought implies can — it makes no sense to say that a person ought to use better methods to form their beliefs when their psychologies prevent them from having any control over such things. There may be no ultimate solution, but there might be some chance that things could improve. Making things better might not be a matter of changing individual minds, but, instead, altering the environments in which those minds are formed. Education should be a high priority and well-funded. We must have policies that reward honesty among public officials and there must be serious consequences when our public figures tell lies.

March 8, 2021December 14, 2022

Grief and Saint Augustine (and WandaVision)

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for all nine episodes of WandaVision on Disney+.

In 2019, Martin Scorsese ruffled fan-feathers when he explained why he doesn’t watch the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: “I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema….It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” This particular sentence might sound odd to those watching the latest entry in the MCU: the 9-part limited series WandaVision on Disney+, which aims to explore experiences of intense grief and loss (even as it offers up yet another batch of costumed superheroes tossing about punches and witty one-liners).

First introduced in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Wanda Maximoff is a super-powered magic user who (along with her brother) betrayed her villainous compatriots to assist the Avengers in saving the world. In the same film, several magical items came together inside a high-tech regeneration chamber, creating Vision, an android who could fly, fire beams of cosmic energy, and alter the density of his molecules to phase through solid matter at will. Over the course of several films, the two characters grew close and fell in love, but their relationship ended tragically when Vision sacrificed himself (at Wanda’s hand) to prevent the death of half the universe at the end of Avengers: Infinity War.

As fans of the MCU know, the story is a little more complicated than that (for example: Vision’s sacrifice turned out to be in vain, though his surviving teammates later managed to undo most of the damage in Avengers: Endgame). But the events of WandaVision begin with Wanda racked with guilt over killing Vision and mourning her many losses: her parents died when she was ten, her brother died in the climax of Age of Ultron, her powers precipitated the catastrophe that sparked the events of Captain America: Civil War, and Vision (because of some time-traveling) actually died twice at the end of Infinity War. In response to all of this, Wanda’s reality-altering powers accidentally engulf the town of Westview, New Jersey, warping it into a pastiche of various television sitcoms that Wanda enjoyed with her family as a child. Within this waking dream, Wanda is not only reunited with a reconstituted (though memory-less) Vision, but the now-happily-married couple also welcomes the birth of twin sons.

(Explaining superhero stories always sounds a bit odd, doesn’t it?)

The point is that, in various ways, WandaVision seeks to explore the painful consequences of loss and other traumas. Rather than shying away from the psychological damage done to survivors of death and terror, the show centers the experience of several characters grappling with the pain of prematurely saying goodbye to those they love. Wanda’s grief over losing Vision is mirrored in the storyline of Monica Rambeau, first introduced in 2019’s Captain Marvel and now working as an intelligence agent. Midway through the series, the audience learns that Monica was one of the people who Wanda failed to save by killing Vision in Infinity War (but who was also resurrected five years later by the Avengers in Endgame). During the interim, Monica’s mother died of cancer — something Monica learns mere minutes after returning to life and mere days before encountering Wanda in Westview.

In the penultimate episode, an antagonist leads Wanda through several of her own memories, forcing her to confront many of the most traumatic moments in her life (including the death of her parents). During these flashbacks, a scene from the early days of Wanda and Vision’s relationship took the internet by storm: while comforting Wanda after the death of her brother, Vision encourages her that even within the waves of grief buffeting her in her loss, there must still be something good: “It can’t all be sorrow, can it? I’ve always been alone, so I don’t feel the lack — it’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never experienced loss because I’ve never had a loved one to lose. But what is grief if not love persevering?”

As you might imagine, philosophers have some other answers to this question.

Sometimes, philosophers have discussed grief as a hindrance or distraction from the “proper” objects of our attention. Consider Seneca, the Roman Stoic, who advised the daughter of a dead man to “do battle with your grief” by considering the most logical approach to find peace after her loss:

“…if the dead cannot be brought back to life, however much we may beat our breasts, if destiny remains fixed and immovable forever, not to be changed by any sorrow, however great, and death does not loose his hold of anything that he once has taken away, then let our futile grief be brought to an end.”

Often depicted (not undeservedly, at times) as unfeeling or cold, the Stoics sought to control their emotions (and all other impulses) so as to live a life governed entirely by reason. This did not mean that the Stoics considered grief (or other emotions) inherently bad, but rather that they saw how emotional dysregulation of any kind could upset the careful balance of human psychology. Certainly, at its worst, grief can threaten to overwhelm us — just as Wanda Maximoff’s story depicts.

On the other hand, philosophers have sometimes described grief or sorrow as simply constitutive of the human experience. For thinkers like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, the painfulness of human existence meant that sorrow and loss was simply unavoidable, so the strong must confront their grief and bend it to their will. For philosophers with a more religious or existentialist bent, the reality of grief might be borne from the sinfulness of a broken Creation or from the failure of free creatures to grapple with their own mortality. Consider how the 18th century philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard explained “My sorrow/grief is my baronial castle, which like an eagle’s nest is built high up on the mountain peak among the clouds. No one can take it by storm.” On these perspectives, grief is not something that can even possibly be dissolved, but rather must be harnessed and (hopefully) understood.

WandaVision’s treatment of grief is a line between these extremes: neither rejecting the emotion as inappropriate nor reveling in it as inevitable. It is a line akin to the picture found in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo, who describes in his autobiographical Confessions how the death of a loved one caused him such great distress that he nearly felt like he would die himself. Because of the love he felt for this unnamed friend (“I had felt that my soul and his soul were ‘one soul in two bodies,’” he says in IV.vi.11), Augustine was devastated by his death; regardless of death’s inevitability, “The lost life of those who dies becomes the death of those still living” (IV.ix.14).

And although Augustine (much like his Stoic forebears) infamously sought to curtail the public expressions of his grief after his conversion to Christianity (lest he suggest that the state of a departed soul was not improved by its transition to the afterlife or, even worse, pridefully demand the solace of others), Augustine never argues that grief is, in principle, sinful. In a particularly vulnerable passage, Augustine confesses how, after the death of his own mother, he found a private place and “let flow the tears which I had held back so that they ran as freely as they wished” (IX.xii.33). His love for his loved one persevered (and, in fact, drove him to an even deeper love for God).

Ultimately, WandaVision ends with Wanda realizing how her uncontrolled grief has led her to hurt the people of Westview (something a more Stoic approach to death would have avoided). Tearfully, she accepts (along with Kierkegaard) the inevitability of her pain and chooses to free the town by saying goodbye to her imaginary loved ones. But, just as Wanda’s memories and magic remain within her, so too does her love persevere; in their final moments together, the dream-Vision encourages Wanda once again: “We have said goodbye before, so it stands to reason–” at which point, Wanda sobs “…we’ll say hello again.”

Saint Augustine would indeed agree; the only real problem with Wanda’s grieving love was how she chose to express it.

In an attempt to clarify his criticism of the MCU, Martin Scorsese later published an op-ed in The New York Times where he explained how he always believed that “cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” To be blunt, on such a definition, it’s hard to see how the love and pain of Wanda Maximoff fails to qualify.

And, unbeknownst to Wanda, several lingering plot threads suggest that hope does indeed remain for a genuine family reunion, but fans will have to wait for future MCU installments to see what happens next. In the meanwhile, it stands to reason that we might all benefit from reading a little more philosophy (and not just the bits about “identity metaphysics”) to help us think through our own complicated experiences of grief (and love).

March 5, 2021December 14, 2022

Intuitions and the Duty to Aid

photograph of a cluster of traffic lights sending mixed signals

Many philosophers have considered whether folks who are better off have a moral obligation to help those who are desperately poor through no fault of their own. This issue is especially salient at the moment due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing lockdowns across the globe. The result is that the global poor are hardest hit, and the trend of eradicating poverty over the past few decades is reversing. We are thus left to wonder what, if anything, we owe the global poor.

Here enters the work of perhaps the most famous contemporary philosopher, Peter Singer, who argues that many folks in rich countries — like the USA, Japan, and Germany — have a moral obligation to donate a large amount of their income to the global poor because they can afford to without falling into poverty themselves. He motivates this position by an appeal to a simple thought experiment:

“On your way to work, you pass a small pond. … [You] are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond […] it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. […] The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy.”

Singer thinks we have a moral obligation to save the child based on the strong intuition that it just seems like the right thing to do — it wouldn’t cost us much to save the child, but it would benefit the child significantly. We can formulate Singer’s argument like this:

Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad.
If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.
Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong.

The first step of the argument seems obvious: the pain that comes from failing to have your basic needs met is obviously bad. We wouldn’t go to such lengths to try to prevent these things in our own lives if we thought otherwise. And we will grant, for the sake of argument, Singer’s third step: donating to trustworthy and competent aid agencies allows us to mitigate the harm that comes from people being unable to meet their basic needs.

Our focus here is on the second step of the argument. Do we actually have a moral obligation to the poor; or does it merely seem like that? Should we trust our intuition to save the child? Based on recent experimental evidence from psychology and economics, we should be skeptical of our intuition to save the child. Allow me to make the case.

We have solid experimental evidence from psychology and economics that people care how they look to others. As a species, humans are highly cooperative and social, and depend on help from others to survive — so much so that the ancients believed banishment from society worse than death, as it entailed not only death, but prolonged suffering as well. But relying on cooperation from others makes us susceptible to free-riders: individuals who enjoy the fruits of everyone else’s labor, while contributing less than their fair share. We thus use reputations to distinguish the trustworthy from the untrustworthy; we don’t want to cooperate with someone who might defect, especially in situations with high stakes — e.g., it matters who we choose to have children with. And since we cannot read the minds of others, we must rely on a high-fidelity signal of trustworthiness.

Here we need an example of a high-fidelity signal. The classic example is peacocks: their colorful feathery display is a costly signal to prospective mates that even with amplified risk of predation, he can still thrive — a signal that indicates fitness and is hard to fake. Or consider the ability to lift two-hundred pounds over one’s head as a reliable signal of strength: one cannot lift that much weight without possessing enough strength. Colorful features on a peacock would be a fatal liability if the bird weren’t healthy enough; someone simply wouldn’t be able to lift that much weight if they lacked sufficient strength. If we are to rightly trust others, we need a signal of trustworthiness that would be hard to fake by those who are untrustworthy.

One way to signal trustworthiness and communicate that one is a suitable partner for collaboration is through uncalculating cooperation: helping someone without waiting to consider whether the benefits of helping exceed the costs of doing so. By not calculating the advantages and disadvantages of pitching in, we signal to others that we can be trusted as a potential cooperator: we aren’t participating simply because we’ve determined that it’s in our interests. When we cooperate without doing the cost-benefit analysis, we signal we’re committed to the joint venture not merely because it would benefit us. As the authors of a recent study explain:

“To provide empirical support for this account, we experimentally test the hypothesis that people avoid calculating the costs of cooperation because of reputational concerns. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that when people’s decision-making processes are observable to others, they behave in a less calculating way. This observation suggests that they use uncalculating cooperation to gain reputational benefits.”

We often cooperate with others without calculating the cost. We grant friends’ requests without making inquiries about the time and trouble the request might take; we come to the aid of strangers in distress; we adhere to strict moral and religious precepts that are other-regarding, whatever the costs and benefits. These types of behaviors make sense once we frame them in terms of reputation: we cooperate without calculating because of how it makes us look to others. So it looks like we might have the intuition to save the drowning child because it makes us look good to others — consider the social pressure one would feel refusing to help a drowning child in the presence of onlookers. Just the thought of refusing to help seems unconscionable.

The strong intuition to save the drowning child looks like a product of our evolutionary history as a social, cooperative species and the need to look good to others for the sake of our survival. This should make us doubt that our intuitions in the drowning child case track the moral facts; it looks like we have these intuitions for evolutionary reasons rather than anything having to do with any moral obligations — we may only have such intuitions because they aid in our survive and reproduction, not because there is actually a moral obligation to save the child.

Someone may, of course, reply that we could have a strong intuition to save the drowning child both because it is morally required, as well as for reputational and evolutionary reasons. The trouble here though is that we simply cannot rule out that we have the intuition only because it helps us survive and reproduce. By example: it could be that the lottery ticket you hold in your hand is a winner or a loser; you simply do not know, even though it is highly likely the ticket is a loser given the odds. However, since you cannot rule out that the ticket is a winner — this is a distinct possibility — you don’t know the ticket is a loser. By similar logic: we cannot rule out that our drowning child intuitions are only an evolutionary by-product, so we should doubt we know that we have a moral obligation to save the child — and, of course, by extension, that we have a moral obligation to donate to the poor.

March 4, 2021December 14, 2022

Philosophical Insights from Great Literature

photograph of tall stack of children's books

I expect that some of you are feeling a little worn down, it has been a tough year. And so I want to try something a little lighter than usual, I want to talk about some of the philosophical lessons we can learn from great literature.

Of course, by great literature I mean great children’s books.

I should perhaps mention that the inspiration for this post is a passage in chapter four of G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy. There Chesterton notes, in passing, that many great ethical principles can be extracted from children’s fairy tales.

“But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of “Jack the Giant Killer”; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same as that of the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the “Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.”

So let us extend this analysis, what are some philosophical lessons we can learn from great literature?

To make things more difficult, let’s also limit ourselves to non-obvious lessons. Obviously, we can learn from The Little Engine That Could about the value of optimism and hard work. And obviously we can learn Where the Wild Things Are lessons about emotional management and community. But those books are, at least in part, written to teach us those lessons. What I’m looking for are hidden lessons, insights deeper than the author’s own awareness.

For example, I don’t know if Crockett Johnson read much of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when writing Harold and the Purple Crayon. But whether he had Kant in mind or not, I know of no story that so well captures the Kantian idea that the world we experience, even up to and including space and time, are a construction we create out of the order our minds to impose on the world.

Nor are the insights of that book limited to metaphysics. Consider the profound psychological insight revealed when Harold, after drawing up an apple tree bursting with fruit, frightens himself away from the good things he created by enlisting a frightening dragon to guard the tree. How often, I wonder, do we fence ourselves off from goods simply because we overreact to the fear that others may take something we think our own?

Or perhaps some of you are looking for a more political lesson to draw from the book. And so we reach the point of the book where Harold was looking for his own window. And since “he couldn’t think where it might be. He decided to ask a policeman.” But of course “the policeman pointed the way Harold was going anyway,” and so Harold learnt, even from a young age, the way that police power is employed to maintain the, even unjust, status quo.

But let us move on from Harold and the Purple Crayon.

There is the profound lesson of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie; that your reward for doing a good deed is not usually the relaxation of conscience, but rather the deepening of charity and so a dawning appreciation of the higher and harder acts of love still required of you. And then there are the prosaic lessons of Goodnight Moon. First on the value of attending to the commonplace goods of the everyday, and second the value of taking goodbyes and goodnights seriously, since you never know for certain that you will both wake again in the morning.

There are some obvious Aristotelian themes on temperance in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. (What with how unhealthful attempts to indulge appetite, rather than leading to relief, merely result in the appetites growing all the more persistent; and how he is only sated when he eats his proper food of a single leaf). But there are also deeply hidden philosophical nuggets. For instance, do you remember how the pages of that book grew with each passing day? You could see what foods were coming up, but not yet see their quantity nor read what the effects of indulgence would be. What a profound commentary on what happens to us when we try to pursue future goods. We see, at least somewhat, the good we are after. But we are insensitive to quantity, and rarely notice the unfortunate unintended consequences of the pursuit of the apparent good.

Of course, sometimes the philosophical lessons of children’s books are more abstract and less practical. Thus, in Chapter III of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (entitled “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle”) Pooh starts tracking what he thinks is a Woozle, only to find as he tracks that a second Woozle seems to have joined the first. Piglet joins the hunt, and before long yet another type of animal seems to have joined the pack they are tracking. Eventually Pooh realizes that he has “been Foolish and Deluded,” because of course it was his own tracks that he was chasing.

This is, of course, almost identical to the story that John Perry tells in his famous and rightly acclaimed “The Problem of the Essential Indexical”:

“I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.”

Perry might extract more philosophical insights about the essential indexical than our foolish and deluded Pooh does. But I’m still glad to know that our bear of very little brains came up with the raw material for the philosophical insight 53 years before Perry did.

I hope you’ve found these examples entertaining. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, more hidden philosophical lessons to be drawn from children’s books, but I’d rather hear the examples others come up with. Send me an email with your own favorite examples of hidden insights from great literature; I’ll eventually make a follow up post either here or at least on my personal blog.

But What Are We Doing Here?

Before I end this post, I just want to head off a certain potential skepticism. Some of you may doubt that it is the business of the ethicist to be extracting lessons from children’s books. Philosophers are trying to make great new ethical discoveries, seeing ethical truths others have missed! Why bother with the moral insights so humdrum as to trickle down to the tales we tell kids?

Well, perhaps there is sometimes a role for ethicists to find new ethical truths, identify unnoticed principles, or apply principles in original ways. But I don’t think that is what ethicists should usually be doing. Consider, for instance, this footnote in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason:

“A reviewer who wanted to say something censuring this work hit the mark better than he himself may have intended when he said that no new principle of morality is set forth in it but only a new formula. But who could even want to introduce a new principle of all morality and, as it were, first invent it? Just as if, before him, the world had been ignorant of what duty is or in thoroughgoing error about it.”

Kant’s point, and I think it is a good one, is that ethics is not like natural science at least in this one respect: ethical truth is something to which humanity has always had access just in virtue of being human. We do not need to discover ethics the way we discover that force equals mass times acceleration. Rather, we need to recognize and remember those ethical truths which, in a sense, we already knew. Thus, it is the job of the ethicist not to invent new principles, nor even discover unknown truths, but to give us new and clearer formulations of those principles which we somehow had already.

March 3, 2021December 14, 2022

Incentivizing the Vaccine-Hesitant

photograph of covid vaccination ampoules

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy has remained a constant concern. Given expectations that a vaccine would be found, experts always anticipated the problem of convincing those who distrust vaccines to actually get inoculated. A great many articles coming from the major news outlets have aimed at addressing the problem, discussing vaccine hesitancy and, in particular, trying to determine the most promising strategy for changing minds. In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan surveys some of the methods that have been proposed by experts. Attempts to straightforwardly correct misinformation seems to have proven ineffective as they can cause a backfire effect where individuals cling to their pre-existing beliefs even more strongly. Others instead suggest that a dialectical approach might be more successful. In The Guardian, Will Hanmer-Lloyd argues that we should refrain from blaming or name-calling vaccine-hesitant individuals or “post on social media about how ‘idiotic’ people who don’t take the vaccine are” because “it won’t help.” Similar to this “non-judgmental” approach that Hanmer-lloyd recommends, Erica Weintraub Austin, Professor and Director of the Edward R. Murrow Center for Media & Health Promotion Research at Washington State University, and Porismita Borah, Associate Professor at Washington State University, in The Conversation propose talking with vaccine-hesitant people and avoiding “scare-tactics.” Among the things that can help is providing “clear, consistent, relevant reasons” in favor of getting vaccinated while at the same time discussing what constitutes a trustworthy source of information in the first place.

In spite of all these good suggestions, to this day, Pew Research reports that only 60% of Americans would probably or definitely get a vaccine against COVID-19. Though confidence has been on the rise since September, this still leaves a concerning 40% unlikely to pursue vaccination. It is perhaps in light of these facts that a recent proposal is beginning to gain traction: incentivizing people by offering prizes. Ben Welsh of the LA Times reports that the rewards proposed include “Canary home security cameras, Google Nest entertainment systems, Aventon fixed-gear bicycles and gift cards for Airbnb and Lyft.”

But is it right to give out prizes to lure the initially unwilling to seek vaccination?

The answer depends on the moral system to which you subscribe. You might think that given the seriousness of the current circumstances it is especially crucial to get as many folks vaccinated as possible, and that the means of accomplishing this task are of secondary importance. This would be a consequentialist view according to which the moral worth of an action depends on the outcomes it produces. One might feel the force of this line of argument even more when considering that the consequences of vaccine hesitancy can carry dangers not only for the individuals refusing to get vaccinated but for the rest of us as well. Just recently, a Wisconsin pharmacist purposefully made unusable 57 vials of vaccine that could have been used to vaccinate up to 500 people because of a belief they were unsafe. So considering how significant the impact of vaccine-distrust can be, it is understandable that one might employ even unusual methods – such as prizes – to convince those who remain reluctant to join the queue.

On the other hand, if you do not feel the force of this outcome-based argument, you might think that there is something to say about the idea that changing people’s behavior does not necessarily change people’s beliefs. In this sense, offering a prize might not do much to alleviate the distrust they feel towards vaccination or the government. Consider another example. Suppose you do not believe that exercising is good. Yet your best friend, who instead does believe in the positive aspects of exercising, convinces you to go running with her because the view from the hill where she runs is stunning. In that sense, you may eventually elect to go running, but you will not do it because you are now a believer in exercising. You will go running just so that you can admire the view from the hill, without having changed your beliefs about exercise.

What is the problem of not changing people’s beliefs? You might be tempted to think that there is no problem, if you believe that the end result is all that matters. But even in that case, it is beliefs that drive our actions, and so as long as individuals still believe that vaccines are not to be trusted, giving out prizes will only be a marginal and temporary solution that fails to address the deeper, underlying issue. The worry is that someone who may opt to get vaccinated upon receiving a gift card is not deciding to get vaccinated for the right kind of reason. This argument picks out a distinction famously known in philosophy between right versus wrong kinds of reasons. The philosophical debate is complex, but, in general, when it comes to believing something, only epistemic, evidence-based reasons represent good reasons for actions. Should one, instead, come to act on the basis of reasons that have more to do with, say, wishes or desires, those would represent the proper kinds of reasons.

So what is the solution here? Well, there is no solution, as is often the case when it comes to philosophical positions that are fundamentally at odds with one another. But here is the good news: looking at the ways in which real life events connect with philosophical issues can help us figure out what we think. Examining issues in this way can prove useful in isolating the features that may help us understand our own particular commitments and convictions. Thinking through these tensions for ourselves is what allows us to decide whether we think the proposal to encourage vaccination efforts by offering prizes is a legitimate one.

March 2, 2021December 14, 2022

Implications of Exonerations

black-and-white photograph of empty jail cell

I expect that in the near future we will know, for certain, that at least one innocent person has been executed in the United States. This should not come as a surprise. There have been many cases where those on death row are found to be innocent; indeed by some estimates more than 4% of death row inmates may be innocent. One major reason we have not previously proven someone’s innocence is that there is rarely the political will to continue investigating post execution.

What I want to investigate in this piece is what this should mean for the use of the death penalty. The BBC, in its Ethics Guides, notes that the “most common and most cogent argument against capital punishment is that sooner or later, innocent people will get killed, because of mistakes or flaws in the justice system.” But just how cogent an argument is this?

Let me lay my own cards on the table; I am emphatically anti-death penalty. I think the unnecessary killing of any human being is monstrous, and that the state may only use lethal force when combating an active threat, not as punishment for a past threat. However, I would hold this view even if there was no chance of an innocent person ever being executed; my objection is grounded in an invariant pro-life commitment. Thus, I think I am particularly well placed to assess the ethics of this question. I’m not in favor of capital punishment, and so am not looking for any rationalization to dismiss the argument from innocent execution; but nor do I feel a rationalizing compulsion to think the argument works — my own commitments would persist regardless. Of course, this all may just be a second-order rationalization about my own objectivity, but I’ll put aside worries about meta-level rationalizations for another post.

So here is a simple argument from the possibility of executing the innocent to the wrongness of the death penalty:

If we use the death penalty, eventually an innocent person will be killed. (innocence premise)
Executing the innocent is always morally wrong, no matter how good the consequences. (absolutism premise)
Therefore, if we use the death penalty, we will eventually do something wrong that cannot be justified by the goods of executing the guilty.

Now, there is a certain intuitive plausibility to this argument. Suppose I thought that the death penalty has a strong deterrent effect, and so executing the guilty would save many lives (see this article for a defense of this argument; note there have been, as far as I can tell, several persuasive replies); I still would not think it is permissible to frame an innocent person and execute them to get that same deterrent effect. Thus, it is wrong to kill the innocent, even to bring about the valuable execution of the guilty.

The problem with this argument, is that, by parity, it seems to suggest we should never punish anyone:

If we imprison people, eventually an innocent person will be imprisoned. (innocence premise)
Imprisoning the innocent is always morally wrong, no matter how good the consequences. (absolutism premise)
Therefore, if we imprison people, we will eventually do something wrong that cannot be justified by the goods of imprisoning the guilty.

This argument, as far as I can tell, has the same surface level plausibility as the previous one. If I knew the only way to capture a murderer was to, for some reason, imprison an innocent person for life, it would not be permissible to imprison that person.

So what has gone wrong with these two arguments? I think it is that there is a difference between killing or imprisoning the innocent as an intended means to punishing others, and foreseeing that the innocent may be killed or imprisoned as a consequence of a broader policy of punishment. While there may be an absolute prohibition on killing or imprisoning the innocent, that does not mean there is a prohibition on anything that could lead to that as a result.

To articulate the innocence argument against the death penalty, one needs to show that a) the fact an innocent person will be killed means we cannot use the death penalty, and b) the fact an innocent person will be punished does not mean we cannot use any schema of punishment (since I assume few people would accept that the inevitable punishment of the innocent means all punishment is unjust).

In fact, the problem for the innocent argument is even more profound. Remember that study I cited at the beginning, saying that as many as 4% of death row inmates are innocent? The way that study worked is that they compared the exoneration rate of those who stayed on death row (about 4%) to those who were shifted to life in prison. Because more scrutiny is given to death penalty cases (especially as the guilty approach execution), those who are actually to be executed (and not just on death row) are more likely to be exonerated. So, the study most commonly cited to support the claim that some innocent will be executed, actually shows that likely more innocent people would be punished if we switched from the death penalty to life in prison (since we are less likely to identify the innocent without the scrutiny provided to death penalty cases).

So, what can we point to in order to say that executing the innocent is uniquely bad — bad in a way that imprisoning the innocent is not?

Barbarity. Perhaps the thought is that the death penalty is, in some way, so much worse than life in person, that we cannot take any risk with the innocent being killed, even if we can take risks on an innocent person going to jail for life. But I’m not sure this is quite right. In other parts of life, we don’t treat risks of death as categorically worse than other risks. Anytime you drive a car there is a disturbingly high chance an innocent person might die (far more innocent people die in car accidents than are executed); but I don’t think we treat such risks as categorically distinct from other types of risks. You might, for instance, choose a small risk of death to avoid a much larger risk of having to spend the rest of your life locked in prison.

Irreversibility. The first thing we might suggest is that the death penalty is irreversible. If you kill someone you cannot bring them back to life, but if you imprison someone you can always let them go later. But it is not quite that simple. For one thing, you really cannot reverse a prison sentence. Even if you are eventually released, you do not get back those twenty years spent in prison. The punishment cannot be reversed, all we can really do is shorten it if we discover you are innocent.

Permanency. Is that the solution then? Is the reason the death penalty is so bad because it is permanent? Perhaps the thought is that if we cannot be certain someone is guilty, no permanent punishment is justified. But here, again, this does not seem quite right. After all, I still permanently lose my twenties and thirties to prison, even if I get released on my fortieth birthday.

And note too, the risk of permanence is not the same thing as permanence. Just because someone could be released does not mean they will. And we know that, since executions receive greater scrutiny, an innocent person is more likely to be sentenced to life in prison than sentenced to death.

Reparability. Perhaps it is not that the death penalty is permanent, but that it cannot be repaired. Sure, someone imprisoned till they are forty permanently, loses out on their thirties, but at least the state can do something to make it up to the person falsely imprisoned. For example, often those falsely imprisoned are given financial compensation from the state.

I actually find this argument somewhat convincing, but we have already seen that as a society we don’t accept the broader implication. After all, it is death, not execution, that is irreparable. But we have already seen that we don’t treat risks of death as categorically different from other types of serious risks. If car accidents just resulted in serious bodily injury, we could imagine making some reparation for such injury. Since they sometimes result in death, sometimes no such reparation is possible. But, again, it seems we don’t see that fact as particularly dispositive when assessing the ethics of driving.

It is a terrible and tragic thing to execute the innocent. But, I think, that is just a subset of the terrible and tragic thing that it is to punish the innocent. Perhaps we should strengthen our criminal standards for conviction (I’m quite sympathetic to that line of thought) so that fewer innocent people are punished. But I’m not sure. At the very least, if we accept as inevitable that the innocent will be punished it gives us a categorical reason to select some punishments over others.