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Month: May 2021

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“Politicians in Robes”: Neutrality in the Supreme Court

photograph of judge in robes

As the Supreme Court decides which issues to take up on its docket — abortion, gun rights, and perhaps even affirmative action — legal seers are already tallying the expected results. Emphasizing the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, many see these cases as having all but been decided; the writing is on the wall.

The political leanings of the Roberts Court have only grown more visible. While an air of secrecy often attends the justices’ business and keeps the inner workings of the Court hidden from public view, any sense that the Court stands removed from the political fray is quickly disappearing. Justices Kagan and Sotomayor have increasingly called out Kavanaugh’s inconsistent rulings, and he’s been taken to task for his hollow virtue-signalling and performative hand-wringing. This isn’t like when Justice Alito sparred with Gorsuch over his textualist read of Bostock. In Kagan’s dissent in Edwards v. Vannoy just last week, she explicitly chastised Kavanaugh for his approach that “treats judging like scorekeeping … about how much our decisions, or the aggregate of them, benefit a particular kind of party.” This, Kagan argues, is simply not how judges are supposed to approach their duties. Judging requires focusing on the legal merits of the case before you; it isn’t about anticipating political fallout according to party affiliation or balancing “wins” and “losses.”

The divisiveness seen in the Court mirrors the ugly politics in Congress that preceded its recent newcomers. All three justices, Ian Millhiser points out, were “nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country.” Given the hypocrisy surrounding Gorsuch and Barrett’s appointments as well as the acrimony on both sides over Kavanaugh’s confirmation, it will be hard to dispel the notion that the Supreme Court is just another battleground for political score-settling.

Add to this a common belief in the practice of strategic retirement – justices timing their departure to ensure the installation of like-minded predecessors – and it’s hard to see the Court as anything other than an ideological land grab. The lottery appointment system, ensuring that justices are confirmed unevenly, erodes public trust and stretches the connection between the people’s will and their rulers’ authority to its breaking point.

Taken together, these considerations question the Court’s ability to serve its necessary function as a check on power and legal backstop. Contrary to Justice Roberts’s claim that the Court’s job is merely to “call balls and strikes,” the prevailing perception is that justices are overwhelmingly motivated by their personal political agendas and, thus, the Roberts Court stands committed to effecting the Right’s political will.

So what do we stand to gain by maintaining the fiction that justices are nothing more than umpires? Why deny the Court is composed of “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges”?

However well these cynical accounts reflect the reality, it does great and lasting damage to our legal system to reduce the High Court to just “another political institution” — a nine-member Congress replete with the familiar political hackery and partisan warfare. That damage can’t be undone by simply expanding the bench to instill balance and force it to better reflect citizens’ diverse viewpoints. Any politics-driven reform to the Court threatens to undermine whatever is left of the public’s trust in the institution. The Court’s role as guardian of individual rights, ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, and final arbiter of the law is very much at stake. Ultimately, the Court’s decisions confer legitimacy only insofar as we believe in its singular ability to apply the law in neutral fashion, according to a standard we (perhaps naively) think insulated from political ideology.

These convictions have led Justice Breyer to claim that the “peril facing the Supreme Court comes less from partisan judges than from citizens who, encouraged by politicians, equate impartial justice with agreeable judicial outcomes.” Rather than focusing on results, we should expect judges first and foremost to follow the law. Public trust comes from our faith that, in interpreting the law, justices rely on their legal ability and interpretative powers rather than fidelity to a particular political party. We call on the Court to deliver legal pronouncements rooted in a theory of constitutional interpretation rather than barefaced political morality. The Court stands apart from other political institutions because we see its members as possessing a specific kind of expertise and assessing cases according to a unique and independent metric. Judging is about applying neutral legal criteria, not about partisan policy preferences; it’s about divining the meaning of words, the intentions of authors, and the implications of past precedents. It’s an investigation rather than a contest, a deliberation rather than a quarrel, an art rather than a science.

Apart from this prioritizing of procedure over product, we also tend to think that the justice’s lifetime tenure insulates them from political pressure. On the one hand, this makes the justices unaccountable to the people; these unelected officials exercise enormous power over the lives of citizens without fear of recall. On the other hand, this suggests that judges are freed from the rancor of party politics and are beholden to no one (including the person who appointed them).

But what do we do with the incongruity between this idealized fantasy and our political reality? How do we restore (or at least maintain) public trust in the institution? Expanding the bench threatens to burn whatever credibility the Court has left, but staying the course promises death by a thousand cuts. From regular appointments to term limits, perhaps President Biden’s Supreme Court reform commission can show us the path forward, though no one seems to be holding their breath.

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UFOs and Hume on Miracles

photograph of silhouetted figure shining flashlight at light source in the night sky

UFOs appear to be having a cultural moment. A Pentagon report laying out what U.S. intelligence agencies know about UFOs — or, to use the government’s preferred acronym, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) — is expected at the beginning of June. A recent “60 Minutes” segment included interviews with two former Navy pilots who described their encounters with a UFO. The New Yorker ran a long piece about UFOs in its May 10th issue. And last week former Nevada senator Harry Reid penned a long reflection in The New York Times about his interest in the phenomenon.

It is relatively common to see UFOs, such as those tracked by Navy fighters’ infrared weapons cameras, described as “defying the laws of physics”; for example, flying at many times the speed of sound and then coming to an abrupt halt, without any visible means of propulsion. Being woefully ignorant about those laws, it is difficult for me to tell whether this is journalistic hyperbole or a claim to be taken literally. But if we do take it literally, then we can call on the great Scottish philosopher David Hume to help us decide what to believe.

Hume famously defined a “miracle” as a violation of a law of nature. For Hume, a law of nature obtains only when we have an extensive, and exceptionless, experience of a certain kind of phenomenon: for example, our extensive experience of human beings dying “establishes” the law that all human beings die. (As this example suggests, violations of laws of nature are not impossible or inconceivable; they are simply counterinstances to our extensive, exceptionless experience.) If UFOs really defy the laws of physics, then they perform miracles in the Humean sense.

Hume argued that no testimony — i.e., a person’s statement that something is true — can establish the existence of miracles. His argument can be summarized as follows:

1. The evidence against the existence of a miracle is as strong as it possibly could be.

A law of nature is established on the basis of experience, which is the only kind of evidence we can have for a causal proposition. And our experience is both extensive and exceptionless, so it furnishes evidence that is as strong as experiential evidence could be.

2. The evidence for the existence of a miracle from testimony, while perhaps very strong, is weaker than the evidence against the existence of a miracle.

Hume avers that it is always more probable that testimony is false — that the person giving the testimony “either deceive[s] or [has been] deceived” — than that a miracle has occurred. Put another way: to constitute stronger evidence than that which we have against the existence of a miracle, testimonial evidence for a miracle must be such that its falsehood would itself be a miracle — in fact, would itself be a greater miracle than that which the testimony is evidence for.  But for any given piece of testimony, there is always a non-miraculous possibility of its falsehood.

3. We ought to proportion our belief according to our evidence, and evidence for contradictory conclusions cancels out.

Hume here appeals to “evidentialism,” the commonsense idea that we ought to proportion our belief in a proposition to the evidence we have for it. In addition, he says that evidence for a proposition and evidence for its negation “destroy” each other.

4. Therefore, whenever our evidence for a miracle is based entirely on testimony, we ought to believe that it did not occur.

Since the evidence against the existence of a miracle is always stronger than testimonial evidence for it, when testimonial evidence is all the evidence we have for a miracle, we ought to believe that the miracle did not exist or did not occur.

We can now see how the argument can be applied to UFOs. If UFOs really perform miracles, then any testimonial evidence for the existence of UFOs is always weaker than the evidence against their existence. Therefore, we should reject the existence of UFOs if the only evidence we have for them is based on testimony.

It might be objected that we have non-testimonial evidence for UFOs, such as the infrared camera videos. However, these videos are by themselves difficult for most people to interpret or understand, as are most of the alleged photographs of UFOs. The layman must instead rely on the testimony of experts to interpret the videos or photographs for him or her. Thus, even when photographs or videos are held up as evidence of UFOs, it is really the testimony of experts, who provide authoritative interpretations of these materials, that is doing the evidentiary work. And this leads us back to Hume’s problem.

Of course, Hume’s argument is not without its many detractors; objections are legion. One objection revolves around what Hume says about the “Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost …” The Indian prince had an extensive, exceptionless experience of water in a liquid state. Frost is a counterinstance of the “law” that water is always liquid. Does it follow, then, that the Indian prince could not justifiably believe in frost on the basis of any testimony, no matter how strong? Hume’s response is that solid water is an experience that is not contrary to the prince’s experience, although it is also not conformable to it. The more general problem is that Hume needs to allow for progress in the sciences, including the revision of our understanding of the natural laws. Like many of Hume’s arguments, his argument about miracles set the agenda for much of the succeeding discussion, but left many questions unanswered.

Still, Hume’s argument against miracles is undeniably compelling. As applied to UFOs, the argument shows us the limits of testimony, however well-intentioned or authoritative.

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Automation in the Courtroom: On Algorithms Predicting Crime

photograph of the defense's materials on table in a courtroom

From facial recognition software to the controversial robotic “police dogs,” artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly prominent aspect of the legal system. AI even allocates police resources to different neighborhoods, determining how many officers are needed in certain areas based on crime statistics. But can algorithms determine the likelihood that someone will commit a crime, and if they can, is it ethical to use this technology to sentence individuals to prison?

Algorithms that attempt to predict recidivism (the likelihood that a criminal will commit future offenses) sift through data to produce a recidivism score, which ostensibly indicates the risk a person poses to their community. As Karen Hao explains for the MIT Technology Review,

The logic for using such algorithmic tools is that if you can accurately predict criminal behavior, you can allocate resources accordingly, whether for rehabilitation or for prison sentences. In theory, it also reduces any bias influencing the process, because judges are making decisions on the basis of data-driven recommendations and not their gut.

Human error and racial bias contribute to over-incarceration, so researchers are hoping that color-blind computers can make better choices for us.

But in her book When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Justice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, former judge Katherine B. Forrest explains that Black offenders are far more likely to be labeled high-risk by algorithms than their white counterparts, a fact which further speaks to the well-documented racial bias of algorithms. As Hao reminds us,

populations that have historically been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement—especially low-income and minority communities—are at risk of being slapped with high recidivism scores. As a result, the algorithm could amplify and perpetuate embedded biases and generate even more bias-tainted data to feed a vicious cycle.

Because this technology is so new and lucrative, companies are extremely protective of their algorithms. The COMPAS system (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), created by Northpointe Inc., is the most widely used recidivism predictor in the legal system, yet no one knows what data set it draws from or how it’s algorithm generates a final score. We can assume the system looks at factors like age and previous offenses, but beyond that, the entire process is shrouded in mystery. Studies also suggest that recidivism algorithms are alarmingly inaccurate; Forrest notes that systems like COMPAS are incorrect around 30 to 40 percent of the time. This means that for every ten people COMPAS labels low-risk, 3 or 4 will eventually relapse into crime. Even with a high chance for error, recidivism scores are difficult to challenge in court. In a lucid editorial for the American Bar Association, Judge Noel L. Hillman explains that,

A predictive recidivism score may emerge oracle-like from an often-proprietary black box. Many, if not most, defendants, particularly those represented by public defenders and counsel appointed under the Criminal Justice Act because of indigency, will lack the resources, time, and technical knowledge to understand, probe, and challenge the AI process.

Judges may assume a score generated by AI is infallible, and change their ruling accordingly.

In his article, Hillman makes a reference to Loomis v. Wisconsin, a landmark case for recidivism algorithms. In 2016, Eric Loomis was arrested for driving a car that had been involved in a drive-by shooting. During sentencing, the judge tacked an additional six years onto his sentence due to his high COMPAS score. Loomis attempted to challenge the validity of the score, but the courts ultimately upheld Northpointe’s right to protect trade secrets and not reveal how the number had been reached. Though COMPAS scores aren’t currently admissible in court as evidence against a defendant, the judge in the Loomis case did take it into account during sentencing, which sets a dangerous precedent.

Even if we could predict a person’s future behavior with complete accuracy, replacing a judge with a computer would make an already dehumanizing process dystopian. Hillman argues that,

When done correctly, the sentencing process is more art than science. Sentencing requires the application of soft skills and intuitive insights that are not easily defined or even described. Sentencing judges are informed by experience and the adversarial process. Judges also are commanded to adjust sentences to avoid unwarranted sentencing disparity on a micro or case-specific basis that may differ from national trends.

In other words, attention to nuance is lost completely when defendants become data sets. The solution to racial bias isn’t to bring in artificial intelligence, but to strengthen our own empathy and sense of shared humanity, which will always produce more equitable rulings than AI can.

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A Challenge to Federalism: Mask Mandates and Subsidiarity

photograph of Florida road map

In this post I want to investigate a puzzle about federalism, and in particular a puzzle for those committed to subsidiarity.

Federalism is a political system in which power is divided between more and less local governments. The United States has a federal system, decisions are made by local governments, state governments, and the federal government. Not only are decisions made by these various bodies, but different bodies are empowered to make different decisions.

Sometimes you will hear people claim they want a greater degree of federalism, and what that usually means is that they want more decisions to be made by individual states, and fewer decisions to be made by the federal government. Thus, the conservative lawyer and journalist David French published a book last year arguing that an increase in federalism is necessary to handle political polarization. French thinks that, given that California is far more liberal than Tennessee, it makes more sense to have California and Tennessee each develop their own healthcare systems, rather than have one federal healthcare system.

Now, the puzzle I want to investigate can be asked in those general terms, but the puzzle will be clearer if we look at a more specific form of federalism.

Subsidiarity is an approach to political philosophy which says that decisions should be made by the most local body capable of making the decision. Everyone in my household can decide what book to read on a Saturday afternoon, so it should be up to each person what to read. I should not decide what my wife should read, nor should she decide what I read. If we want to take a family vacation, however, then we can’t just each decide where we want to go. If we each decide, then she might go to the mountains while I go to the beach, with the result that we don’t take a family vacation at all. Where to vacation, then, must be made at the family level. We, as a family, cannot set up a sewer system, and so the county should be in charge of deciding how to distribute water and electricity. Our county cannot administrate an intrastate road system, and so intrastate roads should be handled by the state. The state of Florida cannot coordinate for national defense, and so national defense should be handled by the federal government.

Why might one support a principle of subsidiarity? Well there are lots of reasons. First, you might think that more local control allows decision makers to be more responsive to local conditions and preferences. Thus, many oppose federal minimum wage legislation on the grounds that it is better to allow individual states to decide the minimum wage that is best for them. Most people will agree that the minimum wage in Switzerland should be different from the minimum wage in Bangladesh, but if different economic conditions across countries mean we want a different minimum wage, why would the same not be true between individual U.S. states?

Second, you might support subsidiarity on the grounds that it provides laboratories of experimentation. If each state tries their own healthcare system, then we are more likely to discover which system actually works best.

Third, and I think most plausibly, you might support subsidiarity on grounds of democracy and freedom. The more local an election, the more influence an individual can exercise. If I have more say over local decision-making, then it seems more democratically legitimate for a local body to make decisions on how I can live. Not only that, but because the United States is heterogeneous, with people often clumped with others of similar political persuasion, the more we devolve decisions to local control, the more people will be governed by the sort of policies they would choose themselves. If most people in California want state-funded healthcare while most people in Arkansas do not, then a federalist system where each state can adopt their own healthcare system helps ensure that most people are governed by the system that reflects their particular political preferences.

So what is the puzzle? The puzzle is raised by policies where a less local government bans a more local government from restricting even more local decision-making. The example that started me thinking about this came from my home state of Florida. Governor DeSantis recently signed a bill to end all local COVID-19 restrictions and emergency orders. In doing so, Florida has joined other Republican–controlled states in passing laws that prohibit local authorities from instituting more restrictive COVID precautions.

As someone who generally supports subsidiarity, how should I think about these policies?

We could make a federalist or subsidiarity argument both for and against these state policies. The argument against these policies is easy: subsidiarity says that we should generally defer to more local decision-making. A state coming in and saying that a local town cannot have their own mask mandates overrides that local control. Counties and cities should be free to make their own decisions, as such, it is inappropriate for the state to ban cities from passing mask mandates.

However, you could also make an argument for the other side. You might say that it should be up to individuals whether or not they wear a mask. Individuals and families should be free to make their own decisions. As such, it is inappropriate for local authorities to maintain mask mandates at this point in the pandemic, and as such it is right for the state to step in in order to protect individuals from the overreach of local governments.

To help understand the conflict, imagine we iterated this puzzle at a higher level. Just as Florida passed a law banning cities from requiring masks, suppose the U.S. Federal Government passed a law banning states from prohibiting mask mandates. You could say this is bad for federalist reasons, the federal government should leave it up to the states. But you could also say this is good for federalist reasons, this ensures that states don’t overstep and violate the freedoms of local authorities.

This puzzle of subsidiarity is actually just a particular example of a puzzle that crops up in lots of places. Consider, for instance, this puzzle raised by Marcia Baron:

“An administrator once told me about the following dispute. A speaker had been invited to campus. The point of his lecture would be to oppose free speech. Some of the faculty objected strenuously to having him to campus and favored ‘uninviting’ him. Free speech is a great value, and they did not want to see it undermined by this or any other speaker. Others defended the plan to bring him to campus – and they did so in the name of free speech.

How could both parties appeal to free speech – and only free speech — in defense of their respective views? Those who opposed the speaker’s visit saw free speech as a goal, a goal which would not be advanced and might well be hindered by a speaker who spoke against it. Those who supported the speaker’s visit saw free speech as a matter of principle, imposing a side-constraint on our conduct. In the view of the former, what is desired is that free speech flourish, and to that end it might occasionally be necessary to squelch (what would otherwise be) free speech. In the view of the latter (those who supported the speaker’s visit), free speech is a value not in the sense of a goal to be promoted, but a value never to be violated. It would be a violation of free speech to prevent a speaker from speaking on the ground that his or her views were considered noxious, outrageous, or dangerous. That allowing the speaker to speak might undermine the cause of free speech by winning over some impressionable college students to the speaker’s side is irrelevant, in the supporters’ view. Those who opposed the speaker’s campus visit viewed free speech as a goal to be promoted or advanced. Those who opposed the attempt to uninvite the speaker saw free speech as a matter of principle: as constituting a side-constraint on our conduct. Side-constraints work this way: they tell us that no matter how worthwhile the goal, there are things which we may not do even if they are crucial for that goal.”

This is, I think, the same sort of puzzle. Can we restrict speech to maintain more freedom of speech? Can states force decisions on local governments, to stop them forcing decisions on others? And if Marcia Baron is right, the question we need to answer is does subsidiarity work like a side-constraint, or like a goal to be promoted? If it is a goal to be promoted, then these state policies might make sense. If it is instead supposed to act as a side-constraint these policies are problematic. How does one decide?

I don’t think there is any easy answer. Even if you look at one particular reason for accepting subsidiarity it can be tough to decide. Suppose you think that more local bodies are better able to make decisions for themselves. One the one hand, that might support allowing local governments to decide what is best for their specific conditions. But on the other hand, that might support letting each person decide for themselves whether or not they want to continue masking. And there is something to both these thoughts. Ideally, those who are vaccinated can mostly go without masks and those unvaccinated should continue wearing masks. So, ideally, people could make the best decision for themselves.

But then again, sometimes people make bad decisions and impose risks on others, and you might think that local authorities are in the best position to know how high the general risk is in a given local community.

In this particular context I’m inclined to think that local authorities should be empowered to make emergency decisions. I think the principle of subsidiarity means that states should not dictate what local governments can do.

But on the other hand, sometimes I support overarching restrictions. For instance, the Constitution is federal law that prevents states from imposing a religion on their citizens. I think the choice of religion should be up to individuals, and as such it is appropriate for the Supreme Court to impose on states a prohibition on compelling religious practice.

The puzzle persists, then, and there are no easy answers.

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On the Weaponization of Forgiveness

black and white photograph of pray hands

WARNING: The following article contains discussions of sexual assault and other violent crimes, including the sexual abuse of minors.

On April 23rd, former reality television stars Josh and Anna Duggar posted a gender reveal for their seventh child on Instagram, happily announcing Anna’s pregnancy; six days later, Josh Duggar was arrested and charged with downloading and possessing child pornography. At Duggar’s detention hearing, federal authorities testified that they found hundreds of images of sexually abused children, including toddlers, on one of Duggar’s office computers in a case file described by one agent as being in the “top five of the worst of the worst that I’ve ever had to examine.” Although software was installed on this computer to track Duggar’s activity (and regularly inform his wife of his internet searches), additional software had been installed to circumvent these measures. Josh Duggar pleaded “not guilty” to the charges and has been released on bond to the custody of family friends pending his trial in July.

This is not the first time that Josh Duggar — son to former Arkansas state representative Jim Bob Duggar — has made national headlines. In 2015, In Touch magazine published copies of a 2006 police report indicating that Duggar had repeatedly sexually molested five minors when he was fourteen years old; the ensuing scandal, worsened by the fact that Duggar’s father had leveraged his political capital to protect his son from consequences (despite several of Duggar’s sisters being among his victims), led to Duggar resigning his position as the executive director of the Family Research Council (a Christian lobbying organization). Additionally, in the wake of the controversy, TLC chose to cancel 19 Kids and Counting, the popular reality show portraying the lifestyle of Jim Bob Duggar’s large family. Several months later, hackers exposed user data from AshleyMadison.com, a dating site that markets itself towards “cheating spouses” seeking extramarital affairs; Josh Duggar was one of several celebrities revealed to have paid for multiple accounts with the service.

In his response to these previous scandals, Duggar apologized in 2015 for his “wrongdoing” as a teenager and said that he had “sought forgiveness from those I had wronged and asked Christ to forgive me and come into my life.” Regarding his infidelity, Duggar said he had been “the biggest hypocrite ever” and explained that he had developed a “secret addiction” to pornography that led him to become “unfaithful to [his] wife.” As his confession continues, he says: “I am so ashamed of the double life that I have been living and am grieved for the hurt, pain and disgrace my sin has caused my wife and family, and most of all Jesus and all those who profess faith in Him.” Duggar’s 2015 statement finishes with the following: “I humbly ask for your forgiveness. Please pray for my precious wife Anna and our family during this time.”

At this point, apart from his court plea, Duggar has been silent about his 2021 arrest, but his parents released a short statement asking for prayer and reaffirming their commitment to their family.

Although it might seem like a surprising topic to consider, philosophers have had multiple things to say about the phenomenon of forgiveness that Duggar’s past statements repeatedly invoke. Some have analyzed the emotional elements of forgiveness to, among other things, define the necessary and sufficient conditions for actions that qualify as actually bestowing “forgiveness” on transgressors. (If I say the words “I forgive you” while still harboring resentment, have I truly forgiven you?) Other academics have focused on questions of standing for acts of forgiveness: for example, if Calvin pulls Susie’s hair, it seems like only Susie could rightfully forgive Calvin (should she choose to do so) — no matter how much Rosalyn might insist that she forgives Calvin for pulling Susie’s hair, it seems like Rosalyn lacks the proper standing to forgive the offense. However, this scenario raises another question: what about acts of religious forgiveness, in particular those connected with receiving forgiveness from God? (Could God forgive Calvin on Susie’s behalf? Or has Calvin somehow wronged both Susie and God such that God has standing to forgive Calvin in this case? Or is something else going on here?) And what about obligations to forgive — are there ever duties to do so? Additionally, should forgiveness itself be seen as a virtue?

Indeed, the philosophy of forgiveness can be a rich field to plow.

I think that the Duggar case demonstrates another interesting feature of forgiveness and how it functions as a sociopolitical kind of speech act: namely, one that triggers certain social expectations (and, perhaps, even duties) to view the speaker in a certain valenced perspective (in a manner similar to what J.L. Austin describes as a “behabitive” speech act). When Josh Duggar references his past sins and explains how he has already sought “Christ’s forgiveness,” he is not explicitly obligating people to likewise forgive him for his actions — however, for a certain subset of Duggar’s audience, he is implicitly indicating that they should forgive him on their own. According to Duggar’s religion, Christ’s forgiveness is freely given to all who ask for it: for anyone who might treat Jesus as a moral exemplar (and ask “What would Jesus do?”), Duggar’s invocation of his having already sought divine absolution is an implicit appeal to the Christians hearing his confession that they should do likewise.

In this way, Duggar’s deployment of Christian terminology (like asking Jesus to “come into my life”) functions as what philosopher Jennifer Saul has called a “dogwhistle” because it has multiple layers of meaning, but only certain people in a given audience will be able to fully decode the deeper message. On its face, hearing that someone asked Jesus to “come into their life” might be easily understood as a metaphorical way to recognize Jesus’ influence on the speaker; for Christians — particularly fundamentalist Protestants like Duggar — this phrase carries significant theological meaning with considerable baggage automatically communicated implicitly to anyone who understands the code. And even if audience members don’t calculate the full implicatum of Duggar’s words (“Jesus has forgiven me for X, therefore you should not hold X against me”), they might nevertheless recognize Duggar as a member of their own social group in a manner that often results in the triggering of various in-group biases.

My point is not that Josh Duggar (or anyone else who speaks in similar fashions) is necessarily intentionally trying to manipulate their audience by evoking Christian (or otherwise partisan) terminology; importantly, dog whistles (and other sorts of covert speech acts) can easily be used without speakers realizing that they are doing so. Nevertheless, when such words function to effectively manipulate the emotions and perceptions of audience members, we would do well to pay more attention to their operation.

Consider what happened in 2015: various other celebrity Christians, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, rushed to Duggar’s defense, insisting that, although Duggar’s actions were indeed terrible, his “mistakes” had been addressed and the families involved should be protected from the “blood-thirsty media” looking for a scandal. Pundit Matt Walsh argued that “progressives” were the real hypocrites in this case (because they were allegedly only looking to discredit a prominent Christian family). Whether or not such charges carry water is beside the present point: if Duggar’s statement functioned as I’ve suggested (and indeed triggered certain members of his audience, like Huckabee and Walsh, to implicitly recognize a duty to support their fellow Christian) then these partisan responses are unsurprising.

In short, I’m suggesting that public statements mentioning God and forgiveness (which have been made by everyone from former President Bill Clinton to Kanye West) can work to identify the speaker as an ally or member of a particular subculture or sect. In much the same way that my saying “Live long and prosper” or “May the Force be with you” entitles my audience to make certain assumptions about my background or social position (insofar as they might think I’m a member of certain sci-fi fandoms), deploying specific language — like Duggar’s “Christianese” discussing his sins — works similarly. When such associations might alter interpretations or feelings about violent or otherwise unjust events, said language should be analyzed more carefully.

To date, with the exception of his lawyers and family members, no one has publicly jumped to Josh Duggar’s defense. However, he has been released from jail to await his July trial in the custody of Lacount Reber who was described in court as a “close friend” of the Duggars. Mr. Reber is a pastor in northwest Arkansas.

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Re-Thinking the Nature of Bodies

close-up photograph of Body Worlds Exhibition

Human beings are constantly growing and shedding cells. This means that very few of the cells that any person has as an adult were the cells that they had as an infant. Over the years, as we’ve learned more about cell growth and death, we’ve learned that our bodies aren’t fixed objects that simply change shape over time. Bodies are ever-shifting collections of physical stuff. To co-opt a phrase from Heraclitus, no one occupies the same body twice.

We can also contribute to the set of cells in our bodies by growing them in laboratories outside of the confines of the body. Scientists have already transplanted cell-cultured bladders into people who were born with bladders that do not empty properly. Our improved understanding of cells motivates new questions about bodies. What does it mean to say that I occupy my body? What is a body? What is the relation between my body and my identity? How does emerging technology change and inform our concept of bodies? Why does any of this matter?

In the early 20th century, when scientists first began to experiment with cell culturing, some were quick to point out the implications the technology could eventually have for organ transplants. We’ve long had fewer available organs than are required to save the lives of people experiencing organ failure. For some reason, people are hesitant to donate organs, even after they are dead and are no longer using them. When it became clear that we could cultivate cells in a lab, an incredible life-saving solution appeared to be on the horizon. One initial challenge is that cell-culturing is fairly easy to do when the expected outcome is merely flat plates of cells. But organ cells require a more complex kind of architecture, and this has proven to be a difficult nut to crack. 3-D printing technologies have provided some pathways forward, leading some scientists to conclude that the technology to grow new organs for transplant might well be available within the next decade.

One virtue of producing organs in this way is that a person’s own cells can be used to grow them. When an organ donation recipient has an organ grown in someone else’s body transplanted into their own, the recipient’s body will often reject it. To keep this from happening, doctors put patients on regiments of immunosuppressants to prevent the body from treating the organ as something it should fight. If the organs are grown by culturing a patient’s own cellular material, their body will not interpret it as foreign and the transplant is more likely to be a success. One consequence of all of this is that, once this technology is developed and assuming it becomes widely available, a person’s cellular material is capable of generating many livers, hearts, kidneys, and so on. The organs with which a person was born are just the initial set that the material provided by the body can produce under the right conditions.

These considerations present the raw material for a special form of the Ship of Theseus puzzle. The Ship of Theseus leaves a port on a long voyage. As it travels from one place to the next, it loses its pieces which fall to the bottom of the ocean. We can imagine that by the time the ship reaches its final destination, every part of it has been replaced. Is this still the Ship of Theseus? If not, at what stage did it cease to be the ship that left the port? When it sheds its first nail? When it sheds more than half of its parts? What if we were able to construct a ship using the parts found at the bottom of the sea? Would that be the ship that left the port?

If it becomes possible to grow any part of a human body by culturing cells, we could, in principle, replace a human body plank by plank, so to speak, with material that is cellularly identical to the material that was there before. When these parts have been implanted, what, if anything, has changed about the person’s body? Is there anything either morally or metaphysically important about the fact that cells were grown outside of the body rather than inside of it?

With all of this in mind, you might ask yourself: what does it mean to say that one of your organs is part of your body? After all, at any given time, an organ produced by your cellular material could either be inside of you or in a lab somewhere awaiting implantation or both. One initial way to answer the question may be that your body occupies an identifiable, though somewhat arbitrary, location near the seat of your consciousness. One unique, identifiable feature of occupying your body is that wherever you go, your body goes too. One shortcoming of this kind of position is that it might capture too much; the definition might be too broad. Imagine that a person has shrapnel inside of them from an explosion or has a piercing. These objects occupy the body or adorn the body, but we aren’t typically inclined to say that they are part of the body.

Another proposal is that the organ shares an origin story with the other parts of you, and that’s what makes it part of your body. According to this kind of view, the various parts of a person’s body came into existence as a result of a shared set of causal mechanisms. One shortcoming of this view is that we can, and do, make changes to a body, resulting in sets of physical features that do not share an origin. For example, intuitively, a transplanted organ becomes part of a person’s body after it is implanted, even though it was not grown in that space.

A third, perhaps more plausible, way of thinking about bodies is functional. Your body is your body because of the way the parts work together to play essential roles in keeping you alive and flourishing. So, imagine that you have contributed cellular material dedicated to the creation of a new liver to replace the one that you currently have. The new liver has not yet been implanted and it is currently on ice on the doctor’s office, ready for surgery. The liver that is currently in your body performing the function of a liver (even if it is doing so poorly) is part of your body. Even if the new liver is made of your cellular material, it is not part of your body until it is implanted and serving the function that a liver serves. One consequence of this kind of a position is that functional accounts of the body are not constrained to any particular kind of physical stuff. On this view, a pacemaker or an artificial hip counts as part of a person’s body. This functional account opens up all sorts of possibilities when it comes to how we think about the intersections of body and technology.

The ways that we think about bodies have moral implications at least in part because living beings stand in unique moral relations to their own bodies. Harm done to a person’s body affects that person in a first-personal way that no one else can experience. The things that happen to a person’s body can dictate the course of that person’s life. A person makes choices for their own body that would be either impossible or inappropriate for them to make for anyone else’s. All of this may give rise to unique rights and/or obligations.

For instance, if a person’s organs can be re-grown, are we obligated to provide space and resources for re-growth? Should it be possible for a person to die as a consequence of organ failure simply because they didn’t have the resources to re-grow their organs? Should the number of re-grown organs a person can produce be dependent on their financial resources? Does this technology pave the way for the rich to live forever while the poor die when their original organs fail? Does the potential for the re-growth of organs extend the human lifespan indefinitely and, if so, would this be a desirable state of affairs?

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Hybrid Workplaces and Epistemic Injustice

photograph of blurred motion in the office

The pandemic has, among other things, been a massive experiment in the nature of work. The percentage of people who worked from home either part- or full-time jumped massively over the past year, not by design but by necessity. We are, however, nearing a time in which people may be able to return to working conditions that existed pre-pandemic, and there have thus been a lot of questions about what work will look like going forward. Recent studies have indicated that while many people want to continue working from home at least some of the time, many also miss face-to-face interactions with coworkers, not to mention having a reason to get out of the house every once in a while. Businesses may also have financial incentives to have their employees working from home more often in the future: having already invested in the infrastructure needed to have people work from home over the past year, businesses could save money by not having to pay for the space for all their employees to work in-person at once. Instead of having everyone return to the office, many businesses are thus contemplating a “hybrid” model, with employees splitting their time between the office and home.

While a hybrid workplace may sound like the best of both worlds, some have expressed concerns with such an arrangement. Here’s a big one: those who are able to go into the office more frequently will be more visible, and thus may be presented with more opportunities for advancement than those who spend most of their working hours at home. There are many reasons why one might want or need to work from home more frequently, but one significant reason is that one has obligations to care for children or other family members. This may result in greater gender inequalities in the workplace, as women who take on childcare responsibilities will especially be at a disadvantage in comparison to single men who are able to put in a full workweek in the office.

Hybrid workplaces thus risk creating injustices, in which some employees will be unfairly disadvantaged, even if it is not the explicit intention of the employer. While these potential disadvantages have been portrayed in terms of opportunities for advancement, here I want to discuss another potential form of disadvantage which could result in injustices of a different sort, namely epistemic injustices.

Epistemic injustices are ones that affect people in terms of their capacities as knowers. For instance, if you know something but are unfairly treated as if you don’t, or are not taken as seriously as you should be, then you may be experiencing an epistemic injustice. Or, you might be prevented from gaining or sharing knowledge, not because you don’t have anything interesting to contribute, but because you’re unfairly being left out of the conversation. While anyone can experience epistemic injustice, marginalized groups that are negatively stereotyped and underrepresented in positions of power are especially prone to be treated as lacking knowledge when they possess it, and to be left out of opportunities to gain knowledge and share the knowledge they possess.

We can see, then, how hybrid workplaces may contribute to a disparity not only in terms of opportunities for advancement, but also in terms of epistemic opportunities. These are not necessarily unrelated phenomena: for instance, if those who are able to put in more hours in the office are more likely to be promoted, then they will also have more opportunities to gain and share knowledge pertinent to the workplace. There may also be more subtle ways in which those working from home can be left out of the conversation. For instance, one can still be in communication with their fellow employees from home (via virtual meetings, chats, etc.), they will miss out on the more organic interactions that occur when people are working face-to-face. It tends to be easier to just walk over to a coworker if you have a question then to schedule a Zoom call, a convenience that can result in some people being asked for their input much more frequently than others.

Of course, those working in hybrid environments do not need to have any malicious intent to contribute to epistemic injustices. Again, consider a situation in which you and a colleague are able to go back to the office on a full-time basis. You are likely to acquire a lot more information from that colleague who you are able to have quick and easy conversations with than the person working from home whose schedule you need to work around. You might not necessarily think that one of your colleagues is necessarily better than the other, but it’s just easier to talk to the person who’s right over there. What ends up happening, however, is that those who need to work from home more often are gradually going to be left out of the conversation, which will prevent them from being able to contribute in the same way as those working in the office.

These problems are not necessarily insurmountable. Writing in Wired, Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, writes that, “Unquestionably sticking to systems and processes that made an office-based model successful will doom any remote model to fail,” and mentions a number of measures that his company has taken to attempt to help remote workers communicate with one another, including “coffee chats” and “all-remote talent shows.” While I cannot in good conscience condone remote talent shows, it is clear that if businesses are going to have concerns of epistemic justice in mind, then making sure that there are more opportunities for there to be open lines of communication, including the possibility for informal conversations with remote workers, will be crucial.

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Biden, Trump, and the Dangers of Value-Free Science

President Joe Biden observes dosage preparations during a tour of a vaccination center

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the Trump administration lived in tension with scientific advisors. Because of concerns that Trump politicized science in ways that put life at risk and undermined public trust, the Biden administration is launching a 46-person federal scientific integrity task force to investigate areas where partisanship interfered with scientific decision-making and to come up with ways to keep politics out of science in the future. While risk to scientific integrity is an important concern, the thinking behind this task force risks covering up a problem rather than resolving it.

Critics seeking “evidence-based policy-making” have accused the Trump administration of letting politics interfere with issues including, but not limited to, coronavirus, climate change, and whether Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama. They also argue that this interference made the response to COVID-19 worse and led to a higher death toll. Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted, “What we have seen in the last administration is that the suppression of science, the reassignment of scientists, the distortion of scientific information around climate change was not only destructive but counterproductive and really problematic.”

But it isn’t clear scientific integrity can be defined in a way that is free from political interference or that it should be. Consider the memo from Biden on the subject which states that “scientific findings should never be distorted and influenced by political considerations.” While this might mean making sure that findings and data are not suppressed or distorted in ad hoc and arbitrary ways, this approach also sounds like an attempt to enforce a value-free ideal of science, which, according to many philosophers of science and scientists themselves, is neither possible nor desirable.

For starters, it isn’t clear that we can completely separate politics from science even if we wanted to. According to philosopher Helen Longino, what we take as evidence for something requires assumptions that are informed by our values. These assumptions often cannot be (and are not) empirically measured, and so “there are no formal rules, guidelines, or processes that can guarantee that social values will not permeate evidential relations.” Such assumptions can dramatically affect the methods taken by scientists including what protocols to follow, what sorts of things to measure, and for how long.

For example, in his book A Tapestry of Values, Keven Elliot provides an example of Woburn Massachusetts in the 1970s when several people became ill and it was noted that the local water had taken on a strange color and taste. Eventually it was discovered that barrels of industrial chemicals were found buried near the city’s wells. Proving a direct link between these chemicals and the many cancers and illnesses in the city proved difficult. A department of public health report about a connection between the two was inconclusive. Later, citizens of the community managed to get a separate study commissioned with significantly more input from the community and which later found that there was a significant correlation between consumption of water from the contaminated wells and the health problems people experienced. As Elliot notes,

“assumptions about the appropriate boundaries of the geographical area to be studied can be very important to scrutinize; if a study incorporates some heavily polluted areas and other areas that are not very polluted, it can make pollution threats appear less serious than they would otherwise be. Similarly, analyzing health effects together for two neighboring towns might yield statistically significant evidence for health problems, whereas analyzing health effects in the two towns separately might not yield statistically significant results.”

In other words, there are many cases where values are needed to inform the methods of research that is taken.

Consider an example from the headlines this week. On Monday it was reported that less than 3% of all land on Earth is fully ecologically intact. Philosophers Kristen Intemann and Inmaculada de Melo-Martin have argued that measuring climate impacts requires values because “impact” depends on judgments about what is worth protecting. As the paper that inspired this week’s headline makes clear, “there is no clear definition of what is meant by intactness and the term is used loosely in the scientific literature.” For some scientists measuring the intactness of an ecosystem is done by measuring anthropogenic influence, whereas for the authors of the paper measuring whether an ecosystem is intact will involve measuring the habitat intactness, faunal intactness, and functional intactness. Depending on how this is measured, we find that the amount of land that is intact varies from 3% to 25%. The decision regarding which of these measures to use is quite significant and will inevitably depend on our values. Whatever we decide, the findings will have an enormous impact on our policies.

Philip Kitcher has argued that science is not just about finding truth, but finding truths we deem significant, which makes democratically-informed values highly desirable. The decision of whether agricultural science should focus on efficiency and maximizing crop yields or sustainability and maintaining future output is something that we might want to be politically-informed. Another area where values are desirable involves cases of inductive risk. As I’ve previously explained it, inductive risk involves cases of dealing with the risks of real world consequences relative to the uncertainty you have in your current conclusion.

A really good example of this thinking at play is the public health advice when it comes to COVID. From social distancing, to mask-wearing, to vaccine use, the guidance has always been a matter of weighing what is known relative to risks of being wrong. This has been pretty blatant. Experts need to weigh the risks of, for example, using the AstraZeneca vaccine despite not knowing a lot about its connection to blood clots because the alternatives are worse. In a case like this, regardless about how you may feel about the scientific findings, when scientists say the benefits outweigh the risks, this is a value judgment, and therefore it is a fair question whether political or ethical values other than those of scientists should be relevant to science in way that doesn’t damage the integrity of the research.

For these reasons, many philosophers have argued that trying to bury values under the rug and pursuing a goal like value-free science isn’t helpful. If, in your attempt to banish political interference, values are only made more subtle and difficult to notice, you only make the problem worse. It’s possible that efforts to secure scientific integrity may stop short of the value-free ideal; the aim may not be to weed out all values, but only “improper political influence.” But then the word “improper” takes on huge significance and requires a lot of clarification. Thus, there is a larger moral question about how much influence democratic values should have over science and whether it is possible to provide an account of integrity that may be politically informed but not just as politically controversial at the end of the day.

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On the “Canceling” of Liz Cheney

photograph of Liz Cheney at Trump inauguration

On May 12th, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to remove Wyoming congressperson Liz Cheney from her leadership position as their conference chair. Previously the third-highest ranking member of the Republican Party in the House, Cheney’s responsibilities were focused primarily on maintaining an organized, unified approach to policy and governance among Republican lawmakers. Earlier in 2021, Cheney came under fire from her party members when she publicly criticized former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and behavior — including voting to support Trump’s second impeachment trial. After surviving an initial vote to revoke her chairship in February, Cheney was censured by the Wyoming GOP for failing to support Trump (Representative Tom Rice of South Carolina faced a comparable backlash for his similar vote). But after a tense leadership retreat at the end of April, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who had supported Cheney in February, but was recently caught criticizing her to a reporter with an unexpectedly hot microphone) instigated another attempt at her removal; after only sixteen minutes of debate, Cheney’s position was revoked by an unrecorded voice vote behind closed doors.

Prior to 2021, Liz Cheney had enjoyed relatively consistent political success as the sole representative of Wyoming in the House, routinely winning elections with supermajorities of the vote (her 2020 campaign, for example, saw her win 73% of primary ballots and nearly 70% of the general election). Particularly considering her political pedigree (her father is former Vice President Dick Cheney), it is perhaps unsurprising that Liz Cheney has been frequently mentioned in speculations about the future of the GOP’s leadership. Despite her recent setbacks, Cheney has indicated her plans to fight for her political future in the coming primary election (several additional candidates have already filed to run for the Republican nomination and Trump’s political team has indicated its intent to support one of her challengers).

The question for us to consider here is: what did Liz Cheney do wrong?

On its face, one answer to this question is plain: Cheney failed to show fealty to Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican party. Although once an ally of the former president (and supporting over 90% of his policy positions with her votes), various events during his final months in office — and particularly his instigation of the mob that attacked Congress on January 6th — led Cheney to break from what John Hudak and others have called “the Church of Trump.” Insofar as Trump’s political persona has become a synecdochal representation of the party as a whole, Cheney’s critiques of Trump’s behavior might be seen as critiques of the party itself — certainly by members of the party’s rank and file; consider how one man in Gillette, Wyoming explained his anger at Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump: “’We are very loyal people here,’ said Paul Roberts, 47. ‘We didn’t elect her to vote her conscience.’”

One might, then, be tempted to draw comparisons between the contemporary adulation Donald Trump receives from Republicans and the political theory of philosopher Thomas Hobbes. When Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina (who has represented his state in Washington since 1995), states that the Republican party can not “move forward without President Trump,” Graham is evoking an image of Trump as a political figurehead whose authority and power is of supreme importance for the continued functioning of the government — much like Hobbes’ notion of the Leviathan. To Hobbes, the world is a frightening and violent place filled with dangers — he infamously describes life in this so-called State of Nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — and only the strength of an absolute monarch can protect the citizenry and maintain social stability. Certainly, much of Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric, his fear-based politics, and his persistent cultivation of an authoritarian strong-man image over the last half-decade suggest a desire to be seen as a Hobbesian Leviathan (and the acquiescence of many long-standing party members within the GOP to such a vision is telling). By casting doubt on the primacy of the leader, Representative Cheney might be viewed by Republicans as a seditious enemy who needs to be removed from her influential position within the party.

However, this explanation seems incomplete — and not least because of the formal presumption that the United States recognizes no actual king. Although Cheney is one of the only party members to experience official punishment for her conscientious objections to Trumpism, she is not the only influential Republican to criticize Donald Trump. Consider, for example, the former governor of Massachusetts and current senator from Utah Mitt Romney: not only was Romney the sole Republican to vote for Trump’s conviction in both of the president’s Senate trials, but he has repeatedly criticized the former president’s approach to politics and even indicated publicly that he did not vote for Trump in 2020. Nevertheless, Romney has enjoyed relatively consistent support from many of his constituents and managed to avoid a censure vote from the Utah GOP in April (though a few Utah counties have since voted separately for his censure). Arguably, Romney, as a former Republican presidential nominee and long-standing representative of the party on a national scale, is an even bigger threat to Trump the Would-Be Leviathan than Liz Cheney, so why is she in even hotter water?

It might well be thanks to Cheney’s gender. Philosopher Kate Manne has argued that “misogyny” is not merely a matter of women being hated in virtue of their gender, but rather that misogyny manifests when women are systematically mistreated because of social structures that disadvantage them. More specifically, misogyny is “primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the “bad” women” who do not conform to the roles expected of them by those in power. Even if Trump is not a full-blown Leviathan, he certainly still wields considerable clout within the GOP: criticizing him, as Cheney has, could easily earn her the label of a “bad” woman who “deserves” to be exiled.

Consider, too, Cheney’s expected replacement as chair of the conference: four-term Representative Elise Stefanik from upstate New York. Although Stefanik’s voting record has been far less aligned with typical Republican positions than Cheney’s, she has been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump for some time. During Trump’s first impeachment trial, Stefanik found the spotlight with her passionate defenses of the accused president and has since continued to consistently back Trump, amplifying his claims about alleged voting irregularities in the 2020 election and voting to reject some of President Joe Biden’s electoral votes. In this way, Stefanik might be understood as someone who is playing the game so as to be included on the GOP/Trump team — she is a “good” woman serving well the interests of the system in which she finds herself (contrast this with Stefanik’s first few years in Congress when she was actually quite critical of Trump). Now, her pro-Trump performances have earned her praise from the former president, even as he has been increasingly critical of Cheney. By speaking her mind and voting her anti-Trump conscience, misogyny demands that Cheney be punished — even by Stefanik, who twice nominated Cheney for the leadership position she is now poised to assume.

The future of the Republican party — and whether the Cheneys/Romneys or Trumps/Stefaniks come to define it — remains to be seen. One thing, though, is certain: the consequences of hyper-partisan political attitudes negatively affect many people (both external and internal to the parties in question) — and women, in particular, bear uniquely potent pressures. When an authoritarian figure demands loyalty above all other virtues (and functionally “cancels” people who choose independence), everybody beneath the Leviathan’s boot loses.

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A Stark Divide: On Critical Race Theory in the Classroom

photograph of students studying at desks in classroom

“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist nation.” So declared Senator Tim Scott in his address last month. Refusing to acknowledge a messy explanation of how institutional racism contributes to significant racial disparities in criminal justice, healthcare, education, and economic outcomes, Scott chose the tidier, more familiar framing of racism as an all-or-nothing character trait. As though racism must always take the form of a conscious and deliberate act. As though offenders must have violence on their mind and evil in their hearts. As though longstanding inequities could be the simple work of a few bad apples.

But Scott’s pronouncement wasn’t designed for nuance, it was meant to serve a particular political function: contesting the need for race-based education in our schools.

“A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic. And if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them, and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.”

Race-based education, Scott claims, is infected with the very same racial essentialism it seeks to expunge. Whatever their intentions, these educational programs are thought to be reductive — they reduce individuality and personal responsibility to a matter of skin color and treat race as though it were the only relevant characteristic defining one’s social identity. But, as Scott argued, “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination.” As such, race-based education stands accused of being divisive. By focusing exclusively on our differences, it pits us against each other rather than bringing us together. Perhaps most damning of all, race-based education challenges an article of faith: that the social, political, and economic rewards reaped in this life are proportional to the sweat of one’s brow.

These charges, however, misunderstand (and sometimes willfully misconstrue) the purpose and aims of race-based education. Critical race theory, the unnamed villain in Scott’s address, is designed to question the ways we perceive our society and the ways we are perceived. These reflections provide us the opportunity to develop and strengthen our racial and social literacy. At its very core, critical race theory challenges each of us to appreciate our situatedness (or perhaps “thrownness”). There is no view from nowhere; we all speak from a specific perspective informed by a unique lived experience, and we each possess a particular point of view. If we are to truly come together and bridge that gap, then we must learn to recognize these differences and begin to develop a shared language with which to communicate — identifying the barriers to the inclusive and just society we wish to share, as well as articulating the work needed to dismantle them.

Critics often assert that critical race theory is not a proper pedagogical model because it focuses on what to learn rather than how to learn. In truth, however, it offers us an alternative lens by which to gain perspective on our social situation and consider the ways things could be otherwise. In this way, critical race theory delivers real educational goods: the civilizing of students, the enlargement of imagination and empathy, the cultivation of rich and meaningful autonomy, and the development of independent judgment by challenging dogmatic ways of thinking and perceiving.

The political war being waged on race-based education is not new. Senator Scott’s statements echo Trump’s proclamations that critical race theory represents “radical indoctrination,” and Scott’s words speak in support of Trump’s (since rescinded) ban on the “un-American propaganda” in diversity and inclusion initiatives. Critical race theory is smeared as left-wing proselytizing, the toxic by-product of the Great Awokening spilling out of the ivory tower and threatening education reform from grade school on up. To escape being swallowed up by PC culture and white guilt, there is but one recourse: Resist. And many conservative state legislatures are responding by outlawing any and all attempts to broach the subject of slavery and segregation in American history in the classroom.

In the wake of recent events, many schools have been prompted to reconsider their traditional course offerings. Unfortunately, proposed changes to the education curriculum are continually cast as a struggle over the soul of the nation. Just last month, Cornel West and Jeremy Tate referred to Howard University’s dissolving of its classics department as a “spiritual catastrophe,” signaling the “spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness run amok in American culture.” Contrary to faculty’s explanation, they depict Howard’s decision as a loss of faith. Lacking the strength of conviction to defend the sacred texts, Howard succumbed to pressure from the woke mob. The barbarians are at the gates.

In defending the discipline from would-be reformers, West and Tate emphasize the formative power the study has for its disciples. “Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage” they argue, “is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.” But the idea that one must assimilate oneself into Western culture in order to find one’s true identity and have anything meaningful to say is precisely the problem. It may very well be true that only through understanding our place in history can we ever hope to know ourselves, but the question that remains is: whose history?

This question is especially pressing for a discipline like classics. Even scholars within the field are beginning to question the ways in which the study lends itself to supporting white supremacy narratives, promotes Eurocentrism, and is instrumental to the construction of whiteness. As classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta has argued, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.” So how might we separate the meat from the bone and dismantle the power structures that seem inextricably fused to the life-blood of the discipline?

This discussion regarding what should be excised and what can be rescued within the classics curriculum reflects the substantial difficulty facing us in the larger societal conversation. Unfortunately, these questions are often explored in terms of who is cancelling whom — is the left out to expel all conservatives from the academy, or is the right suppressing academic freedom by claiming that all education is merely liberal ideology? But this way of assessing the debate only encourages us to retreat to our separate political corners. Commentary devolves into scorekeeping: whose tribe is winning? At present, public debate is paralyzed, consumed in accusing the other side of one of two untenable extremes: continuing to actively ignore an oppressive status quo, or burning everything to the ground.

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Public Divorces and Media Privacy

photograph of Bill and Melinda Gates

On May 3rd, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their decision to divorce. The announcement sent shockwaves through the business community as well as the philanthropic world, and surprised many members of the general public. Since the announcement, little by little, media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to The Daily Mail have been publishing news stories speculating on the reason for divorce, and also providing very personal aspects of the Gates’ married life. This coverage raises important questions about the role of the media in reporting on the private lives of the rich and famous and the role of individuals in consuming this private information.

Where should we draw the line when it comes to media coverage of relationships and dating? Is it moral to seek out such intimate information about a stranger’s life?

Coverage of high-profile relationships is by no means new. For decades tabloids and mainstream news have covered the intimate details of the personal relationships of public servants to Hollywood socialites. While many celebrities make their living primarily from remaining relevant in the public eye, a whole host of other professionals, like athletes, politicians, and philanthropists have also received their fair share of scrutiny. In 2009, news of Tiger Woods’ litany of affairs dominated the news cycle for weeks. In 2019, during Jeff and McKenzie Bezos’ divorce, details of his consistent public infidelity came to light. Would we know, or care to know, any of these details about our coworkers, acquaintances, or even strangers?

Many of us accept media scrutiny of the rich and famous but would be appalled if a local news channel or paper ran a story on the affairs of everyday people. Though there are designated celebrity news platforms which specialize in tabloid gossip, even conventional news sources partake in running stories which reveal embarrassing and personal details of public figures. Clearly, these stories get more clicks than criticism, but that does not necessarily make such stories ethical.

The field of celebrity gossip carries its own set of ethics. These include seeking permission by subjects whenever possible, avoiding content which could harm a celebrity’s reputation, and maintaining credible sources of information. In the case of Bill and Melinda Gates, several pieces of information released by the press arguably both invade their privacy and damage their reputation. For example, the media recently reported on the details of Bill Gates’ annual trips to visit his ex-girlfriend for a weekend, a condition reportedly negotiated during the Gates’ marriage arrangements. As this arrangement appears to be consensual, private, and holds a high potential for damaging the Gates’ reputation there does not appear to be an ethical reason to report on it if not given permission to do so. Other details of the decision to divorce are more ethically fuzzy, such as Bill Gates’ association with Jeffrey Epstein serving as a motivating factor for the divorce. While this information is private, there is also an interest in the public knowing who was closely associated with a convicted child predator. As more information comes out about the Gates’ divorce, it is important to analyze information reported through the critical lens of journalistic ethics.

Should individuals seek out news concerning the personal lives and relationships of celebrities? Whether or not we believe that the media should cover such stories depends on what value derives from access to this information. While it makes sense to publicize clearly immoral actions of public figures, from violent behavior to fraud and deception, why should we make public the relatively amoral details of their personal affairs? Perhaps we seek out this knowledge because we believe that those we idolize, buy products from, or even vote for, should be “good people.” To some, a string of affairs might communicate a lack of trustworthiness, and a divorce could communicate a lack of perseverance. If we demand these qualities in our business or political leaders it makes sense that we would want to know these details in their personal lives. However, is setting such moral standards reasonable considering the fact that about 1 in 5 Americans engage in infidelity at some point in their lives and roughly 40% of marriages end in divorce? Knowing the sordid details of Bill Gates’ divorce will likely not impact the way that people interact with Microsoft, or even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It might, however, affect the level of space Gates is given in influencing public discourse. This function of accessing celebrities’ personal information is based on the utility it brings to exercising our own relationships with these celebrities. Perhaps this is similar to how we might judge a coworker or friend: if we found out they behaved in a way contrary to our values, we might limit the degree to which we trust or revere celebrities who do similar things.

Another reason we might seek out this information is not to make judgments, but to revel in the rich and famous’ inability to fulfill happiness despite their massive privilege. Knowing that even Bill Gates is not immune from divorce shatters the image that immense wealth automatically creates the perfect life. Those who do not enjoy such privilege yet have happy marriages might feel satisfaction knowing that they have something that Gates does not. Alternatively, realizing that even those who wield the most power in society might still have imperfect personal lives might change one’s priorities or path to seeking long-term happiness. This function of celebrity gossip might be considered immoral if one believes that we should not use others simply as a source of entertainment, pleasure, or wisdom – especially without their permission.

Finally, answering these questions requires grappling with celebrity privacy, and how much we believe their choosing the spotlight justifies having the painful details of one’s most difficult moments on full display. While fame comes with higher scrutiny, perhaps we should reconsider where we think the lines should be drawn. Perhaps those who choose to use the media to amass wealth and followers should expect no less attention  when it comes to difficult or painful topics. However, perhaps we might believe that no one deserves such details on display, regardless of their position in the public eye. Tabloids have notoriously caused acute mental distress to celebrities and profited off of humiliating personal experiences while doing so. While many might enjoy reading entertainment news, they might not be comfortable with the range of methods taken to obtain this information.

Privacy is something nearly everyone values in their personal lives, especially concerning the most intimate details of close relationships. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we would be comfortable with our relationship drama splashed across the front page before clicking on the next celebrity divorce story.

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Why Would Anyone Marry?

black and white photograph of "Just Married" in back window of vintage car

“Marriage is wonderful when it lasts forever, and I envy the old couples in When Harry Met Sally who reminisce tearfully about the day they met 50 years before. I no longer believe, however, that a marriage is a failure if it doesn’t last forever. It may be a tragedy, but it is not necessarily a failure. And when a marriage does last forever with love alive, it is a miracle.”

                                                                           —Peggy O’Mara, Mothering

On May 3rd, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce, stating that after lots of “thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” ending their twenty-seven year union. Whatever their reasons for divorce — the announcement being understandably vague — we should pause here to think about an important philosophical question, namely: why would anyone marry? Choosing to enter into a marriage is among the most consequential decisions one can make, affecting potential future children, well-being and happiness, and so on. A good marriage can be a major blessing, but a bad marriage can be hell.

Here’s a rough argument against marriage: no one wants a loveless marriage; it is something that, if we knew it would happen, would likely encourage us not to wed to begin with — to be stuck in a loveless marriage is a potential horror show. Often enough, the love couples feel for each other, entering a marriage, will fade and sometimes cease. To avoid this fate, we should be reticent prior to taking the vows. As the philosopher, Dan Moller, explains:

“Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument [against marriage] is simply that, (a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable.”

What’s partly hard about marrying is that emotions — an essential aspect of romantic love — have an autonomous element, not wholly governed by the will, even with the best of intentions. If romantic love is an essential aspect of marriage, how can marriage vows bind? When you cannot control something, you cannot be culpable for it — we don’t think people culpable for the ocean waves, by example.

Someone may object that marriage vows specify actions, not emotional states, and are thus under our control. As the philosopher, Justin McBrayer, argues:

“Notice how heavily [many generic marriage vows focus] on actions compared to emotions: support one’s partner, honor one’s partner, respect one’s partner, and so on. Even the emotional content is easily understood in a behavioral sense: to be a faithful partner in sickness and health clearly has a behavioral component. To see this, imagine the following thought-experiment. Suppose Landon makes the aforementioned promise to Hannah. Suppose next that he feels all the right things toward her (for example, he is in love with her), but that his behavior is wildly erratic – he sleeps around, is verbally abusive to Hannah, abandons her when she is ill, etc. Would anyone be willing to say that Landon has fulfilled his wedding vow? Surely not.”

There’s only one problem with this: it ignores the fact that emotions, like romantic love, are also essential to marriage. Of course it is clear that marriage vows, and marriage itself, includes the vow to do certain things — many married people expect their partner to be faithful to them, by example. However, it cannot be that actions and behavior is all there is to marriage — without an appropriate emotional component, it is not clear one would be in a marriage they would find fulfilling and satisfying. Imagine a different thought experiment: John treats his wife well, cares for her when ill, never cheats on her, and so forth, but simply doesn’t feel love for her at all. He is a good husband to fulfill his marriage vows because his nagging conscience won’t let him break them. We wouldn’t think though that this is a fulfilling marriage; it likely isn’t one John would have entered into had he known the result would be the death of love for his wife. Whether marriage vows include a behavior aspect is irrelevant — emotions seem a necessary part of marriage too.

So then we must wonder why people would marry — the people who marry usually do not want to end in a loveless marriage. There must be an upside then to marriage; benefits that contribute to our well-being. Likely they partly include the positive emotions many experience, especially in the early days of the marriage. However, there must be more to explain why so many people, despite the risk a bad marriage poses to living a good life, still choose to tie the knot.

It looks like, in addition to a romantic venture, marriage is a commitment device: by imposing costs on dissolving a marriage, the institution of marriage forces individuals to comprise and grow in a manner they wouldn’t if the cost of ‘walking away’ from a relationship were relatively low. And this can do several things: incentivize individuals in a marriage to work together, to engage in personal improvement for the sake of the union and family, provide a more stable environment for rearing kids, and make relationship-specific investments. Think of it like this: often time, but not always, couples will get along if forced to. Imagine, by example, you’re permanently handcuffed to someone — your fate and theirs are bound up. It would then make sense, assuming the other person is reasonable, to make the best of the situation by doing things like getting along and compromising.

This can, of course, be a bad thing if one of the partners is unreasonable; there are downsides to nearly anything. Our point isn’t to claim that marriage is always a good thing — we began the piece by thinking about why anyone would marry — but to highlight some marital benefits; whether the benefits outweigh the costs will likely vary from couple to couple. However, there are some downsides too if the cost of abandoning commitments is too low: it may be harder in some cases to find a long-term relationship if the cost of finding a new partner, whenever one is even remotely dissatisfied, is too low. To illustrate, consider a scene from Season 5, Episode 4 of Seinfeld, where Elaine has just dumped her partner:

JERRY: You’re out of your mind you know that.

ELAINE: What?

JERRY: It’s an exclamation point! It’s a line with a dot under it.

ELAINE: Well, I felt a call for one.

JERRY: A call for one, you know I thought I’ve heard everything. I’ve never heard a relationship being affected by a punctuation.

ELAINE: I found it very troubling that he didn’t use one.

We don’t want to be trapped in a loveless marriage, obviously; but we should worry too if the cost of abandoning our commitments is too low — the ramification of that would extend beyond marriage to, among other moral practices, promises more generally.

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Saturday Night Live and the Humanization of Elon Musk

headshot photograph of elon musk in a tux

In late April of 2021, the long-running sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live announced that Elon Musk, controversial tech magnate and owner of Tesla, would be hosting the show on May 8th. This decision was a controversial one, both for viewing audiences and SNL cast members, who were given the option not to perform alongside the billionaire. Some critics were reminded of when Donald Trump hosted SNL back in 2015, a decision which the showrunners (despite their generally negative attitude towards the president during his four-year reign) never openly interrogated or expressed regret towards in later episodes. But do major pop culture institutions like SNL have an obligation to only give the spotlight to figures who meet certain ethical standards? By allowing deeply problematic figures to dress up in silly costumes and tell milquetoast jokes about themselves, are we normalizing oppressive power structures, or is all this just baseless moral frittering?

Evidence does suggest that SNL has very little impact on our perception of the rich and powerful. In 2012, Oxford University conducted a study on the impact Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impersonation had on voter perception of the vice-presidential candidate. They found that people from both ends of the political spectrum tend to come to SNL with their opinions already fully formed, and that Fey’s impression had little to no real world impact on the voting populace. With that in mind, it’s unlikely that those with a deep-seated distrust of Musk would be won over by his Wario impression.

Even so, SNL certainly made gestures towards humanizing Musk. As one critic for NPR describes,

“[Musk’s] game efforts to keep up with the show’s cast helped lighten his growing image as a callous tech bro — see the public furor when he downplayed and questioned concerns about the coronavirus last year — including a joke in one sketch about how his character once thought masks were dumb, but now believe they make sense.”

This seems a glib attempt to gloss over the very real harm done by Musk at the height of the pandemic, which includes spreading blatant misinformation about coronavirus through Twitter and providing less than adequate access to ventilators. Musk seems determined to embed himself in pop culture, which is part of a larger problem than the Oxford study can address.

In an article for The New Yorker, Naomi Fry theorizes that Musk’s attempt at relatability signals a dissolution between the categories of “mainstream” and “indie” culture. Nowadays, the hyper-wealthy share memes on Twitter, do drugs, and understand video game references. Musk may hold more wealth than the majority of the population combined, but he can also make jokes about Star Wars on Twitter. In particular, Fry argues that the controversy surrounding Musk’s surprising union with indie musician Grimes, who before dating the neo-colonialist tech giant proclaimed herself to be an “anti-imperialist,” has inspired “a nostalgia for a time when political differences translated more securely into differences of taste, and vice versa.” She asks, “What if ideological distinctions still mattered and were not so easily swept away by a leveling torrent of information and capital?”

At the end of the day, Saturday Night Live is interested in numbers, not ethics. As The Washington Post pointed out, SNL typically draws in the most viewers when the host is at the center of an ongoing controversy; Trump attracted nearly 9 million viewers, and their most highly rated episode of all time was hosted by Nancy Kerrigan in 1994, not long after her entanglement with Tonya Harding. Musk wasn’t selected for his acting chops, but for the boost in ratings that his name would provide. SNL is clearly not an indie show corrupted by the mainstream influence of Musk; this is an instant of the mainstream embracing the mainstream for mercenary ends. At the same time, our collective discomfort with Musk’s hosting gig speaks to our longing for aesthetic and political readability, our weariness with the relationship between media and capitalism.

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On the Art of Evildoers

close-up photograph of Philip Roth

The fall of a literary star is something to behold. At the beginning of April, Blake Bailey was the toast of the literary world; his new biography of the novelist Philip Roth had been published to acclaim, landing on The New York Times best-seller list. But by the end of the month, Bailey’s fortunes were laid low by horrific allegations made against him, including that he raped two women as recently as 2015 and “groomed” middle school girls when he was a teacher in the 1990s. After they surfaced, his publisher, W.W. Norton, took the rare step of stopping promotion and shipment of the book just days after his literary agent dropped him as a client.

One might very well be tempted to say, “good riddance.” And there is no reason to defend Bailey personally; the accusations against him are credible and multiple. Yet Norton’s decision raises an important philosophical question: how evil does a person have to be in order for it to be impermissible to disseminate their art?

One problem we are immediately confronted with is the issue of arbitrariness. Are there any criteria for setting a threshold for the badness of a person such that it is impermissible to disseminate their art? One fruitful perspective on this question comes from rule consequentialism, which evaluates the rightness of acts according to how much the rules permitting or obligating those acts would promote overall good consequences, however the latter are spelled out. This perspective helps with the problem of arbitrariness because it prompts us to compare, in a morally meaningful way, different thresholds in terms of their hypothetical consequences. Not publishing Bailey’s book implies a rule setting the threshold for permissible publication at rape or sexual assault (or, presumably, worse). What would be the effect of consistently applying that rule as compared to a world in which the rule permitted disseminating just about anyone’s art?

Shockingly, not a few great artists have either admitted to or been credibly accused of rape or worse. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, details his attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl named Dora in his unpublished memoir Men and Women. William S. Burroughs killed his wife; Norman Mailer came close. Eldridge Cleaver famously wrote about raping white women as an act of revolutionary violence. Of course, Woody Allen stands credibly accused of sexually assaulting his daughter, Dylan Farrow; Roman Polanski was actually convicted of drugging, raping, and sodomizing a 14-year-old girl. And then there’s Bill Cosby. And Hitler, whose Mein Kampf chillingly lays out the dictator’s plans for the extermination of world Jewry.

The point is this: applied consistently, the rule implied by the act of not publishing Bailey’s work would deprive us in some cases of great works of art, and in other cases of important information. Publishers, producers, and art dealers, hesitant to invest in works that they might end up having to pull, might refuse to enter into contracts with artists without intrusive background checks. Yet the world of the consistently applied rule would also be better than ours in certain respects: victims would not be retraumatized by the fame of their abusers; artists might be deterred from committing heinous behavior by the thought that it would negatively affect their careers. How one weighs these different effects is a matter of fine judgment. In my view, the benefits seem speculative, while the costs seem probable and cumulatively great. But I could be wrong.

Another idea is that it is wrong to benefit people who are guilty of heinous moral wrongs, perhaps because it encourages or emboldens them to continue behaving as they do, or because — if they continue to commit badly — we may take on partial responsibility for their wrongdoing. Here, I think, we can do better than simply throwing up our hands and concluding that we must benefit wrongdoers if we want to benefit from their art— or at least, that we must benefit only them. For example, in Bailey’s case, Norton could have decided to donate all of the proceeds minus Bailey’s royalties from his book to rape survivors’ organizations. This outcome would surely not encourage Bailey, as it constitutes a clear condemnation of him. This would also be a great way of establishing some symbolic distance between the publisher and the author.

There are other compelling arguments against publication from a non-consequentialist perspective. Some may think that it is simply wrong to honor individuals who are guilty of heinous moral wrongs. By “honor” I mean something like expressing admiration for a person in a way that tends to enhance their social status. Perhaps this is wrong because such individuals do not morally deserve to be honored — and not because honoring them would bring about bad consequences. Publishing a person’s book certainly does honor them; thus, it is wrong to publish. The trouble with this argument is that it is arbitrary: when is a moral wrong so heinous that the obligation applies? Is there any reason to prefer the rule that sets the threshold for heinous acts at the killing of ten people rather than the killing of one? There doesn’t seem to be. Without any reason to draw the line at rape or sexual assault rather than, say, the extermination of the entire human race, we might as well choose the higher bar. But if we draw the line at the higher bar, then in effect publishing anyone is permissible.

That we nevertheless tend to believe it is wrong to honor people who don’t deserve it helps to explain why the question whether it is wrong to publish evil people will remain with us for the foreseeable future. Human beings have a well-documented aversion to ambivalence, preferring to hold either wholly positive or wholly negative attitudes towards persons and things. But publishing evil people puts us in the uncomfortably ambivalent position of having to appreciate and honor their talents while abhorring their deeds. This will never be a natural fit for beings like us.

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How Can the 2022 Olympic Games Remain Neutral?

photograph of runner statues in Beijing's Olympic Park

After a year of isolation for most everyone around the world, there is hope that we will get back to a  more normal existence thanks to the continued roll-out of vaccines. Traditions that were impossible with coronavirus might now be making a comeback, and this includes the internationally-beloved Olympic Games. While the Tokyo 2021 Olympics are desperately trying to make the show go on while Japan struggles with a rise in infections, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is already facing challenges to the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. Although the city won the bid to host the games in 2015 there has been an intense wave of criticism with China’s recent actions towards their own people. When Beijing was one of two countries on the ticket to win the bid for next years’ Olympics, the IOC passed reforms aimed at protecting human rights in the host countries. This was after the Sochi 2014 Olympics where there were mass violations of human rights, especially against migrant workers who came to Sochi to help build the facilities for the Olympics. In an attempt to prevent a similar disaster in the future, the IOC passed a number of reforms. Thus far, however, these measures have proven ineffective in preventing human rights violations. Despite China currently committing atrocities against their own citizens, the IOC continues to support them as the host country.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have characterized China’s actions against the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region as “genocide.” Since 2019, over one million Uyghurs have been held in “re-education” camps, which are essentially forced assimilation camps where there have been reports of physical abuse, torture, and forced sterilizations. China has denied these allegations and instead claimed that the camps teach job skills as well as the Chinese language. Reports, however, indicate that the Uyghur population, a minority ethnic group, is under continued attack by the Chinese government. These actions represent a clear violation of the reforms the IOC passed in 2015.

Additionally, the government in Beijing has focused their authoritarian energy on Hong Kong, a region that traditionally enjoyed a democratic-like leadership because of former British rule. Recently, that system has essentially collapsed as the government has passed laws placing all the political power of Hong Kong firmly back in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. This has led to arrests of pro-democracy leaders and human rights activists. Those who escaped are now hiding in exile. As another component of the government’s desire to see a completely unified China, the central government might make Taiwan, who considers itself independent from China, it’s next target. In addition, the Chinese government continues its political control over Tibet, despite the decades-long movement for a free Tibet. Taken together, there is overwhelming evidence that China is currently violating, and will continue to violate, the rights of those they don’t see as fully pro-China.

This situation makes the IOC’s continued support of the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing increasingly difficult to justify. Already, over 180 organizations have called for a boycott. In response, the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, has insisted that the IOC must remain neutral. This position should perhaps not come as a surprise as the IOC allowed for Nazi Germany to hold the 1936 Olympics, when their anti-semitic policies were well-known around the world. The Nazi regime ensured visitors would receive a picture-perfect look of Germany, one where everyone was welcomed and accepted — a very far cry from the reality. Germany played the part so well that the Games helped legitimize the Nazi regime and earn appeasement from the rest of the world. Eleven Olympic athletes would die in the Holocaust just a few years later. While the Berlin Games were decades ago, the IOC appears to still not have learned their dangerous lesson and recognized the legitimizing power that the Olympics can bring to a country actively violating the rights of millions of people. This power makes it impossible for the IOC to be truly “neutral” in these violations; refusing to move the Olympic venue makes them complicit in the ongoing violence against people in China.

The decision to hold the games in Beijing is in direct opposition to the spirit and mission of the IOC. By their very own definition, Olympism represents a“philosophy of life” for the Olympics which seeks “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” That vision also consists of “building a better world through sport.” While these inspirational statements gesture at universal values and global commitments, the committee’s actions look very different. Besides refusing to move the location of the 2022 Olympics, the IOC has also urged countries not to protest these games on the grounds that such demonstrations are not effective in changing policy. While the IOC claims they are fully supportive of freedom of expression, they continue to uphold Rule 50, which is meant to “keep the field of play, Olympic village and the podium neutral.” In reality, this measure merely bars athletes from expressing dissent.

When pressed to draw lines, the committee has reflexively responded that no country should be quick to cast the first stone: “where would you celebrate the games if you take that attitude?” Such deflections make a darker point: while countries like Britain and the U.S. chose to confront Nazi extremism, both have a violent past of colonization and slavery of their own to reckon with. Countries around the world have their own histories, current realities, and potential futures of human rights conflicts. It might be nearly impossible to find a country completely free of blame.

But this does not mean that we must stand idly by. We should instead recognize that it is impossible to remain neutral in today’s world. While sports may be a cathartic and temporary relief from the stress of reality for a lot of people, it is a true privilege to be able to enjoy that relief. There are too many lives, cultures, and countries at risk for the IOC to ignore China’s treatment of its citizens and behavior toward its neighbors. If the committee truly wants to live up to their mission of creating a better world through sport, then they need to acknowledge the lived realities of people being silenced and abused around the world and recognize the impact the Games have in legitimizing those actions and hiding that abuse.

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Can You Be a Different Person After the Pandemic?

photograph of woman in masking looking at reflection in the window

An opinion piece in The New York Times recently made the rounds on social media, and makes what looks like a pretty big claim: “you can be a different person after the pandemic.” While the title of the article quickly became a meme, the article itself emphasizes the possibility of a “post-pandemic dispositional makeover.” For example, if you were the kind of person who was chronically late before the pandemic, you can work on developing your conscientiousness so that once you’re able to meet people in the real world again you’ll be on time. Or, if you’re an introverted person, you can work on becoming more sociable; if you’re easily annoyed you can work on being more agreeable, etc. The important takeaway is that your personality is not set in stone, and that changes to major aspects of your personality are achievable, in “just a few months.”

Can you be a different person after the pandemic? That, of course, depends on what you mean by “different person.” The kinds of changes depicted in the memes – e.g. changing from human to eagle, or Stars Wars force-ghost, etc. – are likely not achievable. But what about changes to my personality? Are those achievable, and if so, will I be a “different person” as a result?

Questions about personal identity – i.e., questions about what makes you you – have been mulled over by philosophers for a very long time. There are big questions here about whether you are anything over and above the physical stuff that makes up your body, whether you have a soul (and if you do, what it’s like), whether you have any kind of “essence” (and if you do, what it’s like), and whether you can really be a different thing at different points in time. Plato, for instance, argued that you have an immortal soul that is composed of different parts, and that the way these parts are in balance with one another determine the way you are and the things you do. Other philosophers don’t put much stock in the idea of things like souls. Jean Paul Sartre, for instance, took a look at a view like Plato’s and flipped it on its head: instead of having some kind of essence that determines what you do, Sartre said that the things that you do determine what we think of as your essence. While someone like Plato thinks that essence comes before existence, Sartre argued that existence comes before essence.

It is this latter, broadly Sartrean view that seems to be underlying the opinion from The New York Times that you can, in fact, be a different person after the pandemic: if you change your habits, if you start doing different things, then you will be a different person as a result. Instead of appealing to philosophy, it appeals to work in psychology, specifically the “Big Five” personality test. The test – which you can take online for free, if you’re so inclined – gives you a score on five different characteristics: extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Scoring “high” or “low” on any of these measures is not meant to be necessarily good or bad, and does not differentiate between different people’s reasons that they might have for answering any given way on any given question. While many, many personality tests have failed to be endorsed by the scientific community (perhaps the most infamous being the Myers-Briggs personality test) the Big Five ostensibly has empirical support. 

In taking the test myself, I was not surprised at the results. I am neither high- nor low-scoring on extraversion or conscientiousness, I’m pretty agreeable and not super emotionally stable, and I maxed-out open-mindedness. Is this the personality profile of the kind of person I would like to be? In some sense, sure; in others, not so much. I wish I got less stressed out by things, I can be overly negative and complain a lot, and being a bit more sociable certainly wouldn’t hurt. Maybe coming out of the pandemic I can be this new and better person. “Changing a trait requires acting in ways that embody that trait,” The New York Times article says, “you can behave ‘as if’ you are the person you want to be. Pretty soon, you might find that it is you.”

How are you supposed to do this? Therapy is one option: “a month of therapy — any kind of therapy — reduced neuroticism by about half the amount you might expect to see it naturally decline over the course of your entire life.” No time for therapy? Maybe you could download an app to remind you to “perform small tasks to help tweak [your] personalities, like ‘talk to a stranger when you go grocery shopping.’” Small changes in behavior over time may stick, and after a while you might find yourself a more gregarious shopper, assuming that’s the kind of person you want to be.

There are clearly scientific questions we can ask here, about whether such apps are effective in changing behavior, how long-lasting such changes are, and what that means in terms of changing aspects of one’s personality. I’ve raised one philosophical question, about what these kinds of changes might mean for our identity, and what it might mean to say that one becomes a “different person” as a result. But we might also consider an ethical question. My personality test told me that I’m not a super high-scorer in terms of extroversion or agreeableness. I might then reflect on these results and think that maybe being a grumpy introvert is not my ideal form of being. If it’s the case that I can change aspects of my personality, maybe it’s not only the case that I can be a different person after the pandemic, but that I ought to be, as well.

Of course, a complication of pandemic life has been that many people, I suspect, have not really felt “like themselves” over the past year-and-a-bit. The pandemic has made people more stressed and anxious for many reasons, and that’s no doubt going to show up in the results of personality tests. As I’ve written here before, while the pandemic has offered some the opportunity for self-improvement, it is perhaps better to focus on self-maintenance. When thinking about the kind of person we want to be after the pandemic, I think we should say something similar: while it may be a worthwhile goal to become a better person, it is also worthwhile to aim for getting back to normal. Instead of being a different person after the pandemic, perhaps we should focus on being the people we were before it started.

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COVID-19 Vaccines and Drug Patent Laws

photograph of covid vaccine ampules

One of the problems that Canada has had with the COVID vaccines is a lack of domestic production. We are told that there are plans to construct a new facility for such purposes, but that this will not occur until long after it is needed. In the meantime, it was reported this week that Biolyse, a small pharmaceutical manufacturer in Ontario, has offered to produce millions of doses of vaccine but can’t because patents prevent them from being able to do so. This is just one example of a much larger moral issue regarding potential patent reform.

About three-quarters of the vaccine supply has been secured by 10 countries that account for 60 percent of global economic growth. However, 130 countries haven’t received any doses and they account for over 2 billion people. Companies like Biolyse have offered to produce vaccines for lower-income nations, but they haven’t been able to secure a license from companies like Johnson & Johnson in order to do it. This has led to a growing call for waivers for intellectual property such as patent protections so that more companies can manufacture vaccines to increase the supply.

The move has been led by South Africa and India who are seeking support from to suspend elements of the WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement concerning intellectual property rights for the direction of the coronavirus pandemic. So far, however, the United States and several other countries have blocked negotiations, and this has led to direct appeals to President Biden as “the full protection of intellectual property and monopolies will only negatively impact efforts to vaccinate the world and be self-defeating.”

While efforts such as the UN supported Vaccines Global Access Facility have helped with distribution of vaccines in lower-income nations, the greatly unequal distribution suggests how limited these efforts have been. Supporters of waiving IP rights in this case argue that we should be able to take advantage of unused production capacity to maximize the supply of vaccines. This is particularly important because current estimates show that many nations will be waiting until 2024 to achieve mass immunization. This situation represents a significant drain on the global economy and complicates our ability to deal with variants. Experience also teaches that drug manufacturers in developing nations can make large amounts of quality drugs inexpensively.

Supporters of a waiver also point out the massive amount of public funding that pharmaceutical companies have received to develop coronavirus vaccines and that much of the groundwork for those vaccines were discoveries that came from federally-funded research. Thus, they argue that the vaccine should be a “people’s vaccine” that is universally available to all at no cost. They also suggest that such a waiver would send a message of commitment to public health as opposed to prioritizing intellectual property rights.

Opponents of the measure, however, argue that waiving patents would dampen scientific innovation by deterring private investment. They argue that a waiver “creates a dangerous precedent of nullifying IP rights” which “destroys the bedrock of what makes medial innovation possible.” The argument makes the case that vaccine development is expensive and, without a guarantee of success, a patent protection guarantee is necessary for innovators to continue to fund their efforts. They also argue that existing regulations are already flexible to allow vaccine drug manufacturers to voluntarily engage in agreements with generic drug manufacturers.

It is important to note that just because regulations are flexible to allow something doesn’t mean that that thing will happen. Nor does one case of a patent waver constitute a “precedent.” Typically, precedents require context, so outside of a pandemic scenario, it’s difficult to see how this might become a problem. Unless, of course, that larger context concerns how to reform our use of patents in the face of other significant moral problems, in which case such a moral conversation might be more helpful.

To consider how a wider discussion of the morality of drug patents might be helpful to the issue of the COVID vaccine, we can look to moral philosophers who have addressed the issue. In 2009, philosopher Thomas Pogge argued that developing nations’ adoption of global uniform intellectual property rights under the TRIPs agreement is morally problematic. He maintained that the loss of freedom to produce, sell, and buy medicines produced by patents imposes a huge loss in terms of disease and premature death that cannot be justified. The typical alternatives of government initiatives and partnerships (such as the UN-backed COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility or COVAX) to deliver medicines to developing nations “are really doing good by improving the situation relative to what it would be under TRIPs unmitigated. Still, these efforts are not nearly sufficient to protect the poor.” Indeed while COVAX has delivered hundreds of thousands of doses, “the disparity between high- and low-income countries remains vast.”

Pogge explains how corporate interests and public health outcomes are misaligned; if pharmaceutical companies help low-income patients benefit from patented medicine, it will undermine its profitability by losing out on customers, both in terms of less revenue but also because the disease will be eliminated more quickly. He suggests several reforms to the patent system including the development of a guaranteed Health Impact Fund (HIF) created by governments where a vaccine developer (for example) would agree to provide production and distribution of their drug at the lowest feasible cost in return for a share equal to its share of the assessed global impact for all HIF-registered products from the HIF reward pools (which would constitute a multi-billion dollar fund) for ten years. Since such a fund rewards those in relation to their impact on global health, drug companies would become more incentivized to focus on treatments and diseases that aren’t simply a priority for the affluent.

This idea makes clear that drug patents are a moral issue — one which is connected to other major problems involving excessive litigation and marketing. So perhaps it is a good thing that the waiver is agreed to if a more substantial and target reform can eventually take place. Pogge suggests that patent reform such as his proposed HIF would be a significant step in also addressing global poverty as a whole. So, while discussion of waiving patent protections in the case of COVID is morally important, it may be more morally important to fit this step into a larger conversation that considers the morality of the drug patent system as a whole.