A Philosopher’s Point of View

Thinking Philosophically about Life, the Universe and Everything

Who I am.

I am a husband, a father, a friend, a brother. I am also a philosopher. Many might think that sounds odd – the pursuit of truth, beauty, and wisdom an anachronism in an age of social media and artificial intelligence. Perhaps even worse, a naive pursuit of the facile in a time of need for practical and prudential people. I am committed to the philosophic project, but my work in normative and applied ethics and political philosophy makes what I do particularly relevant at the moment.

What this is about.

Simply put, this blog is a philosophical perspective on everything from politics to foreign policy to law to the genius of Terry Pratchett. We find ourselves in a moment where the political and material motives of those with power are served by manipulating us. By dividing us. By exploiting everything they come to know about us.

A philosophic perspective requires that one think critically about matters, both abstract and practical. It is a great salve, a prophylactic against such manipulation and exploitation. It is a discipline that focuses on ideas and arguments, reasons and justifications. In so doing, it enables us to talk critically but constructively across our ideological divides – though I doubt that anyone could question the genius of Terry Pratchett. I hope I find interlocutors of great passion and good will.

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”I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” attributed to Voltaire.

This may be apocryphal, but it captures what it means to have a right to freedom of expression. It does not require you to lionize the speaker. It doesn’t even require that you remain indifferent to what others have to say. It implicitly recognizes that you might find what others have to say is offensive to you or perhaps even simply wrong.

In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk and the effort to silence Jimmy Kimmel, it is important for us all to understand what it means for each of us to have rights in a community of rights-holders. As to the latter first, being a rights-holder in a community of rights-holders, has its own internal logic. Since each right gives rise to correlative normative burdens, the rights you claim for yourself are not only rights held by the other members of the community, they serve as a limitation on your rights. The correlative burdens implicit in each rights-holder’s rights limit the rights of others.

But, more to the point, what does it mean to have a right to free speech? To understand any right, we must understand the right’s constitutive elements. Less technically speaking, what is it a right to, what implications does it have for others, and whose relationships are defined by the right? To have a right to free speech and expression, is to have a claim to think for oneself, to speak one’s mind regardless of what others think without interference from others. It is not about agreement, approval, or endorsement of the views pressed.

Implicit in this understanding of the content of the right to free speech – what it is a right to – is a limitation. In a community of right-holders, one is also obligated not to interfere with the right to free speech held by others. This has implications beyond mere coercion and physical force. We ought not use our speech to cause harm to others. Speech that directs actions or “incites” violence breaches that limitation. What counts as an incitement to violence is ambiguous at the edges, but it is not meant as a back door to limiting offensive speech. Neither Kirk’s nor Kimmel’s speech came close to that line.

Perhaps most important for our understanding of the role rights play in our public and political lives, is that rights include a zone of discretion that permits individuals to act in ways or to say things that are offensive to others, but not to harm. What this also means is that we can (and should) separate our judgment of the moral character of an individual or their actions from the right they have to speak their mind. One need not lionize Kirk or celebrate Kimmel to defend the right we all have to think and speak freely.

  • When someone invokes the notion of courage, it conjures up – at least for me – images of soldiers on the battlefield making sacrifices for their comrades, friends and family, or protesters facing down an authoritarian police state to speak truth to power, or perhaps a child standing up to a bully on the playground.

    This willingness to put one’s physical security at risk in the name of a noble cause is no doubt courageous, and I don’t mean to disparage or doubt the importance of such courageous behavior. This, however, is not the sort of courage I want to discuss. The courage I have in mind shares many features with and is often supportive of the physical courage with which we are so familiar.

    Regardless, the courage I have in mind is epistemic or intellectual in nature. For many of us, this may be a far more meaningful form of courage. A kind of courage that has a more immediate impact on our lives and the lives of those around us, than the hypothetical thought experiments we run in our minds of how fierce or flawed we would be in the face of the threat of physical harm. Harms that, thankfully, most of us are unlikely to face.

    Though not physical, the opportunities for intellectual courage are ones where we face a risk of harm. But, what kind of harm? How could a matter of intellectual or epistemic concern be the sort that could lead to harm, to ourselves or others?

    To explain there are two types of epistemic courage that we need to be more willing to commit ourselves to. One looks inward as a form of critical self-reflection, and the other is about the types of conversations we are willing to have with others.

    As to the former, if we accept that we are epistemically and cognitively fallible – in any number of ways – then we should also accept that many of the beliefs we hold, including some that lie at the foundation of our identity, may be wrong. We can’t come to understand that unless we are willing to have the courage to subject our own views, even those that lie at the core of who we are, to critical scrutiny.

    Doing so in good faith requires that we are willing to alter our beliefs, including our identity and understanding of ourselves, if we identify beliefs that are unfounded or just plain wrong. This is a significant risk not just to but of oneself. Though not physical, it may require more of us than physical courage does. It risks who we understand ourselves to be – who we are.

    The other form of epistemic courage I am advocating is outward-facing. It is about our engagement with others, especially with those with whom we disagree. We often avoid the uncomfortable and inconvenient conversations brought about by a world permeated by partisanship. It is safer. It is easier to just choose to nod and smile rather than say, “Why do you think that?” This avoidance lacks courage.

    Perhaps most difficult is the fact that many of the conversations we avoid are ones with loved ones – family and friends. We do so with the hope that avoiding such conversations will preserve the fragile relationships we have with others. Or, more negatively, perhaps we are concerned about the loss of those relationships given the hyper-partisan world we live in have made them so fragile. In either case, there is something of value at stake.

    The case to be courageous in such situations is, however, over-determined. For one, the more you avoid the difficult conversations the more hollowed out the relationship becomes. The conscious choice to stay away from matters of disagreement, spreads from one issue to another, until the thing you are trying to protect is no longer worth protecting, and you have given up much along the way.

    As such, regardless of how it goes, the risk you run in having such conversations is not likely enough to justify the refusal to have them at all. On the one hand, if an intellectual dispute leads to the dissolution of a relationship, it is unlikely that the relationship was as robust as one might have thought. If, on the other hand, the conversation, though uncomfortable and perhaps because it is uncomfortable, produces new understandings, then not only is the world changed ever so slightly, but the relationship is made stronger.

    If we are willing to be courageous and take a risk, we make it much more likely that we will change in ways that allow us to find common ground with and understand one another. If we choose to avoid critical self-inquiry and uncomfortable conversations with others, we doom ourselves to the endless cycle of partisanship.

  • The last few posts have been focused on – what I am calling – political virtues, the dispositions that we, as citizens, ought to take in order to effect a more aspirational form of politics. This post is not, at least not explicitly, quite so aspirational, though I hope that those who read it are more inclined to seek ways to be better political actors.

    This post does, however, share, at least one important property with the others. It is not directed to, or meant as an evaluation of our political leaders. Though, it likely has some implications for how we ought to think about them. This is about us, about our moral relationship to our political leaders, their actions, and by implication, our moral relationship to each other. To be more explicit, what if any responsibility do we have for the actions of our political leaders, and to what do we owe our fellow compatriots in light of that responsibility?

    To understand the relationships at issue, we must begin by recognizing that they are not direct. They are mediated by the political institutions and decision-making processes that we rely on to shape and govern our life together. Further, the very nature of and need for politics and political decision-making is grounded in the fact of disagreement. Further, those disagreements are often irresolvable and foundational.

    One might be skeptical from the off about the existence of such relationships, given their mediated, and thus indirect, nature – thinking to themselves, “How could I possibly be responsible for what those in power do or for any of the suffering (or benefit) by the choices they make or policies they pursue?” The answer can be found in our philosophical understanding of complicity.

    Though it is certainly the case that the paradigmatic case of responsibility is one in which a single agent is directly responsible for some harm or benefit, what is important is what makes one responsible not whether we adhere to this model. To be responsible one must have capacity, freedom, and knowledge. Capacity is about one’s abilities. Does one have the power to/ ability to effect a result. Freedom is about being unrestrained in one’s use of one’s capacity in relevant ways. But to be responsible one must also have a sense of what one is doing, including the anticipation of the likely results of one’s actions.

    There is nothing in this, rather typical, understanding of responsibility that limits our liability for praise or blame to those things we directly effect. Rather, whether we are responsible is dependent on whether we have the requisite capacity, freedom, and knowledge. What does that mean in the context of the choices and actions of our political leaders?

    I believe that this depends on a range of considerations. For those who voted for a particular party or candidate, should they have foreseen what is being done? For the rest of us, as this is a democratic republic, are we passive or active in response to the policies and actions being taken?

    As to the former, regardless of what type of office we are voting to fill, through an election we empower those who come to hold the office. We literally grant them the power to make choices that affect our lives and the lives of others. Different types of elections, due to the disparity in the effective power granted, have different implications for our complicity.

    If we are voting for a representative to Congress, they may have little power on their own to effect the outcomes of policy, but to the extent they tote the party line AND this is something those who voted for them should have expected, then they are as responsible as the representative themselves. Our complicity lessens to the extent that the representative acts in ways that were not reasonably foreseeable.

    If we focus instead on the responsibility we have for the President, in one way our complicity is more direct. This is a single individual with tremendous power. Power that they would not have but for their election. However, our responsibility for their actions is mediated by the often ambiguous nature of their campaigns. In the case of the current President – and thanks to the microtargeting that social media has enabled – the same person could deliver two conflicting messages to two different constituencies. In which case, one’s complicity is tied to- in part – to the knowledge (or lack thereof) of the likely choices to be made.

    With that said, in the case of the current President, I am skeptical of anyone thinking that he would hold to his word or deliver on promises that ran counter to his previously stated views. As an example, anyone who believed that he would ONLY deport the violent and criminal elements of the undocumented population of the United States were either not paying attention to his first term in office or they are culpably naive. In either case, this might be argued to mitigate some of their complicity.

    What of our responsibility after the fact? In the aftermath of an election, and in the face of the reality of the choices and actions our elected officials. Given that we have empowered these individuals, we have some responsibility to hold them to account. They are our agents, as such, and as the principals, it is up to us to offer our critical voice when they engage in unjust behavior. To the extent that we either ignore it, or seek to excuse or justify it, our culpability only grows deeper.

    For all of us, regardless of party, given the fact that we are complicit – for good or ill – in the policies and choices of those we have empowered to shape our shared lives together, we should take seriously the responsibility we bear.

  • In the last post I spoke about the need to embrace humility if we are to learn from each other. I also mentioned that there was another epistemic – and I believe political – virtue that we ought to commit ourselves to, especially if we want to find our way out of the partisan mess that we find ourselves in. To be specific, we ought to be more charitable towards those we disagree with. This is not quite what it seems, but I’ll return to that in a moment.

    So much political writing, especially editorial writing on politics, focuses on the political machines that run our political system. You many have noticed that the audience I am trying to reach is not defined by party. It is an audience that should have a life outside of politics. It is the people, the demos, us. The citizen of a democratic republic who should have influence over our politics. Instead, we are manipulated by those with incentives to keep us divided.

    These posts on, what I take to be, beneficial epistemic-political virtues are for the laity. Those who are being exploited by those with less-than-altruistic motives to divide us by leveraging our various emotional and psychological quirks and idiosyncrasies. I want to lean on philosophy and what it can teach us about being independent free-thinkers in a community of independent free-thinkers. How, for that to function well, we need to protect ourselves from manipulation, especially protect ourselves from being manipulated by those who tell us what we want to hear.

    With that said, let me return to the virtue of charity. This is not about tithe or beneficence. Rather, to be charitable is to adopt an attitude towards others and the views they hold. It is particularly important in how we relate and understand the ideas and arguments of those with whom we disagree.

    To be charitable, in this sense, goes beyond giving others the “benefit of the doubt.” It is a more active disposition. To be charitable requires that we work to understand why someone would believe what they believe, given that they are just as rational, just as intelligent as we are.

    This often requires that we fill in missing information, engage in empathic imagination to see the world through another’s eyes, and – at the very least – try to reconstruct arguments to find what is reasonable in the views of others. Developing a disposition to be charitable towards others is a way to avoid being manipulated by those who benefit from dividing us. It is a pathway to mutual understanding and respect, if not agreement.

    On that last point, let me be clear, being charitable does not mean that you ought to change your mind or condone injustice, cruelty, or viciousness. If someone is a racist-misogynist-xenophobe-…etc., then they ought to be called out as such. But before you put someone in that category and dismiss them, you ought to make the effort to see if there is something more there. We are all far more complicated than the simple stereotypes we use to divide up the people around us.

    You might still wonder why you should be charitable to those who disagree with you, and in many cases might not be willing to reciprocate. The reasons for being charitable are overdetermined. They range from moral reasons grounded in what we owe to each other to very pragmatic reasons related to how we effectively persuade others.

    It is the morally right thing to do because failing to be charitable presumes that those who disagree with us are somehow deficient or inferior. It presumes that they are either ignorant or irrational, unable to see the world as it really is. It is highly unlikely that those you disagree with are all that much different – cognitively and psychologically – from you. Just as you have reasons for why you believe what you believe, they have reasons operating in roughly the same mental architecture for why they believe what they believe. To respect them as moral equals – as you would want them to respect you – requires that you try to figure out why anyone would believe what they believe that meets some minimum standard of rational thought.

    As to the more pragmatic reasons for being charitable, for one thing, the more charity we find in our public political spaces, the more understanding, the less divided we will be, the less easily manipulated we will be, the more control we will have over our politics and the institutions that shape and govern our shared lives. Further, and perhaps more hard-nosed, being charitable has significant persuasive advantages. there are two groups of people we want to persuade, those who disagree with us and those who are undecided. If you paint the opposition in terms they would not recognize, then you have little chance of finding space within which you could persuade them to change.

    Finally, if you are trying to convince an independent third-party to share your views, you do not do yourself any favors by presenting your opposition as a parody of itself. Doing so would leave you vulnerable to some relatively easy responses – that you have presented the world with a false choice. That you have very little idea about what you are talking about. That you are blind to the world outside of your perception of it.

    In the end, we have every reason to be charitable. It is demanded by the belief in our equal moral worth, it is likely part of a social cocktail that could serve as an antidote to partisan manipulation that ails us, and it is essential to proper rational persuasion and rigorous argument. In the end, to be more charitable towards others we do ourselves a greater good.

  • At the beginning of every semester I ask my students what they want to get out of class … besides a good grade, or to complete some general education humanities requirement. The most common answer to that question is some version of “I want to know what others think.” Or, “I want to learn from others.”

    After we go through our introductions, I return to that question and their answers. Before we even have our first discussion about justice, truth, beauty and wisdom, we spend a little time on what is required of them if they are going to learn something from those around them, and I stress two epistemic – and what I will argue are political – humility and charity. I want to discuss the former her, and I will discuss the latter in another post.

    One might wonder why a philosophy class and the virtues appropriate to discussions there, is a good model for the application and development of political virtues. There are few other disciplines as steeped in – and comfortable with – conflict and disagreement than philosophy. Philosophic inquiry is dedicated to critical dialogue and rational argument in response to questions that admit of a range of reasonable (and often conflicting) answers.

    To think philosophically, to seek out truth and wisdom, given the disagreement and discord that permeates philosophy, one must be willing to engage in discussions across various ideological and theoretical divides. In that context, to learn from others is to recognize that there is something to learn. In the midst of such conflict, there is little to learn from those you already agree with, though, even there, you are likely to find someone with an argument or idea that had not occurred to you before.

    In either case, to learn you must be willing to recognize your own limitations. You must be humble. The most important implication of this commitment to humility is that when discussing and arguing over matters that admit of a variety of reasonable answers, that you should recognize that you might be wrong.

    As to why you might be wrong, you are likely to have a variety of prejudices; and, just like all humans, you are saddled with a less than perfect cognitive system. As Christopher Cherniak (1945-2025) says in his seminal work Minimal Rationality, we are “minimally rational.” We are finite and limited creatures that are epistemically and cognitively flawed.

    Whether it is cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias, we are neither complete, nor perfect, rational thinkers. This same thing is true of others, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with them. Given these facts about us, if we are to learn anything we need to do it together.

    Being humble, however, does not mean that you should embrace a sort of subservient false humility, an attitude of conciliation or surrender at every moment of conflict. We need everyone to bring their best version of themselves into the space of public deliberation. We need them to argue rigorously and think critically, but we also need everyone to recognize their own limitations – to be humble. To follow the better argument, rather than retreat to the safe and comfortable spaces where everyone tells everyone how right they are.

    So, how do the epistemic virtues necessary for philosophy have anything to do with politics; I would imagine that the connection is implicit, if not obvious. Nonetheless, it bears stating explicitly. One of the failings of our politics at the moment is a belief in (the righteousness of) our own press. This certainty is, however, in the face of questions that admit of a range of reasonable answers.

    Given our cognitive and epistemic limitations, we don’t have good reason to be so certain. Further, given our shared limitations, if we want to get closer to the right answers, or if we just want to learn from others, we need to recognize that we might have something to learn.

    A democratic republic requires that we do the hard, and at times uncomfortable, work that is demanded by the responsibility of governing ourselves. This burden also presents us with an opportunity. If we engage one another – especially across the various ideological divides that define the map of our political system – with humility and a desire to learn, our politics would not only be less partisan and more functional, it would likely produce outcomes that are more conducive to the common good, more closely aligned with the truth.

    At present, however, our politics is undermined by partisanship and the active effort by many to keep us mired in our information bubbles and echo chambers. This only redounds to their, not our, benefit. To escape, we must first be humble..

  • ”I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” attributed to Voltaire.

    This may be apocryphal, but it captures what it means to have a right to freedom of expression. It does not require you to lionize the speaker. It doesn’t even require that you remain indifferent to what others have to say. It implicitly recognizes that you might find what others have to say is offensive to you or perhaps even simply wrong.

    In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk and the effort to silence Jimmy Kimmel, it is important for us all to understand what it means for each of us to have rights to free speech in a community of fellow rights-holders. As to the latter, being a rights-holder in a community of rights-holders, has its own internal logic. Since each right gives rise to correlative normative burdens, the rights you claim for yourself are not only rights held by the other members of the community, they serve as a limitation on your rights. The correlative burdens implicit in each rights-holder’s rights limit the rights of others.

    But, more to the point, what does it mean to have a right to free speech? To understand any right, we must understand the right’s constitutive elements. Less technically speaking, what is it a right to, what implications does it have for others, and whose relationships are defined by the right? To have a right to free speech and expression, is to have a claim to think for oneself, to speak one’s mind regardless of what others think without interference from others. It is not about agreement, approval, or endorsement of the views pressed.

    Implicit in this understanding of the content of the right to free speech – what it is a right to – is a limitation. In a community of right-holders, one is also obligated not to interfere with the right to free speech held by others. This has implications beyond mere coercion and physical force. We ought not use our speech to cause harm to others. Speech that directs actions or “incites” violence breaches that limitation. What counts as an incitement to violence is ambiguous at the edges, but it is not meant as a back door to limiting offensive speech. Neither Kirk’s nor Kimmel’s speech came close to that line.

    Perhaps most important for our understanding of the role rights play in our public and political lives, is that rights include a zone of discretion that permits individuals act in ways or to say things that are offensive to others, but not to harm. What this also means is that we can (and should) separate our judgment of the moral character of an individual or their actions from the right they have to speak their mind. One need not lionize Kirk or his legacy, or celebrate Kimmel speaking truth to power to defend the right we all have to think and speak freely.