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.

Political Virtues: A need to be more charitable

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.

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