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.

Complicity and Politics: Are we to blame?

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.

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