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: Be Courageous

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.

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