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.
recent posts
”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.
Category: Uncategorized
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I am sorry for the absence. The holidays got away from me. On to what I want to share … There is much that Donald Trump could learn from the Melian Dialogue. The lesson might not, however, be what many might expect from those who are familiar with Thucydides’s famous work. In the Melian Dialogue,…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
A Philosopher’s Point of View 