by Regina Rini

ABSTRACT. This paper does four things: (1) It provides an analysis of the concept ‘fake news.’ (2) It identifies distinctive epistemic features of social media testimony. (3) It argues that partisanship-in-testimony-reception is not always epistemically vicious; in fact some forms of partisanship are consistent with individual epistemic virtue. (4) It argues that a solution to the problem of fake news will require changes to institutions, such as social media platforms, not just to individual epistemic practices.

Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Or that Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had”? No, you didn’t know these things. You couldn’t know them, because these claims are false.[1] But many American voters believed them.

One of the most distinctive features of the 2016 campaign was the rise of “fake news,” factually false claims circulated on social media, usually via channels of partisan camaraderie. Media analysts and social scientists are still debating what role fake news played in Trump’s victory.[2] But whether or not it drove the outcome, fake news certainly affected the choices of some individual voters.

Why were people willing to believe easily dis-confirmable, often ridiculous, stories? In this paper I will suggest the following answer: people believe fake news because they acquire it through social media sharing, which is a peculiar sort of testimony. Social media sharing has features that reduce audience willingness to think critically or check facts. This effect is amplified when the testifier and audience share a partisan orientation. Shared partisan affiliation encourages testimony recipients to grant more credibility to testifiers than would otherwise be warranted.

So far these points may seem familiar. But the deeper aim of this paper is to normatively evaluate how fake news is transmitted, and here my answer may be less expected. I will argue that fake news transmission is often individually reasonable. That is, individual people typically act reasonably when they grant greater credibility to fellow partisans, even if this sometimes leads to the acquisition of false beliefs. This normative analysis generates a further claim about the remedy for fake news: it will not be solved by focusing on individual epistemic virtue. Rather, we must treat fake news as a tragedy of the epistemic commons, and its solution as a coordination problem. Fake news exploits otherwise reasonable practices of information transmission. Ending it will require institutional change.

This paper has four goals, corresponding to the following four parts. First, I give an analysis of the concept ‘fake news.’ Second, I identify the unusual epistemic features of news transmission via social media testimony. Third, I argue that partisanship in testimony is sometimes individually reasonable, and can be consistent with epistemic virtue despite predictably generating false beliefs. Fourth, I argue that we should treat the harms of partisan epistemology as an institutional, rather than individual, problem, and I offer an example of institutional improvement.

 

WHAT IS FAKE NEWS?

What is fake news? It is not merely false information conveyed by reportage. As the word ‘fake’ suggests, fake news requires intentional deception; honest reporting errors are not fake news.[3] When TIME journalist Zeke Miller falsely reported on Twitter that Donald Trump had removed a bust of MLK Jr. from the Oval Office, this was not fake news. Miller mistakenly believed that the bust had been removed, though in fact it was merely hidden behind a door (Gibbs 2017). Fake news is not merely false; it is deceptive.

But this is not yet sufficient to fully characterize fake news, because fake news involves a particular type of deception. It is more than mere lying. Suppose you ask me why I did not come to your Jeff Sessions Appreciation Party, and I falsely claim that I was doing the laundry. In fact, I was undergoing a superfluous root canal, an experience I deemed preferable to attending your party. This is not fake news, though obviously it is intentional deception. The ‘news’ part of ‘fake news’ implies that the deception is intended for an audience larger than the immediate recipient; fake news is meant to be shared and shared again.

The intentions behind fake news are also more complicated than in simple cases of lying. A moment ago I said that fake news requires intentional deception, but this may be too strong. Deception is not always the primary goal of fake news. Often the motive is financial rather than epistemic. Entire businesses, now infamously concentrated in Macedonia, exist to generate fake news headlines that attract fervent Internet clicking—and ad revenue (Silverman and Alexander 2016). The film studio 20th Century Fox recently created websites full of click-bait fake stories in order to attract social media attention to promote a new film (Rainey 2017). Presumably these entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers and film producers did not care whether anyone ended up believing their fake news, so long as the clicks kept coming.

These examples show the complexity of motives for fake news; spreading false information is not the only goal. But deception does play some role, even in these cases. Fake news works as click-bait only if a large number of people choose to share links, and presumably this requires that at least some of them believe the story. People who make money from fake news are perfectly happy if nine-in-ten of their readers are not deceived, but they do need some percentage to be deceived long enough to convey the link to future clickers. So we can say that creators of fake news intend to deceive at least a part of their overall audience, even if this deception is merely instrumental and not the ultimate goal.

Of course, other fake news creators do intend to deceive as many people as possible. Committed partisans try to erode their opponents’ support by tricking persuadable voters. Foreign actors may be involved as well; some analysts claim that anti-Clinton fake news was manufactured by shady groups with links to Russian military intelligence.[4] For these creators, fake news needs to travel widely not only to generate clicks, but also to change epistemic states. We can call this aimed-at-deception form ‘pure’ fake news, while also keeping in mind the impure, deception-as-instrument form motivated by financial gain.

So, we can finally give a clear definition of fake news. A fake news story is one that purports to describe events in the real world, typically by mimicking the conventions of traditional media reportage, yet is known by its creators to be significantly false, and is transmitted with the two goals of being widely re-transmitted and of deceiving at least some of its audience.[5]

You’ll note that my definition of fake news does not specify how it is transmitted. In particular, I have not specified that it is spread through social media. Fake news can be spread other ways—email chains, posters on streetlamps, etc. But there is a strong contingent relationship between fake news and social media, especially in the 2016 election. I will therefore focus on social media fake news.

 

THE BENT TESTIMONY OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Why do people believe fake news? A first-pass answer is easy enough; they believe fake news because it is presented to them via testimony, and like most of us they typically accept testimony from others, all else equal. Fake news stories turn up in their social media feeds, evidently endorsed by people whom they trust (to some degree), and it’s natural to believe what trusted friends tell you.

The epistemology of testimony has received significant attention from philosophers in recent decades (e.g., Coady 1992; Lackey 2008; Goldberg 2010). A person counts as believing a proposition on the basis of testimony when she believes it because the proposition was presented to her by another person. This is typically an epistemically virtuous practice, as we rely upon others for our knowledge of many things distant from us in space or time. A community of people with a practice of accepting one another’s testimony will be able to learn far more than individuals who insist upon believing only what they discover on their own.

Of course, an epistemic practice of uncritically accepting testimony would be prime for abuse by liars and bullshitters.[6] Sensible use of testimony requires norms for blocking the acceptance of suspect cases. Some of these norms have to do with the identity of the testifier or features of her current motivation.[7] It is wise to suspend default acceptance of testimony from someone who wishes to sell you a used car. Other norms are about testimonial content; like all sources of evidence, it is reasonable to suspend confidence in a piece of testimony if it is radically at odds with what you already know about how the world works. If a new acquaintance tells me that she saw a squirrel steal a park-goer’s slice of pizza, I’m going to believe her. If she tells me that she saw a squirrel steal a police officer’s handgun and rob a bank, I’m going to require further evidence.

These are elementary points about the epistemology of testimony. But they allow us to see how peculiar the transmission of fake news is. I’m now going to argue that social media transmission of fake news is a form of testimony, but it’s a bent form of testimony.

Why is it a form of testimony at all? Look at an example. Suppose I believe that Donald Trump threatened to deport Lin-Manuel Miranda (though Miranda is an American citizen). My belief is false; Trump never said that.[8] But I believe it because I saw the headline circulating in my Facebook feed. My belief is therefore held on the basis of testimony; I believe it because it was presented as truth by another person.

Yet this is certainly not a standard case of testimony. For one thing, the relationship between the testifier and the content of her testimony is hard to categorize. In standard cases, the testifier makes an assertion. But when my friend posts a link to the story about Trump deporting Miranda, without further comment, is my friend asserting the content of that story?

Importantly, there is quite a lot of debate about this question, mostly in terms of whether people are rightly held accountable for posting or retweeting defective social media items. For example, in November 2015, Donald Trump himself posted to Twitter an infographic riddled with fake statistics, including the made-up claim that 81% of white homicide victims are killed by African–Americans (the actual figure is 15%) (Greenberg 2015). When challenged by Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, Trump replied with a defense he has since given for other demonstrably false tweets: “Bill, am I gonna check every statistic? All it was is a retweet. It wasn’t from me” (Colvin 2016).

The “just a retweet” defense will be familiar to social media users. When called out for posting material that is false or offensive, people often insist (truthfully) that they are not the originator of the content—they only passed it along. They often insist that “a retweet is not an endorsement” and claim that they pass along content to encourage discussion, not necessarily to stand behind it.

Is a retweet an endorsement? When you post a news link to Facebook without comment, are you vouching for its truth? These are disputed norms of communication. Social media is a relatively new way of distributing information, and we have yet to settle on norms for how to interpret its use. We understand that a newspaper article with an embedded quotation isn’t necessarily affirming the content of the quote. But we don’t yet have a common understanding about social media shares.

Notice that where we do have established norms for older forms of communication, they can be quite nuanced. Consider this situation: a person on the streetcorner is handing out printed copies of a newsletter. Should you understand that this person believes most of the factual claims contained in the newsletter? It depends. If this person is taking payment, then probably not; newsagents don’t necessarily believe (or even read) much of what they sell. On the other hand, if the newsletter distributor isn’t being compensated, then it is reasonable to assume they believe the contents of what they are passing out. Why else would they bother doing so, unless they believe that they are communicating important truths?[9]

But, for now at least, social media sharing operates under unstable norms. People are happy to be understood as asserting the contents of shared news stories that turn out accurate (especially if they ‘scooped’ their friends) but insist that they meant no such assertion when trouble emerges. And, for now, our accountability conventions seem to tolerate this instability; we may roll our eyes at “a retweet is not an endorsement,” but we don’t (yet) place most embarrassed retweeters in the same category as outright liars or bullshitters.

The instability of these norms is one reason that I called social media sharing a bent form of testimony. The epistemic relationship between testifier and testimony is ambiguous, as we haven’t yet settled on a norm whereby sharing entails assertion.[10] Nevertheless, many of us treat social media sharing as if it were ordinary testimony, at least until something goes wrong. This is why the “a retweet is not an endorsement” mantra causes so much argument; many of us implicitly assume that our social media interlocutors do believe what they share, even though we are vaguely aware they may later disclaim it. This is part of what makes social media testimony aberrant.

There is a second reason that social media sharing of fake news is bent testimony: many fake news stories are ridiculous, seemingly violating a basic content-related norm of responsible testimony-reception, yet people accept the testimony anyway. Recall the earlier point that the reasonableness of default acceptance of testimony requires that we suspend confidence when a piece of testimony is radically at odds with what we know about the world. This norm seems to be routinely violated by social media users, who accept extraordinary stories about political enemies on mere say-so.

For example, consider the fiasco surrounding a Washington, DC, pizza parlor. For several weeks in 2016, social media posts circulated claiming that the restaurant’s basement was being used as a hub for child sexual abuse by a Satanic cult including Hillary Clinton and several of her senior staff. On December 4, 28-year-old Edgar Welch allegedly drove from North Carolina to Washington, with a loaded AR-15 rifle at his side, in order to “self-investigate” the allegations. Welch was reportedly shocked to discover no evidence of child sex trafficking in the pizza parlor, and thankfully was arrested without harming anyone (Goldman 2016).

This story is a truly bizarre thing to believe, even if you think Clinton and her staff are evil. If a cabal of extremely powerful individuals wished to conduct vile and criminal activities, why would they choose to do so in the basement of a pizza parlor? Wouldn’t their money and influence give them access to far more secure locations? The story is inconsistent with basic facts about human behavior, even assuming the worst of Clinton. Sensible employment of testimonial norms ought to filter out this sort of ridiculous story.

Yet Welch was not the only one who believed the pizza parlor story. According to a survey by YouGov and The Economist, 46% of Trump voters continued to believe the underlying conspiracy theory, even after the media attention focused on Welch’s folly (Frankovic 2016).

There is something about social media sharing that seems to deaden people’s normal application of consistency-with-the-world filtering on testimony. Before the era of social media, the pizza parlor story might have circulated by word of mouth among a particular paranoid sub-population (just as lurid urban legends have always surrounded the Clintons). But something about Facebook, etc. allowed a ridiculous story to build testimonial momentum to the point of acceptance by more than the furthest fringe.

I suspect that the two bent features of social media testimony are related to one another. Perhaps people are less inclined to subject ridiculous stories to scrutiny because we have unstable testimonial norms on social media. A friend posts a ridiculous story, without comment, and maybe they don’t really mean it. But then other friends ‘like’ the story, or comment with earnest revulsion, or share it themselves. Each of these individual communicative acts involves some ambiguity in the speaker’s testimonial intentions. But, when all appear summed together, this ambiguity seems to wash away. Perhaps the implicit thought is like this: could it really be that all these people aren’t really testifying to this? A thought like that might overwhelm ordinary skepticism about ridiculous testimony.

I am not sure that I’ve got this mechanism quite right. Clearly, this is an empirical hypothesis for social scientific investigation. But however the details go, it seems plausible that the bent aspects of social media testimony play a role in the transmission of fake news.

 

THE (INDIVIDUAL) EPISTEMIC VIRTUE OF PARTISANSHIP

So far I have tried to explain what fake news is and how it passes through testimony. These have been descriptive analyses. I’ll now turn to normative evaluation of social media transmission of fake news. I will defend a surprising conclusion: even though fake news is false and damaging, the testimonial practices propelling it are consistent with individual epistemic virtue. Specifically, I will argue it is partisanship that makes some fake-news-conveying practices reasonable, and partisanship is consistent with epistemic virtue.[11]

Before giving this argument I need to stress what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that it is good, full stop, for fake news to circulate and affect our collective political choices. That is obviously not a good thing. Nor am I claiming that partisanship is good in itself. What I am claiming is something more nuanced: given the realities of human psychology and politics, certain forms of epistemic partisanship are individually reasonable in the world as we actually confront it. This would not be the case in an ideal world, but that is not where we live. In effect, I am defending a form of non-ideal political–epistemic theory. Accordingly, I will argue that our normative focus should be on identifying realistic structural changes, rather than specifying idealized individual practice.

My first claim, then, is that partisanship-in-testimony-reception is sometimes compatible with epistemic virtue. That is, sometimes it makes sense to assign greater credibility to a testifier because you know you share a political affiliation with her.

The word ‘sometimes’ is important. I doubt that we should always assign greater credibility to co-partisans. If two people are testifying to the spectrometer-observed molecular mass of a particular carbon sample, it is probably not reasonable to trust the Democrat over the Republican, or vice versa. Rather, I mean to defend partisan epistemology within specific domains.

Which domains? The domain of politically normative claims, certainly, such as ‘equality of opportunity is more important than equality of outcome.’ I include also many morally normative claims. And I include some claims that are seemingly purely descriptive when these are relevant to political decisions. Most importantly, I include characterological judgments about particular political candidates. I will call all of these politically relevant claims. My position, then, is that partisanship in testimony reception is reasonable with regard to politically relevant claims.

Let me start with testimony about obviously normative matters, political and moral. Here I will simply assume that it is sometimes good practice to accept normative testimony from others, though some philosophers dispute this.[12] Allowing this assumption, I am now adding the further claim that it is sometimes reasonable to be differentially receptive to normative testimony from others, depending on their partisan affiliation.

Why? Consider what partisan affiliation involves. Though we sometimes bemoan it as mere tribalism, this is an exaggeration. Partisan affiliation reflects a person’s value commitments. Political parties are partly defined by common views on the normatively appropriate shape of society. When I learn a person’s partisan affiliation, I learn something about the political and moral values she endorses.

Of course, it is foolish to take partisan affiliation as signaling a monolithic set of values. Parties have significant normative diversity within them, as shown by recent confrontations between Bernie Sanders and establishment Democrats, or Trump and traditional Republicans. But we can still treat partisan affiliation as a reliable indicator of broad categories of values; that’s why many people are hesitant to declare their partisan affiliation in conflict-averse social contexts.

So, when I learn that another person shares my partisan affiliation, I learn that she and I share at least some significant number of normative values. Or, to put it another way, I learn that she tends to get normative questions right (by my normative lights). She establishes herself as a more reliable normative judge than I would take her to be by default, or especially if she were affiliated to an opposed party.

Another way to make the point is to think about whether another person is my epistemic peer in normative domains. Typically, I should accept testimony only from those who are (reasonably assumed to be) at least as good as I am at making judgments in the domain about which they testify. Regarding sensory judgments (e.g., “Look over there, that’s Lenny Kravitz!”), part of the motivation for default acceptance of testimony is that we assume others’ perceptual systems are similar to ours (Foley 2001). However, if a person makes repeated perceptual errors, then I should cease regarding her as a peer and discount her perceptual testimony.

Presumably something similar applies to normative testimony. If a person repeatedly makes normatively suspect claims, I should begin to doubt that she is my normative peer, and eventually I should discount her normative testimony. Adam Elga suggests that in normative domains, our only epistemic peers are those who agree with us on a broad swath of claims. He offers the following case:

[C]onsider Ann and Beth, two friends who stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Consider the claim that abortion is morally permissible. Does Ann consider Beth a peer with respect to this claim? That is: setting aside her own reasoning about the abortion claim (and Beth’s contrary view about it), does Ann think Beth would be just as likely as her to get things right? (Elga 2007, 492–3)

According to Elga, the answer is no. He reasons that, if Ann and Beth have discussed related issues, then Ann will know that Beth has (according to Ann) many mistaken views about such things as “whether human beings have souls, whether it is permissible to withhold treatment from certain terminally ill infants, and whether rights figure prominently in a correct ethical theory” (Elga 2007, 493). Since Beth is wrong about these issues, it would be reasonable for Ann to treat her moral testimony about abortion as less than that of a peer. On the other hand, Elga says, if they agreed about these other issues, then Ann could reasonably regard Beth as a peer on the abortion question. The upshot, says Elga, is that “with respect to many controversial issues, the associates who one counts as peers tend to have views that are similar to one’s own” (Elga 2007, 494).[13]

We can infer many of a person’s normative beliefs from her partisan affiliation, so partisan affiliation is a reasonable proxy for epistemic peerhood in political and moral normative domains. And social media participants tend to group themselves into partisan networks (Bakshy et al. 2015). People often know the partisan affiliation of their social media contacts, especially those who regularly post links to political news. Social media users treat these partisan signals as indicators of whom they can regard as normative peers, and this allows them to decide which testimony to receive.

So far I have been talking about testimony that is overtly normative—claims about how we should live together. But much of fake news is ostensibly descriptive. It claims that such-and-such happened, or that so-and-so said something. These are not normative claims. Is it reasonable to use partisan affiliation, which I’ve claimed is an indicator of normative peerhood, to assess testimony about descriptive claims?

I think so, at least when the testimony is politically related. This is because the act of transmitting political news implicates normative decisions on the part of the testifier. Often these are decisions about what is politically important. Our audience has only so much time to spend reading about politics, so we need to avoid wasting this time on trivialities. Political importance is a value-laden notion; the set of topics that are important to a political conservative will not be identical with those important to a progressive. Importance also plays a role in weighing the degree of confidence one must have before relaying an uncertain news report. Typically, the need to be confident scales with the importance of the subject matter (though this can be complicated in cases that require urgent response).

My point: trusting a testifier regarding political news requires trusting her judgments about political importance, and this means believing that she has, by and large, the right political values. Partisan affiliation provides this information.

This is especially true when testifiers offer characterological evidence about particular political candidates. Characterological evidence is dangerous because it can be easily biased through selective reporting. Everyone (political candidate or not) has some negative traits and has made some bad choices. If I choose to report only negative information, deliberately excluding redeeming characteristics, then relying on my testimony could lead you to a harsh assessment of anyone’s character. Hence, if you are going to rely on my testimony about events related to a candidate’s character, you need to trust that I have good judgment about the representativeness of particular stories, whether additional details might be exculpatory, and so forth. You need to trust that you and I share values relevant to these judgments—and partisan affiliation is a good indicator.

I’ve argued, then, that partisanship can be relevant to assessing the trustworthiness of testifiers on politically relevant claims—not just openly normative claims, but also some related descriptive claims about events, especially those that are meant to provide characterological evidence about candidates. If I am right, then some degree of partisanship-in-testimony-reception is indeed compatible with epistemic virtue.

Of course, the ‘some degree’ qualifier is important. Many epistemic virtues can become vicious in excess. Skepticism is “healthy” in moderation, but becomes destructive as it grows. One form of epistemic injustice is ‘credibility excess,’ in which we grant inappropriately high testimonial credibility on the basis of a testifier’s demography.[14] These are types of epistemic vice that come from overextending virtuous practice. Similarly, it is obviously possible to make an epistemic vice of partisanship. One can overextend the credibility granted to co-partisans, either by simply assigning too much credibility or by allowing it to intrude into non-politically-relevant domains.[15]

Hence, my claim is obviously not that one should always believe whatever testimony is given by one’s co-partisans. That is false. But, generally speaking, one may (and perhaps should) attribute greater credibility to co-partisan testifiers than to others. This is simply reasonable, given that shared partisan affiliation points to shared normative values.

And this, finally, allows to us to see why it is individually reasonable to accept the bent testimony of social media sharing. Recall the core ambiguity of bent testimony: people who share stories on social media may or may not be lending their epistemic imprimatur (“a retweet is not an endorsement”—unless it is), yet we tend to treat what they share as if it were unambiguous testimony anyway. I suggest that we do this because the reasonable credibility boost we give to co-partisans overcomes the hesitancy we feel about bent testimony.

The model is like this: I read a story on social media, shared by one or two of my co-partisan friends. The story is shocking, and I am vaguely aware that my friends’ communicative intentions are ambiguous. Maybe they aren’t really putting their imprimatur on this story. But I know that these friends share my partisan affiliation, hence many of my normative values. They wouldn’t lie to me, right? They would exercise reasonable judgment about balancing confidence in important information, right? They wouldn’t be confused about the relevance of this information to assessing a candidate’s character, right?

Not always right, of course. But right often enough that trusting my co-partisans is reasonable. Hence, despite some qualms over the bent ambiguity of their testimony, I find myself starting to believe the stories they transmit.

Of course, if we were epistemic angels, we’d be more careful to check our testifiers’ sources, to look for independent verification, to ask questions. But all that is true about accepting any testimony, not just on social media or among partisans. We take others’ words for it when we just don’t have the time to go out and investigate claims for ourselves. Social media sharing is the same. There is so much information available, and only so much time to conduct inquiries. In an epistemically non-ideal world, given our temporal and cognitive limitations, it simply makes sense to trust others, even when we antecedently know that this will sometimes lead us astray.[16]

Fake news, then, is a bad side effect of an individually reasonable epistemic practice. If we want to solve the problem of fake news, we’re unlikely to find it in demanding revision to individual epistemic choices. Yes, we could insist that everyone become a far savvier user of social media testimony. But most people won’t, and in our epistemically non-ideal world, most are reasonable not to bother.

If we want to solve the problem of fake news, we need to look beyond individual epistemic practices—we need to look at institutions.

 

INSTITUTIONS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY

I’ve argued that fake news is transmitted through a bent form of testimony and benefits from credibility gained through partisan affiliation. I’ve also argued that the problem is not likely to be addressed by focusing on partisanship, which had seemed the likely target. Instead, I’ll now suggest, the best place to focus is on institutional arrangements that reduce the bentness of social media testimony.

Recall the core bent property of social media testimony: we have an unstable set of norms for assigning testimonial intentions to social media shares. We tend to treat them as conveying our interlocutors’ testimonial approval, yet we also sometimes accept that “a retweet is not an endorsement.”

It’s this ambiguity that allows fake news to slip through. Resolving our ambiguous norms would greatly reduce the effectiveness of fake news. If we firmly established the norm that social media sharers are understood as conveying testimonial endorsement, then people would be less likely to share unverified stories, to avoid later being held responsible for errors. Alternatively, if we firmly established the norm that social media shares (without further comment) communicate no testimonial endorsement whatsoever, then people would be less likely to come to believe fake news on the basis of their friends’ transmissions.

Which of these norms should we aim to establish? I think we must disqualify the second option on grounds of irreality; it is very unlikely that we will be able to convince people to begin treating social media sharing as communicating no testimonial endorsement whatsoever. After all, people use social media to communicate facts about themselves and their friends: so-and-so had a baby; my partner got a new job; look at these amazing photos of this place I could afford to travel to! It is reasonable to expect these reports to be truthful (allowing for self-promotional burnishing). A norm that required us to selectively withhold trust from a subset of ostensibly factual stories (those that are politically related) transmitted via a medium we usually trust seems unlikely to be psychologically efficacious.

A norm of accountability seems preferable then; we should aim for a norm that denies “a retweet is not an endorsement.” People who share news should be unambiguously understood to lend their testimonial endorsement (barring explicit disclaimer), and should be held accountable if their claims are later shown false, in just the same way that a person spreading false rumors about an acquaintance may be held accountable. ‘Holding accountable,’ of course, needn’t involve punishment or even condemnation. It may be simply a loss of testimonial reputation, such that repeated offenses lead to one’s justified discredit as a participant in testimonial exchange.

How do we replace our ambiguous social media testimonial norms with a clear norm of accountability? Unfortunately, this may not be easily accomplished by individuals. It would require that we each keep track of where we learned every piece of purported political news, track later revelations about their accuracy, and trace debunked stories back to specific social media interlocutors. Sometimes days or weeks pass between the initial promotion of fake news and later debunking. It’s not likely at all that many of us could put in the cognitive effort needed to sustain this norm.

This is why institutions matter. When the sustenance of a norm demands unrealistic resources from individual adherents, we can offload these demands to institutions. For a simple example, consider how pedestrians and cyclists interact on busy pathways. Generally, it is best for the pathway to be split—but which side is for pedestrians and which for cyclists? This can vary from place to place, and we cannot assume everyone will remember which is the pedestrian side in every place they visit. A simple institutional solution offloads the demand from memory: paint a line down the middle of the pathway and draw pedestrian and cycle icons on the appropriate sides. The paint facilitates adherence to the norm and makes accountability unambiguous.

We need something similar for social media testimony. The obvious source of infrastructure is the social media platforms themselves. If we could offload onto them the demands of keeping track of who-testified-to-what, then we could sustain a norm of holding people accountable for sharing fake news.

This may sound worrisomely as if I am calling for social media platforms to arbitrate the veracity of news stories and then censor their own users. Social media platforms will certainly refuse to do these things, and we probably would not want them to anyway. But there are milder solutions. I will conclude by describing one—though probably a better solution can be devised by professional technology and communication specialists.

We can start with something social media platforms are already doing. On December 16, 2016, Facebook announced that it will implement new measures against the distribution of fake news.[17] Users will be able to report stories they believe are false. Facebook will not determine veracity itself; instead it will refer frequently reported stories to independent fact-checking organizations such as Snopes.com. If these organizations judge a story false, Facebook’s system will flag it as ‘disputed,’ and this flag will be visible to viewers, along with a link to the fact-checker’s debunking. Anyone subsequently attempting to share the story will be confronted with a prompt informing them of its disputed status. They can still choose to share the story, but it will be auto-flagged as disputed, and Facebook may weight its algorithm to display other posts ahead of disputed stories.

This set of measures is a good idea, and will certainly help to sustain an accountability norm. A story that has been flagged as disputed is, presumably, less likely to be trusted on the basis of testimony, and people who persist in sharing disputed stories may suffer reputational consequences. But there are limitations to these measures. Most importantly, they may move too slowly. Many social media stories are ephemeral; everyone is talking about the latest outrage today, but by tomorrow they have moved on to the next (especially amid the perpetual chaos of the Trump administration). Facebook’s reporting-and-referral-to-Snopes method will take time to catch up with individual fake news stories. By the time a story has been flagged disputed, much of the audience will have already seen it. Of course, it is good to take measures that reduce the durability of fake news by warning latecomers. But it would be better still to get ahead of the next fake story.

Hence, I suggest that social media platforms provide the infrastructure for tracking the testimonial reputation of individual users. Facebook already knows exactly what each user chooses to share. It will also soon have a database of disputed stories, courtesy of the measures it began implementing in December. It would be computationally simple, then, for Facebook to calculate a Reputation Score for individual users, based upon the frequency with which each user chose to share disputed stories. Reputation Scores could be displayed in a subtle way, perhaps with a colored icon beside user photos.[18]

Note that this proposal does not involve censorship. Facebook would not prevent anyone from sharing or receiving any story. Individual users could choose to ignore Reputation Scores. Facebook could provide optional settings for users’ News Feeds, allowing them to deprioritize posts from those with low Reputation Scores, but this need not be the default.

The key advantage of this system is that it offloads memory resources for testimonial track records from individual users to institutional infrastructure. Doing so would encourage a norm of accountability for social media sharing; people could easily identify those who routinely share debunked stories, and the “retweet is not an endorsement” line would become increasingly implausible as track records tabulated. Gradually, our ambiguous testimonial norm could be displaced by a norm expecting genuine endorsement from unadorned sharing.

There are some problems with this proposal, of course. One is the danger of diluting the viewpoint neutrality of social media platforms. Some people continue to insist that fake news stories are true, even after repeated debunking. Months after the pizza parlor debacle, it is still possible to find new blog posts exploring the “conspiracy” and denouncing social media platforms for “censoring” discussion. My proposal would surely result in such people being assigned very unfavorable Reputation Scores by Facebook, and presumably the platform would prefer not to alienate any users. But I think that this problem is unavoidable for any serious institutional response to fake news. Notice that Facebook’s new measures already depart from viewpoint neutrality by tagging stories as disputed.

A more particular problem with my proposal is that it sets a worrisome precedent for social media platforms ‘ranking’ their users. Dystopic speculative fiction regularly imagines that we will spend much of our future struggling to secure positive ratings for our social media personae—see Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, or the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive.” This anxiety becomes especially pressing with repressive governments; recently, some local authorities in China began calculating a ‘social-credit score’ for citizens, which determines access to some government services and allegedly may include politically related social media behavior (The Economist 2016). Perhaps the danger of such possibilities is severe enough that we should avoid any possible precedent, including the Reputation Score of my proposal.

I am sure there is a better, subtler, solution than my specific proposal. My fundamental point is only that we should start thinking in institutional terms. We need to resolve the ambiguous norms that make social media testimony so bent. Proposals addressing partisanship or other aspects of individual epistemic virtues are unlikely to work—partly because, as I’ve argued, some partisanship in testimony is individually reasonable. The most plausible solutions will be institutional, and social media platforms must do something to provide infrastructure for an accountability norm. Better norms, facilitated by wise institutions, are what will stop fake news exploiting gaps in otherwise reasonable norms of communication and belief.

 

Regina Rini teaches Bioethics at New York University. Her research focuses on the cognitive science of morality and the social significance of moral diversity. She is currently working on two books: one about the ethics of microaggression and the other about moral agency and disagreement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the editor and an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions on this paper.

 

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Lynch, Michael Patrick. 2016. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. New York: Liveright Publishing.

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Medina, José. 2011. “The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary.” Social Epistemology 25 (1): 15–35.

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Pronin, Emily, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross. 2002. “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (3): 369–381.

Rainey, James. 2017. “20th Century Fox Apologizes for ‘A Cure for Wellness’ Fake News Promos.” Variety. February 16. http://variety.com/2017/film/news/cure-for-wellness-fake-news-promos-studio-apologizes-1201990634/.

Silverman, Craig. 2016. “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook.” BuzzFeed. November 16. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook.

Silverman, Craig, and Lawrence Alexander. 2016. “How Teens in The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News.” BuzzFeed. November 3. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo.

Sliwa, Paulina. 2012. “In Defense of Moral Testimony.” Philosophical Studies 158 (2): 175–195.

Snopes.com. 2016a. “Shots Hired.” October 14. http://www.snopes.com/wikileaks-cofirms-hillary-clinton-sold-weapons-to-isis/.

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Timberg, Craig. 2016. “Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ During Election, Experts Say.” The Washington Post. November 24. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html.

Zimdars, Melissa. 2016. “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical ‘News’ Sources.” http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/11/Resource-False-Misleading-Clickbait-y-and-Satirical-%E2%80%9CNews%E2%80%9

 

ENDNOTES

[1] For the Clinton story, see Snopes.com (2016a). For the Pence story, see Snopes.com (2016b).

[2] Silverman (2016) claims that the top 20 fake news headlines of the 2016 election cycle generated more Facebook engagement than the top 20 headlines from reputable news sources. Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), however, argue that fake news was unlikely to have been the determining factor in Trump’s victory.

[3] Addendum, July 2017: This paper was written in January and February 2017. Since that time, the term ‘fake news’ has acquired an additional use, especially in tweets by President Trump. In this new usage, ‘fake news’ seems to mean any form of reportage that the speaker disagrees with. For example, on February 6 2017 President Trump tweeted: “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.” (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/828574430800539648) A further innovation is the extension of the term from particular news stories to entire news organizations. We can see this evolution in Trump tweets like “Mainstream (FAKE) media refuses to state our long list of achievements, including 28 legislative signings, strong borders & great optimism!” (April 29 2017, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/858375278686613504) and “The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don’t want America to hear the real story!” (May 28 2017, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/868985285207629825). However, this seems to be an idiosyncratic use of the term among Trump and his affiliates. This paper will persist with analysis of the original use of ‘fake news’, as it emerged during the 2016 campaign.

[4] In November, the Washington Post described claims by anonymous “experts” at the website PropOrNot that many fabricated anti-Clinton stories were amplified by Russian propaganda organs (Timberg 2016). But other journalists dispute the reliability of these claims (Norton and Greenwald 2016).

[5] Note that this definition excludes satirical news of the sort featured in The Daily Show or The Onion. Satire does not typically aim to deceive; its comedic effect relies upon the audience appreciating that it is engaged in exaggeration or parody. There is, however, a peculiar genre of Internet pseudo-satire, one that is carefully designed to trick some but not all readers. The joke is on gullible people, who are meant to earnestly share dross and then be snickered at by their savvier social media friends. The goal of pseudo-satire, splitting the audience into savvy jokers and gullible butts-of-jokes, distinguishes it from typical fake news. Typical fake news does not require that any of the audience see through the deception, and of course is usually intended to be believed by as many as possible.

[6] A bullshitter, in the sense identified by Harry Frankfurt (2005), is distinct from a liar. A liar makes claims she knows to be false. A bullshitter makes claims that may or may not be true; she is indifferent to whether they turn out right, though she wants others to believe her regardless. Some creators of fake news, especially those with a commercial motive, are technically bullshitters rather than liars.

[7] Our existing practices for filtering testifiers are defective in a number of ways. One important way is that we tend to allow a person’s apparent race or gender to affect the degree of credibility we assign them. This is epistemically non-ideal and a form of injustice (Fricker 2007).

[8] Snopes.com (2016c).

[9] Of course, this does not mean that you should believe the contents of their newsletter. A reliable imperative of city living is to avoid accepting any piece of paper handed out on streetcorners.

[10] Technically, a communicative act isn’t testimony at all if the ‘speaker’ does not intend to imply the truthfulness of what they communicate. So, if “a retweet is not an endorsement” is right, then purportedly factual retweets and shares cannot be testimony. But I will stick with talking about ‘testimony,’ since we don’t yet have another word for ambiguous speech acts that may or may not be testimony depending on as-yet-unsettled communicative norms.

[11] A brief autobiographical digression: I imagine some readers will assume my position is motivated by personal inclination. They will assume that I am a dedicated partisan seeking to vindicate my own opposition-flaying practices. But the truth is the opposite. My own inclinations are anti-partisan; I tend to irritate comrades by policing their insufficient interpretive charity toward our opponents. I am perhaps less inclined than most to engage in partisan epistemic filtering. (One should, of course, be extremely cautious about introspectively attributing exceptional epistemic practices to oneself (Kruger and Dunning 1999; Pronin et al. 2002). What I claim here is based upon others’ frustrated descriptions of my disappointingly unpartisan responses.) In fact, I argue elsewhere that we have strong moral duties to aim to understand, and even empathize with, those with whom we disagree on moral and political topics. Hence the position I defend here is not a natural one for me to take. My motivation for adopting it is a second-order extension of my commitment to empathizing with those with whom I disagree; here I am trying to empathize with those who disagree with me about the practice of political disagreement!

[12] See Hills (2009) for challenges to moral testimony, and Sliwa (2012) for a defense.

[13] Sarah McGrath (2007) challenges Elga on this point: she notes that even if Ann and Beth disagree on issues adjacent to abortion, they probably agree on many background moral beliefs about e.g., lying, murder, slavery, etc. Given the great frequency with which they do agree, Ann should regard Beth as a peer after all. For my part, I’m not sure. It’s not clear that we have guidelines for which or how many topics should count as “related” when we assess peerhood with respect to a particular judgment. I can’t settle that here.

[14] The term ‘credibility excess’ comes from Fricker (2007), though Fricker herself argues that epistemic injustice is primarily a problem of credibility deficit. But see Medina (2011) and Davis (2016) for different views.

[15] At extremes, partisan fragmentation risks undermining the sharing of normative reasons that is essential to democratic citizenship. See Lynch (2016, chapter 3) for worries about the Internet’s role in accelerating this trend.

[16] I am not denying that individual people can improve their personal practices for using social media. One easy improvement is to discredit links to news sources with a history of misleading or false reporting. Two prominent lists of these sources are available from Zimdars (2016) and Brayton (2016).

[17] See Mosseri (2016).

[18] A complication: what if I want to share a story that I know is false, precisely in order to explicitly alert my audience to its falseness? How would the Reputation Score algorithm avoid counting this against me? One solution might be to allow me to attach a disputed flag to a link myself as I post it, thus explicitly signaling that I am not endorsing the story. Such pre-tagged disputed stories would not count against one’s Reputation Score.

by Thomas Wilk 

ABSTRACT. During the 2016 US Presidential campaign and in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, many of us have tried to hold friends, family, and acquaintances accountable for their support of a candidate and campaign that we judged to be racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, ableist, and authoritarian. Even when our friends and family avowed, for example, anti-racist norms, our attempts to hold them to those norms were often met with rejections of our standing to do so: What gives you the right to call me out for my vote? In this paper, I argue for the regrettable conclusion that these challenges to our standing to hold are, in at least some cases, justified on the grounds that the targets of our holdings have little evidence that we would allow ourselves to be reciprocally held accountable. As such, recognizing our standing to hold them accountable would be a threat to their agency. I conclude by arguing that we now ought to engage in a project of rebuilding the kinds of communities in which the mutual trust that is foundational to our moral practices can be rebuilt.

 

INTRODUCTION

Who are you to tell me what I should do? What gives you the right to order me around? How dare you call me a racist!? Many of us have heard these refrains over the course of the 2016 US Presidential campaign and since the election of Donald Trump. We try talk to Trump supporters—family, former classmates, hometown friends, and online acquaintances—about the racism, xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and authoritarianism that some of us have judged to be endemic to his campaign and nascent administration. We try to hold them accountable for supporting him, and, almost inevitably, we meet with responses like these.

In this essay, I aim to develop an understanding of these encounters by framing them as attempts to use speech acts to hold others accountable to deontic moral norms that they themselves espouse. I am not concerned with attempts to hold avowed white nationalists to anti-racist moral norms but rather with attempts to hold those who avow anti-racism to those very norms. Even in these cases, we often meet with the above refrains. In this paper, I treat these challenges as attempts to reject our standing felicitously pull off the speech acts in question and so to hold our targets accountable.

My central aim will be to determine whether these challenges to our standing to hold are justified in such cases or whether these refrains are merely ploys to evade accepting responsibility for one’s actions. In what follows, I argue that there is good reason to think that these challenges are justified in some cases, even if this is a regrettable result. I examine a variety of ways in which the standing to hold can be undermined, and conclude that in the kinds of one-dimensional, thin relationships in which these sorts of challenges often arise, recognizing the standing of another to hold one to one’s antecedent moral obligations presents a significant threat to one’s agency. If this is right, then one is justified in rejecting another’s standing to hold in these instances.

I begin developing my account of these challenges by presenting a prima facie case for differentiation in the standing to hold accountable. I then shift my focus to identifying a species of holding—second-personal speech acts of holding to deontic moral norms—by way of a topography of the terrain of holding responsible. Focusing on this species, I turn to the question of who, if anyone, has the requisite standing to felicitously pull off these speech acts by examining how these holdings are related to the more familiar act of issuing an order. I argue that, like orders, alethic holdings have agent-relative normative inputs, i.e., the standing to felicitously issue them is indexed to particular individuals by virtue of their position in some social-normative space, but unlike orders, the standing to issue an alethic holding is not a matter of broadly institutional norms but of second-personal recognition. In the final sections, I turn to the work of Linda Radzik to argue that standing to hold can be undermined when recognizing such standing would present a threat to someone’s agency. One can justifiably reject the standing of another to hold one accountable when one cannot trust the other to recognize one’s reciprocal standing. Recognition of standing in such a case subsumes the target of holding in a hierarchy where one did not previously exist. I conclude by drawing some lessons from this account for our fraught attempts to hold our fellow citizens to account for their support of what many of us perceive to be a racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, ableist, authoritarian administration.

 

NORMS OF HOLDING RESPONSIBLE

Human beings have hit on a variety of practices for holding ourselves and one another accountable to our own commitments, prudential norms, etiquette, laws, and moral norms. Some of these practices are coercive, others merely suggestive. Some are broadly effective, others only mildly so. The mechanisms of enforcement are varied. Some practices rely on the threat of pain, imprisonment, or death, others on social sanctions such as distancing or banishment. Still others leverage psychological mechanisms such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment. In each case, accompanying the norms to which we are accountable—the norms of prudence, morality, and the like—there are norms that govern the practices of holding others accountable to those first-order norms. These norms of holding determine when one has the standing to hold another accountable as well as the appropriate methods of doing so. It is not my business, for example, if you, dear reader, are ordering a decadent brownie sundae in violation of the norms of prudence, and even if it were my business—say, if you were my partner—it would certainly be out of line for me to enforce the norm by ripping the sundae from your hands and throwing it on the floor. This essay is about these second-order norms as they apply to cases of holding to deontic moral norms.

Beginning with Strawson’s influential paper “Freedom and Resentment,” there is a rich literature that examines what it is to take someone to responsible. Much of this inquiry is endeavored on the way to answering questions about what it is to be responsible or as part of some other broader project (Strawson 1962; Korsgaard 1992; Darwall 2006; Wallace 1994; Watson 1996; Oakley 1991; Smith 2007; Maher 2010). More recently, however, greater attention has been paid both to taking someone to be responsible and, importantly for us, to holding someone responsible. Examining some of this literature, we can see a prima facie case that the standing to hold is not universal.

1. A. Cohen has examined the challenges posed by hypocrisy and complicity to one’s standing to hold another accountable. Focusing on the case of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he argues that both parties face a “powerful tu quoque challenge” that undermines each side’s standing “to point the finger at the other with no comment on his own glass house” (2006, 110–11). Cohen argues that Israel lacks the standing to condemn Palestinian acts of terror without first examining its own role in causing the grievances to which terrorist acts are a response and in creating the conditions under which the terrorist response is the only one available (2006, 114–15). By Cohen’s lights, not just anyone has the standing to hold someone else responsible. Hypocrisy and complicity potentially undermine such standing.
2. A. Duff has similarly argued that standing to hold accountable can be undermined if one has previously wronged the person one is trying to blame or if one incited the wrongdoing for which one is leveling blame (2010, 129). Linda Radzik has advanced this line of inquiry proposing three principles that she claims underwrite the norms of standing to hold responsible. She has argued that “the importance of liberty in self-regarding behavior, the moral significance of special interpersonal relationships, and the interests victims have in asserting their own authority” can each give rise to reasons that undermine one’s standing to hold in particular cases (2011, 597).

These authors lend credence to the thought that the standing to hold accountable is differentiated rather than universal. As we’ll see, such standing is the product of its recognition by others, and there are a variety of reasons such recognition might be withheld. Our question is whether the “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” challenges that have been issued by our Trump-supporting friends, family, and acquaintances legitimately undermine our standing to hold. Further on, I’ll develop and extend Radzik’s account to argue that these challenges to standing are legitimate, but first I want to step back and sketch some of the contours of the broader domain of holding accountable. In quickly canvassing the literature on the standing conditions for holding, I haven’t yet provided an account of what it is to hold accountable. Is it merely judging one to be so? Is it having a certain constellation of reactive attitudes with respect to them? Or does it require specific action toward them in the form of rebuke, sanction, or some other speech or physical act? How does holding responsible work? How does the act of holding responsible—whatever it is—function as the act that it is? To begin sketching answers to these questions, we first need a picture of the broad terrain of treating others as responsible. A good place to start is with Colleen Macnamara’s account (2011).

 

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE

Macnamara offers a picture that aims to capture the ways in which the complex attitudes and activities of taking others to be responsible fit together in what she dubs the participant stance, i.e., the orientation we take toward other normatively bound beings.[1] Her picture is one of three concentric circles that together represent the participant stance with all the attitudes and activities that are constitutive of it. In the outermost circle but excluded from the other two are attitudes and activities involved in treating another as a person other than those involved in appraising her conduct or holding her responsible. The examples are multitudinous and varied: making pacts with another, telling her secrets, expecting her to avoid emotional pain, regarding her with suspicion, falling head over heels for her. In the middle ring but excluded from the center circle we find attitudes and activities that are not yet appraisals or judgments of conduct but that engage another regarding her actual or potential conduct. Offering advice to another on how she should proceed, consulting with her about her potential actions, asking her for her reasons, and engaging in soul-searching moral inquiry all fall into this space. Finally, the innermost circle contains only those attitudes and activities constitutive of holding others responsible for their conduct. Here we can include both participant reactive attitudes involved in holding oneself and others accountable—shame, disgust, disappointment, etc.—as well as acts of rebuke, condemnation, cajoling, and demanding (Macnamara 2011, 97–98; also see Wanderer 2014, 64–65).[2] These communicative acts often take the form of speech, but we also hold others accountable through things like protest, direct action, boycott, and sanctions. These all would fall within Macnamara’s inner circle, but my focus in this paper is on second-personal speech acts, i.e., attempts to directly address another through speech regarding her actual or potential behavior.[3]

Within the inner circle of the participant stance, Macnamara identifies “two faces of holding others responsible” (2011, 89). The first of these faces encompasses attitudes and activities of appraisal. These are “forms of emotional reaction that mark the moral meaning of others’ morally significant actions” (2011, 89). Such responses are evaluative, but not necessarily within the deontic realm. Our emotional reactions to others may but need not necessarily indicate their adherence to or violation of deontic norms but often mark their exhibiting some virtues or vices or causing some pleasures or pains for themselves or others. Activities of the accountability face, on the other hand, are always responses to violations of deontic norms. This is the face of holding others to their obligations or, as Macnamara puts it, “of holding someone to the oughts that bind them” (2011, 90). There is a second distinction between the two faces that is more important for our inquiry. The accountability face but not the appraisal face always involves some kind of communicative expression. In order to hold someone to the oughts that bind her, i.e., to enforce the norms that are in place, one must by some means communicatively engage her. A judgment or appraisal that remains unexpressed in word or deed is normatively inert. It necessarily fails to hold its target to anything at all.[4]

What we see in the two faces are two distinct senses of “holding responsible.” In the appraisal face sense one takes one to be responsible. Suppose you happen upon two children. Fatima is crying, while Anika is sitting happily playing with a toy truck. Having just seen Fatima playing with the truck, one surmises that Anika has taken it from Fatima, eliciting her tears. One takes Anika to be responsible for upsetting Fatima. This taking to be responsible might involve feeling that Anika has evinced some disregard for Fatima, harboring some resentment toward Anika, and, perhaps, judging that Anika ought not to have taken Fatima’s toy without permission. Being merely a bystander, however, one might feel it is not one’s place to correct Anika or to return the toy to Fatima. In fact, one might go along in one’s business without any sort of behavioral expression of one’s reactive attitudes and judgments regarding Anika. This is holding responsible as merely taking to be responsible. Now contrast Anika’s father, who has also happened upon the scene. Judging Anika to be responsible for Fatima’s tears, her father goes a step further. He reproaches Anika for taking the truck, tells her to apologize, and returns the truck to Fatima. Anika’s father has held her responsible in a sense stronger than merely taking her to be responsible. He has enforced a norm by holding her to account for her actions, and he has done so by way of a set of communicative acts. Rather than merely taking her to be responsible, Anika’s father has held her accountable for her actions.

The accountability face differs from the appraisal face, then, in that it encompasses only those takings to be responsible that are communicatively expressed with the aim of holding others to deontic norms. Jeremy Wanderer has pointed out that the requirement of communicative expression makes the accountability face “voluntary” (2014, 65). His idea seems to be that while we cannot control our reactive attitudes, we are in control when we communicatively express those attitudes “with the intent of rebuking” (2014, 65). In forming the intention to rebuke another, we judge that the communicative act will at least potentially be effective, that it “is a worthwhile undertaking” (2014, 65). A nice result of this would be that the case for norms of holding would be bolstered by the idea that we are voluntarily responsive to such norms, but I want to caution against moving too quickly in this direction. My reason for hesitation is some reticence over the role of intention in the communicative act. Consider a variant on the foregoing example. Anika’s father happens upon the scene described above and immediately and without intending to rebuke, takes the toy from Anika and returns it to Fatima. This act communicates something to Anika, all the same. She has been corrected. Given the context, she comes to understand that she ought not have taken the toy from Fatima even if it is not her father’s intention to communicate this. It is not clear to me that this differs in any significant way from our earlier case in which Anika’s father did intend to rebuke her. In fact, I think that much of our behavior around holding others to deontic norms takes this form: our reactive attitudes seep out whether or not we intend to express them. This doesn’t make their expression any less communicative, for, as I see things, it is not the intent but the pragmatic structure of the act that defines it. Even when “unintentional,” communicative acts seek certain kinds of uptake from their targets and function as communicative acts when they achieve such uptake, regardless of intention.

Communicative acts have “a distinct internal aim, mode of achieving it, and success conditions” (Macnamara 2011, 90). Sanctioning behaviors like rebukes, for example, have as their aim what Macnamara calls “first-personal practical uptake of the ought-violation” by the individuals toward whom they are directed. They aim “to get the wrongdoer to acknowledge her wrongdoing [as a violation of the relevant norm], feel remorse, apologize, make amends, and commit to doing right in the future” (Macnamara 2011, 90). This is achieved through the imposition of burdens on the one being rebuked. The burdens, in this case, are emotional. She feels “the sting of reproof” (Macnamara 2011, 90). Finally, the rebuke is successful when “it is met with full first-personal practical uptake of the ought-violation” (Macnamara 2011, 90). It is this constellation of internal aim, mode, and success conditions that makes a communicative act of rebuke the act that it is. It matters not whether the person doing the rebuking does so with intention or merely as a result of reactive attitudes that have seeped out in behavior. It does matter, though, whether expression is given to the attitudes at all. If it is not, no rebuke has occurred.

This result does not undermine the case for standing conditions for holding accountable. I have argued that holdings need not be intentional, but this does not place them beyond one’s control. So long as it is possible for one to suppress an unintentional seeping out of reactive attitudes it seems reasonable to think there may be norms governing when one ought to do that. Compare, for example, the ability to suppress or contain unintentional outbursts of joy or anger.

Following Macnamara and Wanderer, I have rendered a picture of the terrain of holding others accountable, and I can now more clearly identify the target of my inquiry. I am interested in the innermost circle of the participant stance: those attitudes and activities that serve to hold others responsible. Of those attitudes and activities, I am particularly concerned with the activities of holding others accountable rather than merely taking them to be responsible. Acts of holding others accountable are communicative acts. Of these communicative acts, I am concerned with speech acts addressed second-personally to those whose obligations or commitments are under consideration. It is the standing conditions of such acts that I take up in what follows. To know whether my Trump-supporting friends and family are justified in their challenges to my standing I need to answer a pair of questions. Who, if anyone, has the requisite standing to felicitously carry out acts of holding, and what, if anything, can undercut such standing?

 

WHO HAS THE STANDING TO HOLD?

Who, if anyone, has the standing to hold another to deontic moral norms? There are clear-cut cases of standing conditions for other kinds of holdings, but the deontic moral case seems at least a little more complicated. Consider a prudential case. It would, we can assume, be better for you to skip dessert. All things considered, eating dessert amounts to the consumption of calories you don’t need that would be stored as fat and, in the long run, be a detriment to your health. Yes, you’d enjoy desert, but the long-term ill effects are a high price to pay for that small pleasure. Suppose this is your own assessment, and, given your interests, it is a correct assessment. You really ought not to eat dessert. Even so, it would be out of line for me, a stranger sitting at the next table, to lean over and whisper “You shouldn’t have dessert tonight,” when the waiter comes offering. Even if I’m a mind reader and somehow know with full certainty your interests and what they dictate, I would be terribly out of line if I chastised you as you considered the dessert menu. It’s just not my place. Someone else—your best friend, for example—might be able to hold you to your prudential obligation to refrain from dessert, but a stranger at the next table simply lacks the standing to do so.

The judgment that it’s not my place could originate from my own laziness or the fear that my own judgment about the situation is mistaken. It might be that I worry that interjecting will require me to follow through in ways for which I am not prepared. Sometimes, though, the judgment that it’s none of my business, that I ought to refrain from holding you to account, is a judgment “that it would be wrong to” do so (Radzik 2011, 582). In the previous case, it seems a matter of respect for privacy that I refrain from interfering in your dessert choices. It would needlessly complicate our lives to have strangers assuming they know our preferences and reminding us of how we ought to fulfill them. It would foster anxiety and interfere with all sorts of everyday social interactions. This seems a good reason to maintain that it’s not the case that just anyone has the standing to hold you to prudential oughts.

Still, one might think that the moral case and the prudential case differ quite dramatically. Darwall seems to defend the universal standing to hold in arguing that “the moral perspective [is] an impartially disciplined version of the second-person standpoint” (2006, 102). His idea is that when we take up the mantle of morality, we speak not as a particular individual but “as an equal participant in the first-person plural (“we”) of the moral community” (2006, 102). We address another as an equal member of this community and on its behalf. In doing so, we are not claiming any special authority for ourselves, we are merely claiming standing as part of the “we” (Radzik 2011, 584–88). I think, however, that this argument follows from a confusion between the standing to issue moral judgments and the standing to hold. To make this case, I want to examine a parallel between deontic holdings and another speech act with a similar pragmatic structure.

Orders come with clear-cut standing conditions. As your professor, I can order you to stow your laptop away during class, but should a passerby in the hall poke her head in the door and token the very same utterance, her speech act will be infelicitous. She lacks the standing—the authority—requisite for carrying out this speech act. Similarly, to use a well-trod example, if I am walking by a parade ground and overhear the drill instructor’s order to her cadets to drop and give her twenty, I am under no obligation to begin doing pushups. She has the authority to order her cadets to do so, but I, as a civilian, am beyond the reach of that authority.

In these cases, there is a defined structure of authority—a hierarchy—that is known and recognized by the relevant parties and that is the product of broadly institutional relationships between them. This structure defines the standing conditions for issuing the speech acts in question. As a professor, I have the standing to issue an order regarding the use of laptops in class, but this authority does not extend to orders about your time spent on Snapchat outside of class. These examples differ from the cases under investigation in at least two key respects. First, in the case of holding to deontic norms there is not, in general, a well-defined, institutional, and widely recognized structure of authority. There may be such a structure in special cases such as a parent issuing a holding to a child, a teacher to a student, or clergy to a parishioner, but, in general, our cases are messier and, often, negotiable. One dear friend might have the standing to hold me to quitting smoking, for example, while I may count it as an insult if another reminds me of my commitment when she sees me at the corner store. Second, orders are what Kukla and Lance call constative holdings (2009, 111–12). These speech acts create new normative statuses rather than call attention to and enforce already existing ones. Before the drill instructor gives the order to do push-ups, there is no sense in which the cadets were already obligated to do them. The status of one required to do push-ups is newly created in the act of ordering. Deontic moral holdings do not, by their very nature, create new normative statuses but rather have as their aim enforcing already existing commitments. They are alethic holdings. I ought to quit smoking, and my friend telling me so only aims to enforce this true prescription (Kukla and Lance 2009, chap. 5; Wanderer 2014).[5]

Though alethic holdings are grounded in already existing commitments, while constative holdings create new ones, they still share important structural features. Following Kukla and Lance, we can think of speech acts as functions on normative statuses. They take normative statuses as inputs, and their outputs are alterations of normative statuses. These statuses can be either agent-relative or agent-neutral. The former are indexed to individuals on the basis of their position in some social-normative space. The latter are, in principle, universal (2009, chap. 1). Both have agent-relative normative inputs. For both orders and alethic holdings it’s not the case that just anyone has the requisite authority, i.e., normative status or standing, to successfully pull off the speech act. Contrast this to declarative speech acts. Declaratives—run of the mill fact-stating speech acts—have agent neutral inputs. In principle, anyone can become entitled to utter a declarative. There are epistemic constraints on such entitlement, but there are no institutional barriers that make it the case that one particular person or class of people is entitled to a declarative while another is not.

 

Standing To Hold vs. Standing To Assert

Darwall’s universal standing position follows in part from a conflation of standing to hold and standing to issue a moral assertion. The assertion, (1) “Tom ought not to belittle his partner” is one to which, in principle, anyone could be entitled. It is, of course, true that I ought not to belittle my partner, and anyone who can produce the reasons why secures entitlement to this utterance. Such reasons as she may have, however, do not necessarily entitle her to tell me (2) “Tom! Don’t belittle Kate!”

(1) is a speech act that Kukla and Lance call a prescriptive. Prescriptives have agent-neutral entitlement conditions and agent-relative outputs. That is, they are speech acts to which, in principle, anyone can become entitled and which have as their constitutive aim uptake by one (or a few) specific individual(s) for whom first-personal uptake of the utterance has particular practical significance. When Ryan hears, “Tom ought not to belittle his partner,” his uptake of this speech act involves becoming himself entitled to the assertion, barring its defeat by other claims to which he is committed. My uptake of that same speech act, however, involves my recognition that it is me who is committed to not belittling my partner. My uptake involves recognition of the practical significance of the normative status ascribed to me by the assertion. It is the recognition that I am obligated to act accordingly.

Speech act (2), however, is not a prescriptive, but an imperative. It has agent-relative inputs as well as agent-relative outputs. Like constative holdings, this imperative cannot be uttered felicitously by just anyone even though just anyone could be entitled to (1), the prescriptive that underwrites it. Entitlement to (1) is necessary but not sufficient for entitlement to (2). We saw this already in the case of counsels of prudence discussed above. In that case, though it is clear that any observer, in principle, could have justifiably made the judgment and asserted the prescriptive “S should not order the cake,” it would still be infelicitous to issue a second-personal holding directed at S. The reason, I claimed, has to do with a presumption of privacy. It would be treacherous to navigate a world in which just anyone would be entitled to render second-personal just any prudential obligation that one might have. Why, one might wonder, should my own interests be twisted in such a way that I now owe it to a stranger to ensure their fulfillment? It is only those to whom we’ve entrusted our interests or with whose interests our own are intertwined who might hold us to fulfilling them. Of course, unlike the case of orders within well-defined, institutionalized structures of authority, exactly who has this standing is always negotiable, but one can see one’s way to the sorts of reasons that might be relevant to such negotiation. I see no reasons for thinking that the moral case should be treated differently than this prudential case. The standing to assert a moral prescriptive is, in principle, universally available, but the standing to issue an alethic holding to a deontic moral norm accrues to particular agents on the basis of their positions in normative space.

 

AGENCY AND CLAIMS AGAINST STANDING TO HOLD

The challenge now is to see our way to the sorts of reasons that might legitimately undermine one’s standing to hold in the moral case as privacy does in the prudential case. Linda Radzik’s work on differentiating the standing to sanction provides a promising point of departure. Following Darwall, Radzik begins from the assumption that the standing to hold to deontic moral norms is universal but then argues that this entitlement is defeasible by other moral reasons so that the target of an attempted holding might have a justifiable claim against one exercising her standing to hold (2011, 592). If this is right, then one might find oneself with “an obligation to refrain from sanctioning a particular kind of wrong” even when one is entitled to the concomitant moral prescriptive (2011, 590). A target of holding might have a justifiable, second-personal claim against the prospective sanctioner that undermines her standing to hold. Our question, then, is whether such reasons might be available to our Trump-supporting friends and family who reject our standing to hold them to anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist moral norms. Could the case be made that they have a second-personal claim against us that undermines our standing to hold? To show that they might, I begin with an examination of three cases that Radzik develops in which one’s standing to hold accountable is defeated by considerations having to do with respect for agency (2011, 592–93).

Radzik’s first case is self-regarding behavior. She argues that holding a person with respect to her purely self-regarding behavior interferes with “the agent’s ability to develop trust in her own judgment,” which has the effect of undermining her agency (2011, 593). Agents need space to develop their decision-making capacities and shape their identities. Introducing too much noise in the form of external voices aiming to guide behavior threatens to derail the process and, as such, is an affront to agency itself. If this is right, then the agent has a claim against the would-be holder or sanctioner that she refrain from holding or sanctioning. Such a claim is defeasible, of course, as there may be reasons that do, in some cases, justify a degree of paternalism, but the presumption is against such interference.

A second case Radzik explores is that of wrongs within what she calls “special relationships.” Within the bounds of romantic relationships, friendships, family, and activist groups, for example, outsiders lack standing to hold or sanction insiders with regard to behavior internal to the relationship. Such relationships are central to our self-conceptions and vital for our well-being, but they function well only when they are afforded “degrees of privacy, intimacy, and trust” (2011, 593). Outside interference can undermine their constitutive bonds. As such, the parties to such relationships have a claim against would be interveners that they refrain from holding or sanctioning with respect their behavior vis-à-vis one another. As with the previous case, such a claim is defeasible. Intervention might be justified in the protection of the physical well-being of the parties or in cases that involve children, for example (2011, 594).

Finally, Radzik’s third case is that in which bystander sanction interferes with “the victim’s ability to find vindication in the aftermath of wrongdoing” (2011, 597). Here again we find a reason that has to do with respect for agency, but in this case it’s that of the victim rather than the target of the holding. Were a third-party to come to the rescue, the victim may find herself further marginalized. She is interpellated as one who cannot stand up for herself. Her standing as a moral agent is weakened, and the likelihood that the pattern of wronging will be replicated is heightened because of her diminished standing.

Radzik’s cases demonstrate that a variety of moral reasons might undermine one’s standing to hold. What unifies these reasons is that in each case recognition of someone’s standing to hold would in some way threaten the agency of some relevant party. Since the protection of agency is a central moral concern, these seem the right sorts of reasons for challenging the standing to hold in moral cases just as privacy is in prudential cases. Can this model be extended to fit other cases where one’s standing might be challenged? It seems difficult to see how hypocrisy, for example, threatens someone’s agency or how an attempt to hold her to her own avowed anti-racist commitments threatens the agency of your Trump-voting aunt. One response to such cases would be to dismiss these as cases in which standing to hold is not really undermined. One might argue that the common reaction to hypocrisy cannot be grounded in a principled challenge to another’s standing to hold and that your aunt’s attempt to reject your standing is merely a ploy to evade being held responsible. I think such a retreat uncalled-for. Instead, I argue that we can extend Radzik’s account. Challenges of hypocrisy and “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” can be justified insofar as they threaten the agency of the target of the holding. The way in which they threaten her agency has to do with a particular kind of trust.

 

TRUST AND THE STANDING TO HOLD

When one party tries to blame another for a violation of deontic moral norms of which the first party herself is also guilty we hear challenges like “look who’s talking” or “that’s the pot calling the kettle black” (Cohen 2006, 108). “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” we are reminded in scripture. It is argued sometimes that the root of this tu quoque challenge is that in practicing hypocrisy, one is making an exception for oneself. Moral rules apply equally to all, but if I am guilty of a moral wrong and then blame you for a wrong of the same kind, I have tried to claim for myself some elevated status, to carve out an exception such that my action was acceptable while yours was condemnable. This challenges a deep Kantian commitment that the same rules must apply universally.

This explanation misses the mark. After all, one need not be a moral saint to hold others accountable. We can begin to see our way both to how it misses the mark and to how hypocrisy undermines standing by way of an example. Damon and Ella are out for a stroll. As they walk, Ella picks up a stone. Damon can see that she’s about to send it sailing at a squirrel. “Ella, stop!” he yells, in an attempt to hold her to her already existing obligation to refrain from doing unnecessary harm to other living creatures. Ella looks at him and asks, “Who are you to tell me to stop? Just last week I saw you clock a squirrel with a stone.” Damon’s past misdeed, according to Ella, undermines his standing to hold her to the same norm that he previously violated. On what grounds could she claim this?

Damon made an exception for himself. But how does this differ from the case in which Damon commits the act but does not try to hold Ella to the norm? It seems all he has done in the present case is make evident the exception he has already granted himself. The act of holding is not the site of his violation, it is merely a reminder of it. But why should this past violation undermine his standing to hold now that it has been brought to our attention? His standing would not be undermined, after all, if we were to recall that he has a penchant for shoplifting rather than for harming small critters. So it is not merely that he has excepted himself from moral norms in the past that undermines his standing to hold.

To see how hypocrisy undermines standing to hold, we need to recognize that Damon has also claimed authority over Ella in taking himself to be in a position to hold her to account. If, in response to Ella’s charge of hypocrisy, Damon fails to recognize his past wrongdoing, then he fails to reciprocally grant this authority to Ella. He does not recognize her standing to hold him to account. It is in this point that we begin to see how hypocrisy can undermine the standing to hold. Ella can justifiably reject Damon’s claim to authority, I urge, because it grants him influence over her behavior that she does not have, reciprocally, over his. In Ella’s recognition of Damon’s authority, a hierarchy is instituted where none previously existed. With her recognition, Damon assumes a position not unlike that of the drill instructor or the parent whose hierarchical role is institutionally defined. This puts Ella in a precarious position in their relationship, as Damon now wields some control over her behavior.

Ella has reason to reject Damon’s claimed authority. Accepting a hierarchical relationship with Damon by recognizing authority that he does not grant to her in return opens Ella up to potential manipulation in a way that significantly threatens her agency. Recognizing the standing to hold where it is not reciprocally recognized, would also undermine Ella’s ability to challenge Damon’s attempts to hold her. Successfully challenging Damon’s moral judgment requires his recognition of her standing to hold him to epistemic norms. His refusal to recognize her standing to hold him accountable, however, means that in recognizing his standing, Ella grants Damon fairly broad authority in judging and shaping her behavior. She cannot now claim for herself the standing to challenge Damon’s attempts at holding her when she finds them to be inappropriate. Unless Damon will recognize that she has the standing to hold him to the same norms to which he is attempting to hold her, Ella ought not recognize Damon’s standing to hold.

To put this another way, hypocrisy undermines trust. I will not recognize your authority to hold me if I have no reason to trust that you will recognize my authority to hold you to your commitments or to challenge your attempts to hold me. I am justified in withholding my recognition of standing insofar as recognizing your standing would undermine my agency. Your refusal to allow me to hold you accountable for your past violation is evidence that you do not recognize my standing to hold. As such, I have reason not to trust that you will recognize my standing to hold you accountable to any norms at all.

I claimed earlier that hypocrisy sometimes undermines the standing to hold, and I can say now why it does not do so universally. Hypocrisy does not always undermine trust. I’ll note two kinds of cases in which it does not. First, trust may be restored when, in response to the charge of hypocrisy, one takes responsibility for the wrong one has done and tries to make amends. In recognizing that one has committed a wrong and attempting, if possible, to correct for that wrong, one demonstrates to one’s interlocutor that one will allow oneself to be held to account by them. This is a step in restoring a trusting relationship with members of one’s moral community. They come to see that you take yourself to be beholden to moral oughts and that you recognize their standing to hold you to them. This is, to be sure, no guarantee that attempts to hold you to your moral commitments will be successful, but it is a reassurance that you will recognize their standing to hold. With this reassurance, recognizing your standing to hold them accountable no longer threatens their agency, as they can hold you in return.

The second kind of case in which trust and standing can be maintained even in the face of hypocrisy comes into view when we consider what I will call deep or layered relationships. Philosophers feed too often on a diet of under-described, impoverished examples, but real-life cases in which individuals attempt to hold others to moral obligations are rarely so one-dimensional. These acts are usually embedded in deep and long-tenured relationships between individuals as well as within communities that are bound together in varied and complex ways. We are not merely strangers passing in the night or even merely classmates or colleagues. In our communities, we may be related to some one individual as colleague, cycling partner, bowling buddy, and fellow Rotarian. Our relationships, that is to say, are usually multi-dimensional and normatively saturated. We engage across diverse normative environments that present many opportunities for normative holding in different settings. I might, for example, hold my cycling partner to account for slacking on his training and my fellow Rotarian to account for failing to pay dues. Trust is built in these varied, low-stakes incidences of holding, and this trust is called on when one claims the standing to hold in the moral context. This means that when Damon tries to hold Ella to her commitment not to harm other living creatures, his single past misdeed may not be sufficient to undermine his standing to hold. If their relationship is normatively rich in the ways just described then Ella has many reasons to trust that Damon will be responsive to her attempts to hold and so has reason to recognize his standing to hold her to deontic moral norms.

 

TRUST AND OUR DIVIDED COMMUNITIES

Now let’s return to the sorts of cases with which we began. During the campaign and since the election, many of us have thought about how to reach out to those who voted for Donald Trump. We tried, before the election, to hold prospective Trump voters to their own avowed anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, etc., moral commitments, and since the election, many of us have tried to hold to account those who did vote for him for enabling and emboldening his deeply troubling agenda. Such attempts have often been met with challenges to our standing to hold these folks accountable, even when they are old friends or family. We are often met with refrains of “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” or “What gives you the right . . . ?”

The response we receive is often predicated on a disagreement about whether the action in question was racist, xenophobic, etc. This is no different from most cases of successfully holding or blaming someone. In the standard successful case, the person one is trying to hold to her commitments or blame for her wrongdoing does not, at first, agree with one’s assessment of the situation. Holding has an epistemic dimension. The target needs to be brought around to one’s own way of seeing things morally through a conversation. When an attempt to hold is met with a challenge to one’s standing, however, it is just this sort of conversation that is preempted. Such a challenge is an attempt to end the discussion by denying one the authority to hold or blame even if the reasons one could give would be good ones. One could be entitled to the attendant prescriptive yet not be entitled to issue the holding.

Are such challenges to standing justified? I argue that, at least in some cases, they are on grounds that recognizing the holder’s standing undermines the agency of the target by granting the holder authority that is not reciprocal, i.e., by subsuming her in a hierarchy. Of course, these might not be the grounds that the target herself would give for rejecting standing. My aim, though, is to give a rational reconstruction of this sort of rejection that tries to understand it as a legitimate rejection of standing rather than merely a defense mechanism with no normative import.

In the “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” sort of case, the target is being held or blamed by someone who is nominally part of her community. She is a fellow citizen. She accepts many of the same moral principles that the target accepts and aims to live by. In the cases we’ve imagined, she is also more intimately related to the target. The holder may be a family member, an old friend, a college roommate, or a co-worker. Many of these relationships, though, are rather thin or one-dimensional. In my own experiences, I have met such responses when trying to talk to family and friends who I only see a few times a year or interact with only on social media. These are relationships that were once more robust, but as I’ve moved from my rural hometown to a metropolitan area, and visits have become fewer and farther between, these relationships have become much less normatively rich than they once were. These are not deep, trusting relationships, as we lack the varied interactions that present numerous low-stakes opportunities to hold one another accountable or to witness one another acting out our moral commitments. These are precisely the sorts of cases where I think “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” challenges to standing are most plausibly justified.

Consider the case of a family member. Here you may think of someone in your extended family with whom you have only minimal common interests and projects, if any. If you were to try to hold some such family member to a jointly espoused moral norm, you may find yourself met with a rejection of your standing to do so. Such a rejection, I claim, is warranted on the grounds that, in such thin, one-dimensional relationships, the target of the holding has little reason to trust that you would recognize her standing to hold you to your commitments, including the commitment to take seriously the moral reasons she presents in response to your moral judgments. Her claim against you that you not hold her to account is justified on the grounds of a lack of trust like that in the case of hypocrisy. In this case, however, the target has not been given evidence that you are likely to reject attempts to hold you to moral oughts. Instead, she lacks evidence to the contrary. The lack of a layered or multi-dimensional relationship between you and the target of your holding means that a fabric of trust has not been built up between you. She has little or no experience of holding you to account in low-stakes settings, so she has little or no evidence that you will recognize her standing to do so. She has no reason to trust you. In this situation, she would rightfully be concerned that if she were to grant you such authority over her, it would not be reciprocal and would undermine her agency. Her recognition of your standing would subsume her in a kind of hierarchical relationship where you are granted undue authority to enforce her existing moral obligations as you see fit, while she would lack the standing to do so reciprocally or to challenge your attempts to do so. If this is right, then I think that the case has been made that, in at least some instances, one’s standing to hold can be justifiably challenged by one’s Trump-voting friends and family. This seems a regrettable but unavoidable conclusion.

One might accept that lack of reason to trust undermines standing in cases in which the parties are moral equals, but object that this is not one of those cases. There are many instances of legitimate asymmetric holding relationships: child/parent, teacher/student, expert/novice. By continuing to support Trump in the face of all that he has said and done, one might think our friends and family have shown themselves to lack moral expertise. Perhaps one would be aiding the development of their agency by holding them to their moral commitments, even though it would clearly be a mistake for one to recognize their standing in return. This would be a kind of training relationship in which one helps them to see how their moral commitments ought to manifest in their actions. This objection cannot be lightly dismissed, though it seems to me that the evidence that someone is a moral neophyte would have to be substantial before it could override the presumption that we ought to treat other adult human beings as fellow, full-fledged moral agents. It could not be enough that we disagree only on the candidate they ought to have supported. It would not even be enough if we disagreed on a wide variety of moral judgments so long as they manage to make reasonable judgments and live out their moral commitments in much of their conduct, i.e., they warranted our taking up the participant stance toward them. What is important to see is that mutual recognition of the standing to hold is not predicated on agreement. We can morally disagree on a great many particular cases yet still recognize one another’s standing to push each other to defend or reconsider our judgments and correct each other when we’ve gone astray. Mutual recognition is where moral debate begins, not its culmination.[6]

 

CONCLUSION

Two things follow from this analysis. The first is that communities in which varied, multi-dimensional relationships exist and are cultivated are central to our moral practices. Such communities institute the conditions under which recognizing another’s standing to hold is reasonable. In these communities, patterns of holding accountable are built up in organic ways in lower-stake situations. Interacting in these contexts, members of the community develop the mutual trust that is the foundation on which reciprocal authority to hold can reasonably be recognized. A thick, multi-dimensional relationship in which such trust is developed is precisely what is lacking when we try to hold mere acquaintances, old friends, and distant family members to the anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-sexist, ant-transphobic, anti-ableist oughts that bind them.

The second thing that follows is more hopeful. The analysis I have given provides the outlines of a recipe for building the trust that has gone missing. We are isolated to a high degree both in our physical and virtual communities. The recent election provided stark examples of just how much this is the case ranging from online phenomena like Blue Feed, Red Feed to election maps that displayed the concentration of Clinton voters in urban centers separated by vast seas of red. As our communities have become ever more politically homogeneous, the opportunities for building deep, multi-dimensional relationships with those with whom we politically disagree have become ever more rare. But it is just these sorts of relationships that we need to build should we want to hold those with whom we disagree to shared moral standards. This necessitates joining organizations, clubs, and leagues in which we have the opportunity to interact, in low-stakes environments, with those on the opposite side of the political spectrum. It involves re-engaging in our physical communities, for such multi-faceted relationships cannot evolve if we retreat into our well-curated virtual ones. It requires that we go back out into the world and rebuild those organizations that once anchored our communities.

In entering into our communities and developing deep, multi-dimensional relationships with others, we are also making ourselves vulnerable, of course. The trust that develops as multi-dimensional relationships evolve must be mutual and the standing to hold that is granted on the foundation of that trust cuts both ways. As such, what will result is not a clear imposition of one’s own preferred interpretation of moral norms but a conversation in which those norms and their interpretation is contested in the space of reasons. But isn’t this what we want in the end: a functioning moral dialogue across political divides?

 

Thomas Wilk is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct instructor at various colleges and universities in and around Washington, DC. His research interests lie primarily in metaethics, philosophy of language, and epistemology from a neo-pragmatist perspective, but he also does work in applied ethics and has a growing interest in public philosophy. Tom’s recent publications include “Inferences, Experiences, and the Myth of the Given” in Logos and Episteme and “The Right Way to Win Over Posterity” in Hamilton and Philosophy.

 

REFERENCES

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Kukla, Rebecca, and Mark Lance. 2009. “Yo!” and “Lo!”: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Macnamara, Coleen. 2011. “Holding Others Responsible.” Philosophical Studies 152 (1): 81–102.

Maher, Chauncey. 2010. “On Being and Holding Responsible.” Philosophical Explorations 13 (2): 129–40.

Oakley, Justin. 1991. Morality and the Emotions. London; New York: Routledge.

Radzik, Linda. 2011. “On Minding Your Own Business: Differentiating Accountability Relations Within the Moral Community.” Social Theory and Practice 37 (4): 574–98.

Smith, Angela M. 2007. “On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible.” The Journal of Ethics 11 (4): 465–84.

———. 2008. “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment.” Philosophical Studies 138 (3): 367–92.

Strawson, Peter F. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25.

Wallace, R. Jay. 1994. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wanderer, Jeremy. 2014. “Alethic Holdings.” Philosophical Topics 42 (1): 63–84.

Watson, Gary. 1996. “Two Faces of Responsibility.” Philosophical Topics 24 (2): 227–48.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] The “participant stance” is Macnamara’s label for a concept that she finds implicit in Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.” It is, she says, “the complex mental orientation we take toward another which modulates our patterns of salience, presumptive interpretations, and leaves us susceptible to certain emotions and types of interactions” (2011, 83n1). The “participant stance” is defined in opposition to the “objective stance,” which is the way we comport ourselves toward inanimate objects and those we deem “incapacitated in some or all respects for ordinary interpersonal relationships” (Macnamara 2011, 84, citing Strawson [1962]), as well as in relation to “participant reactive attitudes,” which “are those distinct emotional states we are susceptible to when we adopt the participant stance” (2011, 83n1).

[2] It is disputed whether this inner circle is comprised only of acts of negative judgment and sanction or whether praise also has a place here. For discussion, see (Macnamara 2011, 92–93; cf. Smith 2008, 381).

[3] Since my focus is on second-personal speech acts of holding others to deontic moral norms, the arguments of this paper are intended only to identify potential challenges to one’s standing to felicitously pull off such acts. The norms governing other ways of holding accountable will inevitably differ from those identified here. Boycotts and protests enforce moral norms in very different ways than do second-personal speech acts of holding. For instance, they do not necessarily require that their targets recognize the standing of their originators in order to be effective. Furthermore, and as will become clear later in the paper, the standing conditions for what we could call third-personal speech acts, i.e., speech acts about the obligations of S that are not directly addressed to S, will differ from those of second-personal address. I thank Mark Lance for helping me to think more clearly about these distinctions.

[4] Within the accountability face, we can make a further distinction between those holdings that are forward-looking and those that are backward-looking, i.e., between pre-emptively holding and blaming. Holding stands to blaming “as preventative medicine stands to curative medicine” (Wanderer 2014, 66). While this is an important distinction in some settings, I will not differentiate between the two in what follows. The sorts of reasons that undermine one’s standing to hold in the cases that interest me in this paper are also reasons that undermine one’s standing to blame.

[5] There’s an interesting and important question about how exactly alethic holdings function to normatively hold their targets to already existing commitments. Kukla and Lance (2009) and Wanderer (2014) each offer accounts of how they achieve their function. In general, we can say that alethic holdings both elicit first-personal practical uptake of the relevant norm and render that norm more salient by making it the case that the target of the holding is beholden not just to the norm but also to the originator of the holding. If I light up even after hearing my dear friend’s reminder I have violated a norm, but I have also, in some sense, violated her and our relationship.

[6] I thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to consider this objection.

by Rebecca Kukla 

I’m extraordinarily proud and excited to present this special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, which focuses on ethical, social, and political reflections on the 2016 U.S. election and the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. It is rare for a philosophy journal to take up such a current and pressing topic. When I decided to put together this issue, I was not sure what sort of submissions I would receive, or how many. I was moved and elated to receive dozens of excellent submissions on a wide range of topics. In making difficult choices about which ones to publish, I eliminated any that took an abstract or distanced approach to the material. Plenty of good-quality philosophical work uses this sort of abstract methodology, but I wanted to publish only papers that captured and grappled with the immediacy and the practical enormity of the changes and challenges that this last election posed. I also eliminated papers that were more like op-ed pieces than scholarly articles. I chose only papers that offered rigorous and deep conceptual analysis, as I wanted this issue to continue the journal’s hallmark tradition of combining philosophical sophistication with practical engagement. The submissions that made the final cut – both those that appear in the special issue itself, and those that appear in the supplement to the issue on the journal’s blog – are, in my opinion, more than just examples of excellent and ethically relevant scholarship; they are also brave.

The topics represented in this issue, including the supplement, span a wide range of the controversies raised by Trump’s victory. Some of them concern large-scale political issues such as climate change and immigration policy (see for instance the articles by Frisch, Hedahl and Rieder, and Gotlib). Others explore difficult questions concerning the emergence or at least the uncovering of an angry political climate in the United States, from the specter of authoritarianism to the apparent rise of hate-based political speech and decision-making (Corvino, Reiheld, Pierce). Some of the papers examine the visual and symbolic iconography of the election, including the role that gender and embodiment play in how we respond to political figures (Reiheld, Park). Regina Rini’s paper takes on the important epistemological question of how we should consume and disseminate information in the age of the internet and in the face of the rise of ‘fake news.’ A final group of papers excavates the difficult topic of second-personal communication and relationships between individuals across painful political divides (Golden, Bennett, Wilk).

I tried hard to include a representative span of voices and topics in this special issue. I am delighted with the spread of topics. I am also delighted with the mix of scholars from different career stages and disciplines, and the mix of genders. In two respects, however, I am disappointed.

Although the essays are grounded in different political perspectives and approaches, I was hoping to include at least some contributions that presented a positive message about or view of the election and presidency, so as to achieve a certain kind of broad-strokes political inclusivity. But despite my actively encouraging some likely authors to submit such papers, I received no appropriate submissions that argued in support of Trump’s policies or election.

More pressingly, in my view, I received no submissions appropriate to the journal from people of color. Race is absolutely fundamental to many of the issues that are most at the center of Trump’s election and presidency. His views (and his vocal supporters’ views) on immigration, refugees, the Mexican border, Islam, and policing spring immediately to mind. But his views on climate change, health insurance, public education, and other such topics also have deeply racialized dimensions and repercussions. Global warming and environmental destabilization will have a dramatically disproportionate impact on economically and racially disadvantaged nations and groups. Weakening our public education and insurance infrastructures directly harms socially vulnerable and stigmatized Americans. Our collective ability to think critically and well about Trump’s proposed policies and professed goals in all of these areas essentially requires that we hear from people in the groups most targeted and disadvantaged by them.

For these reasons, as well as because of my general commitment to creating an inclusive forum, I wanted a racially diverse set of perspectives represented in this issue, but I failed to achieve it. I reached out to some scholars of color working on relevant topics and I disseminated the call for papers in places where I thought it would reach diverse scholars. I am sure there are all sorts of ways in which I could have done better, and I take responsibility for this deficit. But also, Sean Valles has been generous enough to write a powerful and emotionally difficult meta-commentary (published here in the blog supplement), which examines the important reasons why scholars of color may be disinclined to submit to an issue such as this. As proud as I am of this issue, I strongly encourage all its readers to think about the challenges that Valles’s essay makes vivid for those of us who want to build a more inclusive philosophical and political community of discourse.

 

by Sean A. Valles

ABSTRACT. This special issue conspicuously lacks work by Philosophers of Color (with the exception of this commentary). I have been given this opportunity to discuss the impediments that kept me from submitting my relevant work, offered as a small step toward recognizing the impediments faced by other Philosophers of Color. I highlight factors including direct and indirect consequences of a disproportionately White community of US philosophers, and some underrecognized risk-reward calculations that Philosophers of Color face when choosing an article project. I urge further discussion of the topic, starting with an exhortation to choose the right phenomenon and accordingly frame the right question: Why are White philosophers deliberating the “ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election” in a prestigious journal, while Philosophers of Color are deliberating the same issues in tense classrooms, closed offices, and on-/off-campus forums?

This is not a real article. But in this special issue on the 2016 US election and Trump it is, to my knowledge, the only contribution written by a Philosopher of Color. It is a commentary about the fact that it is the only contribution written by a Philosopher of Color.

After Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Kukla expressed consternation that the issue was full of excellent papers, but written by a roster of White philosophers, I offered to say something about why I didn’t submit any of my relevant philosophical work (on nativism, racism, health policy, Latinx health, etc.), and why it didn’t surprise me that almost none of the other well-qualified Philosophers of Color did either. Whether or not you, reader, agree with my account here, I contend that it is at least worth addressing these professional issues directly and explicitly. Though, to be clear, I am only willing to write this contribution to the issue because I believe Kukla made sincere and diligent efforts to recruit Philosophers of Color and that she was genuinely dismayed at having not succeeded.

This special issue is about a US election and I am a US philosopher, so I will constrain my comments to the US professional philosophy community. But, I am not a spokesperson for Philosophers of Color (reader: you know that’s not a thing, right?). I am a millennial Jewish-Chicano-Irish-Alsatian-Purépecha Indian applied philosopher of population health, happily employed as a tenured Associate Professor. But, I have the privilege of being relatively free to speak up since I happen to be ensconced in two wonderfully supportive academic units (I have the dual privileges of working in Michigan State’s Lyman Briggs College and its Department of Philosophy). In other words, I am at relatively low career risk compared to many of my Philosopher of Color colleagues, and risk is the first of several reasons why this issue ended up without any articles by Philosophers of Color.

Deciding to write and submit an article to a special issue requires a risk-reward calculation. For contributors to this particular special issue, it was a case of high risk and high potential reward. It is a prestigious venue, and publishing in it constitutes a major career success—if one’s article is accepted. Yet, applying to a narrow special issue like this one is an especially large risk since the more idiosyncratic a special issue is, the more it requires one to tailor an article to it. By contrast, a run-of-the-mill philosophy paper, if rejected, can usually be adapted with minor alterations for submission to any of several alternative journals. Early in my career, I reluctantly transformed a talk into an article and submitted it to another such relatively narrow special issue, after being persuaded by two senior colleagues editing the special issue. As I had originally suspected, the talk did not translate well into an article, so it was rightly rejected and I never found a good way to repurpose it. Writing and submitting that article was probably the most costly research failure of my career, and it happened during the pivotal period soon after I was hired for a faculty position. Every contributor to this issue took a risk by writing and submitting an of-the-moment article in a field that generally prizes timelessness over timeliness. But, Philosophers of Color must enter into each new risk-reward calculation while already weighed down by a disproportionate burden of career risks.

Philosophers of Color must make an unending series of risk management decisions on top of the ones faced by White philosophers. Philosophy is a hard profession, but things are different for Philosophers of Color. We are, to use the terminology of Frohlich and Potvin, “vulnerable” in the sense that we are “at risk of risks” (Frohlich and Potvin 2008, 216). Academics of color tend to get assigned to more committees and miscellaneous departmental service tasks, particularly being asked to “diversify” committees with our presence (Matthew 2016). Whether we like it or not, our days get filled with work other than the research output that is valued above all else by Academia. Perhaps most importantly, we disproportionately occupy untenured positions (Finkelstein, Conley, and Schuster 2016). Academics of color working without the protection of tenure (whether employed on short-term contracts or in pre-tenure positions on the track to tenure) are very much “at risk of risks.” Any new risk, from a vindictive department head to a racist tenure letter-writer can derail the career of a tenure-track Philosopher of Color; a displeased university donor or vocal parent of a student can lead to a contingently-employed Philosopher of Color getting laid off. Philosophers of Color can indeed have thriving careers, but our paths to success are narrow at best, and always beset by known and unknown pitfalls.

The plethora of risks facing Philosophers of Color have the additional cumulative effect of making us rather rare—there are just not that many article-writing Philosophers of Color out there, thanks in part to being forced to traverse a career gauntlet set on ‘hard’ mode. Rather infamously, Philosophers of Color remain vastly underrepresented at even the early stage of doctoral completion (Schwitzgebel 2016). The passage of time is not kind. For example, of 2,906 Regular Members of the American Philosophical Association (non-student, non-emeritus, etc.) who report their race/ethnicity, only 0.6% report being American Indian or Alaska Native (I am one of seventeen people in that category), but we make up 1.7% of the US population (Humes, Jones, and Ramirez 2011; American Philosophical Association 2016). It is hard to find article submissions from Philosophers of Color when around 85% of US philosophy PhDs are going to non-Hispanic White philosophers (Schwitzgebel 2016).

The underrepresentation of Philosophers of Color also has subtle psychological effects. Our small cohort works inside a profession permeated with racist and ethnocentrist inequities. I, for one, find it requires some serious mental exertion to get excited about the prospect of any endeavor officially or unofficially positioned as the effort of philosophers-in-solidarity against [insert social problem here]. I and other Philosophers of Color can and do routinely look out into the world and confront the covert and overt inequities in it. But I’m pretty sure almost all of us are acutely aware that we must do this—and all things—while looking over our shoulders in constant vigilance for misdeeds by our fellow philosophers. Our profession perpetuates many of the same explicit and implicit racist structures/biases that I and others critique in the Trump era (adulation of White men of dubious merit, dog whistle invocations of Western culture, blindness to structural racism/sexism/heterosexism, etc.). That makes it feel…different…to critique the Trump era from the position of a Philosopher of Color. My career has been at least as benign and charmed as that of any Philosopher of Color whom I’ve talked to about career matters, but even mine includes a string of macro- and micro-aggressions from my fellow philosophers, including: outrageous defamatory peer reviews of my (non-anonymous) submitted work, condescending White-splaining of basic points during Q&As, flat refusals to believe that I know even a little about topics in which I have well-documented expertise, and many other incidents I can’t even safely mention.

In this milieu, the prospect of banding together with fellow philosophers to boldly stand together and critique the Trump era for its faults is not tantamount to hypocrisy, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder to feel the team spirit. I even get (often unfairly) frustrated when I see my White colleagues appear to overestimate the novelty of Trump era inequities, since it reinforces my perception that they still vastly underestimate the breadth and depth of inequities before the rise of Trump. It can grow frustrating, as a Philosopher of Color, to be surrounded by White colleagues getting “woke,” even though their waking up to social inequities is obviously a change for the better. Much is new about the Trump-era rhetoric, policies, and zeitgeist, but much is not.

Taking stock, even if a Philosopher of Color were to be: 1) able to spare the time to write a paper for this special issue, 2) willing to risk dedicating that block of time to writing an article for the special issue, and 3) able to muster sufficient enthusiasm to complete the project in the allotted time, there are yet more obstacles. To put it bluntly, overt racist intimidation has become more normalized. I am a husband and a new father, and since the election I need to be all the more careful to filter my ‘Come at me, bro!’ instincts through the reality of my responsibilities. Most of my work deals directly with contemporary politics and policies (as a shorthand, I say that I research and teach exclusively offensive content). In the Trump era, I need to ask myself much more regularly, and more carefully, whether that day’s article/interview/blog is going to be the one that gets a swastika spray-painted on my door. I don’t pretend to know how many of my fellow Philosophers of Color have been effectively dissuaded from submitting to this issue by such considerations, but contributing to this special issue would be a pretty quick way of transforming oneself from a hate crime target into a hate crime prime target. (Note: if this commentary is the work that finally gets a swastika spray-painted on my door that would seriously add insult to injury—I don’t even get to count this as a peer-reviewed article in my annual review!)

None of the above factors was individually sufficient to dissuade me from submitting an article to this special issue. Rather, the net effect of all of them was that they dampened my resolve enough that I just let inertia carry me along on my current path. Like most professional philosophers, I lead a pretty busy life. I could have spared the time without sacrificing my book manuscript deadline and my various article revisions, but I’ve got plenty to do.

None of this is meant to downplay the risks and disincentives faced by other philosophers due to their identities, experiences, or social positions. Female philosophers entering into public sociopolitical discourse encounter dual threats, from the public at large (horrifyingly, rape threats are par for the course) and from the profession (female philosophers navigate career perils that are, in many ways, similar to those facing Philosophers of Color). Philosophers who are sexual and/or gender minorities live with not only de facto bigotry inside and outside the professional community, but also legalized discrimination (threats of dismissal by certain religiously-affiliated schools, etc.). Philosophers with a range of physical or cognitive conditions or disabilities face various impediments to contributing to this issue (e.g., a philosopher living with trauma after a sexual assault confronts the daunting task of commenting on the election of a man accused of multiple sexual assaults). Philosophers with fragile immigration statuses run into the unique risk of critiquing the very executive branch that has broad discretionary enforcement powers over immigration law (ojalá and inshallah, the judicial branch will protect my colleagues from executive abuses). The list goes on. Moreover, there are additional (but non-additive) intersectional dynamics between these factors for some philosophers, such as an undocumented queer philosopher imperiled by multilateral legal hazards. This commentary does not presume to speak expertly about the range of risks facing philosophers. Instead, I offer this rather personal commentary from my position as a Philosopher of Color and Ambiguously Swarthy American™.

So, I and my Philosopher of Color colleagues almost all let this opportunity pass by. But, it is absolutely vital that readers of this issue understand that Philosophers of Color are most definitely doing more than our fair share of untangling and addressing the “ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election and the transition to the Trump administration” (to use the language of the special issue’s advertisement). The difference is how we do it. As others have expounded at length, the job of an academic of color is filled with invisible labor (Matthew 2016). Philosophers of Color counsel the terrified students of color who pull us aside in hallways to whisper into (what they hope will be) an empathetic and wise ear. We share survival tips with fellow Philosophers of Color. We sacrifice our evenings to planning and participating in election-inspired campus panels, student organization meetings, and solidarity rallies. We serve as go-to resources for our well-intentioned White colleagues who seek a Philosopher of Color’s advice on whether/how to address the Trump era tragedy of the day. We do these things while knowing—somewhere between the backs and the fronts of our minds—that the next time we open the car/office/home door there might be a swastika and/or “TRUMP” painted on it.

The net result of the above reasons (and the many others I failed to mention) is that this special issue, which I indeed look forward to reading, only features White authors. In light of the preceding paragraph, I caution against trying to explain the whiteness of this special issue as an isolated phenomenon. In my previous research, I have argued that explanations hinge more than one might think on “phenomenon choice” and the corresponding questions they engender—we must be exceedingly careful when deciding exactly what ought to be explained (Valles 2010; 2016). In this case, I urge readers of this issue to not get sidetracked by a misleading question (Why is this issue so White when the concerns of/about people of color are especially relevant?). The question that needs answering is: Why are White philosophers deliberating the “ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election” in a prestigious journal while Philosophers of Color are deliberating the same issues in tense classrooms, closed offices, and on-/off-campus forums? Publishing an article in KIEJ garners praise from promotion committees; those other activities, not so much. Let’s please discuss the right question. I have tried to articulate what I think are some ‘upstream’ social and professional structures that allowed an outpouring of excellent work by White philosophers, yet failed to channel work by Philosophers of Color into the same pool. For philosophers to forcefully and effectively critique the Trump era, we must simultaneously do the hard work of addressing our own profession’s inequities.

 

Sean Valles is an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the Michigan State University Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy. His research spans a range of topics in the philosophy of population health, from the use of evidence in medical genetics to the roles played by race concepts in epidemiology. He is currently completing a book on Philosophy of population health science.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe immeasurable thanks to my wife, Margot Valles, for her comments on the text and most of all for fearlessly sharing the risks of my choices. I am grateful to Rebecca Kukla for the opportunity to write this, and for the feedback on the content.

 

REFERENCES

American Philosophical Association. 2016. “Demographic Statistics on the APA Membership, FY2014 to FY2016.” https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/apaonline.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/data_on_profession/Member_Demo_Chart_FY2016_rev.pdf.

Finkelstein, Martin J., Valerie Martin Conley, and Jack H. Schuster. 2016. “Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity.” TIAA Institute. https://www.tiaainstitute.org/publication/taking-measure-faculty-diversity.

Frohlich, Katherine L., and Louise Potvin. 2008. “Transcending the Known in Public Health Practice—the Inequality Paradox: The Population Approach and Vulnerable Populations.” American Journal of Public Health 98 (2): 216-221.

Humes, Karen R., Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez. 2011. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010.” Washington, D.C.: United States Census Bureau.

Matthew, Patricia A. 2016. “What is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?” The Atlantic. November 23. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/508334/.

Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2016. “Percentages of U.S. Doctorates in Philosophy Given to Women and to Minorities, 1973-2014.” The Splintered Mind, January 13. http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/percentages-of-us-doctorates-in.html.

Valles, Sean A. 2010. “The Mystery of the Mystery of Common Genetic Diseases.” Biology and Philosophy 25 (2): 183-201.

Valles, Sean A. 2016. “The Challenges of Choosing and Explaining a Phenomenon in Epidemiological Research on the ‘Hispanic Paradox’.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (2): 129-148.

by Andrew J. Pierce

ABSTRACT. In this essay, I provide an analysis of the much-discussed authoritarian aspects of Donald Trump’s campaign and early administration. Drawing from both philosophical analyses of authoritarianism and recent work in social science, I focus on three elements of authoritarianism in particular: the authoritarian predispositions of Trump supporters, the scapegoating of racial minorities as a means of redirecting economic anxiety, and the administration’s strategic use of misinformation. While I offer no ultimate prediction as to whether a Trump administration will collapse into authoritarianism, I do identify key developments that would represent moves in that direction.

The unorthodox campaign and unexpected election of Donald Trump has ignited intense speculation about the possibility of an authoritarian turn in American politics. In some ways, this is not surprising. The divisive political climate in the United States is fertile soil for the demonization of political opponents. George W. Bush was regularly characterized as an authoritarian by his left opposition, as was Barack Obama by his own detractors. Yet in Trump’s case, echoes of earlier forms of authoritarianism, from his xenophobic brand of nationalism and reliance on a near mythological revisionist history, to his vilification of the press and seemingly strategic use of falsehoods, appear too numerous to ignore. In this essay, I attempt to provide a sober evaluation of the authoritarian prospects of a Trump administration. As presidential agendas inevitably differ from campaign platforms, much of this analysis will be unavoidably speculative. However, the nature of Trump’s carefully studied campaign, the early actions of his administration, and the wealth of philosophical reflections on earlier forms of authoritarianism provide ample resources to inform such speculation. I focus on three elements of authoritarianism in particular: the authoritarian predispositions of Trump supporters, the scapegoating of racial minorities as a means of redirecting economic anxiety, and the administration’s strategic use of misinformation. While these elements are sometimes thought of as competing causal explanations for the rise of authoritarian regimes, my analysis here has no such explanatory pretensions. I assume that the rise of Trump is attributable to a complex causal network of social forces, including those mentioned here and perhaps others besides.[1] Moreover, I will argue that these elements are not mutually exclusive; that, for example, the authoritarian predispositions emphasized by some political analysts are closely linked to xenophobia and racial intolerance, and that the strategic use of misinformation plays a role in “activating” authoritarian predispositions. In short, my view is that identifying the most statistically significant predictor of supporting authoritarian regimes, or their single most salient causal factor, is less important than attaining a wide-ranging view of their central attributes, thus developing the outlines of a standard by which to judge the Trump and other administrations. Accordingly, while I offer no ultimate prediction as to whether a Trump administration will collapse into authoritarianism, I do identify key developments that would represent moves in that direction.

 

AUTHORITARIANISM AMONG TRUMP SUPPORTERS

If Trump is an authoritarian, then his is a populist authoritarianism, a form of rule in which “a strong, charismatic, manipulative leader rules through a coalition involving key lower-class groups” (Gasiorowski 2006, 111). Thus any study of Trump’s alleged authoritarianism cannot neglect the nature of his appeal to his core supporters, nor the fact that he was propelled to power by a groundswell of support that was largely unanticipated by the Republican establishment that ultimately – though with great initial reservation – nominated him as their party’s presidential candidate. Fortunately, scholarship on authoritarianism has historically emphasized the importance of understanding its psychological appeal, and thereby focused on not just authoritarian rulers and governments themselves, but on their core supporters. Adorno et al.’s study on The Authoritarian Personality (1950) provided the model for this sort of approach, and offers a more general definition of authoritarianism. Adorno et al. identified a number of personality traits that were correlated to ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, and “anti-democratic” attitudes. Grounded in Freudian psychology, these researchers ultimately located support for authoritarian regimes and policies in childhood pathologies that resulted in rigid adherence to simplified worldviews, strict obedience to authority figures, and fear and distrust of those who do not share this same orientation to the world. And while this particular study has been criticized both for its reliance on empirically questionable Freudian presuppositions and for methodological errors (Stenner 2005; Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Christie and Jahoda 1954), the core idea of an authoritarian personality type remains influential, and continues to be developed and refined by social scientists.[2]

Matthew MacWilliams has recently utilized such a revised authoritarian personality measure to study Trump supporters, and claims as a result of his study that a predisposition to authoritarianism is the single most statistically significant predictor of support for Trump, more significant than race, income, level of education, or other commonly cited correlates (2016). MacWillams used a serious of questions about childrearing that have been shown to capture not only active authoritarian views, but the predisposition to having such views “activated” by threat (Stenner, 2005). High scores on this measure of authoritarian predisposition corresponded to a greater likelihood of supporting Trump over the other contenders for the Republication party nomination.

MacWilliams’ results have been challenged by Wendy Rahn and Eric Oliver (2016), whose own research showed greater predispositions to authoritarianism among supporters of Ted Cruz than among Trump supporters. They claim that anti-elitist populism, manifested in distrust of experts and political elites is the more significant factor that distinguished Trump supporters from supporters of other Republican contenders. But even if Cruz was the preferred candidate of those predisposed to authoritarianism, their study still revealed high levels of authoritarianism in Trump supporters as well. It is thus quite likely that most Cruz supporters turned to Trump supporters when Cruz dropped out of the race, a claim supported by evidence that evangelical Christians overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the general election (Smith and Martinez 2016). But more importantly, anti-elitism is not necessarily opposed to authoritarianism. One might expect authoritarians to submit to the authority of political and other elites, but this misses the fact that authoritarians do not view all forms of authority equally. As MacWilliams puts it:

authoritarians’ sense of order is not necessarily or sole­ly defined by worldly powers. To authoritarians, there are higher powers that delineate right from wrong and good from evil. There are transcendent ways of behaving and being that are enduring, everlasting, and the root of balance and order. These authorities are “morally and ontologically superior” to state or institutional authority and must be obeyed. (2016, 14)

If the actions of social and political elites are viewed as being inconsistent with these higher sources of authority, if they are viewed as unconventional outsiders aiming to upend traditional values, and so on, there is no inconsistency in authoritarians resisting them or their claims to authority. This is precisely the reason that “populist authoritarianism” is not a contradiction in terms, and part of the reason that I have identified that variety of authoritarianism as the relevant one for evaluating Trump’s rise.

Still, Oliver and Rahn’s study might be taken to suggest that support for conservative candidates in general is marked by authoritarian predispositions, such that these predispositions do not uniquely explain support for Trump. Indeed, the study of authoritarianism has historically been plagued by difficulties in disentangling it from conservative political ideologies. This is partly why some scholars of authoritarianism have refined authoritarian personality measures to focus specifically on “Right Wing Authoritarianism” (Altemeyer 1981). Yet one of the advantages of approaches that focus on child-rearing is that they are supposed to get behind ideological commitments and political beliefs. As MacWilliams claims, “authoritarianism is a predisposition that arises causally prior to the political attitudes and behavior that it affects” (2016, 25). In principle then, it should be able to identify latent authoritarian tendencies as well as explicit authoritarian beliefs, as expressed, for example, in some varieties of conservative ideology. Nothing in Oliver and Rahn’s study suggests that the measure fails to do that, but it does perhaps suggest that, in order to understand the distinctiveness of a Trump presidency, we must look at the actions and ideologies of Trump himself, and of his campaign and administration, in addition to the psychological predispositions of his supporters. With this in mind, I now turn to one such tendency of Trump’s governing strategy: the tendency toward racial scapegoating.

 

RACIAL SCAPEGOATING

While MacWilliams presents authoritarianism as an alternative to explanations that focus specifically on race and the alleged racial resentment of many Trump supporters, it is clear that the two factors are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one of the key features of authoritarianism is its fear and suspicion of those who are different, as Adorno’s general definition suggests, and racial difference is one of the most visible and, in the United States, historically salient forms of such difference. It is not necessary here to decide on conceptual grounds whether the manipulation of racial attitudes is a necessary feature of authoritarianism. It is enough to note that, empirically, authoritarian regimes often employ this strategy. Including an analysis of this sort also helps especially to clarify how exactly populist authoritarian leaders manipulate “key lower class groups.” Trump’s campaign certainly employed this strategy, effectively playing upon the anxieties of the white working class regarding their perceived cultural marginalization in the face of the increasing racial diversity of the United States. Yet analyses of Trump’s rise that focus specifically on racial resentment often neglect the economic dimension of Trump’s support among the white working classes. The geographical locations where Trump found the most support are areas where traditional sources of employment have been rendered obsolete or moved overseas, where free trade agreements like NAFTA are viewed with suspicion, and where the social effects of economic marginalization manifested in things like drug addiction have wreaked havoc.[3] These two features – economic marginalization and racial resentment – are not unrelated. The economic marginalization of a subset of the white working class provides fertile ground for racial scapegoating. Here again, the analyses of those writing in the wake of earlier forms of authoritarianism is instructive.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno aimed to show that German anti-Semitism was intentionally cultivated as a means of redirecting discontent arising from economic exploitation. In their words, German anti-Semitism served a specific purpose: “to conceal domination in production” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142). While European Jews had historically been excluded from ownership of major industries, they had, according to Horkheimer, Adorno, and other social theorists of the time including Hannah Arendt (1976), achieved some success integrating the “circulation sphere,” including what we would now call the financial sector, as well as small business ownership. This social position made the Jew an easy scapegoat for the most basic injustice of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value, i.e. profit, from the wage-laborer. This is allegedly because the workers “find out the true nature of the exchange only when they see what they can buy with [their wages]” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142). Thus the injustice of capitalist wage labor is projected onto the merchant and the banker, and “the economic injustice of the whole class is attributed to him” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142). This produces what Horkheimer and Adorno call a “socially necessary illusion” (necessary, presumably, for the maintenance of the economic status quo, not in any ultimate sense), that “the circulation sphere is responsible for exploitation” (2002, 143). This form of scapegoating is expressed finally in their claim that “in the image of the Jew which the racial nationalists hold up before the world they express their own essence” (2002, 137). The exploitation that they attribute to the Jew is really a projection of their own exploitative nature, and in unleashing violence against these substitute exploiters, the masses feel a false sense of emancipation, while remaining within the established “reality principle” of capitalist exploitation.

Interestingly, Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory also describes the way that this form of scapegoating relied on what contemporary race theorists call “racialization” – the transformation of a social group into a racial group (Omi and Winant 2014). Prior to the early twentieth century, and even in the earlier writings of critical theorists (Horkheimer 1989), the “Jewish question” was primarily considered to be a matter of cultural and religious difference. As Marx put it, “the most stubborn form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition” (1978, 28). In contrast to this view, Horkheimer and Adorno point out, German fascism understood Jewishness first and foremost in racial terms, thus distancing itself from the “liberal thesis” which held that “the Jews, free of national or racial features, form a group through religious belief and tradition and nothing else” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 137). The Nazis thus attributed to Jews a shared biological essence, solidified in both law and social practice. The Nuremburg Laws, for example, like the so-called “one drop rule” in the United States, included precise specifications of who was to count as a Jew, in order to eliminate any element of voluntary self-identification (or, perhaps more to the point, dis-identification). In this way, the group targeted for scapegoating is identified and fixed in a more or less stable form.

The psychoanalytic foundations of Horkheimer and Adorno’s scapegoat theory are as apparent here as they are in Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality.” But as with Adorno’s reflections on authoritarianism, the observation that authoritarian forms of rule tend to rely on this sort of scapegoating does not rise or fall with one’s acceptance of the psychoanalytic framework.[4] Nor must one accept the Marxist framework upon which their theory of capitalist exploitation draws. The key idea is simply that scapegoating occurs as a response to a real economic crisis, which results in political dissent of a sort that threatens the vested interests of those who hold economic power, which is then redirected toward vulnerable minority groups. Scapegoating of this sort has certainly played some role in Trump’s rise to power. White working class communities that have experienced the loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs, decreasing tax revenue, crumbling infrastructure, and general social anomie have proven incredibly responsive to explanations that link these phenomena to the (perceived) influx of immigrants from the south. Growing white anxiety about misleading reports that whites will soon become a minority in the United States due to increased immigration from non-European nations compounds these economic fears (Passel and Cohn 2008; Pierce 2015). This shows that it is not immigration per se that worries Trump supporters, but a racialized immigration that challenges white control over power and resources. While such racial anxiety is in some form as old as the United States itself, it was manipulated masterfully by the Trump campaign.

Again, the link between this sort of scapegoating and the authoritarian character of Trump’s appeal must be emphasized. Debates about which factor has greater explanatory salience can easily miss the ways in which they are closely intertwined. Authoritarian predispositions are “activated” by threat, and scapegoating represents targeted groups as both economic and existential threats. Mexicans not only threaten “our” jobs, but are also represented as murderers, rapists and all around “bad hombres,” responsible for (fictional) increases in crime and disorder. Their perceived threat to law and order is surpassed only by those from the Arab world, who are equated with terrorism and “radical Islam.” Such threats must be rooted out by any means necessary, and so racial profiling and increasingly invasive police practices are tolerated within our borders, and broadly restrictive immigration measures, physical barriers, and other imprecise responses are promoted as a means of fortifying them.

While it is true that these forms of scapegoating target minority identities that are not technically racial (at least not by the United States’ own official system of racial classification[5]), there is a gap between “official” and popular understandings of race when it comes to Arabic Muslims and “Hispanic” groups. For example, the myriad reports of impending white minority almost always focus on non-Hispanic whites as the relevant demographic for measuring when whites will fall beneath fifty percent of the overall population. And even if Trump supporters’ aversions to Arabs or Muslims appear to be primarily cultural or religious aversions, the rarity of distinguishing between culture, region, and religion in the discourses surrounding immigration from the Middle East demonstrate the increasing racialization of this group (Sheth 2009). These examples show that the folk understanding of race may not match up with official racial categories – that Hispanics and Arabs are commonly thought of as being racially distinct from non-Hispanic, non-Arab whites. As tools like the Census are integral to defining and categorizing populations as “racial,” it will be interesting to see how a Trump administration approaches the 2020 Census, and in particular whether some effort is made to distinguish Arabs and Middle-Eastern populations from “whites.”

Finally, new research suggests that it is not just economic marginalization, but economic inequality in general that contributes to authoritarian attitudes, which in turn make their possessors amenable to racial scapegoating. The “relative power” theory of Frederick Solt holds that economic inequality leads to inequality in power and thereby produces hierarchy. This hierarchy in turn “mak[es] experiences that reinforce vertical notions of authority more common and so authoritarianism more widespread” (Solt 2012, 703). In short, if the economic structure of a society requires or rewards submission to the authority of employers, benefactors, and those with more economic power, this sort of subservience is likely to be seen as normal, and thereby transferred to the sphere of political (or familial) authority, where it can be exploited to support xenophobic policies that purport to address complex social and economic issues.

Combining the insights of the scapegoat theory and the relative power theory then, one can say that societies with a high degree of economic inequality will produce heightened levels of authoritarian predispositions, and that these heightened authoritarian predispositions are more easily activated in times of economic or political crisis, or among economically marginalized populations. Given that capitalism is prone to both extreme inequality and frequent crisis, it is fair to say that it will reliably produce such authoritarian attitudes, especially in those that become economically marginalized. Scapegoating will thus appear as an easy solution to any legitimation crisis that might arise. Trump’s campaign and early administration has relied heavily on this ready solution, and one can expect that it will rely on it even more heavily in the case that crises within the administration and within the United States itself deepen.

 

TRUTH, POWER, AND PROPHESY

A final, much discussed feature of Trump’s alleged authoritarianism is his seeming indifference to truth. Trump is by no means the first politician to employ a strategy of deceit and falsehood. But generally, politicians lie through omission, or in ways that can be easily retracted or reinterpreted. Trump’s cavalier and easily repudiated use of falsehoods regarding matters large and small has struck many observers as unique. Here many analysts have referred to Arendt’s comments on the matter in Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt claims that authoritarian regimes are marked by their “extreme contempt for facts as such” (1976, 350).[6] Moreover, she explains, “the chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error” (1976, 348–49). Yet the authoritarian orientation to the truth is misunderstood, she claims, if it is viewed as an attempt at factual accuracy. Rather, the “propaganda effect” of such pronunciations consists in their “habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophesy” (Arendt 1976, 349). Once authoritarian rulers attain power, “all debate about the truth or falsity of a … prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive” (1976, 350). Among the examples she discusses are both predictions (Hitler’s claim that if “Jewish Financiers” brought about a second world war, the result would be their annihilation) and factual claims (the USSR’s claim that Moscow possessed the world’s only subway system), which she characterizes also as kinds of “prophesy,” since such assertions are lies “only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others” (1976, 350).

Some of the falsehoods that the Trump administration traffics in could be understood in this way. The baseless claim that three-to-five million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the general election, for example, was taken by some as “telegraphing his administration’s intent to provide cover for longstanding efforts by Republicans to suppress minority voters by purging voting rolls, imposing onerous identification requirements and curtailing early voting” (New York Times Editorial Board 2017). Trump also claimed that the U.S. murder rate was at a 47 year high when it was actually at a 45 year low, and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeated similarly false claims about increasing crime rates, calling the increase a “dangerous, permanent trend” (Beckett 2017; FBI 2017). Recalling the importance of threat to activating authoritarian predispositions, these claims serve both to shore up obedience in general and to signal an intent to “get tough” on crime, continuing the legacy of criminalization that undergirds the repression of minority groups.[7]

But perhaps most troubling, and less discussed, are the claims that look more like “prophesy” than assertion. For example, when a federal judge issued a stay on his Executive Order temporarily banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, Trump tweeted “just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” (Trump 2017). While the claim that people were “pouring in” could be disputed on factual grounds, the more important aspect of this message is found in its prophetic character, and the precedent it sets for blaming the judiciary for any future attack that might occur. Given the high likelihood of some act of terrorism occurring at some point in Trump’s presidency, this message sets the groundwork for consolidating power in a truly authoritarian fashion. Despite recent increases (likely due to the generalized, post-victory optimism of Trump supporters) public approval ratings of Congress remain at historic lows. This demonstrates a lack of faith in the effectiveness of the legislative branch of government. If faith in the judiciary were similarly undermined, the stage would be set for reigning in its powers, and undermining the system of checks and balances designed to prevent autocracy.

Understanding this strategy provides a basis for responding to an important objection to characterizations of Trump’s administration as authoritarian. One might identify as key features of authoritarianism (as a political system, as opposed to a psychological predisposition) the consolidation of executive power, the elimination of effective checks on that power from legislatures, judiciaries, and the press, repression of opposition parties, and repression of political opposition more broadly. Trump’s early administration does not seem to have consolidated power or repressed dissent in this way. To the contrary, his actions appear to have produced levels of dissent, protest, and pushback, from citizens, from the media, from opposing political parties, and in some cases even from the Republican Party itself, not seen in the United States in some time. Perhaps this indicates that worries about Trump ushering in an era of authoritarian repression and control are exaggerated.

It does seem unlikely that a Trump administration will succeed in outlawing the Democratic Party, disbanding Congress, or replacing independent journalism with state-sponsored channels of propaganda. For this reason, it seems premature to declare the Trump administration definitively authoritarian. However, it is equally unwise to ignore Trump’s clear pretensions to authoritarianism: his disdain for judges and legislators alike, his attempts to delegitimize protest and resistance with conspiratorial fantasies of shadowy puppet masters, paid operatives, and terrorist infiltrators, and his attempts to exclude certain news media from White House press briefings, to bypass journalistic channels entirely, communicating with the public through Twitter, and to create his own news organization. If some of Trump’s intentions and preferred methods of rule are indeed authoritarian, this is reason enough to pay close attention to changes in the political environment that might create possibilities to introduce such methods.

For example, Trump has already flirted with the dangerous possibility of simply disregarding judicial review of his policies. When the first federal judges issued a temporary stay on Trump’s January 27th travel ban, the Department of Homeland Security originally announced its intention to continue to enforce the provisions of the order in spite of the early rulings. Thankfully, the administration changed course as public outrage grew and additional decisions reinforced and expanded the initial rulings. But it is easy to imagine that if public opinion turned against the judiciary (perhaps as a result of acts of terrorism as prophesied by Trump’s tweet), such a strategy of disregard might appear more feasible to Trump’s administration. A major terrorist attack on the United States would also provide a convenient premise for expanding executive power and restricting the constitutional rights of citizens, following precedents set in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In short then, while it is premature to conclude that the Trump administration is an authoritarian regime, I have identified three authoritarian elements of his campaign and early administration that should be carefully monitored, and shown how these elements are inter-related. Authoritarian regimes appeal to the authoritarian inclinations of their supporters, and such inclinations do appear to be present at significant levels among Trump’s supporters. These inclinations make Trump supporters amenable to policies and explanations that scapegoat vulnerable racial minorities (as well as contribute to the “racialization” of groups that were previously not thought to be racially distinct), and that redirect attention away from the structural economic causes of their increasing marginalization. And finally, Trump’s strategic use of falsehoods points to their “prophetic” character as predictions rather than truth claims, intended to construct ideological grounds for rationalizing future actions, as Arendt describes. Citizens and political analysts alike should continue to monitor these elements of the Trump administration, and to guard against their expanded use and exploitation.

 

Andrew J. Pierce is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of Justice Education at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago. His specialization is social and political philosophy broadly conceived, with interests in critical theory and the philosophy of race. He is the author of several articles in these areas, as well as a recent book: Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription.

 

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.

Altemeyer, Bob. 1981. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.

Beckett, Lois. 2017. “Experts Dispute Jeff Sessions’ Claim that Crime Rise is a ‘Permanent Trend’.” The Guardian, February 10.

Case, Anne and Angus Deaton. 2015. “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” PNAS, December 8, 112(49): 15078−83.

Christie, Richard and Marie Jahoda, eds. 1954. Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality”: Continuities in Social Research. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Executive Order 13769 of January 27, 2017, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. Code of Federal Regulations, title 3 (2017): 8977−80.

FBI Uniform Crime Reports. 2017. Accessed February 23, 2017. https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/

Gasiorowski, Mark J. 2006. “The Political Regimes Project.” In On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants, edited by Alex Inketes, pp. 105−23. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Girard, Rene. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hibbing, John R. and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. “A Surprising Number of Americans Dislike How Messy Democracy Is. They Like Trump.” Washington Post. May 2, 2016.

Hetherington, Marc and Jonathan Weiler. 2009. Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. “The Jews and Europe.” 1989. In Critical Theory and Society, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, pp. 77−94. New York: Routledge.

MacWilliams, Matthew C. 2016. The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring. Amherst: Amherst College Press.

Marx, Karl. 1978. “On the Jewish Question.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, pp. 26−53. New York: Norton.

New York Times Editorial Board. 2017. “The Voter Fraud Fantasy.” New York Times, January 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/the-voter-fraud-fantasy.html?_r=0

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. 3^rd edition. New York: Routledge.

Passel, Jeffery and D’Vera Cohn. 2008. “U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050.” Washington D.C. Pew Hispanic Center.

Pierce, Andrew. 2015. “The Myth of the White Minority.” Critical Philosophy of Race. 3 (2): 305−23.

Rahn, Wendy and Eric Oliver. 2016. “Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 election.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 667 (1): 189−206.

Sheth, Falguni. 2009. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. Albany: SUNY Press.

Smith, Gregory A., and Jessica Martínez. 2016. “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis.” Pew Research Center.

Solt, Frederick. 2012. “The Social Origins of Authoritarianism.” Political Research Quarterly. 65 (4): 703−13.

Stenner, Karen. 2005. The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trump, Donald. 2017. Twitter Post. February 5, 2017. 12:39 PM. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/828342202174668800.

Wayne, Carly, Nicholas Valentino and Marzia Oceno. 2016. “How Sexism Drives Support for Donald Trump.” Washington Post. October 23. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/23/how-sexism-drives-support-for-donald-trump/?utm_term=.147c75c7355e

 

ENDNOTES

[1] See for example Wayne 2016 and Hibbing 2016.

[2] Methodological criticisms of Adorno et al. gave rise to decades-long debates in the social sciences about the proper way to measure authoritarian attitudes, and the crucial difference between authoritarian predispositions and authoritarian behaviors. Yet the existence of these measurement problems does not fundamentally challenge the underlying conception of the authoritarian personality, and the fact that the method that is widely considered to avoid such problems returns to questions about childrearing lends some evidence to Adorno’s original emphasis on childhood experience.

[3] See for example the discussion of what have come to be called “deaths of despair” among this demographic in Case and Deaton 2015.

[4] Neither is it necessary for the present analysis to identify the deep anthropological origins of the “scapegoat mechanism” as, for example Rene Girard 1977 does. Whatever role (if any) scapegoating plays in human culture generally, it is clear that this feature takes on a particularly intense and specific form in authoritarian regimes.

[5] According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanic is an “ethnicity” rather than a racial identity. Thus, respondents are asked whether they are Hispanic or non-Hispanic, and then must answer an additional question about race. The racial category “white” explicitly includes people from the Middle East and Arabs.

[6] Arendt’s analysis is focused on “totalitarianism,” which she understands as an extreme version of authoritarianism that aims to extend its sphere of control beyond opposing parties and branches of government and into the fabric of everyday social life, demanding not just obedience, but assent to the dominant ideology of the State. The differences between authoritarianism and what Arendt calls totalitarianism are interesting, but can be set aside here for the present purpose of an analysis of authoritarianism, since it is not clear that this particular feature – the strategic use of falsehoods – is one that distinguishes the two forms of rule.

[7] On the link between criminalization and race, see Alexander 2010.

by Marcus Hedahl and Travis N. Rieder

ABSTRACT. In trying to motivate climate action, many of those concerned about altering the status quo focus on trying to convince climate deniers of the error of their ways. In the wake of the  2016 Election, one might believe that now, more than ever, it is tremendously important to convince those who deny the reality of climate science of the well-established facts. We argue, however, that the time has come to revisit this line of reasoning.  With a significant majority of voters supporting taxing or regulating greenhouse gases, those who want to spur climate action ought to focus instead on getting a critical mass of climate believers to be appropriately alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove more useful in creating the political will necessary to spur bold climate action than would engaging directly with climate deniers.

Less than a month after the 2016 presidential election, incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus stated that climate change denialism would be the “default position” of the Trump administration (Meyjes 2016). In March 2017, Scott Pruit, President Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, expressed his belief—contrary to the estabilished scientific consensus—that carbon dioxide was not one of the primary contributors of climate change (Davenport 2107). Given this existence of climate denialism at the highest reaches of U.S. government, one might believe that, now more than ever, it is tremendously important to convince those who deny the reality of climate science of the well-established facts.[1] Surely, with truth on our side, we must trumpet the evidence, making deniers our primary target and acceptance of the truth of climate change our primary goal.

The time has come, however, to revisit this line of reasoning. We’ve spent too much time and energy trying to convince climate deniers of the obvious facts,[2] and false optimism has been too friendly to our entrenched inaction.[3] Arguing the science against the deep-rooted climate denial of a small but influential portion of American society has failed to achieve even modest climate action. The election of Donald Trump is, sadly, almost assuredly going to make the task more difficult, given his appointments of prominent climate deniers and fossil fuel advocates to every climate-relevant cabinet position (Sidahmed 2016). If successful climate action depended on convincing the radical deniers, we would justifiably despair at the task before us.

Fortunately, there is another strategy for motivating climate action, and it does not rely on convincing those hopelessly incalcitrant to being swayed by scientific evidence. New public opinion polling data on climate change beliefs suggest another way forward for cultivating the will to enact climate policy: In short, we need to focus on getting a critical mass of the believers to be appropriately alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove significantly more useful in creating the political will necessary to spur bold climate action than by engaging directly with climate deniers.

 

MORAL DENIAL VS. SCIENTIFIC DENIAL

To better understand climate denialism, it will be helpful to consider one particularly vivid example: Senator Jim Inhofe, author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. In 2015, Sen Inhofe held up a snowball on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to “disprove” the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding our changing climate. One may initially attribute these kinds of stunts to a lack of basic scientific acumen. After all, no one thinks rising global temperatures imply the immediate end of snow everywhere on the planet. Thankfully, however, we need not hypothesize about the Senator’s reasons for denying the reality of climate change; he did us the favor of making them explicit by proclaiming, “Do you realize I was actually on [the climate change] side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and first heard about this? I thought it must be true until I found out what it would cost.”[4] His lack of understanding, then, seems not to be a scientific one, but something else altogether.

It might be tempting to dismiss Sen. Inhofe as an anomaly on this score. Unfortunately, however, he is not alone in possessing these particular epistemic motivations. In a recent study, research participants who identified as Republican were more than twice as likely to affirm a plausible scientific prediction (namely that, ‘Global temperatures will rise 3.2 degrees in the 21^st century’) when it was paired with a free market solution to avoid it than when it was paired with a policy solution involving taxes and regulation (Campbell and Kay 2014). This evidence suggests that climate change deniers don’t always become deniers because they reject the science behind climate change; rather, some may well become deniers because they dislike the proposed solutions—generally regulation or taxes. For such individuals, their dislike of proposed solutions to the problem appears to color their view on whether or not the science regarding the underlying issue is reliable.[5]

In short, climate skeptics demonstrate the limits of the deficit model of scientific communication, a model that holds that popular opinions differ from a given scientific consensus only when citizens lack scientific knowledge (Requarth 2017). In the domain of climate change, scientific literacy actually has a small negative effect on developing accurate beliefs about climate change: among those who take themselves to be conservative, those who know the most about science take climate change to pose the least amount of risk (Kahan et al. 2012). These conservative, scientifically knowledgable citizens are already aware of the scientific consensus—they simply reject it (Kahan 2014).

This phenomenon fits well with Michael Mann’s “Six stages of climate change denial,” in which climate deniers tend to move (sometimes fluidly) from outright denial of the science, to denial of human causation, to denial of serious harm, to optimism about human adaptability (2012). These moves make little sense when considered as an attempt to formulate a coherent system of beliefs, but climate denial is generally more pragmatic than epistemic: For deniers, any dialectical move that postpones action—particularly the kind of bold action needed to combat climate change—is a winning one. If you jokingly point out the folly of using a local snowfall to disprove a change in average global temperature, many climate deniers will laugh right along with you. Despite their pronouncements to the contrary, they aren’t using the snow to claim that climate change doesn’t exist, but rather to claim that a world of climate change won’t be so dissimilar to our own. Any policy response that’s even slightly costly would always thereby be inappropriate because, as they like to say, “the climate is always changing.”

The problem, of course, is that the world won’t be so different for them: privileged adults currently living in the developed world. If the reasoning behind that kind of climate denial were merely lavishly imprudent—and, for what it’s worth, it is (Stern et al. 2006; Stern et al. 2014)—the rest of us might be able to tolerate it as an input to our collective civic discourse (Habermas 1991). Yet in today’s tightly interconnected world, the venerable requirement not to harm others gives us a number of novel, moral reasons for action (Shue 2010a). These reasons become even stronger given the fact that we know that the impacts of climate change will not be regionally uniform, with many of the least fortunate most vulnerable to its most adverse effects (Stocker et al. 2013). These differences in vulnerability become even more salient when we consider issues of intergenerational justice (Barry 1997; Broome 2012). If we realize that one of the purposes of the language of justice is to provide normative protections for the vulnerable, we quickly realize that for future generations and those already less fortunate, the status quo with respect to climate change is not merely imprudent but also immoral (Shue 2010b). What this tells us is that for many climate deniers, their espoused denial of the science isn’t motivated solely by skepticism of the scientific reasoning, but also a rejection of the moral imperatives that stem from that reasoning.

So, we are left in a dialectically impossible situation with the denier of climate change. They claim to deny the science, so an appeal to justice will leave them unmoved—after all, why should we sacrifice to solve a moral problem that doesn’t actually exist? Yet a move to the scientific realm will be equally unsuccessful if the root disagreement is as much normative as it is descriptive. The denier of climate change thereby becomes a moving target that we are left unable to engage, let alone convince.

 

SHIFTING FOCUS FROM DENIERS TO THE CAUTIOUS AND CONCERNED

If what we’ve said thus far is plausible, then we have good reason to believe that at least some climate deniers are unlikely to abandon their position even in the face of contrary evidence, in part because their denial is motivated by their dislike of the proposed policy solutions. This state of affairs would be especially problematic if climate deniers constituted a majority of the population, and so could easily turn their views into political will. Recent data suggests, however, that climate denialism doesn’t enjoy anything like a majority. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, in 2016, 72% of Americans regarded climate change with ‘caution’, ‘concern’, or ‘alarm’ (Roser-Renouf 2016).[6] In other words, a clear and significant majority of Americans “believe in” the reality of climate change and would be amenable to some form of climate action.

The problem remains, however, that mere belief in anthropogenic climate change isn’t sufficient to motivate climate action. Indeed, nearly half of Trump supporters (49%) report believing that climate change is occurring, but that didn’t stop them from voting for an avowed climate denier (Leiserowitz 2017). Individuals must also be aware of the consequences of inaction, rather than merely that a problem exists; for what distinguishes the cautious, concerned, and alarmed is how important they take the issue of climate change to be, how much they are worried about climate change, and how long they think it will be before people are harmed by climate change. For far too many, climate change is taken to be yet another issue among many, ranking behind objectively less dangerous problems, like gun control or infrastructure (Roser-Renouf 2016). There’s little reason to believe, therefore, that even near universal belief in the existence of a problem would be sufficient to spur bold and radical climate action.

We want to suggest an alternative to trying to create a universal consensus about the reality of climate change: Focusing on the cautious and concerned in order to get them to reconsider the significance of the climate crises. There are at least two reasons that this approach may prove to be more efficacious than continuing to browbeat climate deniers. First, those who are cautious and concerned about climate change are much more malleable than are those who deny the fact of climate change altogether. These individuals have considered the issue much less thoroughly, and they report that they are much more open to revising their opinions about climate change’s relative significance (Leiserowitz et al. 2009). Second, although U.S. citizens remain divided on the question of whether regulation is beneficial for the public interest in general (42% believing it is to 45% believing it is not), in the more specific domain of environmental protection, that division is significantly diminished, with many more believing that environmental regulations are generally worth the costs they may impose (59% believing environmental regulations are in general beneficial for the public interest to 34% believing they are not). Indeed, 62% of self-identified Trump voters support taxing and or regulating greenhouse gases (Leiserowitz 2017). The cautious and concerned, then, may be receptive both to reconsider the seriousness of climate change, as well as the need for government regulation.

We therefore recommend focusing on those who are cautious and concerned in order to make them appropriately alarmed. We do so despite recognizing that the language of ‘alarm’ is not particularly popular in climate change debates, in no small part because ‘alarmist’ is a preferred moniker by the deniers for those who advocate for climate action. Alarmism may well be disreputable if one were trying to scare others in the absence of evidence (perhaps wearing billboards saying, ‘the end is nigh!’). We contend, however, that the reasons to be alarmed can be based on the same, solid data that justifies a belief in climate change itself. The same scientific evidence that demonstrates that the climate is changing also tells us that relatively small changes in the earth’s climate can have drastic effects on the planet’s life-support systems. And alarm, we think, is precisely the appropriate normative reaction to such facts. In a way, then, our goal is a kind of reclamation project: climate alarmism isn’t an epithet to anyone but the denier, and so we shouldn’t be bullied into avoiding (sometimes dire) warnings. Of course we’re alarmed, because we find the situation objectively alarming.

 

CHANGING CLIMATE COMMUNICATION

If the percentage of those Americans who are alarmed about climate change were slightly higher, then perhaps we would start to see real change: change in the public dialogue, change in what we demand of our policy makers, and ultimately change in public policy. Yet developing a deep understanding of the threat of climate change and the demands of justice is difficult: the problem is global in scale, the effects are occurring over a fairly long time-scale (for humans), and the threats pose a type of danger that we simply haven’t experienced before. So, climate change is often spoken about it in a abstract way, normalizing the processes with thousands of headlines that lack any kind of intimate drama: “Climate change may decrease wheat yield in Bangladesh by more than 30% by 2050,” or “Record-breaking heat waves may become the norm, say scientists.” Such normalization makes the problem seem far off and difficult to relate to in our everyday lives. The cautious and concerned citizens affirm these statements, and acknowledge that at some point, someone, somewhere really ought to do…something.

The unfortunate truth that we must face is that motivating people is often difficult—especially if what we must motivate them to do runs counter to their more immediate self-interest. Exacerbating this issue is the fact that we are all subject to predictable biases.[7] One that is particularly relevant for present purposes is that we tend to move slowly from our initial response to climate change, thinking that it must not be that bad, or else someone would be doing something about it. After all, most of us only hear the same kinds of political solutions we hear in other areas of political discourse: a modest change in taxation, new investments of research and development funds, or regulations treating CO₂ as a pollutant. It’s not surprising, therefore, that so many take climate change to be yet another issue among many. If you only hear more tempered solutions to the climate problem, you are more likely to believe that one of them must be sufficient to solve the crisis.

Some have advocated that one possible solution would be to appeal to emotions rather than reasons, focusing on sympathetic or relatable figures (Requarth 2017). A powerful example of this type of appeal can be found in Susan Mathew’s recent analysis of the Podcast S-Town:

In reality, the feeling I get when I think deeply about climate change is the same feeling I get when I remember that someday, at some point, I, me, myself personally, am going to die. There’s fear and disbelief, and my heart seems to collapse in on itself. Eventually, something in me forces myself to stop thinking about it…John B. didn’t have this defense mechanism…He felt the reality of our impending doom every day. He kept staring off the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t look away. Which reaction is “normal”? Mine is certainly more common. It’s also more pragmatic…But if you want to ask which is more logical, which is more moral, which is more correct, the answer is surely John’s. What kind of human can look ahead and realize that we’re headed for a massive disaster and then shrug and still order takeout?” (2017)

Another effective example imagines future tourism posters encouraging vistors to scuba dive the Lincoln Memorial, kayak Arches National Park, and visit the Pacific Coast in Nevada (Lui 2017).

These kinds of appeals surely have some place in the larger climate communication strategies, but they are vulnerable to the charge of hyperbole. They are also suceptable to counter-emotional appeals by those who want to defend the status quo. To acquiesce to emotional appeals wholeheartedly, even to mix emotional appeals with scientific data, is to forfeit the objective, epistemic high ground that science is meant to provide. The kind of stable and widespread climate alarm that has the potential to spur bold climate action cannot be primilarly the product of an appeal to emotion.

In order to get people to grasp the true danger climate change threatens—or, in other words, in order to alter beliefs about climate changes without brute appeal to emotion—we contend that, the climate crises must be shown to be both more tangible and more urgent. Two strategies that we want to suggest are:

1. Grounding larger, global changes in smaller, local ones; and
2. Grounding future effects in changes that are already occurring.[8]

In short: we suggest fighting typical cognitive biases by bringing the global and future effects back home to the local and present.

With respect to the first strategy, we can begin by noting that citizens—even citizens in a landscape littered with a focus on climate denialism—generally understand and acknowledge the local impacts of our changing climate (McCormick 2016). In the United States, many citizens are well aware of the changes affecting them—of how, in the Midwest, higher nighttime temperatures have reduced corn yields (Thaler 2016); or how in the West, exposure to higher temperatures have caused losses in livestock that have exceeded $1 billion annually (Hatfield et al. 2014); or how in Miami, FL, or Hampton VA, rising sea levels are already threatening local infrastructure (Thaler 2016) and may already be impacting the long-term value of local real-estate (Nehemas 2016).

With respect to the second strategy, we can highlight that these changes occurring in our own neighborhoods are unprecedented, worsening, and threatening genuinely terrifying days to come. All over, warmer air is holding more moisture, increasing the severity of deadly whether events. Between October 2015 and October 2016, the United States was subjected to eight storms that would, without climate change, be once-every-500-years storms (NOAA 2016). The flooding that caused so much devastation in Louisiana (Vaidyanathan 2016),[9] West Virginia (Dileberto 2016)[10] and Maryland (Dance 2016)[11] have each been called a once-every-1000-years event. Unfortunately, climate change has made terms like ‘once-every-1000-years storm’ meaningless. We can expect these types of events—and worse—year after year.

The last 30 years have been warmer than any since 1850 and they are very likely the warmest in the last 1400 years (Stoker et al. 2013). More recently, 2016 was the hottest year on record, replacing 2015, which replaced 2014. We are already seeing disturbing disruptions of precisely the kind predicted by climate models. Unprecedented ‘heat domes’ have caused deadly temperatures during the past two years, especially in the Middle East, where the heat index climbed to 165 degrees F during July 2015 (Samenow 2015). At the end of 2016, in the Arctic winter, when temperatures should be plunging and sea ice should be expanding rapidly, temperatures were soaring, and sea ice was actually shrinking (Yulsman 2016).

People are already suffering, losing their homes, and dying because of human emissions. Globally, earlier spring temperatures have disrupted critical ecosystem services on which human society depends (i.e., clean air and water, crop pollination, etc.) (Staudinger et al. 2012). Water resources have become scarce and more highly variable (Haddeland et al. 2014), with associated negative consequences for crop yields (Lobell et al. 2011) as well as food security overall (Shindell et al. 2012). And it will only get worse. The World Health Orginization estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate disruptions will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year (WHO 2014).

If we continue business as usual for too long, then in the latter half of the century, we will face the much more dangerous reality of a 4–5 degree C rise in temperature, bringing virtually unimaginable damage and suffering. The world of unmitigated climate change is a world in which, by 2100, large swaths of the world (portions of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean) will be virtually uninhabitable in the summer months due to heat. Low-lying island nations and coastal regions will disappear, creating millions more climate refugees (World Bank Group 2014). Combined with escalating food insecurity and severe water stress, as well as changing disease vectors and the political instability that could result from all of these pressures, the world of under-mitigated climate change will be a world of massive human suffering.

 

TRUMPETING ALARM

While granting that a change in climate communications could alter public discourse in a positive way, some may nonetheless worry that current polical realities complicate that recommendation. One could believe that ignoring the climate denials of those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo is one thing, but ignoring the climate denials of those in positions of political power is quite another. In this section, we want to suggest that while this state of affairs is indeed troubling, the best strategy may nonetheless be an indirect one. The time has come to give up on convincing climate deniers of the obvious facts—even deniers in high elected office—but that does not imply that we need resign ourselves to a future of climate inaction.

In the 2016 election, the differences in level of concern regarding climate change among the cautious, concerned, and alarmed was reflected in different choices of a Presidential Candidate. While the ‘alarmed’ citizens rank the issues of environmental protection, climate change, and alternative sources of energy at or near the top of their policy concerns, the ‘concerned’ rank those issues somewhere in the middle behind issues like infrastructure and gun control, and the ‘cautious’ rank them near the bottom of several dozen listed options (Roser-Renouf 2016). Unsurprisingly, the relative size of these various groups ended up having an influence on both the democratic primary and the general election.[12] In 2016, the percentage of Americans who categorize themselves as “alarmed” was merely 17% in comparison with 28% who are concerned and 27% who are cautious (Roser-Renouf 2016). While those ‘alarmed’ is up from 10% in 2010,[13] it was not enough to nominate a 2016 presidential candidate in either party with a platform of significant climate action, nor was it enough to stop a climate denier from eventually taking office. In other words, the reality of climate change, while accepted by most people, was not sufficiently important either to nominate a genuine environmental champion, or even to prevent the election of an outright climate denier. What this seems to suggest is that one way the last election could have been changed (or that the next one could be) is by engaging unmotivated believers in an effort to make climate policy a more important voting issue. One clear benefit to spreading appropriate alarm concerning climate change is that, at a minimum, widespread understanding of the gamble we are taking with the climate could help to prevent the election of proud climate deniers to elected office (e.g., Trump, Inhofe, Rubio, Cruz, and dozens of others).[14]

The quick and radical change in elective officials’ attitudes towards cigarette regulation may prove to be a useful case study on this score. The change in the positions of a majority of elected officials was not brought about because old representatives were replaced with new ones,[15] but because—either out of pragmatic or democratic concerns—many elected officials changed their position as their constituents’ views changed. Long before the changes in cigarette regulation of the 1980s,1990s, and 2000s, there was a widespread belief that cigarette smoking was dangerous. It was, however, developing a better understanding of who would be harmed, how they would be harmed, and when they would be harmed that spurred a change in belief about the significance of the issue.

That kind of understanding can also lead to an even more important political benefit of increased alarm: Not only would it limit the ability of one party to tolerate climate deniers, it could lead many in the other to become less likely to tolerate climate moderates. Becoming appropriately alarmed allows citizens to realize a fundamental truth: Climate change will require dramatic political action. Not only will combating climate change require policies like carbon taxing, but it will also likely demand the kind of solutions almost never raised in mainstream discussions of climate policy, solutions such as divesting pension funds from fossil fuel companies and taking preventive action to strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuels in the ground.[16] The problem is serious. The solutions required to solve it are very likely not what they were twenty, ten, or even five years ago. We need an Apollo Program, or a Manhattan Project, not merely an expansion of New England’s cap and trade market (McKibben 2016). In today’s world, the only way to even begin a truthful conversation about our climate policies is to be sufficiently alarmed.

 

CONCLUSION

In the coming years, as President Trump threatens to roll back even our already insufficient, incremental progress on climate change, citizens must fight back against those measures—but we cannot do so by simply fighting against denialism. We must talk about climate more: every year, every month, every week, but we must do so strategically, investing our efforts where they are likely to have a real effect. We must make clear what is at stake and what the costs of inaction will be, thereby making it more likely that we can achieve a citizenry that is appropriately alarmed.

To do so, it is important to recognize that not all deniers are scientific deniers; their flaws are more than merely epistemic. They agitate, they obfuscate, and they dominate discussion. One cannot win an argument with someone whose goal is to keep others talking about their incalcitrant, untethered beliefs. To participate in that “argument” is, by definition, to lose it. Engaging the denier is not a costless endeavor; the world continues to burn. While it does, far too many get distracted, they view themselves on the “right side of history,” and give themselves moral credit for doing nothing more than believing the most brute facts of modern science. We must do more: We must become keenly aware of the specific dangers climate change poses and we must spur bold climate action. We’ve likely already lost the next four years to climate policy regression; we can’t risk losing any more.

 

Dr. Marcus Hedahl is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the U.S. Naval Academy. He holds a B.S. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Georgetown University. He previously served as a Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment located at the London School of Economics and Political Science and as an Environmental Justice Fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

Travis N. Rieder is the Assistant Director of Education Initiatives & a Research Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Travis holds a BA from Hanover College, an MA from the University of South Carolina, and a PhD from Georgetown University, all in Philosophy. He also completed a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics at the Berman Institute before joining the faculty in 2015.

 

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ENDNOTES

[1] This claim should not be read to imply a denial of any disagreement about the specifics of climate change. There is, for example, significant uncertainty regarding the amount of warming we should expect given a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (3 degrees Celsius is a common estimate, but this is a point of much debate). For a brief overview of this issue – known as equilibrium climate sensitivity – see the discussion of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ in (Johansson et al 2015). There is also disagreement about precisely how successful and predictive various climate models are. Although groups like the Potsdam Institute have made strong claims about what a world with 4 degrees Celsius warming would be like, the IPCC assessment reports, for instance, tend to assign much lower confidence levels to predictions concerning dramatic change over longer periods of time; compare (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014) and (World Bank Group 2014).

[2] A particularly powerful reading of the history of climate debate can be found in Jamieson (2014).

[3] Indeed, although the Paris Treaty is being widely hailed as a major first step in global climate action, it is nothing like a ‘first’ step. It was the outcome of COP21, or ‘Conference of the Parties 21’, meaning that it was at least the twenty-first “first step.” Moreover, as has been widely noted, the commitments made at COP21 are not nearly enough on their own to prevent dangerous warming; the most recent numbers indicate that faithful adherence to the Paris Treaty would limit warming to between 2.9 and 3.4 degrees Celsius (Rogelj et al) – a far cry from the aspirational limit of 1.5 degrees set in that very same document.

[4] Sen. Inhofe made this comment during an interview on Rachel Maddow. The complete transcript of the show is available at NBC, here: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46762101/ (last accessed Feb. 21, 2017).

[5] Although such a finding is, in one sense, surprising (the desirability of a solution simply doesn’t bear on whether a problem exists), it also follows a general trend in social and moral psychology. Joshua Knobe, for instance, has shown that much folk psychology does not follow the expected, ‘linear’ model of reasoning we might expect: just as the acceptability of a solution can effect one’s acceptance of climate science, the ‘Knobe Effect’ tells us that the moral acceptability of an act can influence one’s acceptance of that act as ‘intentional’ (Knobe 2003). Perhaps even more disruptively, Jonathan Haidt has argued that the empirical data implies that most people, most of the time, don’t reason at all, but rather engage in post hoc rationalization (Haidt 2001). These growing sets of literature combine with others to suggest that we perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprised at Inhofe’s and others’ move from ‘unacceptable implications’ to ‘bad science’, even if such a move violates the norms of logic.

[6] These are not self identified categories, but rather ways in which the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication groups American citizens based on their answers to a variety of questions regarding their beliefs about climate change. Those categories are the alarmed, the concerned, the cautious, the disengaged, the doubtful, and the dismissive. In this paper, when we refer to the cautious, concerned, or alarmed, we are referring to those who would be categorized as such given the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s criteria for differentiation. All of the Program’s studies and data, as well as interactive polling-data maps, can be found at their website, here: http://climatecommunication.yale.edu.

[7] Many relevant biases have been well explored (Gardiner 2013). Here we consider a bias not tied to the more general problem of climate change, but related specifically to the condition of not being sufficient alarmed by the current climate crises.

[8] These two strategies are advanced merely as a starting hypothesis; they are not intended to be a comprehensive list.

[9] Six people were killed by the floods that left more than 20,000 people in need of rescue (Vaidyanathan 2016).

[10] Flooding was blamed for the deaths of 23 people, making it the deadliest WV flood on record (DiLibreto 2016).

[11] Two people were killed in the flooding in Ellicott City as a result (Dance 2016).

[12] The fate of climate change discussion on the Democratic side of the 2016 election is an interesting case study in exploring these factions of American voters. Senator Sanders seemed to have the support of many of the 17% of alarmed voters, as both he and they discussed climate change loudly and often as a genuine legislative priority. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, although not hostile to climate change policy, seemed much more comfortable with the majority position that climate change ought to be addressed, but that there are other priorities.

[13] Although still down from its high point of 18% in 2009.

[14] That contention ought not be read as an endorsement of either party or any particular candidate. It is, in fact, a sad and somehow uniquely American issue that admitting the existence of climate change has become, for a vocal minority, a politicized issue. Nonetheless, in both parties, you can find leaders who favor bold climate action—albeit in different ways (Schwartz 2017). We hope that phenomenon can become more widespread. In fact, it is our greatest hope that President Trump himself will eschew his current position of climate denial. After all, barring a cataclysmic political event, that is the only way in the next four years to obtain an Executive who takes seriously the pragmatic and moral dangers that climate change presents.

[15] See note 15.

[16] For those who think this claims sounds too extreme, some simple math demonstrates its veracity. As Bill McKibben has powerfully articulated, the amount of oil currently in known reserves—oil that we will burn, so long as it is economically viable and we are not prohibited from doing so—is about five times the amount that would guarantee that we pass the two degree temperature rise threshold. For all of the relevant data, see McKibben’s (2012) and (2016).

by Christian Golden

ABSTRACT. I consider how American citizens alarmed by the election of Donald Trump and the authoritarian populist movement around him should respond to both given the deficit of public trust in the media, political leaders, institutions, and other citizens. I argue that mobilizing broad-based resistance to Trump’s divisive regime requires building trust in the electorate. I take trust to be a social condition bound up with civility, a virtue of democratic citizenship endangered by our increasingly polarized political discourse. Building trust therefore requires raising standards of civility by practicing charity, which in turns involves vulnerable listening across politically charged differences. I develop a model of democratic interaction based on an ethos of charity, which I call the open model, partly by weighing the tragic risks assumed by alternate strategies of response. I defend a strong presumption favoring listening to, or at least not silencing, one’s fellow citizens in the hope of promoting reconciliation in our time of crisis.

A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love one another (Tocqueville 1835, Volume II, Section 2, Chapter IV: That the Americans Combat the Effects of Individualism by Free Institutions).

1. VULNERABLE POLITICS

The weekend of January 21, 2017, laid bare deep and dangerous divisions in American society. On Friday, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45^th President of the United States after running a narrowly successful campaign on a message of chauvinistic nationalism, divisive racial animus, populist outrage at elites, and gauzy cultural nostalgia. The next day saw a worldwide protest involving five million people that began with the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Half a million participated in The Women’s March on the capital against Trump’s rhetoric and in support of human rights issues, including women’s rights, worker’s rights, racial justice, and LGBTQ equality.

The volatility of these contradictions was dramatized when a masked Antifa, or “anti-fascist,” vandal sucker-punched Richard Spencer during an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C., that weekend. Spencer is an outspoken white nationalist credited as the leader of the “alt-right,” a far-right-wing movement steeped in racist visions of an America restored to its inherent whiteness. Spencer sees Trump’s ascendency as a windfall for his cause:

Donald Trump as a potentiality was undoubtedly energizing. And what I mean by that is that the Donald Trump campaign was the first time in my lifetime that an identity politics for white people was on the scene. (Ganim and Welch 2016)

Spencer’s assault was celebrated on the left. After all, lashing out is a natural product of feeling vulnerable. As Martha Nussbaum explains in recent work, anger and violence are common responses to acute vulnerability in the absence of trust in those thought to have power over one (2016, 21). Mistrust among Americans is clearly not confined to Trump’s supporters, many of whom resent elites and fear perceived outsiders; it exists among liberals and progressives, too.

I want to explore the connection between trust and vulnerability in order to illuminate the question of how concerned Americans may counteract the illiberality that Donald Trump has unleashed in our common political life. I will try to show that there are strong ethical and pragmatic grounds for charitably and vulnerably engaging one’s fellow citizens across politically charged differences. And trust is the key.

 

2. TRUST’S VIRTUES

What is trust? Trust is, among other things, a social condition bound up with agents’ virtues in subtle ways.[1] Take civility, considered as a virtue of citizenship. Civility and trust do not strictly presuppose each other, but in healthy democratic communities they form a circuit that makes sustained nonviolent relations possible.[2] Tomas Spath and Cassandra Dahnke, founders of the Texas-based nonprofit group Institute for Civility in Government, define civility as “claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process” in a way that involves “listening past one’s preconceptions” (The Institute for Civility in Government 2017). Building on this, I regard civility not as a bare activity but as an excellence of character—a disposition to act—essential within practices of communication predicated on charitable listening across differences.

Being disposed to listen charitably to others is not sufficient for being civil towards them, but it is necessary.[3] If I am unwilling to listen to you, you will naturally doubt that I have your interests at heart. Not trusting me, you will refuse to listen, too, perhaps by withdrawing or attacking. Seeing this, I also withhold trust—why trust someone out to ignore, hurt, or silence me? A vicious cycle is joined. Justice, conceived procedurally or as a material condition of personal relations, is forestalled when incivility prevails and folks mistrust one another. And if the 2016 United States presidential election has revealed anything, it is that there is a socially corrosive deficit of trust dividing the American electorate.

Recent studies of U.S. adults’ attitudes towards government, the media, and their fellow citizens should trouble those who think healthy democracy rests on public trust and civility. According to recent Gallup data, Americans’ trust in politicians and other Americans to make political decisions hit record lows in late 2016:

The percentages trusting the American people (56%) and political leaders (42%) are down roughly 20 percentage points since 2004 and are currently at new lows in Gallup’s trends…At no point in the last four decades have Americans expressed less trust than they do today in U.S. political leaders or in the American people who voted those leaders into office. (Jones 2016)

A related, widely reported fact is the public’s current historically low, bipartisan, declining trust in the media (Kauffman 2016a). As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observed in the wake of the 2016 election, “We are in a trust spiral” (Tavernise 2017).

Meanwhile, experts find a concurrent decline in civility. Public opinion polls during the Obama years showed many Americans concerned over “the erosion of civility in government, business, media, and social media.” According to one 2012 poll,

65% of Americans say the lack of civility is a major problem that has worsened during the financial crisis and recession. What’s even more distressing is that nearly 50% of those surveyed said they were withdrawing from the basic tenets of democracy—government and politics—because of incivility and bullying (Williams 2012).

Another survey of 1,000 U.S. adults found that “Most Americans report they have been victims of incivility (86%),” while many “admit to perpetrating incivility—approximately six in ten (59%)” (Williams 2012). And many commentators within higher education and government have expressed grave concern about the sharp decline in standards of civility during and after the 2016 election (Farish 2017; Mendieta 2016).

Since the run-up to the presidential primary in Spring 2015, U.S. citizens, both in my orbit and in public fora like blogs, major news networks, talk radio, and social media, seemed to be united more by what they lack than by what they share. Conversations, especially online where there is a false sense of moral limbo and fewer immediate consequences for uncivil behavior, were tense and fraught with recrimination, sometimes devolving into the virtual equivalent of a shouting match. I was struck by how commonplace this was among those with ostensibly similar commitments, and I found it to be far worse across political differences. It is a truism that Americans from divergent groups often overlook the grounds for political solidarity in their common social, economic, or other interests. It does not help that political divisions among U.S. citizens have widened and ossified in recent decades. Journalist Bill Bishop has argued that, demographically speaking, Americans have self-segregated into increasingly ideologically homogenous communities since the late 1970s (2009). And political polarization is not confined to older generations. A Fall 2016 study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute showed first-year college students throughout the United States to be more ideologically divided than they have been in over half a century (Glattner 2017).

I believe the difficulty we have listening to dissenting voices is both partial cause and consequence of the lack of solidarity that has made the electorate vulnerable to Trump’s demagogy. But what are the sources of this fateful impasse? Are they racial or economic? Religious or ideological? As we will see below, the difficulty is that they are all of the above.

 

3. TRUST & TRUMP

The deficit of public trust was exploited by the weaponized religious and racial anxiety, a “politics of loss, nostalgia and grievance,” behind the nativist populism of Trump’s presidential campaign (Marshall 2016). Robert P. Jones, author of The End of White Christian America, observes that, as a result of long-term demographic trends, during Barack Obama’s two terms, “America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent)” (2016). Jones ties Trump’s electoral college success, particularly in the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, to his ability to mobilize fear and anger among white Christians who feel that the nation defined according to their identity is under siege by demographic and cultural changes that will displace and “demote” the white majority by the middle of the century.

Trump’s white nationalist strategy depended upon blaming ethnic and religious minorities for complex social, economic, and national security problems (Painter 2016). A paranoid urge to fortify the porous boundaries of American selfhood was expressed figuratively in Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and literally in his theatrical campaign vow to construct a wall along the Mexican border—punitively, at our southern neighbor’s expense. Indeed, many have observed the latent or tacit fascism of Trumpism as an authoritarian populist brand rhetorically steeped in economic protectionism, vilifying the press and academics, ethnocentric scapegoating of minority groups for the supposed decline of a glorious, forsaken national character, and adulation and empowerment of a demagogic strongman presumed capable of restoring what has been lost.

But things are more complicated. Though Trump’s appeal relied heavily on racist dog-whistles, chauvinism, and nativist xenophobia, it is not to be reduced to bigotry among the electorate. His economic populism resonated with voters from communities that suffered under the rising inequality that culminated in The Great Recession of 2007-2009 (Klein 2016). Like his socialist rival Bernie Sanders, the billionaire Trump blamed financial elites, “crony capitalists,” and decades of bipartisan neoliberal trade policies for the economic insecurity and underemployment of millions of Americans. This messaging was decisive. Scarcely more than 100,000 votes from the mostly white working-class in the upper Midwest delivered Trump a narrow winning margin in the Electoral College despite his historic loss of the popular vote to Clinton by nearly three million ballots (Meko, Lu, and Gamio 2016).[4]

Sanders’s and Trump’s shared rhetorical strategy was well-founded. In recent work, political economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich shows that

starting in the early 1980s, large corporations and their top executives, major actors on Wall Street, and other wealthy individuals have exercised disproportionate and increasing influence over how the market is organized…

dominating public institutions that make and enforce market rules, eroding popular trust and participation in governance, and benefitting themselves at the expense of poor and middle-class Americans and the stability of the U.S. economy as a whole (Reich 2015, 92). During Obama’s last term in office, Reich presciently observed that

Capitalism, alas, depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks…Moreover, people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas. (2015, 73)

Such figures exploit popular frustration at widening inequality under a rigged system

by turning the public’s economic anxieties into resentments against particular people and groups. Isolationist and nativist, often racist, and willing to sacrifice overall prosperity for the sake of achieving their ends. (Reich 2010, 127–28)

Trump’s campaign fit the bill, exploiting a hodgepodge of popular fears and anxieties, from embattled white, male, and heterosexual privilege to common experiences of economic precarity. His campaign’s appeal among voters is thus a morally mixed bag. Progressives will have little sympathy for a white person’s loss of the relative status conferred on them by a racist social order, but will share the resentment of low-income people made to work longer hours for lower wages under a legal and economic system that deprives them of collective bargaining rights and other basic protections while lavishly subsidizing the richest Americans. But it is harder to say whether progressively minded folks should morally countenance the disorientation of (typically white) Christians over the loss of their sense that the United States is home to their distinct spiritual aspirations as religious pluralism widens and they are confronted with a sharp decline in religious affiliation, especially among younger Americans (Smith and Cooperman 2016).

I think this is a hard question with no simple answer. Much depends on what it means to say that someone’s loss of their sense of self, or of the social world that gives that self its place and its rich, lived significance, deserves moral recognition. One difficulty is that the disorientation accompanying such loss goes to the heart of peoples’ identities and their sense of what is most deeply worthwhile. In the first instance, the issues at stake are intimately existential, not impersonally moral.

Take the apt expression “white fragility.” It identifies a curiously widening barrier to effective communication and sympathy across a narrowing gap of racial privilege and so presents many challenges to the pursuit of racial reconciliation and justice. But white fragility really is fragility—psychologically and emotionally speaking, it realizes a distinctly human vulnerability. As a form of vulnerability, even the pangs of lost privilege must warrant some moral concern. There is something paradoxical here about the way oppression deforms our relations—a point to which I will return in closing.

The fact that Trump voters have many grievances, some more sympathetic than others, discredits efforts to dismiss them all as reactionary bigots, though surely many in his base are such. Importantly, exit polls on Election Day show that Trump won by exploiting not only race and gender divisions, but also widening educational divides. He had a 39-point advantage over Clinton among white voters without a college degree, “the largest [margin] among any candidate in exit polls since 1980.” The gap in presidential preferences between those with and without a college degree, with college graduates backing Clinton by a 9-point margin, and non-college graduates backing Trump by an 8-point margin, was also the largest since 1980 (Tyson and Maniam 2016).

Racism is one thing; being poorly educated and badly informed is another. Refusing to sympathize with the former makes sense; writing off victims of the latter is callous and short-sighted. The trouble is that many Americans suffer from both at once. Since racism and poor education, as a symptom of poverty, are positively correlated, their roles in shaping attitudes cannot be neatly disentangled.[5] And as Andrew Sullivan provocatively observes in a critical but incisive analysis of the reactionary politics burgeoning here and throughout the world, besides being an oversimplification, “the American elite’s…reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia,’ only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel” (Sullivan 2017).

What all this means is that though Trump’s own gross vanity, shameless incivility, and willful ignorance may put him beyond the pale of constructive dialogue, we should not draw the same conclusion about his supporters, most of whom deserve at least the presumption of empathy from their compatriots. And, as Sullivan suggests and as I will argue next, writing them off would represent a costly lost political opportunity.

 

4. ENTRENCHMENT

Consider interactions between parties with strongly contrasting cultural, religious, or political values. Folks’ commitments arise from a rich interplay between their native endowments, training, experience, reflection, and developed aptitudes. Naturally most of this is hidden from our view when we encounter those we do not know intimately. We easily misjudge the basis and extent of differences between ourselves and others, especially when our uptake of their motives and behavior is burdened by stereotypes of supposed enemies or rivals.

Americans now spend much of our political lives online, often on social media where biased views circulate in insulated bubbles, aggressive voices tend to predominate, and combative memes and fake news shape attitudes on the left and right alike (Meyer 2017). Routine exposure to antagonistic, us-versus-them discourse distorts our perceptions of, and virtual interactions with, those stereotyped. Similar polarizing trends have been observed as a result of the popularity of talk radio and cable television news channels like CNN, The Fox News Channel, and MSNBC (Martin and Yurukoglu 2017). These developments undercut the disposition to civility, making democratic citizenship more difficult. It is especially important not to assume differences are fixed in a democratic society where civility and compromise tempers and mobilizes citizens’ shared exercise of power.

This has not been lost on Peter Levine, Associate Dean and Director of CIRCLE (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) at Tufts University, who recently blogged about how to proceed in the wake of the 2016 election. A few days after the election concluded in favor of Donald Trump, Levine shared a flowchart offering suggestions under various subheadings to help readers “think about how to respond to the devastating results of the election” (Levine 2016). Under the subheading “Repairing the civic fabric,” options include “Working with vulnerable/traumatized communities” and “Dialog across partisan divides.” One suggested tactic for the latter is “ideologically diverse deliberation; listening.”

What exactly this should mean in practice is an open question for engaged participants. But something surely needed is listening of the sort that helps loosen the grip of ossified divisions along cultural, ideological, racial, educational, and other sectarian lines. Positions have hardened and discourse on the left and the right is frequently insulated and uncharitable. Or so Charles C. Camosy observed in a Washington Post op-ed on the day after Election Day, arguing that seeing one’s political opponents as exhaustively identified with their supposed commitments contributes to ideological fragmentation that makes our politics more brittle and polarized:

Thus today’s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage, gender and privilege. And that same culture leads such educated people to either label those with whom they disagree as bad people or reduce their stated views on these issues as actually being about something else…Most college grads in this culture are simply never forced to engage with or seriously consider professors or texts which could provide a genuine, compelling alternative view. (2016)

Uncompromising stances, particular about what the other side must be like, stymie efforts to enter into the frame of mind of one’s interlocutor. This can be seen in the shrill debate over the function and value of “political correctness” on college campuses where safe spaces and trigger warnings are derided by some as a form of coddling and defended by others as bulwarks for mental health and social justice. One commonly finds a palpable lack of trust for the other on each side.

 

5. CHARITY & “THE OPEN MODEL”

What can be done? Many things, and here I make only one suggestion. I said earlier that one earns another’s trust by addressing her civilly. And, as Peter Levine’s work on civic engagement suggests, that this in turn requires charitable listening. What is charity, then? The most politically important element of charity is allowing oneself to be vulnerable.[6]

A charitable listener tries to enter into a speaker’s frame of mind. He invites her presence into his own by trying to be receptive to the stands she takes. But, crucially, he cannot do this while remaining fully himself. By “the self,” I mean understandings of what is worthwhile, true, and relevant that one brings to encounters with others.[7] Asserting the self over against others expresses natural impulses to impose one’s will, gratify desire, return harm for harm, or defend against perceived threats. But doing so undercuts prospects for reciprocal empathy and trust that grow from listening, especially when self-assertion visibly prevails among those who believe they are one another’s enemies.[8] This suggests a revision to the view we started with, offered by Spath and Dahnke, that civility is about “claiming…one’s identity.” If civility involves not just attentive but vulnerable listening, it is less about asserting one’s identity than it is about relaxing our grip on it, and its grip on us, in order to pursue “the hard work of staying present even with those with whom we have deep-seated and fierce disagreements” (The Institute for Civility in Government 2017).

We began by observing that trust is a precondition of healthy social relations. Contrary to John Rawls’s suggestion, justice cannot be the value at the foundation of practices that matter to us because, without trust, the relationships necessary for instituting and maintaining justice (or any decent social value) cannot survive (Rawls 1971, 3). And whereas justice can be demanded, trust cannot. Efforts to do so naturally backfire. This is important for our intimate relations, but it is no less pivotal a fact about democratic life. One of its most precious conditions eludes the adamant will. It cannot be brought under sovereign or unilateral control. It responds to an invitation, not a threat. Like everything that matters to politics, it is precarious.

But this does not make it unattainable. For as folks find ways to loosen their grip on what they see as true and important, animosity across recalcitrant differences can soften, expanding the space of possibility and fostering trust. Trust involves but transcends mere belief, such as the belief that another cares about one’s interests or means one no harm. It is a richly embodied orientation to another with cognitive, motivational, and affective dimensions. It is a way of being situated in a relationship that embodies one’s sense of what matters, what makes sense, and what is possible in one’s dealings. Importantly, trust and vulnerability are bound together in more than one way. We know we trust those in whose presence we are comfortable being vulnerable. And where trust is lacking, as we saw before, we can invite it through a charitable posture of vulnerable listening. Thus, trust is a condition of relations that at once requires and promotes vulnerability.

But how can an absent condition be established if doing so takes something required by the condition itself? This whiff of paradox evokes the Aristotelian maxim that virtue is acquired through habituation. And I think Aristotle was right: with such things, we must simply fake it till we make it. But this sounds pretty glib. What does it really mean in practice, and is it realistic, given the stubborn divisions between us?

After all, just as we sometimes anxiously cling to the sense of self we bring to encounters with others, we often misperceive those who contradict us, seeing them as defined by their supposed ideological commitments, past speech or behavior, or status and privilege. Seeing someone stereotypically disposes us to further engage them in those terms, acting on or over against rather than with them. Empirical research on motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and “backfire effect” suggests that such reactive uptake has deep and abiding sources in our psyches (Nyhan and Reifler 2010). And polling of the electorate before and after the election showed that voters’ perceptions and behavior are deeply shaped by cognitive effects disposing us to cling to our original beliefs or attitudes when presented with contradictory evidence (Mitchell, Gottfried, Kiley, and Matsa 2014; Kauffman 2016b). Importantly, efforts to avoid hearing only what one wants to hear can backfire by increasing one’s felt vulnerability, making defensive maneuvers more tempting and likely.

Experts on these effects concede that work on concrete solutions remains inconclusive (Silverman 2011). But by attempting to mitigate their control over our interactions, we express an aspiration to epistemic humility, particularly about the character and motives of others, that is one mark of a good citizen.

A grassroots volunteer initiative that has arisen in the wake of the election is determined to make such an effort. Its aim is to build broad-based, cohesive opposition to Trump and Trumpism, starting with the sort of open, engaged listening I propose here. The #KnockEveryDoor campaign, organized by former Bernie Sanders staffers, volunteers, and supporters, hopes to succeed where they believe the Democratic party failed by “conducting nationwide, door-to-door canvasses” and learning from face-to-face conversations across political differences. The campaign hopes that

by talking to voters [and non-voters] and focusing on listening and understanding, we’ll be able to communicate the stories, concerns and hopes that the establishment politicians and media either missed or ignored in this past election.

The campaign’s site explains that

groundbreaking political science research suggests that long, open-ended conversations like these can actually change people’s minds—maybe even Trump supporters. (Knock Every Door Campaign 2017)

They also state their desire to better understand what motivated some Obama voters to flip to Trump in 2016, so that such disconnects and reversals can be prevented in future elections.

The Knock Every Door campaign suggests a model of interaction that may help dislodge the ideological barriers preventing folks with varying background commitments, affiliations, or habits of mind from articulating the shared interests underlying the different positions they bring to mutual encounters. Call it the open model. Another version of it is the “calling-in” strategy of engagement around issues of privilege, as opposed to the practice, common among left radicals, of “calling-out” overt exercises of privilege by those who have it (Trần 2013). The open model enacts a commitment to the importance of inviting others into relations whose spirit of empathy and respect across differences creates space for sharing the possibility of being transformed by the encounter.

The open model involves the idea that faking it till you make it, displaying vulnerability in hopes of eliciting it from another in the absence of the trust that makes doing so mutually comfortable, is not a feat of cognitive dexterity, or a problem requiring a rationally formulated solution, but a risky exercise of the sheer bodily ability to be and remain present with another who offends or even threatens one.[9] There is no intractable paradox here because vulnerable listening, an invitation to trust, does not itself require trust. Instead it takes what we can call civic courage—the willingness to risk and possibly sacrifice one’s own comfort, one’s confidence, one’s privilege, even a measure of one’s security, to help decent relations between citizens survive. Civic courage in this sense does not require trust so much as hope, a curious blend of desire and expectation that is perhaps more durable than trust, but no less important to the survival of decent relations in times of crisis.

A charitable listener in this sense embraces, and allows their interlocutor to see them embrace, the possibility of being offended, confounded, disproven, or rejected. What he accepts is the uncomfortable possibility of exchanging a self-assured confidence in his accustomed perspective for a greater degree of doubt about, or a change in, his outlook. Allowing another to see one’s openness to her perspective communicates a recognition of her standing as a worthy partner in deliberation, a function that Cheshire Calhoun rightly argues is essential to the virtue of civility: “Civility always involves a display of respect, tolerance, or considerateness” (Calhoun 2000, 259). In her account, the outward signs of such an attitude include “listening carefully.” I agree, but I think that the charity for others’ standpoints and experiences that civility requires, especially during a crisis when mutual trust is scarce, requires visible vulnerability, not just careful attention. We expect the latter even from our declared enemy, whereas good citizens try to see, and be seen by, one another as entitled to participate in deliberation about matters affecting them together.

We turn now to some final thoughts about what some of the dangers of such a practice are, how much they might be worth, and for whom they make sense.

 

6. TRAGIC TACTICS

I said that I offer only one limited suggestion about how to respond to the election results. Other sensible responses are possible and some will compete with mine in spirit and substance. Some call for more aggressive, confrontational, or doctrinaire tactics than I propose here, and perhaps these are sometimes necessary and even to the good. There are serious grounds for thinking that the practice of the sort of explicit, militant racial terrorism advocated by the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist groups must be directly confronted, perhaps even violently.

Shamefully, the Klan is not the only source of right-wing extremism and open bigotry currently shaping our politics. The alt-right, an authoritarian ethno-nationalist movement bent on entrenching white supremacy in the U.S., is a conspicuous presence in Trump’s base and has an outsized influence within his regime. Its ideals are personified by former banker and broadcasting mogul, Stephen Bannon. Bannon was a filmmaker and executive chair of Brietbart News, a website trafficking in far-right commentary, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and other racist and nativist content. He serves as the White House chief strategist and was briefly placed by Trump on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council. One naturally doubts how far extremists like Bannon and Richard Spencer can be reasoned with, and whether listening vulnerably to them might not normalize, making one complicit in, their degradation of the national conversation about issues like immigration and criminal justice reform.

Here I take no position on such questions besides acknowledging that the circumstances of human action, perhaps most saliently in politics, are fundamentally tragic. We must choose between plural and competing goods that claim our allegiance. Besides involving an opportunity cost, where we neglect some values by seeking others, pursuing goods always carries the risk that our efforts will backfire or otherwise fail to realize our intentions, even catastrophically. And, crucially, oppressive social conditions tend to erode prospects for justice at both the structural level of impersonal institutional mechanisms and the subjective, psychological level of personal experience and action.

Indeed, it might be objected that the humility and self-surrender involved in charitable listening, which I urge in the name of democratic civility, mutual empathy, and trust, is itself a privilege or a product of it, a moral good not equally available to everyone in a society like ours where some groups are generally less secure than others. Vulnerability is already distributed unequally by systems that disproportionately subject minorities to many forms of violence, as with the noxious operation of racial bias in the criminal justice system (Alexander 2010; Wagner and Rabuy 2016; Davey and Smith 2016; Apuzzo 2015). The result of left- and right-leaning Americans enhancing their vulnerability during encounters across gendered, racial, and economic differences may be to entrench the oppressive conditions we hope to see eroded. This could mean that the open model cannot be generally adopted without disparate risk of injury to differently situated persons.

For instance, men and women in a sexist society like ours do not operate from the same baseline of security. There may be greater average risk for a woman than a man in engaging someone whose speech or body language may more or less subtly reinforce her subordinate social position. Women are already more subject than male peers to this sort of discursive violence where her capacities as a competent and credible knower and speaker are damaged or undervalued (Fricker 2007). Increasing men’s and women’s discursive vulnerability therefore preserves the prior disparity rather than redressing it. Similar points can be made about other structurally disadvantaged citizens. So, by advocating for a general practice of civility in my sense, I may invite greater harm to minorities by overlooking the inequality of moral opportunity prevailing in American society.

This criticism rings true. Conditions in a social order corrupted by violence and resentment are severely inhospitable to the general cultivation and exercise of moral virtues like civility.[10] There are potentially ruinous institutional and psychological obstacles to creating healthy relations in American society, corrupted as it is by the traumatic legacies of capitalist exploitation, hetero- and cissexism, military and cultural imperialism, and white supremacy in the forms of native genocide, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. The underlying issue concerns what it takes for human beings deeply shaped by pernicious conditions to transcend them without reproducing them in the effort. Degrading circumstances must be overcome, if at all, by the very people whose powers and abilities they have substantially disfigured.

This is another defining paradox of real political action. Nothing less than the concrete possibility of deliberate moral transformation is at issue. We must articulate it and define and limit its scope, but its tragic nature is precisely why it cannot be mastered or completely evaded—and why any concrete solution will fail to meet whatever ideal standard of equity we wish to institute. This can clearly be seen in the moral residue created by even the most apparently justifiable strategies of violent resistance to oppression, which, whatever else they may accomplish, always serve to reinforce violent dispositions in those who enact them and generate lasting collateral damage in the surrounding social environment.

So why pursue the open model if it risks further harming those already disadvantaged by a corrupt order? Because, due to the tragic realities in play, no approach can avoid this risk; there is still hope for a generally nonviolent reconciliation of the differences that Trump exploits to his own advantage; and I believe the open model can help extend that hope. Widespread persistent violence, or the credible threat of it, is entirely foreign to most Americans’ experience. This is not only a luxury but a precious resource for engaged citizenship that we neglect at our peril. Calls for violent escalation from either the left or the right therefore strike me as perversely naïve and reckless.[11] But if we are to pursue a nonviolent course, I think the findings of cognitive and social science, together with common experience, suggest that critical dialogue predicated on charitable listening can be more effective than the defensive maneuvering and strident declamation that angry political rivals often claim as their right.

But precisely to whom do I prescribe the open model? To start with, and above all, I think my argument has greater presumptive force for those with greater degrees of social privilege. When relations are strained, and important interests are served by a relationship’s survival, someone needs to stick their neck out first. Only thus can an impasse be overcome. Especially for those with privilege—and we cannot forget that most Americans with varying levels of relative privilege are extremely secure and well-off by global standards, a fact made relevant by the far-reaching impact of policies enacted by the U.S. government—sticking one’s privileged neck out is a fine way to use it in the service of democratic hope. Those who avoid doing so when they risk only discomfort or disorientation will be complicit when the situation deteriorates at great cost to many of our country’s and the world’s most vulnerable.

Beyond that, it is not for me to say here how committed to charitable citizenship particular, already especially vulnerable, folks should be. Generally, I think that more privileged Americans—for instance, white, cisgender, male, heterosexual, and so on—have a stronger responsibility to cultivate it as a practice. But, noting that most Americans enjoy what amounts to absolute privilege, I commend the open model on its merits to U.S. citizens with less relative privilege.[12]

 

7. SCOPE & HOPE

I conclude by addressing some sensible worries about the open model.

First, it may seem that the disorientation risked by listening vulnerably to rivals is not so trivial a cost, for it can lead to a morally dangerous change of heart that uproots one’s antecedent convictions. Indeed, we must worry about this. But this danger is another tragically inescapable fact of life, one that is especially salient in an open society like we wish ours to be. This suggests a further, perhaps less tactical, ethical consideration in favor of vulnerable listening as opposed to merely attentive listening. Finite creatures like us may hope for a measure of clarity and autonomy only on these terms.[13]

Since humans always act among others, to act at all is to risk unleashing forces beyond our control, like unforeseen responses from those who have power over us. Hope, like that of a future where relations are otherwise, comes from the fact that speakers are by their very nature capable of listening. Listening itself is an exercise of power—to extend sympathy, to challenge without attacking, to invite a kindred response, to thus express and foster hope. Moreover, listening to dissenting others is not necessarily riskier than shutting one’s ears to them. Recall John Stuart Mill’s suggestion in On Liberty that refusing to interrogate the values at stake in our lives is the greater moral danger, since

Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right…owing to a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. (Mill 1997, 55–56)

The reality to which Mill alludes is that there is no pristine discursive position lying outside concrete circumstances of action from which one might survey the truth before entering the fray. There is just the fray and us, the fallible but corrigible creatures in it.

Of course, reality is far more complicated than these abstractions suggest. There are gaps in principle and in practice between interrogating one’s own values, listening to others, listening to rivals, listening to any rival, and listening to anyone, let alone rivals, vulnerably. I do not suggest that the first step leads inexorably to the last. Serious questions, beyond this paper’s scope, about the range of situations to which the open model can and should be applied need answering. But the model may help guide reflection about tough questions around speech, such as, who, if anyone, should not be listened to? and, who, if anyone, should not be allowed to speak? Typically, I think a strong case can be made for, if not listening, at least not silencing, even when vulnerable listening may be uncalled-for.

Take the controversy surrounding speaking engagements by divisive figures like conservative pundit Anne Coulter, whose scheduled speeches at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 19 and April 27, 2017, were canceled at the last minute due to the administration’s professed security concerns. To justify the cancellations, Berkeley cited the destructive rioting that preceded the canceled February 1, 2017, speech of alt-right media personality Milo Yiannopouos. The violence at these events is often produced by clashes between radical groups on the right and the left. Here we cannot satisfactorily address the question of whether progressives are ever justified in trying to prevent speakers such as Coulter and Spencer from speaking in public. But we should note that the aftermath of these cancellations—framed by some as assaults on free speech, by others as victories in the fight against fascism—illustrates our theme of tragic risk.

Recall Robert Reich’s observation that those less trusting are more averse to risk. Some attempts to mitigate risk produce results that are not only tragic but ironic. For instance, trying to remove the risk to vulnerable populations that supposedly comes from the speech of reactionary figures like Coulter and Spencer, whether by violent protest or personal assault, raises the stakes and risks of backfiring both legally and in the court of public opinion by allowing such figures to pose as victims. It is a further tragic irony that, depending on the extent of the damage done by the violent means of resistance used, silenced figures may become genuine victims, whether by having their authentic rights to expression curtailed, their bodily integrity violated, or in other ways. Their most hardline opponents may not be moved by these injuries, but many more moderate folks likely will be, and not without cause. As Donald J. Farish, president of Roger Williams University since 2011, puts it:

The alt-right movement provokes violent dissent, the black bloc anarchists are only too happy to provide violent dissent, the alt-right then claims that government intervention is required to protect free speech, the anarchists celebrate the breakdown of civil order, and universities become the unwitting foils in an attack on democratic principles. (2017)

In short, efforts to coercively deny platforms to divisive but prominent figures like Coulter and Spencer risk entrenching a cycle of polarization and violence by reinforcing the narrative peddled by such figures themselves, namely that communication with the enemy is impossible or worthless because American society is hopelessly broken and must be transformed by authoritarian means—whether police, executive, or mass action. This sort of apocalyptic thinking is tempting in a society like ours where trust is scarce. It compensates for lost hope with defiance and a gratifying feeling of personal rectitude. But, implicated in degrading the situation to which it is a fatalistic response, it is false comfort. Our situation is grim but, as I will argue now, it is not yet apocalyptic.

Those sympathetic in principle to the case for charity might yet doubt that it will be effective when positions are as polarized and entrenched as they are now. I share the worry. But there are strong grounds for hope that listening works. I want to close by contrasting the punching of Richard Spencer, with which we began our discussion, with a recent case similar in outline but very different in outcome.

Derek Black is the 28-year-old son of Don Black, former Ku Klux Klan leader and founder of Stormfront, the Internet’s largest white nationalist website, and the godchild of former Klan leader and Louisiana state politician David Duke. Groomed since childhood for a prominent leadership role in the white nationalist movement, around 2013 Derek defied expectations by abandoning that path and the racist worldview that went with it. He explains the transformation this way:

Several years ago, I began attending a liberal college where my presence prompted huge controversy. Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there—people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me—I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it…People have approached me looking for a way to change the minds of Trump voters, but I can’t offer any magic technique. That kind of persuasion happens in person-to-person interactions and it requires a lot of honest listening on both sides. (Black 2016)[14]

Spencer responded to his assault on inaugural weekend by escalating his rhetoric, redoubling his propagandistic efforts, and calling for a paramilitary security force for those like him. Adept at PR, he predictably used the favorable optics to entrench his support. Meanwhile, observers not yet convinced of how dangerous Trump is, and unaware of the openly fascist elements behind him, have been given a clear opportunity to associate opposition to Trump and his supporters with criminal violence, assaults on what many will regard as rightly protected speech, and public disorder. Indeed, notwithstanding my concession that anti-democratic forces might merit a violent response, research suggests that resistance movements embracing violence and other extreme tactics tend to backfire when compared to alternatives:

Nonviolent black-led protests played a critical role in tilting the national political agenda towards civil rights and black-led resistance that included violence contributed to outcomes directly in opposition to the policy preferences of the protestors. (Wasow 2017, 4)

The authors of another recent study that examined “popular responses to extreme tactics used by animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests” found that, contrary to the activists’ beliefs, “extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement” (Feinberg, Willer, and Kovacheff 2017, 2). These findings stand to reason. Experience suggests that berating or intimidating people tends to only make them resentful, which risks entrenching our current politics of resentment. We saw earlier that even presenting folks with good evidence contrary to their given beliefs or attitudes inclines them to cling ever more firmly to them. The vicious cycle we observed in our opening remarks should therefore come as no surprise: one who feels humiliated or attacked will only be that much harder to reach.

Meanwhile, Derek Black’s remarkable trajectory suggests that difficult, reciprocal listening can open minds and transform our relations, even across extreme differences. In the remarks I cited above, he adds that dialogue would not have led to his transformation without his experiencing “clear and passionate outrage” about his views from his interlocutors. Black learned that charitable listeners need not, indeed should not, be docile or morally enervated. Suitably communicated outrage can be rigorous but civil and constructive, perhaps unlike anger, which is arguably punitive, harboring a futile and counter-productive payback wish (Nussbaum 2016, 15).[15]

It must be said that the evolution of Black’s views on race and America was a largely intellectual process whereby he gradually and soberly absorbed scholarly research on the history of race as a concept, the achievements of Islamic civilization, the effects of bias and institutional discrimination on minorities, and other empirical resources. My point is not that charitable listening alone can change minds. But it can help open them. Black accessed many of these materials not in his college coursework but through informal conversations with his Sabbat dinner friends. His own account of his development shows that without his Jewish classmate’s gesture of trust, inviting into his home a known white nationalist, widely mistrusted on campus, the decisive exchange of ideas in Black’s transformation would not have occurred.

This is not to say that the less privileged parties to an encounter should shoulder a greater burden of outreach or communication. As I said before, greater responsibility generally attends greater privilege. What Black’s case shows is that gestures of trust across differences, from anyone prepared to offer them but especially those directly concerned, can do a great deal of good. Those who undertake them, like Black’s Jewish classmate Matthew Stevenson, offer us a lesson in civic courage.

The cases of Richard Spencer and Derek Black are by no means identical, not least because Spencer and Black are themselves different people. But they jointly reflect our crisis of trust from opposite directions, reminding us that we still have choices about how to respond. Not all efforts to listen will prevail over mistrust and resentment. Maybe only few will. But I have tried to defend a strong presumption in favor of listening, and in extremis, of not coercively silencing. In the words of high school student activist of color Mahad Olad:

I earnestly believe that the best and most beneficial method to simultaneously fight against blatant bigotry and for marginalized groups who are the objects of hate is more speech, not less (Friedersdorf 2014).

In this spirit, I have argued that healthy democracy rests on the exercise of civility, a virtue of citizenship requiring charity towards compatriots, which in turn calls for vulnerable listening across disagreements and differences, which fosters the trust that makes sustained civil relations possible. We saw that civil listeners charitably engage speakers’ stances by relaxing their grip on “the self,” or the attitudes about what is true and important, that they bring to the encounter themselves. With some luck, maybe civil listening can help temper the truculent identities ossified and weaponized by our mistrustful politics (McElwee and McDaniel 2017).

I presume many Americans share my hope for nonviolent transformations of our strained relations in the direction of trust and reconciliation. Whether our hope will be rewarded is an open question, of course. But I think those who wish to see Trump’s populist antagonisms overcome, rather than succumbed to, must further hope that the question remains open for as long as possible. Listening takes time. Maybe it can buy us a little more: “Our job in these circumstances is not to condescend but to engage—or forfeit the politics of the moment (and the future) to reaction” (Sullivan 2017). In all humility about our uncertain future, I suggest that a widely shared ethics of vulnerable listening may help Americans create a decent future together:[16]

These days, my young children want retribution for every unfair thing that happens to them. An eye for an eye. But in teaching them that civility means laying aside the desire for self-gratifying retaliation, I hope to alleviate for them the exhausting and toxic cycle we now find ourselves in today. If we continue as we are, no one will have the last word or obtain reconciliation. (Cunningham 2016)

 

Christian Golden, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at University of Tennessee. Dr. Golden’s primary philosophical interests include the character and limits of subjectivity as well as normative and psychological issues surrounding agency in ethics and politics.  He is also interested in feminism, Nietzsche scholarship, and radical democratic thought and practice.  His current research is aimed at developing ways of understanding personal commitment, as well as key ethical and epistemic virtues like civility, humility, integrity, and justice, that take seriously the role and potential value of conflict in human psychic and social life. 

 

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ENDNOTES

[1] Here I am primarily concerned with trust between citizens as opposed to citizens’ trust in public institutions, though these are surely interconnected.

[2] Like Cheshire Calhoun (2000, 254), I regard civility as “a distinct and important” virtue, though she calls it a “moral” virtue whereas I hesitate to accept that term’s universalistic implications. Here I defend civility as a political virtue of democratic citizenship.

[3] There are surely many other plausible conditions on civil democratic citizenship, such as refraining from violence and coercion, respecting others’ privacy, and so on. Here I focus specifically on the role within civil citizenship of charity as explained below.

[4] Notwithstanding his populist campaign rhetoric, Trump has appointed to his cabinet many of the same ultra-rich insiders he vilified and swore to purge from the Washington “swamp” in a campaign pitched against a system rigged and exploited by Wall Street and special interests. Examples include Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, an oil executive and former CEO of Exxon Mobil; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, hedge fund manager and former senior executive at Goldman Sachs; and Wilbur Ross, Commerce Secretary and 79-year-old billionaire investor with no prior experience in government or public service.

[5] Perhaps greater moral difficulties are raised by empirical research showing a link between lower intelligence and many forms of prejudice even after controlling for education and socio-economic status. See, e.g., Hodson and Busseri (2012).

[6] Other accounts of charity emphasize the role of listening. Take Rawls (1993, 217), for instance, for whom civility is a duty of liberal citizenship involving “a willingness to listen to others and a fairmindedness in deciding when accommodations to their views should reasonably be made.” See also Kingwell (1995, 211). Here I go further, arguing that civil listening is charitable and therefore puts one’s antecedent attitudes and practices at risk of transformation.

[7] These often involve our conscious or avowed self-understandings, but may also conflict with them due to the prominent role of self-deception and other forms of non-self-transparency in human experience and action. The cognitive effects discussed below give some illustration of the finitude of the human capacity for sovereign control over our own character and conduct. There are many other varieties. For more discussion, see Protevi 2009 and Cassam 2014.

[8] I explore these ethical and psychological issues, and discuss their political implications, in “Taking Our Selves Too Seriously: Commitment, Contestation, and the Dynamic Life of the Self” (forthcoming).

[9] Members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the civil rights groups who defied Jim Crow in the South during the 1960s through sit-ins and Freedom Rides, knew the grave physical and psychological risks they took by practicing nonviolence in a brutally repressive white culture of police and mob violence. Here I argue for something far less demanding than the voluntary submission to severe interpersonal violence courageously practiced by CORE and SNCC activists. But the inspiring transformative impact of their public interventions should not be lost on those who want to resist Trumpism without reinforcing the conditions that enable it.

[10] Work on moral luck is thus enduringly relevant to a proper diagnosis of the intricate, bedeviling difficulties inherent in dismantling oppressive social conditions.

[11] Crucially, violent escalations by or on behalf of minority groups will likely backfire for the foreseeable future, since they tend to provoke more and worse repression and violence disproportionately inflicted on minority communities themselves. Here what is most relevant is not the rarity of sustained, open violence in our society but—a complexly related fact—the authorities’ virtually total monopoly on the means of violence. We see this play out in the wake of the presidential election. In pursuing their agenda, authoritarian elements formerly confined to the fringes but emboldened by Trump’s ascendency eagerly claim the protection and support of the state, dominated as it now is by revanchist forces loyal to Trump’s regime. Consider, for instance, Richard Spencer’s call for the creation of an extreme right-wing vigilante force in response to being physically assaulted by a masked protester on inaugural weekend (Solomon 2017).

[12] Here I adapt the distinction between relative poverty and absolute poverty, or “poverty by any standard,” introduced by Robert McNamara and deployed by Peter Singer in arguing for a stringent duty on the part of the global rich to prevent widespread preventable suffering and death among the world’s poor (Singer 1993, 218–19).

[13] This is part of my principled response to the objection that what my argument really requires is the pretense of vulnerable listening as opposed to the real thing. The other part is simply that, besides being intellectually weak, deceiving one’s fellow citizens is wrong and especially perverse where issues of trust are at stake. This is notwithstanding the tactical consideration that we are rarely the gifted deceivers we imagine ourselves to be; folks tend to be good at sniffing out a phony. If we cannot manage sincere openness in dialogue with others, and faking it is the really best we can do, then perhaps we should do so. But phony vulnerability as such is nothing to ethically aspire to. In short, the open model requires that we encourage trust in others by simulating it ourselves through genuinely vulnerable listening across differences. Even when we must simulate the vulnerability, we can try to telegraph that effort itself. This may be the limit of what we can do, but it may yet be enough to introduce new possibilities.

[14] After Black’s outing on The New College of Florida campus as a prominent white separatist, the first of his peers to reach out to him was Matthew Stevenson, an Orthodox Jew. Stevenson’s opening gesture was an invitation, which Black accepted, to a weekly Shabbat dinner he hosted with a diverse group of friends in his campus apartment.

[15] My sense of civility therefore does not necessarily involve law-abidance or refraining from publicly expressing convictions fellow citizens may not share, two conditions on liberal democratic civility put forward by Clifford Orwin (1991). Civility in my sense may at least permit lawbreaking (the civil disobedience practiced in the 1960s by CORE and SNCC) and require one to express views others do not share (the outrage civilly addressed to Derek Black by his fellow students) about what is true and important within one’s plural community. There is thus a key internal connection between civility in my sense and integrity as conceived by Cheshire Calhoun (1995) as a co-deliberative social virtue.

[16] I am grateful to those who offered thoughtful feedback and criticism on early drafts of this paper, especially Gerald Mara, Terry Pinkard, and the referees of Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, as well as its Editor-in-Chief, Rebecca Kukla, for her helpful guidance.

by Arielle Bennett

ABSTRACT. The day before the 2017 Inauguration of Donald Trump, I started teaching the American Presidency to a group of nearly ninety students. As one of the most controversial individuals of this era has taken office and has shaken the meaning of free speech and the value of facts themselves, this is undoubtedly a unique time in history to be both a lecturer and an observer in a presidency course. This classroom offers an interesting case-study on the discussions between the politically engaged youth of America, as well as the debate surrounding the disruptive speech of the alt-right and the “politically correct” reaction to it.

This spring I was given the opportunity to teach the American Presidency to a class of nearly ninety undergraduate students in New Jersey. The 2017 Inauguration was the day after class began; Donald Trump was now President and his Executive actions within his office would have to become part of this course on the presidency. I assumed it would be a controversial semester given the tone of the election, but I had not expected it to be used by some students as a forum for “alternative facts.” Nor did I expect to see students willing to make comments that bordered on bigotry so openly, without thought for the diverse group of people in the classroom. From my experience in political science courses, students are ready to become partisan if the discussion warrants it, but this was my first experience where I was distressed in a classroom; not by the subject of the readings, but by the behavior of some of the participants.

On the first day of class I asked the students to raise their hands if they were political science majors, and most affirmed. I took this measure positively, hoping that the classroom of mostly advanced majors in the field would remain classically “political science” focused, or at least keep to the topic at hand. Then again, my time as an undergraduate during the first Obama-Clinton showdown was a much different one, and while debates between students were certainly heated at that time, I can’t remember ever feeling uncomfortable in a classroom or amongst my peers. In the tradition of most political science courses, I tried my best to make the course “unbiased,” “non-partisan,” and based on historical facts about the presidency. After all, it should be a historical course that looks at each significant presidency week by week. However, I found myself defending the notion of equality itself on a regular basis; I found myself continually going in depth to explain the elements of racism and sexism that were embedded in our nation’s Constitution and were reinforced by the three branches if government; I found myself in what seemed more like a talk show, or a Twitter war, by continually justifying common sense socio-political facts against the faction of those “liberated” by the new precedent of the political rule-breaking of Donald Trump.

The alt-right youths of America were not as distant, or as rural, as I imagined anymore. Some were in my classroom, less than an hour from New York City. The one to two male students who appeared to be advocates of the alt-right somehow seemed like the majority of the classroom because they were the loudest, when in fact the other eighty or more students of every other political persuasion were the substantial majority. The true majority was veiled—their speech was more quiet and rare, and by the end of week four of class any attempt to dispute the eagerness of the alt-right students’ speech had completely withered. It was as though the true majority had a very limited desire to directly and continually confront these outbursts, and only for the first few weeks of class did they attempt it. The eventual silence of most of the classroom in deference to the alt-right students was daunting, and my own persistent attempt to defend my teachings against the alt-right with genuine facts and historical evidence did not seem to be enough. When facts no longer matter to your debate opponent, which party becomes the loser?

After all, for the first several weeks of class we were still learning about the founders and their philosophies, the early presidencies, and the role of the Constitution. By week three of the course, President Trump’s travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries had just been released, and on this occasion the classroom was in uproar. It took nearly an hour to bring the tone down between opposing sides of the classroom after that event, and while I hoped to assure the students of how checks and balances worked and remind them Executive Orders can be challenged, it was clear that the classroom dynamic itself was going to be our immediate challenge. Little did I know the majority of the students would be willing to give up engaging with the alt-right just a week later.

In the first month of class, we heard from a farright student that said, “We have always had equal rights in America.” This comment was in response to my presentation about how after the 13^th and 14^th Amendments were passed, segregation still emerged, later verified by a 7-1 Supreme Court decision in Plessey v. Ferguson, and voting rights were suppressed for African Americans regardless of the 15^th Amendment’s clarity. I told the story of Susan B. Anthony’s court case U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony, where she was denied a trial by jury and convicted of illegal voting, and the ruling reaffirmed that women were not full citizens despite what the 14^th Amendment might say about general “persons” having equal protection, citizenship for those born here, and due process. Next we heard a student say “the gender pay gap is a myth” (intending to prove that women had “full equality”), and my reply that our R1 university has scholars that research this very issue and that it is a fact women earn less than men for the same work did not convince him. Arguments that deny the history and reality of obvious inequalities were not what I was expecting in my classroom. But, in a world where existing knowledge, fact, and academia are being challenged, it seemed inevitable to enter into a classroom, especially one that is meant to examine our current President. The strangest part of this classroom dialogue was that I rarely heard from students willing to challenge these bizarre claims, even in a very diverse classroom on a very liberal campus.

The lowest point of the dialogue came at the end of the first month of class. I was lecturing on the Constitution, explaining how women and minorities were not included as persons in the Constitution, which is why we have had to struggle to obtain equal rights. A student, trying again to prove that there was no need for more constitutional wordage on equality because he believed equality already existed, literally said to the class, “But we all know there’s no such thing as rape.” Then moments later, he went further to say “there’s no such thing as discrimination either.” In response, the faces of the class dropped; nearly all of us gasped in sync. These comments were so irrelevant to the discussion at hand, yet they were able to take over and create the most somber atmosphere I have experienced in a classroom. I was nearly speechless for that first minute. Never did I imagine having to confront or defend the very concept of rape or discrimination. I was visibly upset, but as someone that spent a great deal of time studying the ills of patriarchy, I used my knowledge of gender-based violence and historical discrimination against sex and race as confidently as possible. As I was attempting to prove myself, I felt how ridiculous I sounded. It was too outrageous and too offensive that anyone would have to make a public attempt to explain common knowledge and historical fact. While I can still see the faces of my students that were disturbed by the offenses, there were only two of them willing to respond to the student that offended them. Neither that was willing to argue back mentioned racial discrimination. The conversation somehow stayed limited to proving there was gender-based violence and discrimination. I was worried that if the conversation had moved one step farther toward debating the existence of racism, we would have heard directly racist comments. While I did my utmost to control the aftershock, the damage had been done by the inflammatory words meant to sting the other for no reason at all, just for the sake of harm. Hearing a public declaration that the experiences of the other did not exist, that they could not exist, was something I never expected in a university classroom in 2017.

I didn’t plan on discussing sexual violence statistics that day, but I told the class that nearly a quarter of all undergraduate students are sexually assaulted. In my most commanding voice I said, “that means over twenty-percent of people at our university right now have been sexually assaulted.” I saw the discomfort in their expressions as I said this, and no doubt they saw the pain in my own. This is a conversation that we should be willing to have in a college environment, but having the conversation in response to those denying it, in a classroom that had nothing to do with the subject whatsoever, was not an effective platform. After I gave the most compelling arguments I could to prove the existence of the reality of rape and discrimination, I ended the class for the day.

On my way home, after calling other faculty for advice, it took several days to recover from hearing unfounded prejudice in my classroom. I decided not to continue open discussions afterward; not by “suppressing” free speech, but by becoming the stereotype of a professor that simply lectures without pausing for the entire length of class. What alternative could I have than to monologue? It was evident in this context that the students would not learn academically by discussing with one another. They may have learned another lesson, as I did, that unduly harsh words are going to be spoken publicly and boldly in this new era, and that the leader of this trend is our current POTUS. While the monologue is not my favorite teaching method, being someone that believes in students learning from one another’s thoughts in discussions, not merely traditional lectures, it seemed that in allowing my classroom to be open, it became closed. When free speech becomes unjustifiably antagonistic in settings that are meant to be scholastic and thoughtful, it harms the beauty of learning. When speech is about disregarding the authority of all those that differ, when it becomes centered on denying the other, it is hardly productive, especially in a classroom.

The silence of the majority of the class continued as I monologued week to week, though the persistent hand-raising of the couple far-right students left me with little alternative but to call on them occasionally, though their comments were more appropriate after the day we confronted the denial of rape and discrimination. When I would ask for their sources since I had never heard of the information they were offering, they would site some organization unknown to me or say sardonically that “everyone knows this.” I also tried group activities where I would select a person that was quiet in class to speak for their group, instead of waiting for the most eager students to speak. I didn’t hear confrontational comments for several weeks after I decreased the open discussions, so I was optimistic that once the class reached the topics of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama it would be possible to see more communication between students once again, since they had lived during these presidencies. Not surprisingly, the students on the left remained largely quiet, and the class didn’t hear student-led approval of President Obama, nor a critique of President Bush. Long before this point in class, few students other than those on the far-right had anything they were willing to share.

As an emerging political scientist, this classroom experience has been a case-study for me. It was what I imagined to be a picture of the politically engaged youth in a typical Northeastern state. It was an incredibly diverse group of students from all kinds of backgrounds, though most are from New Jersey or the tri-state area. On the day I tried to confront the fact that discrimination exists, I asked the class to raise their hands if they were first generation college students; well over half of them obliged in affirmation. This showed that it was certainly not a room of privilege; it was a room of hopefuls looking toward the American Dream. There were mostly what appeared to be diligent students from all realms of the political spectrum left and right, but there were also those couple leaning to the fringe alt-right persuasion that had no trouble expressing themselves consistently throughout the entire semester, while those from all other political persuasions spoke less and less as the semester went on.

The most interesting observation I have about this group of students was that it appeared they were not comfortable with confrontation that isn’t anonymous. Given that these students had to see each other twice a week, I believe it made them more shy and inexpressive then they usually would be at a political event or online dialogue where they could interact with others politically and anonymously. The only outliers in my classroom, those that were willing to speak up to everyone no matter what, were from the alt-right; most likely because their political orientation as an opposition force encourages blatant politically “incorrect” discussion. With nearly all of the comments in class I heard, no matter what the subject at hand was, the first hand to be raised was from the far-right. However, after class was over, the students that came up to me to offer comments appeared to be political moderates or liberals. These students spoke with me privately rather than publicly in a classroom, which in my opinion demonstrated they preferred to express their political opinions specifically to like-minded peers or political “neutrals” (like a professor), rather than in an environment where their comments may potentially be critiqued, ignored, or disrespected.

The left has often been critiqued for its inability to address the alt-right as intensely as it likely needs to, and while this might be partially because it is dealing with a group that discounts the other regardless of its merits, it also could be because the rules of the game are changing. While Hillary Clinton advised us to “go high” when others “go low,” is it possible to win a dirty fight with squeaky-clean methods? While many of us might stay away from the followers of the Breitbart camp and the like, and instead surround ourselves with those of our own political persuasions, it is important for us to also be aware of this group and what is being said. Moreover, it is even more important to confront it in open dialogue. The politically correct manners that have been the custom of traditional political actors may indeed be a model of the past. America has been a community of individualism, free speech, and innovation, and those that test free-speech to limit will not be thwarted by the subtle, yet biting, wit of 19^th century “ladies and gentlemen” inclined to take the high ground. Oddly enough, this course reminded me of the 2016 Presidential Debates and Town Halls. On the few occasions the moderate or left-leaning students spoke up in response to the far-right students during the first month of class, they took the high ground and were polite and appropriate (like Hillary Clinton), while those that took the low ground certainly had the most sound bites and floor time (like Donald Trump). It wasn’t the words of sensible solidarity Hillary spoke that the nation remembered months after. Instead, it was the Machiavellian tactics of Donald Trump that we are still thinking about and confronting on a daily basis, as he is now our current President.

Free speech and political activity are evolving, and the election of Donald Trump has proven as much by his unchecked rejection of the traditional politically “correct” dialogue practiced by most political actors. In this era of political upheaval and what will likely be forthcoming partisan realignment throughout the country, the alt-right should not have a moratorium on being the loudest. The numerical majority and all of its glorious types of factions also need to express, to rebel, to be active, to be heard, to inspire, and to disrupt. As this classroom displayed the diversity of the budding millennial generation today, we should also consider what kind of future this group will strive to bring if fear of political incorrectness and confrontation with critics leads to silence. The loudest and most politically-incorrect people don’t always get to be leaders, but the most respectful and reasonable people don’t always emerge victorious either. My hope is that a new generation of strong-willed people emerge that are courageous on all sides, regardless of their interpretation of free speech. Ideally, provocative free speech should not be an exclusive tool of those in the far-right. There must also emerge those of every other political persuasion willing to use free speech to its fullest potential, and to be emboldened and unabashed in their defense of truth and progress, while simultaneously never denying the other.

My classroom should have been a forum for vibrant debate from multiple groups of people represented by New Jersey’s political youth, as a safe space to practice free speech and to learn mutual respect as well as candid self-expression. The students never needed to be politically correct, they simply could have held one another accountable by practicing the art of the Socratic method – by challenging one another’s ideas and taking the time to logically disprove one another’s fallacies so that we could have the opportunity to make the closest approximation to the truth together. Unfortunately, my classroom had no desire to engage in dialogue in the Socratic fashion. In fact, I discovered firsthand that the Socratic method isn’t practicable when one side doesn’t believe in the possibility of undeniable facts, such as the existence of discrimination. The Socratic method has a flaw in such cases as these; “truths” cannot be sought in a mutual dialogue when debaters cannot agree on a baseline understanding of even the questions being asked.

For those of us with the opportunity to teach politically controversial subjects in this polarized era, my advice is simple. If you are willing to discuss current events in the classroom, particularly those surrounding the presidency, be direct as the moderator and be prepared to confront issues of prejudice that may arise. I have learned there are no guarantees that college-level students will practice reasonable partisan debate in political science classrooms. If I could repeat the semester again, to build a discussion I would rely less on students that raise their hands to volunteer their thoughts. I would rotate more between lecture, calling on students randomly from my roster, and student group activities. While some might read this essay and know better ways to manage a classroom or consider my recent semester an anomaly, I predict that my experiences will be increasingly common, assuming political incorrectness continues to become more normalized by President Trump. This experience has shown me why the far-right has gained momentum through their alternative controversial use of free speech. If my classroom inadvertently became a forum for the new alt-right, where a fringe group without strong peer opposition easily dominated a significantly larger majority, I believe it is possible for this tactic to potentially disrupt groups everywhere.

Arielle Bennett completed her graduate degree in Political Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she is also a part-time lecturer. Her research interests are in the history of political thought, feminist theory, and early American gender politics. 

by John Corvino 

ABSTRACT. In June 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump infamously argued that U.S. District Court judge Gonzalo Curiel could not preside fairly over the Trump University fraud case. Pointing to his campaign promise to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, Trump alleged that Curiel’s Mexican heritage created “an inherent conflict of interest.” (Judge Curiel was born in Indiana.)

Criticism of Trump’s allegation was swift and widespread. Robert Maldonado, president of the Hispanic Bar Association, stated that “Donald Trump continues to belligerently inject bigotry and divisive politics into the 2016 presidential contest.” Even House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) denounced the allegation, calling it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Was Trump’s remark bigoted? Were commentators right to label it as such? How does such a label function, and when is it appropriate to apply it? In this essay I explore these questions. While Trump’s comments and their aftermath provide the impetus, my focus is ultimately more general: I am interested in the meaning and use of “bigotry” and its cognates. In Part I, I analyze the concept of bigotry, including its connection to racism, sexism, and other related phenomena. In Part II, I explain how attributions of bigotry function to “stigmatize the stigmatizers” and I discuss ethical and practical considerations concerning such stigma. In Part III, I conclude by very briefly applying these insights to Trump’s remarks, Ryan’s response, and the 2016 U.S Presidential election more generally.

 

In June 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump infamously argued that U.S. District Court judge Gonzalo Curiel could not preside fairly over the Trump University fraud case. Pointing to his campaign promise to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, Trump alleged that Curiel’s Mexican heritage created “an inherent conflict of interest” and “an absolute conflict” (B. Kendall 2016). (Judge Curiel was born in Indiana.)

Criticism of Trump’s allegation was swift and widespread. Robert Maldonado, president of the Hispanic Bar Association, stated that “Donald Trump continues to belligerently inject bigotry and divisive politics into the 2016 presidential contest, and now it has bled over into his legal troubles” (Gamboa 2016). The criticism even crossed party lines. House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced it: “Claiming a person can’t do the job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It’s absolutely unacceptable” (Steinhauer, Martin, and Herszenhorn 2016). Yet Ryan maintained his endorsement for candidate (now President) Trump.

Was Trump’s remark bigoted? Were commentators right to label it as such? How does such a label function, and when is it appropriate to apply it? These are the questions I explore in this essay. While Trump’s Curiel comments and their aftermath provide the impetus for these questions, my focus is ultimately more general: I am interested in the meaning and use of “bigotry” and its cognates.

In Part I, I analyze the concept of bigotry, including its connection to racism, sexism, and other related phenomena. In Part II, I explain how attributions of bigotry function to “stigmatize the stigmatizers” and I discuss ethical and practical considerations concerning such stigma. In Part III, I conclude by very briefly applying these insights to Trump’s remarks, Ryan’s response, and the 2016 U.S Presidential election more generally.

 

1. WHAT BIGOTRY IS

Although Ryan referred to Trump’s remarks as “racist,” the label appears somewhat inapt: Mexican heritage constitutes an ethnic identity, not a racial one. On the other hand, there is no term “ethnicism,” and neither “ethnocentrism” nor “xenophobia” quite captures the problem Ryan was disavowing.

Even if we understand “race” broadly enough to include Mexican heritage, questions remain about what precisely makes the comments racist and how their being racist connects with their being an instance of bigotry. Like Maldonado, many commentators explicitly used the latter term to describe Trump’s remarks. Columnist Lewis Diuguid of the Kansas City Star penned a column entitled “Trump’s Attack on Latino Judge is Bigotry, Pure and Simple” ( 2017). Daily Beast writer Michael Daly stated that “Trump’s bigotry was of the worst kind. His was not the bigotry born of ignorance such as the Curiels were liable to encounter if they ventured into southern Indiana. Trump’s bigotry was purposeful.”(Daly 2017).

Compared to the concept of racism, which has prompted a rich debate among philosophers, the concept of bigotry has received relatively little attention.[1] In this section, I begin by discussing what bigotry is; I then connect bigotry to racism and other ideologies.

In everyday use, the term “bigotry” and its cognates tend to get tossed around without much precision. (In that respect it is similar to “racism.”) The philosopher William Ramsey identifies two related elements emphasized in standard, traditional definitions of bigotry: “The first is a very strong and perhaps irrational commitment to one’s own viewpoint. The second is a strong intolerance toward other viewpoints and groups.” (2013, 128).

Both elements invite further questions: Given that “strong commitment” characterizes not only bigotry but also moral conviction, isn’t the “irrational” part crucial to the definition? After all, some ideas genuinely merit strong commitment. Even more challenging is pinning down what “strong intolerance” entails. It can’t simply mean “strong disagreement,” which, like strong commitment, is often warranted. Most people would strongly disagree with anyone who insists that 2+2=5, but we wouldn’t describe such disagreement as bigoted. The same holds for certain moral views: Most people are strongly committed to the claim that slavery is wrong, and they strongly disagree with anyone who thinks otherwise. They are even “intolerant” of such people, in the sense that they’re willing to take steps to stop them from practicing slavery or from spreading pro-slavery views. But no one would describe the committed abolitionist stance as “bigoted”—except, perhaps, an ardent proponent of slavery. Which leads one to wonder whether “bigotry” is simply a term that we apply to strong viewpoints with which we strongly disagree. (I’ll return to this suggestion later on.)

We are unlikely to capture something as complex as bigotry in a tidy set of necessary and sufficient conditions; we can, however, identify key features. I propose the following: Bigotry consists in stubborn and unjustified contempt toward groups of people, typically in the context of a larger system of subordination. Let me elaborate on some key terms.

First, bigotry is fundamentally stubborn—a point underscored by the traditional definition’s inclusion of terms such as “strong” and “intolerant.” Ramsey suggests that “wishy-washy racists,” who are open to abandoning racism, are still bigoted. I disagree, at least insofar as they are genuinely responsive to contrary evidence. Certainly, the wishy-washy racist’s view would be odious, but bigotry isn’t only about a view’s content: It’s also about the manner in which a view is held.[2] “Compliant bigotry” is a contradiction in terms.

Bigotry is unjustified, a point that captures our intuitions about the anti-slavery case. We don’t consider someone who is strongly anti-slavery a bigot, because we recognize their position to be justified. The slavery proponent, by contrast, would (wrongly) view a strong commitment to abolition as unjustified and thus (wrongly) judge the ardent abolitionist to be bigoted. For similar reasons, we are unlikely to consider young children who parrot their parents’ bigoted views bigots, mainly because young children are generally not in a position to know any better. Their views, though false, are justified in light of the evidence to which they have access. (Ramsey 2013, 132–33).

Bigotry is thus context-sensitive. In different historical periods and places, people’s access to evidence varies, and thus so does their level of (subjective) justification. That evidence includes the testimony of others: It is harder to meet the threshold for being a bigot in a society where most others share one’s wrongheaded view than in one where one’s bigotry is frequently and openly criticized. Note, too, that the lack of justification inherent in bigotry is often accompanied by a systematic insensitivity to, or discounting of, evidence that would upset the bigot’s views—a point also related to the “stubbornness” feature. What Kwame Anthony Appiah writes about “racial prejudice” is apt here as well: Bigotry involves a “systematically distorted rationality” (2002).

Bigotry requires contempt, a stance of disdain.[3] Less certain is whether this stance should be understood as fundamentally affective, a matter of feeling, or cognitive, a matter of thought. Perhaps it is both. On the one hand, “indifferent bigot,” like “compliant bigot,” appears to be a contradiction in terms: We typically characterize the bigot as feeling something, and feeling it strongly. On the other hand, we can conceive of someone coolly and dispassionately holding views that nonetheless strike us as bigoted: Imagine, if you will, a Vulcan who harbors racist beliefs. (The fictional Vulcans of Star Trek suppress their emotions.) In any case, even if felt disdain is not a necessary condition of bigotry, it is surely a typical feature: The paradigmatic bigot feels aversion to his targets.

Bigotry is essentially directed toward groups of people. Stubborn, unjustified contempt toward a isolated individual would be wrong, but it is not necessarily bigotry: the contempt must be directed at the individual qua member of a group. Moreover, not just any grouping counts: Someone who feels stubborn, unjustified contempt toward people whose names being with the letter K would be strange, but not a bigot. Why not? One might think that the reason is that the grouping “people whose names begin with K” is arbitrary, whereas bigotry typically targets constitutive features of identity: race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. But while bigotry is typically directed toward constitutive characteristics, it is not clear that it is essentially so. Suppose that stubborn, unjustified contempt toward people with K-names were widespread. In that case, I think it would plausibly be categorized as bigotry. Moreover, we could imagine that in the face of such systemic contempt, having a K-name might eventually become a salient identity feature: The discrimination would ground the constitutive characteristic, and not vice versa.

I suggest that what explains our intuitions about this case is not that K-names fail to be a constitutive feature of identity, but that they fail to be a target of a larger system of subordination. Bigotry is a social phenomenon, at least in its standard forms. (Of course, someone might exhibit bigotry toward people with certain kinds of names because such names correlate with other identity characteristics—consider, names that end in “ski.” Those other characteristics would be the salient object.)

Notice that the characteristic features of bigotry—stubbornness, lack of justification, contempt—are ones that people may possess to a greater or lesser degree. Blogger Wes Alwan writes, “Bigotry does not constitute a spectrum: rather, it marks a spectrum’s far end.” (Alwan 2013). That’s half-right. Bigotry falls at one end of a spectrum of ways people regard one another, but when we zoom in, we find gradations there, too.

We may now turn to the connection between bigotry and racism. One of the interesting philosophical debates about racism in the last two decades concerns the “location problem”: whether racism consists mainly in beliefs—in particular, beliefs about the superiority of certain races—or in attitudes, choices, behaviors, or some other element. Most accounts treat beliefs as essential. Tommie Shelby, for example, argues that racist beliefs are “essential to and even sufficient for racism” (Shelby 2002, 414; Appiah 2002). He treats racism as “fundamentally a type of ideology,” defining ideologies as “widely accepted illusory systems of belief that function to establish or reinforce structures of social oppression” (Shelby 2002, 415). Jorge Garcia, by contrast, has argued for a fundamentally non-doxastic, volitional account of racism: According to Garcia, racism consists in mainly in ill-will. It is not primarily a belief, ideology, or doctrine, but a sin. (2001, 135–36).

My account of bigotry, like Garcia’s account of racism, treats bigotry as essentially a moral vice—both because bigotry involves unjustified contempt and because such contempt tends to contribute to systemic subordination. Even where the contempt does not risk this effect—say, because the bigot keeps his bigotry to himself—bigotry remains vicious in its improper attitude toward fellow human beings. Bigotry may also be an epistemic vice, insofar as contempt has a cognitive component. This is what Appiah seems to have in mind when he refers to the “systematically distorted rationality” of racial prejudice: The bigot discounts contrary evidence in order to maintain his bigoted views.

Garcia’s non-doxastic account of racism is a minority view, however: Most theorists treat racism as depending essentially on racist beliefs. For the purposes of this essay, I will assume that the more common, doxastic/cognitive account of racism is correct. On that assumption, there is an important contrast between racism and bigotry: Whereas racism is fundamentally about what people believe, bigotry is about how they believe it (or, alternatively, how they feel it, if contempt is essentially affective). The bigot is stubborn, and the bigot lacks justification. One way to think about this (assuming a cognitivist understanding of contempt) is to view bigotry as a matter of bad epistemic hygiene regarding our fellow humans’ moral worth. The bigot’s beliefs about his target are not only stubborn but also careless and risky, and thus morally irresponsible.

This contrast between racism and bigotry may shed light on some earlier puzzles. Recall Ramsey’s example of the “wishy washy racist.” If racism consists in beliefs, then it is perfectly possible to be a wishy-washy racist, one who readily gives up racist beliefs; it is not possible, however, to be a wishy-washy (i.e. non-stubborn) bigot. Also recall the observation that we generally don’t consider young children bigots, even when (for example) they repeat their parents’ racist views. That observation is consistent with labeling children racist simply in virtue of their sharing the views. (Their culpability is a separate matter.)

Ramsey notes that “many regard bigotry is a superordinate category with subordinates that include, most prominently, racism and sexism;” he himself lists racism and sexism as “types of bigotry” (2013, 126–27).[4] According to my account, this common classification scheme is inapt: Bigotry is not a genus of which various ideologies are species. Bigotry is a distorted way of forming and maintaining certain beliefs (or attitudes, or both), whereas ideologies such as racism and sexism are distorted belief systems.[5] Of course, bigotry helps to maintain and reinforce those systems, which in turn foster bigotry by making it easier for the bigot to remain unchallenged.

This clarification of the contrast between racism and bigotry also provides one plausible explanation for why Paul Ryan chose the category of racism in disavowing Trump’s position: Doing so allowed him to isolate his criticism to a particular belief—and more precisely, a particular remark (“the textbook definition of a racist comment”)—rather than to condemn Trump’s general character. It thus made his continued endorsement seem slightly less jarring. Bigotry, again, is essentially a moral defect: stubborn unjustified contempt.

To be clear, I am not denying that racism always, or virtually always, involves immorality. But if the standard, doxastic account of racism is correct, getting to the immorality involves an extra step: Moral categories apply to persons, not propositions. Racist beliefs untethered from action are not immoral, although acting on them generally is, as is the failure to take better care in forming, maintaining, and spreading beliefs when such beliefs have morally significant effects.

One final clarification before proceeding: Having accepted the standard, doxastic account of racism, I have suggested that racism applies directly to beliefs and only derivatively to persons—persons are racist insofar as they hold racist beliefs. Bigotry, I think, is exactly the opposite: It is essentially a feature of persons, and only derivatively a feature of beliefs or expressions of belief (statements, actions, and so forth). A bigoted belief, remark, or action is the sort that is typical of bigoted persons. Thus, to call Trump’s remarks bigoted is to suggest that the problem goes beyond their content; it is ultimately to indict him. With that in mind, let us turn from discussing the meaning of “bigotry” to discussing its use.

 

2. THE ETHICS OF STIGMA

Early in this essay I suggested that it sometimes seems as if we apply the term “bigotry” to any strong viewpoints with which we strongly disagree. Given the account sketched above, we can understand why such use is tempting. When someone is strongly committed to views that we consider not only wrong but badly wrong—wrong in ways that express unjustified contempt—one plausible explanation is a moral defect in the person so committed. They are not just wrong, they are stubbornly and wickedly wrong; they are bigoted.

To call someone a bigot, then, is not merely to disagree. It is to express a kind of contempt. Here I am using “contempt” in the sense defended by Michelle Mason in her provocative article “Contempt as a Moral Attitude”[6] (2003). Mason argues that contempt is sometimes morally justified; specifically, it is justified whenever it correctly regards its object as “ranking low in worth as a person in virtue of falling short of some legitimate interpersonal ideal” (241). The bigot falls short of ideals of fairness and equality. Properly focused contempt for the bigot highlights this fact.

This element of contempt in attributions of bigotry explains the term’s strong emotive force. Calling people bigots marks them—at least with respect to certain views they hold—as beyond the pale: more worthy of shaming and shunning than of thoughtful engagement. It aims to stigmatize the stigmatizers, treating their stance as not merely wrong, but wicked, noxious, out of bounds. (Here I am taking stigma to be the reputational effect of successful efforts at evoking contempt.) This is why calling people bigots functions as a conversation stopper; it both marks and creates distance. Having referred to someone’s view as bigotry, one cannot then plausibly offer to debate it on the merits; one has already dismissed the view as stubborn unjustified contempt. At the very least, such offers are not likely to be taken seriously by the person so marked.

Should we stigmatize people—at least with respect to certain views that they hold—in this way? Some views are indeed egregiously bad and widely acknowledged as such: for example, that certain races are subhuman, that certain religious believers should be exterminated, that certain genders (such as women) should be the property of others (such as their husbands and fathers). Such views merit condemnation in the strongest possible terms, and refusal to engage them may express stronger condemnation than direct rebuttal. Thus we say: “I won’t even dignify that view with a response.” The reason is that rebuttal might unwittingly serve to “normalize” an egregiously bad view by treating it as being on par, in some substantial sense, with alternatives. It suggests a false equivalence.

Beyond questions of their intrinsic merit, stigmatizing bad views might help to eradicate them, in at least two ways. First, given people’s desire to get along with their fellows—their “tribal” nature—their beliefs are often quite responsive to social pressure.[7] Such pressure can change beliefs, and not merely the willingness to express them. Second, even where stigma does not change beliefs, it may convince people to remain silent about certain views, and such silence may in turn contain the views’ spread. It is worth underscoring the fact that bigoted views are bigoted in part because of their tendency to harm; they consist in unjustified contempt and they typically function within larger systems of subordination. All else being equal, to contain their spread is to minimize their risk. So there are both deontological (merit-based) and consequentialist reasons in favor of stigmatizing egregiously bad views.

There are, however, both deontological and consequentialist arguments in the other direction. Put aside for the moment the fact that people sometimes stigmatize views that are not egregiously bad; doing so is, of course, prima facie seriously wrong (and probably all-things-considered wrong in most real-world cases[8]). One might imagine, instead, a Kantian argument of the following sort: Respect for persons requires proper regard for their nature as rational free creatures—as “ends in themselves.” Stigma bypasses that nature, both by appealing to emotion and by dismissing the object as unworthy of rational engagement. It thus treats the “bigot” as in effect less than human.

My first reaction to this argument is to object to the characterization of stigma as treating its object as less than human. One can stigmatize another person in virtue of specific views that the latter holds and refuses to relinquish, without thereby negating that person’s humanity. Indeed, it is precisely because we expect better of the person that we stigmatize them for holding the view.

I also reject the incomplete picture of human nature on which this Kantian-style argument rests. We are rational creatures, but we are also emotional ones, and there is nothing inherently base about acknowledging, respecting, and appealing to that emotional side. As Hume understood, the affective side of our nature is crucial to moral life.[9] One need not be a demagogue in order to appreciate the use of emotion in moral persuasion. The key question is whether the emotional appeal is being used in the service of personal advantage or the service of truth.

The consequentialist case against stigmatizing bad views (or persons, in virtue of their bad views) is more complex. We may begin with John Stuart Mill’s famous argument in On Liberty. Near the beginning of Chapter Two, Mill writes,

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. (1989, 20)

Although Mill is concerned largely with government suppression of views, the arguments he offers apply to social pressure as well.

One can distinguish two interpretations of Mill’s position here; we can call them the extreme interpretation and the moderate interpretation. On the extreme interpretation, what Mill says is clearly false; on the moderate interpretation, what he says is true, but it does not rule out stigmatizing bad views. Let me consider each in turn.

The extreme interpretation states that views that we judge to be egregiously bad must nevertheless be treated as “open questions;” we must give them, if not equal time, at least regular attention. But that conclusion seems wrong even by Mill’s own lights. If we have once, twice, three times given such a view a hearing, and have thus enjoyed the “greater perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with [this view’s] error,” each new collision will have diminishing returns. What’s more, additional collisions would rob time from other possible debates that are potentially more valuable. In a typical college “Contemporary Moral Issues” class, we do not spend time debating whether women should have the vote; one reason is that there are better ways to spend class time. Finally, and importantly: To count only the collision’s value without considering its various downsides is to skew the ledger. The airing of egregiously bad views may serve truth, but it may also harm persons, and the consequentialist Mill ought to take such harms seriously. As Willmoore Kendall argued in response to Mill over a half-century ago:

Mill’s proposals have as one of their tacit premises a false conception of the nature of society, and are, therefore, unrealistic on their face. They assume that society is, so to speak, a debating club devoted above all to the pursuit of truth, and capable therefore of subordinating itself—and all other considerations, goods, and goals—to that pursuit. Otherwise, the proposals would go no further than to urge upon society the common-sense view that the pursuit of truth is one of the goods it ought to cherish… (1960, 977)

So, truth is valuable, but it’s not the only relevant value.

Keep in mind that to stigmatize a view is not to censor it; it is not to demand that those who offer it be muzzled or jailed or executed. It is, rather, to deny them the honor of our continued company and esteem. To put the point in more popular terms: Free speech means that you may say what you want; it doesn’t mean that you may do so without social consequence.

This leaves us, then, with a moderate interpretation, which states that we ought to stigmatize views reluctantly, carefully, and with intellectual humility. Mill is surely right about this, with plenty of historical examples to back him up. But the moderate version doesn’t rule out stigma; it merely insists that it happen judiciously.

A number of contemporary writers have buttressed the Millian case for more cautious, less frequent stigmatizing. In a series of articles for The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf argued that “the coalition that opposes Donald Trump needs to get better at persuading its fellow citizens and winning converts, rather than leaning so heavily on stigmatizing those who disagree with them.” (2016a, 2016b). His central reason for this position is that stigmatization is an unsustainable strategy, largely because of the temptation to overuse it. Friedersdorf cites a case involving Senator Bernie Sanders. A woman in the audience of a post-election speech declared that she wanted to be the second Latina senator and asked Sanders’s advice. Sanders began by agreeing that politics needs more women and people of color. He then went on to say,

It is not good enough for somebody to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country, and is going to take on the big money interests… This is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry. (2016a).

Sanders’s remarks prompted an online debate about whether his comments demeaned the questioner. Strikingly, Washington Monthly writer Nancy LeTourneau suggested that Sanders was “defending white male supremacy.” (2016)

Unlike the term “bigot,” the term “white supremacist” is not inherently evaluative, at least not on the surface: Standard dictionary definitions of white supremacy describe it as consisting in the belief that the white race is superior to others. That belief is wrong, surely, but its wrongness is not built in to the meaning of the words. Nonetheless, among audiences that correctly recognize its wrongness, the term has strong condemnatory force: In decent company, to call someone a white supremacist is to mark them as really bad—again, as more worthy of shunning and shaming than of thoughtful engagement. That stance seems clearly wrong vis-à-vis Sanders. Friedersdorf’s worry, echoing an argument by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones, is that if we stretch the term “white supremacist” to include people like Bernie Sanders, the term becomes less forceful (Drum 2017). Such overstretching makes it harder to distinguish between Sanders, on the one hand, and people like former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke or current Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer, on the other. This is not to deny that white supremacy can infect even well-meaning, progressive people or that it can be useful—indeed, even obligatory—to identify and correct the subtle, unintentional forms. Nor is it to deny that standard dictionary definitions may miss something important about white supremacy: As Charles Mills has argued, white supremacy is “a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties”—and the subtle, unintentional forms are a key part of that structure (Mills 1997, 3). The point is, rather, about the consequences of language: Denouncing Sanders’s remarks as an instance of “white supremacy” may mean that, in practice, the term is less able to create stigma where stigma is due.

In a subsequent piece, Friedersdorf offers an additional argument, reviving a point made by Mill in On Liberty: If we shun rather than engage erroneous views, our ability to defend the truth against them may eventually atrophy—with the result that its opponents may then more easily outmaneuver us. Friedersdorf concludes that it is “vital to understand the dismaying way in which bygone successes at inculcating liberal norms—successfully stigmatizing even that which ought to carry stigma—tend to sow self-destructive seeds.” (2016b). Reliance of stigma may rob us of the intellectual tools for persuading the “moveable middle.”

I would add that, in addition to the risks of overstretching and liberal intellectual atrophy, overusing stigma can also blind us to bigoted views’ pervasiveness. As noted above, one function of stigma is to warn people not to air certain views in public. The potential benefit of such warning is that it may contain the views’ spread and minimize their risk. The danger of such warning is that it may allow the spread to go unnoticed, as people learn to share certain views only in closed circles. This problem is amplified in an internet age, where anonymity makes such closed circles easier to form in some ways. Arguably, this danger is one of the lessons of the 2016 election, in which liberals were caught unawares by the extent of xenophobia, Islamophobia, white working-class resentment, and the like.

Let me conclude this section by identifying a common mistake. In deciding whether to stigmatize a view—to treat it as beyond the pale, and unworthy of engagement—people often begin by asking how bad the view is. That is a good beginning. The mistake is treating it as if it were the whole story; as if there were no moral work left to do. A judicious stigmatizer must ask not only how bad a view is, but also two additional questions: First, how culpable is the person offering the view? Second, and very important, What is likely to be the most effective antidote to the view: shunning or engagement?

The latter question—which is too often overlooked—requires attention to context. Among other factors, its answer depends on the view’s popularity, the tenaciousness with which people hold it, and the attractiveness of alternatives. An honest assessment of these factors may mean that it is sometimes morally desirable not to stigmatize views that are nevertheless egregiously bad on their merits. It may mean that we should sometimes withhold the term “bigot” even in the face of clear bigotry. Calling things by their right name is morally important, but containing and eradicating harmful ideologies is even more morally important.

 

3. TRUMP AND RYAN

In Part I, I argued that bigotry consists in stubborn and unjustified contempt toward groups of people, typically in the context of a larger system of subordination. In Part II, I argued that calling a person or view bigoted functions to stigmatize stigmatizers, and I evaluated various moral arguments for and against such a stance; I cautioned against its overuse. We may now briefly apply these discussions to the case at hand.

Was Trump guilty of bigotry? Without access to his mind and heart, we cannot know with certainty whether Trump’s remarks about Judge Curiel stemmed from stubborn unjustified contempt toward Mexican Americans, or a desire to rile up his nativist base, or fear at losing his fraud case, or an interest in distracting the press—or, perhaps likely, some combination of the above. Substantiating an accusation of bigotry requires considering a larger pattern of behavior—and in Trump’s case, the pattern is consistent with several of the above explanations. Of course, any of those explanations would still entail that his remarks were wrong, regardless of whether they exposed bigotry. Moreover, his remarks are surely typical of bigots and the sort that tend to foster the subordination of Mexican Americans and other people of color. So we can confidently refer to them as bigoted remarks, even if we reserve judgment on the man himself.

What about Ryan’s calling Trump’s remarks the “textbook definition of a racist comment” while continuing to endorse him for the presidency? In the last section I argued that the pragmatics of attributions of bigotry require distancing; indeed, Ryan himself used the language of “disavowal.” But as I noted in Part I, Ryan chose the term “racist” rather than “bigoted,” and that choice gives him slightly more room to “love the speaker, but hate the remark.” Indeed, one reason why attributions of bigotry generally require more distancing than attributions of racism, all else being equal, is that bigotry is by definition stubborn: Bigoted remarks reflect tenacious beliefs, which presumably reflect the character of the speaker. In that sense, “love the bigot, hate the bigotry” suffers from one of the same problems that undermines “love the sinner, hate the sin” as applied to homosexuality. Some (actual or alleged) “sins” are not isolated missteps; they are central to the “sinner’s” identity. In Trump’s case, although the remarks may not reflect stubborn contempt for people of color, they are congruent with a larger pattern of marginalizing such people. Indeed, stoking fear at the Other was a key strategy in Trump’s presidential campaign.

Surely, the best explanation for Ryan’s awkward stance is politics. His own elaboration made that clear: “I think [Trump’s comment] should be absolutely disavowed. It’s absolutely unacceptable. But do I believe that Hillary Clinton is the answer? No, I do not.”(Steinhauer, Martin, and Herszenhorn 2016). Ryan’s interest in maintaining political power gave him a strong material incentive to excuse Trump’s remarks, if not in word then at least in practice. It was disavowal without consequence.

The problem with this kind of political pivot is that it, too, abuses words—in ways both related to and different from the abuse that concerns Friedersdorf. Friedersdorf worries that stretching the extension of negative emotive terms robs them of their stigmatizing power. But there’s another way to rob them of their stigmatizing power: Violate their pragmatics. The person who identifies a comment as bigoted, or even racist, but then proceeds as if nothing is wrong is like the person who enthusiastically applauds while saying “Boo,” or the person who slaps someone while saying “I love you.” The problem is not merely that such behavior is confusing, or even that those who engage in it should not be trusted. It’s also that they make it harder for the rest of us to use language to proper moral effect.[10]

John Corvino Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His work focuses on LGBT equality, marriage, and, more recently, religious liberty. He is the author of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (with counterpoint by Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis, 2017); What’s Wrong with Homosexuality? (2013); and Debating Same-Sex Marriage (with counterpoint by Maggie Gallagher, 2012), all from Oxford University Press. Read more at www.johncorvino.com.

 

REFERENCES

Alwan, Clarence. 2013. “What the Word ‘Bigot’ Actually Means (and Why It Is Important).” The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2002. “Racisms.” In Ethics in Practice, 2nd Edition, edited by Hugh LaFollette, 389–99. Blackwell Publishing.

Daly, Michael. 2017. “The Mexican Judge Trump Slimed Is Really Making America Great Again.” The Daily Beast. January 30. http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-mexican-judge-trump-slimed-is-really-making-america-great-again.

Diuguid, Lewis. 2017. “Trump’s Attack on Latino Judge Is Bigotry, Pure and Simple.” Sun-Sentinel.com. Accessed May 3. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-ldcol-trump-20160606-story.html.

Drum, Kevin. 2017. “Let’s Be Careful With the ‘White Supremacy’ Label.” Mother Jones. Accessed May 3. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/lets-please-kill-white-supremacy-fad.

Friedersdorf, Conor. 2016a. “Too Much Stigma, Not Enough Persuasion.” The Atlantic, November 30. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-scourge-of-the-left-too-much-stigma-not-enough-persuasion/508961/.

———. 2016b. “How Stigma Sows Seeds of Its Own Defeat.” The Atlantic, December 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-stigma-sows-seeds-of-its-own-defeat/509273/.

Gamboa, Suzanne. 2016. “‘Bigotry’: Trump’s Attacks on Judge Rile Latino Legal Experts.” NBC News. June 3. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/bigotry-trump-s-continued-attacks-judge-rile-latino-legal-experts-n585471.

Garcia, J. L. A. 1996. “The Heart of Racism.” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (1): 5–46.

———. 1997. “Current Conceptions of Racism: A Critical Examination of Some Recent Social Philosophy.” Journal of Social Philosophy 28 (2): 5–42.

———. 1999. “Philosophical Analysis and the Moral Concept of Racism.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (5): 1–32.

———. 2001. “Racism and Racial Discourse.” The Philosophical Forum 32 (2): 125–45.

Gill, Michael B. 2014. Humean Moral Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kendall, Brent. 2016. “Trump Says Judge’s Mexican Heritage Presents ‘Absolute Conflict.’” Wall Street Journal, June 3, sec. Politics. http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-keeps-up-attacks-on-judge-gonzalo-curiel-1464911442.

Kendall, Willmoore. 1960. “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies.” American Political Science Review 54 (4): 972–79.

LeTourneau, Nancy. 2016. “What Sanders Doesn’t Understand About Identity Politics.” Washington Monthly. November 25. http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/11/25/what-sanders-doesnt-understand-about-identity-politics/.

Mason, Michelle. 2003. “Contempt as a Moral Attitude.” Ethics 113 (2): 234–72.

Mill, John Stuart. 1989. J. S. Mill: “On Liberty” and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2003. “‘Heart'” Attack: A Critique of Jorge Garcia’s Volitional Conception of Racism.” The Journal of Ethics 7 (1): 29–62.

———. 1997 . The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.

Ramsey, William M. 2013. “Bigotry and Religious Belief.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2): 125–51.

Shelby, Tommie. 2002. “Is Racism in the ‘Heart’?” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (3): 411–20.

Steinhauer, Jennifer, Jonathan Martin, and David M. Herszenhorn. 2016. “Paul Ryan Calls Donald Trump’s Attack on Judge ‘Racist,’ but Still Backs Him.” The New York Times, June 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/politics/paul-ryan-donald-trump-gonzalo-curiel.html.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] The most developed philosophical treatment of bigotry per se of which I’m aware is (Ramsey 2013, 128) Ramsey’s own definition is “Holding evaluative beliefs or other attitudes that are (usually) negative and directed toward members of a group of persons where the property used for grouping fails to provide proper support for the negative evaluation” (141). My own definition is strongly influenced by his argument, although we differ on some key points. For racism, see for example (Appiah 2002; Garcia 1996, 1997, 1999; Shelby 2002; Mills 2003).

[2] Ramsey elsewhere seems to agree. See (2013, 129).

[3] For a helpful discussion of contempt as a reactive attitude, see (Mason 2003).

[4] In a footnote Ramsey acknowledges that “some may believe that there are forms of institutional racism that do not qualify as bigotry. If so, then perhaps the proper subordinate category is racial bigotry.” (Ramsey 2013, 149 fn5).

[5] Shelby defines ideologies roughly as “widely accepted illusory systems of belief that function to establish or reinforce structures of social oppression” (2002, 415).

[6] I leave open the question of whether contempt is fundamentally affective (Mason’s view) or cognitive.

[7] For some research on this point see (Haidt 2012).

[8] One can imagine hypothetical exceptions of the following sort: An evil genius will commit mass-murder if a certain good view spreads, and the only (or best) way to prevent its spread is to stigmatize it.

[9] For a wide-ranging and thoughtful recent discussion, see Gill 2014.

[10] I wish to thank Jonathan Cottrell, Robin Dembroff, Katherine Kim, Timothy Kirschenheiter, Rebecca Kukla, Lawrence B. Lombard, Jonathan Rauch, Brad Roth, Bruce Russell, Soraya (Layla) Saatchi, Tom Wood and anonymous reviewers at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts of (portions of) this essay.