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Month: July 2020

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ICE Ruling and Universities’ Autonomy

photograph of Princeton University's campus

Educational groups across the country are releasing statements that denounce the ICE policy requiring international students to leave the US if their classes are fully online. These statements focus on the cruelty of it, the complexity and lack of clarity, and even the economic devastation.

Harvard and MIT are suing to block the rule claiming that it violates the Administrative Procedures Act which requires administrative agencies like ICE to offer a reasonable basis justifying the policy and give public notice to provide opportunity to comment on it.

But beyond these complaints there is another deeply pernicious aspect to this ruling. ICE’s policy represents a significant encroachment on universities’ autonomy to determine how best to educate their students. The federal government has made two false assumptions about education that no college likely accepts:

  1. Education at colleges only happens in the classroom
  2. When courses happen online, the students can be anywhere in the world and still get an education that is as effective.

Both of these are false. There is all sorts of learning that happens on a college campus outside of class time that might still happen face-to-face even when instruction takes place online. For example, professors might meet one-on-one outdoors with students and they might even prioritize meeting with international students who could face cultural or linguistic barriers. I, for instance, tend to hold extra office hours for students who might need extra assistance or guidance with respect to their coursework, and my international students are often the students who take me up on that.

Even if a student takes their classes online, there will likely be a wide-range of face-to-face activities that provide opportunity to meet an institution’s educational goals. Co-curricular activities could happen in socially-distanced settings. Students might be organized into smaller bubbles that could meet face-to-face for the purposes of study or group projects. Students might also join student clubs and organizations where genuine learning happens in safe, manageable settings.

Another part of the educational experience that ICE ignores is the value of studying in another country/cultural setting. Most liberal arts colleges boast on how big their study abroad programs are. Last year, DePauw ranked 4th among four-year baccalaureate institutions for affording its students the opportunity to study abroad. Why is this boastworthy? Because it is widely agreed that there is significant educational value in academic experiences in other environments (and that this value goes beyond what you learn in the classroom). That’s what international students come here for. A 21st-century liberal arts education basically requires that students learn about other countries and cultures, and international students see significant value in learning more about America and participating in that culture. Even without face-to-face instruction, students can still realize many of their educational goals by residing in America when they take their classes online.

The ICE decision is an affront to the autonomy and rights of educational institutions to determine what their learning goals are and what the best methods are at their disposal to deliver on their promise to help students achieve them. We should be appalled by the cruelty and harm of this ruling for international students. We should also be appalled at this assault on the freedom of institutions of higher education. ICE has no business deciding what constitutes genuine learning. That is a decision that should be left up to the institutions of learning.

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The Ethical Dilemma of Extraditing Meng Wanzhou

photograph of Meng Wanzhou on a moblie phone at business function

When students take an introductory ethics course, they are often given thought experiments where they are asked to consider whether it is morally acceptable to sacrifice a few for the interests of the many. Often these thought experiments are fanciful — a running trolley, a South American dictator telling you to choose one person to die rather than twenty — but problems like this can reflect real world choices that must be made. The recent example of the extradition case of Meng Wanzhou is one such case where the ethical road ahead is unclear and solving the dilemma may require sacrifice in the name of the “greater good.”

Wanzhou is the deputy chair of the board and CFO of Huawei, the company founded by her father Ren Zhengfei. In late 2018 she was arrested by the RCMP in Vancouver at the request of the United Stated for conspiracy to commit fraud. The case is owing to the close links between Huawei and Skycom, a company that claimed to be a fully independent but that may be entirely controlled by Huawei. Meng is charged with engaging in a scheme to obtain goods and technology as well as transferring money through Skycom in violation of international sanctions against Iran. The United States has formally requested extradition of Meng, with the matter now before Canadian courts.

The case is complicated by several other important factors. The Chinese government protested to the Canadian ambassador and threatened “grave consequences” for the arrest. Two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, have been arrested and detailed in China for endangering state security in a move seen as retaliation against the arrest of Meng. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called the arrests arbitrary. Meng has been released on bail, but wears an ankle monitor and has surrendered her passport. She is living in Vancouver in a $13 million-dollar mansion. Kovig and Spavor on the other hand were interrogated for six to eight hours a day for months, kept under 24-hour artificial lighting without being able to go outside, and were only able to have monthly consular meetings without being able to talk to friends or family. There is also the case of Robert Schellenberg, initially found guilty of smuggling drugs and sentenced to 15 years only to be hastily retried and sentenced to death. It’s been intimated that the fate of these three Canadians — Kovig, Spavor, and Schellenberg — rests on the Canadian government’s treatment of Meng.

Meng’s extradition case recently suffered a setback after a British Columbia court ruled that the charges met the double criminality criteria for extradition. Meng’s legal team argued that since Canada did not have sanctions similar to those the United States had against Iran, she isn’t being charged with something that would be a crime in Canada. The ruling held that the charges are about fraud, which is a crime in Canada. Despite this, the Canadian government possesses the ability to set Meng free. Under extradition law, Canada’s justice minister may at any time intervene and withdraw the government’s support for the case which would allow Meng to return home and possibly get the release of detained Canadians and smooth out relations.

In the meantime, there is very little upside for Canada to detain Meng. Canada-Chinese relations have been hurt by the affair, and experts have claimed that this is likely to affect trade talks and lead to a reduction in tourism and investment in the Canadian economy. China has apparently not tried to retaliate against the U.S. due to their desire to improve their relationship. Canada, meanwhile, has been squeezed between the U.S. and China in an issue that some experts believe is a direct result of their ongoing trade war. Unsurprisingly, there are a significant number of Canadians who would rather be rid of the matter. In 2019 a poll found that 45% of Canadians believe that Canada should have resisted the U.S. request and not arrested Meng at all. A group of over a dozen prominent former Canadian politicians and policy advisors from different political parties have issued an open letter calling on the Trudeau government to release Meng in the hopes of securing the release of Kovig and Spavor, even if it means straining U.S.-Canada relations.

So what reason is there for Canada to not release Meng immediately? One of the reasons, and the one touted by the Trudeau government, is that it would be inappropriate for the government to intervene with a matter before the courts and that the rule of law should be respected. Trudeau has stated that “Canada has an independent judiciary and these processes will unfold independently of any political pressure, including by foreign governments.” Indeed, the reliance on an independent judiciary to settle the matter has been labelled a win for the rule of law. Despite this claim, those seeking Meng’s release have cited the opinion of a lawyer well-versed in extradition proceedings who notes that government discretion is “explicitly codified” in the law and that intervention would not endanger judicial independence and would be consistent with the rule of law.

But the Trudeau government, and others, have also argued that releasing Meng on the condition of securing the release of Spovor and Kovig would set a bad precedent. The government believes that cancelling the extradition process for Meng would put “millions” of Canadians in danger. Trudeau has argued that

“The idea of solving a short-term situation by creating a precedent that demonstrates to China that all they or another country has to do is randomly arrest a handful of Canadians to put political pressure on a government to do what (they) want…would endanger the millions of Canadians who live and travel overseas every year.”

On the other hand, the idea that this would set a precedent smells of a slippery slope fallacy. One way to avoid situations like this would be to practice more restraint regarding who is (and is not) detained. Also, we need to consider the unique qualities particular to the situation. How many nations would likely try to detain traveling Canadians if they have a dispute with the Canadian government? Would releasing Meng in this case actually cause this to happen again? What countries would likely do this? What issues would likely prompt governments to do this? While we are considering these things, we may also consider how a concept like “rule of law” is interpreted. As was pointed out during the standoff with indigenous groups back in February, the concept is not singular, universal, or absolute. What are the assumptions we make in this case when we interpret the concept of “rule of law” in this case?

There is also the matter of Spovor and Kovig and whether they may be sacrificed for such principles and precedents. Kovig’s wife Vina Nadjibulla does not agree with the government’s refusal to intervene, arguing that we can both protect Canadians and secure the release of her husband. She notes, “There is no cost-free solution. We have to pay a price. The question becomes, who pays the price, and at the moment Michael Kovrig and Michael Spovor are paying that price.”

Finally, there is also the risk of violating agreements with the U.S. over extradition. Canada and the U.S. are allies and it makes sense to not antagonize America for the benefit of China. However, given the U.S. administration’s “America First” motto, one wonders whether the favor would be returned if the shoe were on the other foot. Indeed, there is a sense that “Washington is using Canada in its trade battle with China.” Even President Trump has mused about using Meng as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations, suggesting that this process may not be about the rule of law at all, despite John Bolton’s recent claim that the criminal charges are not politically motivated.

As Nadjibulla noted, there is no cost-free solution, and this is essentially at the heart of all moral dilemmas. The goals Canada is trying to achieve in ending the situation are incompatible. What combination of ends are the right balance is difficult, and it will require determining how much value we place on a given conception of the rule of law, economic gains and losses, creating political tensions (what kinds? with who?), creating possible dangerous precedents, and the suffering of those few who are detained.

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Rio Tinto and the Distinction between Saying ‘Sorry’ and Being Sorry

photograph of Rio Tinto train cutting through landscape

“…we haven’t apologised for the event itself, per se, but apologised for the distress the event caused.” – Chris Salisbury, Rio Tinto Iron Ore CEO

In late May, mining giant Rio Tinto shocked Australia, and the world, by blasting an ancient and sacred Aboriginal site to expand an iron ore mine.

The blast destroyed a cave in the Juukan Gorge, located in the Hammersley Ranges in Northern Western Australia, that was one of the oldest of its kind in the Western Pilbara region, and was the only known inland site on the entire Australian continent to show signs of continual occupation through the last ice age (between 23,000 and 19,000 years ago) during which, evidence suggests, most of inland Australia was abandoned as the continent dried out and water sources disappeared. The cave site itself was found to be around 46,000 years old.

The blast received ministerial approval in 2013, consent obtained under Western Australia’s out-dated heritage laws drafted in 1972 to favor mining interests. Following the 2013 approval, archaeological work carried out at the site discovered it to be much older than originally thought, and to be rich with artefacts and sacred objects.

The 1972 Heritage Act does not allow for renegotiation of approvals based on new information; however, the act is due to be replaced by new legislation, and various factors have caused the renewed heritage act to be delayed. The new draft bill currently in preparation includes a process of review based on new information. In its response to the new draft legislation Rio Tinto has submitted a request that consent orders granted under the current system should be carried over.

The blasting of the site was conducted without prior notification to traditional Indigenous owners, or the state government, and has caused deep distress to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people (PKKP). Among some of the precious and rare items recovered from the site prior to the blast was a 4000-year-old plaited length of human hair from several people which DNA testing revealed to belong to the direct ancestors of the living PKKP people.

“It’s one of the most sacred sites in the Pilbara region … we wanted to have that area protected,” PKKP director Burchell Hayes told Guardian Australia.

Peter Stone, Unesco’s Chair in Cultural Property and Protection said that the destruction at Juukan Gorge was among the worst in recent history, likening it to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddas in Afghanistan and the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.

Rio Tinto claims it was not aware of the importance of the site, nor of the traditional owner’s wish for it to be preserved. But the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation rejected Rio’s suggestion that its representatives had failed to make clear their concerns for the site, and their wish for it to be preserved. “The high significance of the site was further relayed to Rio Tinto by PKKP Council as recently as March,” Burchell Hayes said.

Following the blast, Rio Tinto issued an apology to the PKKP people. “We are sorry for the distress we have caused,” Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury said in a public statement.

Several days after the public apology a leaked recording from a private Rio Tinto staff meeting found its way to The Australian Financial Review which reported that Salisbury told staff ” … we haven’t apologised for the event itself, per se, but apologised for the distress the event caused.” In a subsequent interview, Salisbury did not contradict the report, and repeatedly refused to directly answer when asked if the company was wrong to blow up the site, only repeating that they were sorry for the distress.

So, what is going on here — what can we make of Salisbury’s remark that the company had apologized not for the event itself but the distress it caused?

In taking the line that it did not know about the site’s significance, and attempting to insulate its apology from an admission of responsibility, Rio Tinto is trying to avoid moral blame. But does the separation hold? Can an agent be sorry for causing distress without ipso facto being responsible for causing it? And if so, does Rio’s attempt to excuse its actions from moral blameworthiness succeed?

The attribution of moral blame is not straightforwardly connected to the objective wrongness of an action carried out or caused by an agent. One way to assess the connection in any given case is to consider what conditions would have to be present for an agent to be held morally responsible, that is, to be blameworthy for an action.

It is possible to identify cases in which an agent is blameworthy even if an action is not in itself wrong; or, conversely, in which an agent is not blameworthy even if an action is wrong.

To give a relatively simple example, Jane intends to poison Joe by putting a white substance, which she believes to be arsenic, in his tea. It turns out Jane was mistaken, and the powder was only sugar; nothing happens to Joe so there is no objective moral wrong committed, however Jane’s intention to poison him is blameworthy. Conversely, if Jane accidentally poisons Joe by putting what she believes to be sugar, but what in fact turns out to be arsenic, in his tea, she is not (necessarily) blameworthy though the act of poisoning Joe is itself an objective moral wrong.

Here we can see that the salient elements for establishing blame are intention and knowledge. In the first case, Jane’s intention is morally blameworthy, even if the outcome is neutral. In the second case, though Jane has no intention to harm Joe, further questions arise about how Jane came to make this mistake, and whether she should reasonably have been expected to know that the substance she put in Joe’s tea was in fact arsenic rather than sugar.

In the case of Rio’s destruction of the Juukan Gorge cave we cannot know if it was Rio’s intention to blast the site over the strong objection of the PKKP owners, though some suspect that it was.

For an action to be morally wrong yet the agent not blameworthy, the agent must have an excuse for carrying it out which absolves them of responsibility. As Holly Smith suggests, “Ignorance of the nature of one’s act is the preeminent example of an excuse that forestalls blame.”

The question, then, is epistemic — for an agent to be held responsible, certain epistemic conditions need to be fulfilled. The first condition is that there is an awareness of the action (that the agent knows what she is doing); second the agent has to have been cognizant of the moral significance of the action; third the agent has to have been aware of the consequences of the action.

The first condition is obviously fulfilled, as the action of blasting the site was deliberate. The second condition of cognizance of the moral significance, together with the third condition of cognizance of consequences is, by Rio, under dispute.

In another statement, made subsequent to the leaked tape of his remarks, Salisbury said he had “taken accountability that there clearly was a misunderstanding about the future of the Juukan Gorge.”

It isn’t clear what having ‘taken accountability’ means, but the claim that it was a misunderstanding is an attempt to avoid blameworthiness by claiming that an epistemic condition is not fulfilled.

However, ignorance can itself be morally culpable. If (in the above example) Jane did not read the box when she could have, say, or if she ignored reasonable suspicions that someone had replaced the sugar with arsenic, then her ignorance does not excuse her of blame for poisoning Joe. It must be noted that there is disagreement among philosophers on this point; while some argue that an agent can be blamed for their ignorance, others maintain that, however criticizable it is, ignorance nonetheless exculpates the agent from moral blameworthiness.

On the former view, if Rio is culpable for its ignorance, that ignorance fails to shield the company from moral blame. This, to me, seems correct — and I would argue that even if we take Rio Tinto at its word that it was not aware of the significance of the site and the PKKP people’s wish for it to be preserved, the company has failed in its responsibility to the traditional owners and is indeed blameworthy.

I might add that taking Rio at its word here seems to me exceedingly generous, and I remind the reader that the PKKP people strenuously denied the suggestion that they had not made their wishes known to the company.

So, regarding the dubious distinction between apologizing for the distress caused but not for the action which caused it, Rio Tinto may say it is sorry, but without an accompanying willingness to accept responsibility, its apology is hollow. It appears the company has apologized from an ostensible obligation to do so, but shows little genuine remorse for this act of cultural destruction.

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When We Call Genocidaires “Monsters”

black and white photograph of human skulls stacked on top of one another

Netflix’s The Devil Next Door, a docuseries about an elderly man in Ohio accused of being Nazi death camp guard, received critical acclaim. While the topic may be interesting, the title is noteworthy. It is not uncommon for different media to refer to genocidaires (a term usually used to describe perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide) as monsters or devils. Books, such as “Hitler’s Monsters” and “The Devil Came on Horseback” (about the genocide in Darfur), tabloid journalism, and periodicals utilize similar language.

Such language seems innocuous, even appropriate given the gravity of the perpetrators’ sin. After all, it would appear only monsters and devils would be capable of committing such a monstrous and hellish crime. Amidst the complexity of studying genocide, the one incontrovertible assertion is that genocidaires are indeed monsters and devils. Or is it?

Despite the labels’ ubiquity in popular culture and common parlance, there are a few reasons to believe that society should refrain from using such characterizations. Aside from the risk of dabbling in the same dehumanizing language used by the genocidaires themselves, such characterizations obscure one’s ability to understand how genocides unfold and serve to perpetuate a mythology of evil. Referring the agents as something other than human also removes their culpability, distancing human society from the inhuman perpetrators.

It is a weak and potentially regressive starting point for analyzing the causes of genocide. Are the genocidaires born monsters? Or do they become monsters? How can we spot the monsters before they commit genocide? How do we stop them? How do we hold them accountable to human standards of justice and morality?

Perhaps the greatest obfuscation of these labels is that it makes the crime of crimes appear extremely unlikely, requiring the intervention of the Devil incarnate into Earth’s affairs. But in fact, it requires the participation of everyday human beings to plan and carry out a policy of genocide. They are civilians. They are neighbors. They are friends. They are relatives. While the act itself is the embodiment of horror, its organization and execution is disturbingly unexceptional.

The origin of this notion that only a supernatural, inhuman force of villainy could cause such heinous acts may be found in the horror stories of centuries past. John Douglas, a former FBI agent who spent his career studying the psychology of serial killers, claims novelists and storytellers created fictitious monsters to explain seemingly inexplicable murders and massacres. But we have the tools now to better explain past heinous acts in the pursuit of preventing future ones from occurring.

In their book, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim examine the role of German scientists and scholars in the Holocaust. These intellectuals posited deportation, ghettoization, displacement, sterilization, and mass murder as a solution to German’s population “problem”. As Goetz and Heim conclude, “To a very large extent the policy of annihilation was the product of a rational argument taken to a mercilessly logical conclusion.”

The two writers make another noteworthy observation: These intellectuals, who served as advisers to the civilian administrations and the SS, “did not match the stereotype of the zealous, narrow-minded Nazi ideologue, and who argued their case objectively and dispassionately.” In other words, they saw their advocacy for genocide as merely fulfilling their professional duty to advise the government, even though their scientific recommendations were glaringly absent of any consideration of the value of human life.

Rationalist accounts of genocide, such as Architects of Annihilation, focus on genocidal planning and cost-benefit analysis. Analyzing genocide as the logical end of a rational argument demystifies the crime and demonstrates that genocide is not a far-fetched phenomenon conjured by evil but rather policy option, requiring the participation of seemingly ordinary individuals to organize and execute. While rationalist accounts explain the logic of genocide, they fail to account for the ideological, racist, and irrational forces that seek to justify genocidal policy.

Structuralist accounts, on the other hand, seek to understand the macro-level features of society that permitted the genocide to occur. Ian Kershaw writes that a structuralist explanation of the Holocaust focuses the “ad-hoc responses of a splintered and disorderly government” which “produced an inevitable spiral of radicalization.” Zygmunt Berman made the highly influential assertion that modernity was a necessary condition for the Jews to be annihilated in systematic fashion. While this approach does not blame existing bureaucratic or larger societal forces for genocide, it does acknowledge the role these institutions and systems played in facilitating these acts and how their power was harnessed. Other accounts focus on the intent of the genocidaires, the purported causal linkage of colonialism and war, or the role of inflamed ethnic or cultural animosities.

But notice, among the variety of serious explanatory tools, none seek to ascribe a monstrous or satanic nature to the human perpetrators, partly because it fails to explain why or how genocide occurs. Of course, labeling genocidaires as “monsters” and “devils” does not prevent one from understanding the crime, but the labeling is conceptually inconsistent with any accurate explanation and also unintentionally denies the perpetrators’ human moral responsibility. It discounts the very real possibility of this very human phenomenon.

As Hanna Arendt noted, this evil is banal. The devil next door is no devil at all. He is a human. And that might be even more frightening than the monsters our horror novels depict.

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Uighur Genocide and the Wrong of Population Control

photograph of four Uighur women, one with a baby

An AP investigation has confirmed complaints from Uighur women that China has been sterilizing them against their will, and in fact discovered that these assaults have been more widespread than previously thought.

Since 2016, an estimated 1 million or more Uighurs have been detained in “re-education” camps. The new investigation highlights the relationship between pregnancy, fertility, and the threat of the camps: “Uighur women and other ethnic minorities are being threatened with internment in the camps for refusing to abort pregnancies that exceed birth quotas [….] Women who had fewer than the legally permitted limit of two children were involuntarily fitted with intrauterine contraceptives.”

By interfering with the reproductive choices of the potential parents, the Chinese government is interfering with the bodily integrity of individuals, and thus violating basic moral principles and fundamental human rights. China is specifically targeting a particular ethnic group with a policy that infringes on individuals’ reproductive autonomy. These acts constitute genocide according to the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.

The first morally problematic feature of China’s policies is also the most commonplace and simple: government representatives are acting on members of the community against their will. This infringement of bodily autonomy is assault. There are a very limited number of situations where it is permissible to interfere with someone’s body absent consent, but these cases clearly do not qualify. Moreover, these policies interfere with people’s private desires regarding the formation of a family unit. Family identity and relationships can inform a great deal of one’s priorities and self-understanding; to take those relationships, networks, and choices away from individuals is a particular kind of harm.

Secondly, it is clear that these policies are a further element of oppression towards a population that China has been systematically disadvantaging for years. Uighurs in China have been isolated, surveilled, put into work and re-education camps, and exposed to varieties of mental and physical harms. The group subject to these forced sterilizations has been the target before of racist, bigoted policies aimed at affecting its population and the promulgation of its community in the future.

Given these policies aims and outcomes, China actions constitute genocide against the Uighurs. Many consider genocide to be limited to violent killings with the intent to eliminate an ethnic, racial, or religious minority, as in Myanmar (against Rohingya) in 2016 and again in 2018, or in Somalia (against Isaaqs)1987-8, in Rwanda (against Tutsis) 1994, in Bosnia (against Bosniaks) 1995, by ISIL (against Yazidis) 2014…. However, there are more ways to eliminate a group of people beyond presenting its members with a violent death.

Given that the act of sterilization is targeted towards an unwanted, oppressed community and, by its nature, serves to prevent births in the group and thereby limit its future population, China’s forcible sterilization of members of the Uighur population represents an act of genocide. As the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect states, “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: …d. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

China is far from the first government body that has used the interference and control of reproduction, or the breaking down of the family unit, as a way to undermine or even eliminate an ethnicity or cultural group. Recent examples include:

  • In the fall of 2018, a group of Indigenous Canadian women filed a class-action suit against Saskatoon Health Authority, the provincial and federal governments, and some medical professionals claiming that doctors forcibly sterilized them over several decades, through the 2000s.
  • In the United States in the 20th century, 20,000 the government funded sterilizations performed in California disproportionately targeting African Americans and Latinos.
  • Further, California prisons have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010.  The state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion.
  • In 2003, an investigative report documented grave human rights violations against Romani women in Slovakia, that 110 Romani women in Slovakia were forcibly or coercively sterilized, or had strong indications that they had been sterilized.

China’s policies in the Xinjian region actually qualify for genocide under two defining acts. The UN Article outlining crimes of genocide that follows just after that cited above states that, “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is a crime of genocide. This highlights further concerns of China’s policies towards Uighurs and also brings the behavior of many governments into question.

As mentioned above, China has been sending ethnic minorities, Uighurs prominent among them, to re-education and work camps. A primary function of these camps includes separating children from there family and community in order to inculcate them in the “Chinese” mode of life. From 2017-2019, thousands of children in the Xinjiang region were separated from their parents in a “systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide.” In these schools, children are banned from speaking their Uighur language and are taught instead Chinese mannerisms, customs, and language. As German researcher Dr. Adrian Zenz shares with The Independent, “China has implemented the “weaponisation of education and social care systems” in order to cut off minority children from their roots. “Boarding schools provide the ideal context for a sustained cultural re-engineering of minority societies.”

Again, China is not alone in these tactics. Into the 20th and 21st century, the United States has performed similar operations.

  • The United States has relocated children away from their parents multiple times throughout its history as a way of preserving its deluded sense of national identity. From 1860 to 1978, the boarding schools for Indigenous Americans had the express purpose to separate children from their families and cultures and indoctrinate them in the government’s ideas of American-ness. Thousands of children.
  • In the last decades, the United States has performed family separation and detention operations at the southern border in the name of National Security but with barely concealed xenophobia and racism. From November 2017 to April 2018, The New York Times reported that the United States had already removed an estimated 700 children from their families at the southern border. Genocide Watch reports, “According to Trump administration statistics, 2,342 children were separated from their families as a result of criminal prosecution between May 5 and June 9, 2018, bringing the total number of children forcibly separated from their families to over 3,000, though no reliable figure is easily available. These children are now scattered across the United States in a confusing mixture of detention facilities and foster home arrangements.”

Retaining control of the family and reproduction as the means of preserving the cultural or ethnic identity of a community is critical. When young members of the community are separated and immersed in another community entirely, their original community is robbed of members, and that individual loses those deep connections. When new members can no longer continue the existence of the community across generations, the interference succeeds at eliminating these communities’ very existence.

In morally assessing the sterilization practices of China on the oppressed Uighur population, it is important to have the appropriate tools to articulate the specific injustice of these policies. That is the goal of the UN declaration, which identifies and underscores the seriousness of actions like forced sterilization.

But what relevant moral weight is added by labeling such actions ‘genocide’ as opposed to merely ‘assault’? When I assault you against your will, moral theorists of any stripe can say “bad!” and explain why it was morally wrong. When we add the context that this assault took away important choices, moral theorists might still be able to account for this being worse than some other harms: because the part of one’s life that involves such choices is important, harming the ability to control it increases the relevant harm. So, perhaps, we could respond “BAD!” to express our moral assessment.

It may become a bit tricky from here. Intuitively, that the harm is being targeted at an individual because of who they are, or because of the group they are a member of, many theories this is not only morally relevant, but that it makes the harm worse. This amplification of wrong is furthered when the harm isn’t just targeting someone based on their identity, but when that targeting is meant to eliminate the person and group’s existence.

But for traditional utilitarians, the oppression or prejudice involved in a harm doesn’t necessarily add to the harm experienced by the individual. Harms will differ for the utilitarian in degree if 1) more individuals are harmed, or 2) the harm is worse, either straightforwardly like a scratch versus a stab, or in a manner similar to that articulated above where perhaps a physical assault might begin to approximate an anesthetized tubal ligation, but the latter comes with more life import.

This has been one of the core critiques of utilitarianism by feminist philosophers. As long as an action produces more harm than good, it is morally permissible. We could imagine a world where prejudice, bigotry, and oppression of some minority communities results in an overall benefit to the population as a whole (just so long as the detractions occur within minority communities). In its simplest form, utilitarianism seems to lack the moral structure to make sense of how this is an unjust and immoral state of affairs. Imagine, for instance, that a library excludes some from entering (women, or non-white people, etc.). Helpful classmates may provide all the copies of the material you need, and therefore no harm is ever accrued by the policy, yet there exists morally wrong behavior and actions. The wrongness of the exclusionary policy isn’t just the harm to those excluded, but lies within the structure of the policy itself — a feature that utilitarianism can struggle to account for.

What this means is that not all moral theories will agree that the charge of genocide possesses some unique moral weight. In order to make China’s policy of forced sterilization as poignantly impermissible to utilitarians, for instance, one need only show that the harms of the policies outweigh the benefits — this does not seem a tall order.

Indeed, for the host of international wrongs listed above, it cannot escape any moral theory that grave wrongs are being committed. According to the United Nations, a major body that passes for international standards of crime and responsibility, countless lives are being abused in ways that cannot be tolerated regardless of the language we use.

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Is Biden Trapped by Identity Politics?

photograph of Biden at rally pointing to the crowd

As anticipation continues to build over Joe Biden’s choice of running mate, he’s announced  that his preference is for a candidate of a different race and gender than himself and followed this up with a commitment to selecting a candidate of a different gender. This rankles many people, even some with otherwise liberal leanings. The thought, it seems to them, is that candidates for office should be selected entirely on the basis of their qualifications, without consideration of their sex or race. To think otherwise, now, has come to be pejoratively called “identity politics”, and as more Democrats push for Biden to choose a Black woman, right-wing voices delight in the insistence that Biden is being held hostage by identity politics. What’s so bad about that?

Identity politics is often treated as a term of abuse. This is not surprising, as the concept now so often stands for politicians using their racial or gender identity — or proximity to such — as a means to achieve political aims such as winning an election or silencing critics. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, has seemingly attempted to counter the growing number of criticisms from African-American former allies by increasing public appearances with his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray.

Such uses of identity politics appear cynically calculated to influence voters’ decisions not through sound argument or policy, but by appealing to a desire to support one’s group. In the worst-case scenario, identity politics in this sense is meant to deceive voters: it tells them that a candidate is one of them, or on their side, while endorsing policies that harm them. Identity politics can, of course, be abused in this way, in what Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò has called “elite capture”: the process by which a movement is exploited by elites to serve their own purposes rather than those of the people it is supposed to help. But abuse of this kind is not unique to identity politics, and so not a reason to dismiss it as harmful in itself.

It would be objectionable if Biden or those pressuring him were using identity politics in order to manipulate voters into acting in ways that harm them while helping Biden or his party. But for that to be the case, it would have to be true that he is actively pushing for policies that would harm the voters such a stratagem is designed to win over, and it’s unclear that he is — at least compared to his opponent. Moreover, for him to be using identity politics in this way, it would need to be the case that distracting voters from their real interests were his main reason for leaning toward a Black woman as a running mate. But there is no evidence of this, and it seems unlikely considering the chorus of his supporters pushing him to make this choice. It’s true, of course, that Biden is trying to win the election, and any running mate he chooses will be someone calculated to help him do that. But presumably he does a lot of things with that aim, most of them unobjectionable. If his purported reliance on identity politics is a problem, then, there must be a further reason.

One common objection to identity politics holds that voters have “been presented with a narrative and arguments convincing them to rely on identity politics, or in other words, shallow stereotypes,” as Tammy Bruce puts it. On this uncharitable view of identity politics, it functions primarily by reducing people to representatives of particular identities rather than recognizing them as individuals. Perhaps, then, the critics mean that in having to choose a Black woman candidate, Biden is ensuring that whoever he eventually chooses is not chosen for her qualifications, but for her gender and race alone. This is a popular take on identity politics, but it comes with its own set of problems.

First, to think that the pressure on Biden forces him to choose not a person but a stereotype seems to itself reduce Black women to stereotypes, since simply committing to a Black woman candidate does not imply either that anyone who meets that description is equally qualified nor that everyone who meets that description is qualified. The thought, instead, could be that although a number of Black women are perfectly qualified to be vice president, no one from that demographic has ever been chosen for the role due to a social depreciation of their race and sex. Seen in this light, a commitment to choosing a Black woman need not appear as a commitment to choosing a stereotype, but to choosing from a typically overlooked pool of excellent candidates.

Second, there is an underlying assumption that one’s sex or race is irrelevant to one’s qualification for a job. But clearly this is not always the case. It makes good sense, for example, to choose a Black spokesperson for the NAACP or a woman to consult women on reproductive issues. In these cases, a candidate’s race or sex is a qualification for the position, though it is not the only qualification and may not even be a necessary one. If, for example, a reproductive counselor is needed but no women with the requisite training can be found, it would make sense to choose a man. Still, to strongly prefer a woman for that position is not in itself problematic. There is no reason that the same might not be true of a candidate for vice president, especially if we consider that what qualifies one for that role is not some fixed set of laws, but an interplay of the historical and cultural context with the presidential candidate’s and their party’s strategy and priorities.

But there is an even more widespread, and perhaps slightly more highbrow criticism of identity politics, leveled by pundits from the liberal middle to the far right of the spectrum, such as Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Jonah Goldberg, and the Heritage Foundation. The spirit of this criticism isn’t so much that identity politics encourages us to see each other — and ourselves — as stereotypes. Instead, while such critics sometimes express sympathy for identity politics, they argue that by focusing on group identities it undermines the communal ties that bind us together. On this view, identity politics weakens our shared values by encouraging us to view ourselves primarily as members of sub-national groups and to focus on the interests of our group rather than those of the country. From this perspective, in expressing a preference for a running mate of a particular race and sex, Biden is sending a signal to some social groups that he is on their side but simultaneously telling other groups that he is not on theirs, and that he represents a fundamentally different culture from their own: one that prizes diversity over their interests.

But the view of identity politics as essentially divisive only works if we assume the divisions aren’t there to start with, or that they are minor enough that drawing attention to them causes more harm than good. If the divisions are already there, however, the options are to ignore them or to work to repair them, which cannot be done without recognizing that they exist. Now suppose that an electorate overwhelmingly votes for white men, regardless of the qualifications of others in the running. We might think that such an electorate is flawed. Waiting for the political landscape to improve on its own might work, but it also might not, since the electorate reproduces its biases with every election, choosing the person who “looks right” for the job, and thereby ensuring that that’s the kind of person who looks right for the job. In the meantime, an entire field of highly qualified candidates is left out. Another alternative, then, is to change the landscape by providing extra support for the candidates who don’t fit that type.

Identity politics — or at least the term itself — began life with the statement composed by the Combahee River Collective in 1977. The Black lesbian activists who comprised the collective did not take the concept to mean that they should get special treatment simply because they were Black, women, and lesbians. Instead, the thought was that insofar as society is structured in a way that does not treat all equally, they have a better insight into the inequalities that affect them than Black men, or straight women, might have. But the goal is not to splinter into ever-smaller groups, each demanding different treatment. The goal, rather, is for each group to lay out the ways in which it is not treated equally, so that different groups can come together in solidarity to help right each other’s injustices. Identity politics is the means; solidarity is the end. Elizabeth Drew asks, “But why does a woman necessarily merit a head start on the next presidential nomination?” The answer, perhaps, is that it’s time that women — and especially Black women — have the platform from which to present their own solutions to injustice.

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Indro Montanelli’s Statue and Reckoning with the Past

photograph of Indro Montanelli statue

Following the death of George Floyd, protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the removal of statues across the United States built in honor of controversial figures. The United States has not been unique in confronting its troubled past. In Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, has been torn down. In Belgium, the statue of King Leopold II, who has been estimated to have murdered approximately 10 million people while ruling Congo, has been covered with “BLM” signs and subsequently removed. In Italy, controversies have surrounded the monument built in honor of Indro Montanelli, an influential journalist from the 30’s whose reputation has been repeatedly haunted by his associations with the colonization of Africa during the Fascist regime. The statue, built in Milan in 2006, has recently been covered with paint, yet unlike its European counterparts, the monument has been cleaned by the Mayor who refuses to remove it.

Montanelli’s Story

The controversies surrounding Montanelli’s statue stem from his role in the Fascist colonization of Africa in 1935. Then 24, Montanelli voluntarily joined the fascist occupation and soon after arriving in Ethiopia he went on to marry a 12-year-old girl from the village. As Montanelli recalls the story in an interview from 2000, he “leased” the girl, whose name he claims to be Destà, from his father. Montanelli’s actions have been harshly condemned, and protesters have surrounded his statue with signs that call him “racist” and “rapist.” But why the decision to clean the monument and refuse to remove it?

“Erasing History”

One of the arguments against the removal of the statue is that doing so would have the consequence of erasing part of Italy’s history. Montanelli founded the conservative daily Il Giornale in 1973, worked several years for the daily Il Corriere Della Sera, as well as collaborated with the United Press in New York. Mariastella Gelmini, leader of the right-wing political party Forza Italia, claims that Montanelli was responsible for playing a crucial role in journalistic history, and perhaps even within the country’s, so the statue should stay in order to preserve Italy’s past. The fact that Italy takes particular pride in its millennial history, has given these claims considerable traction.

The argument however hinges on the premise that monuments play a role in communicating shared history. Yet statues do not seem to have a historical function, but an honorific one. We do not learn history by contemplating monuments, instead we learn history through the traditional tools that are meant to pass it on (let these be books or lectures or testimonies). It is because we already know history, that we decide to build monuments that commemorate it, not the other way around. To illustrate, consider the following example: In the small beach town of Anzio, approximately 1-hour from Rome, there is a statue that depicts a girl walking surrounded by seagulls. The monument was built in honor of a 5-year-old called Angelita who, during the Second World War, was found during the Battle of Anzio by the Scottish soldier S.C. Hayes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers walking on the beach, frightened by the bombings. She later died in Hayes’ arms. In 1979, the city of Anzio decided to build the monument in Angelita’s memory. Yet the statue is not particularly informative. It only shows Angelita’s name without explaining why the statue was built. Would anyone be able to learn Angelita’s story simply by contemplating the monument? No, the statue does not teach any history. On the contrary, it is because one already knows Angelita’s story that one is able to grasp the meaning of the statue. It is unclear then how history would be erased if the statue was removed.

“A Man of His Time” 

Another argument in favor of keeping Montanelli’s statue is that his actions do not justify the removal of his monument because they should be properly contextualized. In 1969, during a famous talk show, Montanelli himself specified that in marrying Destà (and consummating the wedding) “no violence” was exerted because, “in Africa it was another thing.” What Montanelli is hinting at is that in Ethiopia marrying girls of Desta’s age was considered perfectly legal. When pressed by Elvira Banotti, a feminist activist, he admits that marrying a 12-year-old girl in Europe would be illegal, but because such a marriage is permitted in Ethiopia his actions are above reproach. But this confrontation fails to address the elephant in the room: the philosophical distinction between explanatory reasons and justificatory reasons. An explanatory reason helps to make sense, psychologically, of why someone is motivated to act in a certain way. A justificatory reason, on the other hand, provides argument as to the rightness or wrongness of an action. If, for example, you accidentally step on my foot, the pain may explain my angered reaction towards you. But it does not justify my anger — that is, my explanation does not make that action right. Similarly for Montanelli, the fact that in Ethiopia it was permissible to marry a 12-year-old girl may provide an explanatory reason for what Montanelli did, but not a justificatory reason.

But, one might wonder, isn’t the legality of the action enough to justify Montanelli’s behavior? This raises an interesting issue about the relationship between the legal and moral domain. What is legal (or illegal) often does not overlap with what is moral (or immoral). Betraying a friend may be immoral, but it is not illegal. Similarly, one may believe that smoking marijuana, which is illegal in many countries, is not immoral. If one thinks that smoking marijuana is only a legal issue (and not a moral one), then geography will make a big difference. Moving from the United States to Canada (where smoking marijuana is legal), for instance, might change one’s situation. But the same does not work for actions that are illegal and also immoral. Torturing kittens for fun is illegal and arguably immoral. If you moved to another country where it was legal, would you engage in said practice? No, if you genuinely think that torturing kittens for fun is morally wrong. That is, if you internalize wrongness of that action, and by ‘internalize’ I mean that the wrongness of that action speaks to you, then that action is immoral regardless of its geography. Given this, we should reflect on why Montanelli immediately after moving to Africa decided to marry a 12-year-old girl which in Italy not only was illegal but also arguably immoral. The quickness and ease in which he married a 12-year-old girl raises questions, and doubts, about whether he regarded the action as genuinely immoral instead of merely illegal.

“Lives Should be Judged in their Complexity”

Even if his actions were wrong, Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, claims that Montanelli’s life should be judged in “its complexity.” After all, Sala insists, “when we judge our own lives, can we say that ours is spotless?” But even if we assume for the sake of argument that we should judge lives in their totality, this seems to be an argument in favor of the statue’s removal rather than against it. The statue of the journalist, which depicts him at his typewriter, captures only an isolated frame of his life. Doing justice to his life’s complexity would require also doing justice to Destà’s story, which has instead been obscured. Thus, a statue that represents only one aspect of Montanelli’s life is not a statue that should stay, precisely because, as the mayor says, it fails to represent Montanelli’s life in all its complexity. That our statues fail to tell the whole story of the characters they depict is not uncommon. And, as philosopher Joanna Burch-Brown argues, the removal of statues can express a “commitment to tell the full truth about its problematic history.” Milan’s mayor may not see the statue as being built because of Montanelli’s crimes in Africa, but keeping it in spite of those crimes, does not address the problem. The situation demands a justification for why the crimes Montanelli committed are not sufficient to outweigh the reasons for keeping the statue.

The arguments discussed here are not unique to Montanelli’s case but can be generalized to how we treat monuments and statues. Our assessment of honorific monuments must take into consideration the messages these might send, even when these are unintended. In line with this reflection, we should keep in mind that those historical figures we choose to honor should be people we can all look up to.

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White Skins, Black Masks: Voice Acting and Representation

photograph of Mike Henry beside poster of Cleveland character he voices

On June 26, 2020, the creators of The Simpsons announced that from now on, white actors will no longer voice the show’s non-white characters. This came a few days after Kristen Bell, Jenny Slate, and Mike Henry said that they would no longer voice characters of color on their respective shows. “Missy [a character voiced by Slate on the Netflix animated comedy Big Mouth] is Black,” Slate wrote on Instagram. “[A]nd Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” Thus, there appears to be a growing belief in the ethical principle that only people of color are permitted to voice animated characters of color. Call this the Exclusive Principle.

The argument most frequently advanced for the Exclusive Principle concerns the underrepresentation of actors of color in the entertainment industry. Thus, NPR’s Eric Deggans writes that casting white actors as non-white characters “has the practical effect of reinforcing Hollywood’s damaging tendency to elevate…white performers over people of color.” There is no question that this is a serious problem: for example, while people of color make up 40% of the U.S. population, they comprise only 14% of directors, 13.9% of writers, and 32.7% of actors. But the argument for the Exclusive Principle is that following it is either sufficient or necessary to increase the representation of actors of color, and this may be doubted. To see this more clearly, consider an animated television show in which there are twenty characters, nineteen of whom are white while one is a person of color. All nineteen white characters are voiced by actors of color, while the sole person of color is voiced by a white actor. While this television show violates the Exclusive Principle, it appears to do well with respect to employing actors of color. By contrast, another television show that employs a person of color to voice its sole character of color but white actors for every other role satisfies the Exclusive Principle, but does not do well with respect to representation. Thus, following the Exclusive Principle is neither necessary nor sufficient for significantly increasing representation.

A reasonable reply is that following the Exclusive Principle would still typically have the effect of increasing representation. That may well be true. But it is also possible that only allowing people of color to voice animated characters of color is not the most effective way of employing more actors of color in animation. A better way may be to simply cast more actors of color to voice both characters of color and white characters. On the other hand, while this might theoretically be a better way of increasing representation, it might also be the case that following the Exclusive Principle is easier in practice than fulfilling this more demanding policy of casting more actors of color to voice both white and non-white characters. Since there are fewer characters of color in animated series overall, following the Exclusive Principle as a means to increase representation would require fewer ‘affirmative’ casting choices. And if showrunners are more likely to follow a policy entailing fewer such choices, then it may turn out that following the Exclusive Principle will increase representation more effectively than the more demanding policy.

In any case, my hunch is that many of those who subscribe to the Exclusive Principle would still object to the television show in which actors of color are well-represented but the sole character of color is voiced by a white actor. But this means they must have some reason for supporting the Exclusive Principle that is distinct from the representation argument. At first sight, the notion that white actors should not voice animated characters of color is a logical extension of the prohibition on black-, brown-, or yellow-face: if white actors ought not play live action characters of color, then they ought not play animated characters of color. But the validity of this extension depends upon the reasons behind the prohibition on blackface and its ilk. One reason why these practices are wrongful seems to be because of their resemblance to degrading and pejorative representations of people of color in the past, which leads to emotional harm in many who see the resemblance. We ought to avoid causing this kind of harm if there is no good moral reason to cause it; and in this case, there does not seem to be such a reason. If many are similarly harmed by the perceived resemblance between white actors voicing non-white animated characters and degrading and pejorative representations of people of color in the past, then this would be a reason to follow the Exclusive Principle. It would also explain objections to the television show in which actors of color are well-represented but the sole character of color is voiced by a white actor. There may very well be degrading or pejorative representations of people of color that the voicing of a character of color by a white actor resembles. Thus, I leave this argument open for consideration.

However, one might worry that this argument is in danger of proving too much. For instance, if no physical impersonation of a character of color by a white actor is permissible — either via the actor’s whole body or her voice alone — then it might be argued that it is impermissible for white screenwriters or novelists to write non-white characters. But following that principle may very well lead to perverse consequences, in that it might reduce the overall number of characters of color in novels, books, and TV shows. One way to block the slippery slope is to argue that impersonations of characters of color are impermissible only if they are either pejorative and degrading in themselves, or resemble some historical representation that is pejorative and degrading. It might then be argued that some impersonations of persons of color by white writers do not satisfy this condition. But if this is true, then it becomes harder to see why all vocal impersonations of persons of color by white actors satisfy this condition. And if not all of them do, then this line of argument does not strongly support the Exclusive Principle.

In her statement, Bell wrote that “[c]asting a mixed race character with a white actress undermines the specificity of the mixed race and Black American experience.” One way to interpret this claim is that white actors are unable to impersonate people of color well, precisely because they lack the requisite experience. This is an aesthetic argument; it concerns not the morality of voicing a character of color, but its goodness as art. And this might be the right way of thinking about the Exclusive Principle — not as a moral principle, but as an aesthetic one. Of course, there will probably be significant disagreement about this aesthetic claim, and I am not in a particularly good position to judge such matters. However, one wonders why a 21st-century actor could effectively give voice to, say, a 19th-century person, but not a modern-day character of color, particularly if the latter’s lines are written by a person of color. Furthermore, the political implications of the claim that even white people who are trained to use their imaginations to inhabit the mental space of people very different from themselves cannot empathize with people of color enough to impersonate them well also seem unduly pessimistic.

Society seems to be undergoing rapid change in its moral attitudes surrounding race. Many of these changes are unequivocally for the good. Even so, it is worth pausing to reflect on what exactly we wish to accomplish with these changes. As we have seen, with respect to the Exclusive Principle the key questions are whether it is the best policy to further the worthy end of promoting people of color in the entertainment industry, whether there are reasons beyond underrepresentation that are motivating its adoption, and if so, whether those reasons are ultimately valid.

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Dungeons, Dragons, and Du Bois’ Race Problem

photograph of D&D figurines and dice

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

On June 17th, Wizards of the Coast — the company that owns and manages the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons — released a statement about its plans to update the official rule sets and materials describing the fictional worlds of D&D. In addition to hiring new staff (including sensitivity readers) and altering the canonical depictions of some fictional people groups that “echoed some stereotypes” of real-world cultures, Wizards of the Coast is intentionally working to eliminate the role of racial attributes and cultural essentialism within the fantasy game. Specifically, this will mean shifting character-creation techniques to center individualized player choices about a character’s background (rather than making certain features dependent on the character’s race) and, most notably, recasting the two “evil” races within D&D as people groups that are “just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples.”

If you’re not already familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, much of that last paragraph probably sounds pretty odd. First published in the 1970s, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) that offers a basic set of rules for players to follow as they collectively tell a make-believe story about heroes and villains in a fantasy world. Perhaps most famously, these sorts of RPGs use dice rolls to randomize the outcomes of various in-game events, allowing players opportunities to cooperatively and creatively react to unexpected elements of the imaginary scene. Often, those dice rolls are modified by various attributes of your player-character and, to date, at least some of those modifications have been pre-set based on which of the several fictional races (like elves, tieflings, and dragonborn) your character represents. And, while the story of each game of D&D is unique to the group of people (or “party”) playing, Wizards of the Coast regularly publishes a wealth of materials to help parties create the worlds of their stories.

The announced changes to D&D amount to a shift away from an essentialistic approach to race or culture within the game — an approach long-criticized in both Dungeons and Dragons and the fantasy genre writ large. Such a story-telling technique treats a character’s biology or social origin as necessarily constraining their personality, worldview, or moral compass, such as when Rowling’s giants or Tolkien’s trolls are treated as hopelessly evil enemies for the heroes to simply eliminate. According to the most recent Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook, the drow (or “dark elves”) are a “depraved” race of people who are “universally reviled” after their ancestors followed a path “to evil and corruption;” players who choose to role-play as a drow are encouraged to treat their characters as unusual individuals who have “develop[ed] a conscience.” Similarly, D&D presents the orc race as a monstrous, violent culture bent on waging “an endless war against humans, elves, dwarves, and other folk.” If players choose to create a half-orc character to role-play (full orcs are not officially valid options), the Handbook advises that evil impulses and desires will necessarily “lurk within them, whether they embrace it or rebel against it.” Although it remains to be seen how Wizards of the Coast exactly plans on presenting the orcs and drow “in a new light” going forward, the way they have presented these races to this point is plain.

While the response to Wizards of the Coast’s announcement seems to have been largely positive, it has not escaped criticism. Most detractors argue that these rule shifts are unnecessary, either because they will do little to prevent actual racism in the real world or because the classic presentation of orcs in D&D isn’t racist in the first place. Some have suggested that the publishers of D&D have actually been fooled by supposedly-disingenuous protestors interested more in social control than social justice. One need only look to the responses on Wizards of the Coast’s Twitter thread or the comments on, for example, Breitbart’s coverage of the story to see such attitudes.

But these critiques fall flat. Even if used simply to promote seemingly-innocent story-telling tropes or to simplify morality narratives for easier digestion, any reliance on cultural or racial essentialism — even just narratively — is ethically perilous (and, incidentally, aesthetically lazy). The point is not that “racists portrayal of these fictional peoples will promote racist treatment of non-fictional peoples,” but rather that employing racial essentialism of any stripe legitimates — even unconsciously — an unavoidably immoral way of viewing the world (regardless of whether that world is Abeir-Toril, Arda, or Earth).

It is a way of viewing the world which W.E.B. Du Bois describes as “a vast veil” that shuts people out from the worlds in which they belong. Speaking from his own experience as a Black man at the turn of the 20th century, Du Bois traces how his personal experiences of racism in post-Reconstruction America mirrored wider social policies designed to maintain the cultural homogeneity of the United States in the wake of Emancipation. Time and again, Du Bois recounts stories of how relatively mundane — and, perhaps, unintentional, in some cases — choices led to him being routinely set apart from the people around him. Consider this anecdote from when Du Bois was a college student looking for work as a teacher in Tennessee:

“I remember the day I rode horseback out to the commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and the water jingled, and we rode on. ‘Come in,’ said the commissioner,—’come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?’ ‘Oh,’ thought I, ‘this is lucky’; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I—alone.” (The Souls of Black Folk, ch. IV)

The Veil comes from the often-unspoken set of assumptions about what counts as “normal” in matters of race and culture against which everything, including even relatively small and otherwise-unimportant actions, is tacitly judged. The Veil is also a manifestation of one form of racial essentialism that judges (even implicitly) individuals in virtue of their biology, rather than their unique personalities and histories.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: my point is not that a fictional orc is necessarily wronged by a Dungeons and Dragons player treating it like a monster (nor is it that a player who doesn’t care about orcs will also not care about flesh-and-blood humans). Instead, my point is that carefully considering both the intentional and unintentional messages of our cultural artifacts (like D&D) is an important part of being responsible people who care about our fellow citizens; this is precisely what Wizards of the Coast has started to do. Suggesting that the kinds of racial and cultural essentialism long-incorporated into Dungeons and Dragons is valid somewhere, even just in a fictional context, requires us to say (or at least operate on the assumption) that it is not inherently unethical — that is a morally indefensible position.

Echoing Fredrick Douglas before him, Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” In this regard, the twenty-first century is no different: what Du Bois called the “race problem” remains, both in explicit, intentional acts of racist oppression and, far more frequently, in the unthinking assumptions that lead many to uphold the Veil, however accidentally. Defenses of racial essentialism, wherever they may appear, contribute to this in their own way by tacitly legitimating a fundamental component of the Veil’s operation.

(It’s also worth pointing out that the stereotypical depiction of orcs and “dark elves” likewise demonstrates Du Bois’ separate point about a curiously European theory of human culture wherein “Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is ‘white’; everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is ‘yellow’; a bad taste is ‘brown’; and the devil is ‘black.’” Considering the potential contributions of such imagery to the contemporary real-world Veil is an exercise left to the reader.)

Given both the inherent customizability of the game and its five-decade-long history, it is not possible for Wizards of the Coast to simply change by fiat how all parties will play D&D, but the company is taking visible steps to improve how racial diversity will be officially represented going forward. Given that the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons has skyrocketed in recent years (including being prominently featured in Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things) and the lockdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have only spurred greater interest, it is good to see Wizards of the Coast clearly demonstrate that it wants “everyone to feel at home around the game table and to see positive reflections of themselves within our products.” Analyzing how the Veil might nevertheless affect both the worlds and the players of Dungeons and Dragons, even unintentionally, is an important part of engaging with this sliver of our culture’s much larger race problem.

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Retweets, Endorsements, and Indirect Speech Acts

image of retweet icon

Over the weekend, President Trump engaged in a rare retraction, deleting a retweet of a video of pro-Trump protesters at a Florida retirement village. Midway through this video, a man in a golf cart sporting ‘Trump 2020’ and ‘America First’ placards, raises his fist and clearly shouts ‘white power’ at a group of anti-Trump protesters. The retweet stayed up for around three hours on Saturday morning, before it was taken down after uproar. In subsequent statements, the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has tried to maintain both that the 45th president of the United States watched the video before retweeting, and that he nonetheless didn’t hear the slogan shouted in the middle of the video. We might find this is a little difficult to believe, given his record of sharing white supremacist slogans and iconography.

Setting to one side the question of whether the president actually watched the video before sharing it, this example opens up a more general question: when should one be held responsible for one’s retweets? Is it possible to hide behind the defense that a retweet involves someone else speaking (and in this case making a white supremacist hand gesture), or does retweeting involve repeating what someone else has said, meaning that a retweeter can be held just as responsible as the original poster?

One way to make sense of our responsibilities for sharing other peoples’ words is to deny that there is an important distinction between tweeting and retweeting. On this view, when we share other people’s words, we make them our own, meaning that we put our credibility behind them, express belief in them, and take responsibility for them.

This view faces a number of problems.

The Oxford philosopher G.E. Moore observed that it is absurd to make a claim while denying that one believes that claim. The sentence ‘I went to the park yesterday, but I don’t believe that I did’ is perfectly grammatical, but it is a very strange thing to say. Explanation of so-called Moorean sentences differ, but almost everyone agrees that uttering a Moorean sentence is a strange thing to do. By contrast, it is perfectly possible to retweet an article with the comment that you don’t believe its headline claim. Here’s an example:

(To be clear, I don’t have any strong views about the number of bikes sold, and cycling weekly is a reputable source: this is just an example.) Relatedly, there is a whole genre of tweets in which a fact checker retweets an article or picture, along with a claim that the article is false.

 

If retweeting were equivalent to tweeting, this genre of debunking tweet would involve making a claim and denying it. This wouldn’t be just absurd: it is a flat out contradiction.

Retweets that involve promises, requests, or questions similarly don’t behave like tweets. If you tweet a promise to your partner to clean your house every day in August, and I retweet it, I haven’t thereby promised to clean your flat too!

These differences suggest that we ought to draw a pretty clear distinction between tweeting and retweeting.

A natural strategy in thinking about kinds of online communication is to look for features of offline communication that have similar features. There are two offline devices of communication that are good candidates for making sense of retweets: quotation and pointing.

In a recent paper Neri Marsili explores the view that retweets function like quotation. This view take the original format of retweets — a sentence prefaced by ‘RT’ — seriously and claims that retweeting is like putting quotation marks round a sentence and saying so-and-so said: […]. This view can deal with retweeting with a comment by treating it as a quotation embedded into a longer sentence. It is perfectly reasonable for you to say “Josh said that he went to the park yesterday, but I don’t believe that he did,” or “Josh said that he went to the park yesterday, but he didn’t.”

The problem with this view comes from the diversity of retweets. Besides retweets of sentences, we also find retweets of pictures, gifs, polls, and videos. Unlike sentences, gifs and the like aren’t the kinds of things that one can put in quotation marks, so this view can’t be correct.

An alternative view, suggested by Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken (and ultimately endorsed by Marsili) treats retweeting as akin to pointing. Pointing is an extremely common and flexible referential device associated with words like ‘this’ and ‘that’. By itself, it can function as a device for directing attention. If we were on a walk together, I might stop and point to draw your attention to an interesting bird. We can also use it to make claims about the world (“that [points] is a very ugly chair”), to answer questions (“which student cheated on the test?”), and even to make commands (“give me that [points]!”). One piece of evidence for this view is the fact that is extremely natural to use ‘this’ and ‘that’ with retweets; in fact some tweets are simply labelled with an imperious ‘THIS’.

The proposal is that retweets function like pointing, with the comments functioning like the sentence that refers to the object pointed towards. On this view, disbelieving and debunking retweets work a bit like the sentences “I don’t believe this [points]” and “this [points] is false” which are clearly reasonable sentences.

So far, we’ve got a bit clearer on how to think about what kind of communicative action retweeting is, but we haven’t yet addressed the issue of responsibility for retweeting. On the view under consideration, a plain retweet is purely referential; it’s like pointing to a bird whilst on a walk to draw others’ attention to it. Retweets with comments may clarify whether the speaker means to endorse the retweeted comment, but merely retweeting doesn’t clarify whether one has endorsed the claim.

Here we can bring in another piece of philosophical technology: indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts involve performing one direct communicative acts as a means to performing another indirect act. For example, directly asking the question “do we have any beer in the fridge?” might involve indirectly making a request for you to get me a beer. Indirect speech acts are highly conventionalized and context-sensitive. If I’m clearly drawing up a shopping list, asking “do we have any beer in the fridge?” will probably function as a straight question (unless I have a habit of drinking a beer while writing lists).

The suggestion is that retweeting can involve two distinct speech acts: a direct referential act and an indirect act of endorsement. We might think about retweeting an article in order to endorse it as being a little bit like opening a newspaper on an interesting article and leaving it in the spot where your partner goes to have their morning coffee.

Frustratingly, this means that there is no easy answer to the question of what responsibility we bear for retweets. As we’ve just seen, indirect speech acts are highly context-dependent. There may be some internet communities where the conventions around retweeting involve strong endorsement. If I share an article about a new treatment for COVID-19 into a Facebook group for medical professionals, I might be endorsing both the headline claim of the article, and the supplementary claims it makes. By contrast, if I share an article about the performance benefits of a new Nike running shoe into a running group that habitually shares different studies, and where it is common knowledge that these studies are based on shaky science, I might merely be drawing attention to a new piece of information.

What happens when a communicative situation lacks clear norms about the significance of retweeting? Well, things get messy. One person might retweet a controversial article meaning to call attention to its argument, and be interpreted as endorsing it wholesale. Another person might share a picture of a protest meaning to endorse the cause of the protesters, and be interpreted as mocking or belittling them. In this kind of situation, context collapse is rife, and it becomes difficult to rely on shared presuppositions and conventions about communication.

In this defective speech situation, it is extremely difficult to make sense of which indirect speech acts we are performing. When we hold one another responsible for indirect speech acts associated with retweets, we are not implementing established norms for indirect communication, we are trying to create conventions for indirect communication based on sharing content online.

What kinds of conventions do we want to have? Regina Rini suggests that we ought to have a convention whereby retweeting conveys endorsement of the central claims in a retweeted article, accompanied by robust practices of holding users accountable for what they share. An alternative convention would be that retweeting doesn’t convey endorsement of any of the claims in an article (perhaps it merely conveys that something is interesting), in which case we could hold one another to much lower standards. A third possibility is to have a bundle of different conventions for different situations. Maybe the context of political speech involves endorsement of all claims and robust accountability, and contexts of private speech are much more relaxed. This conclusion is unsatisfying, but it does help clarify what is at stake in debates about retweets: we aren’t trying to describe independent and general conventions, but to create linguistic communities that can meet our intellectual needs.

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Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed and the Aims of the Opinion Page

photograph of newspaper printing press in operation

On June 3, 2020, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton calling for the U.S. military to use an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” He was referring to the riots that broke out in reaction to George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police—riots that Cotton depicted as the work of “left-wing radicals” and “nihilist criminals.” The fallout over the piece led to the resignation of the paper’s opinion page editor, James Bennett, with The Times publicly conceding that Cotton’s piece should not have been published. This reversal, and Bennett’s ouster, has itself provoked criticism of The Times by commentators of various political persuasions. For the philosophically inclined, it provides an opportunity to consider the criteria editors should use in selecting the independent opinions that appear in their pages.

Should The New York Times have run Cotton’s op-ed? In order to answer this question, we need to think about the purpose of a newspaper opinion page, and the way that purpose helps realize important values. There is an obvious sense in which an opinion page can share certain features with a public forum: it may serve as a venue for the expression of a multitude of opinions by ordinary citizens as well as public figures. Public forums are valuable because they are spaces in which citizens can deliberate, debate, and voice their dissent concerning important political, social, and cultural issues. Such spaces help citizens make better political decisions and keep public officials accountable.

The public forum conception of the opinion page is not the only one a paper could adopt. For example, a newspaper could decide that its opinion page should speak with one voice, advancing a more-or-less coherent set of positions on matters political, social, and cultural. On this view, only op-eds that are consistent with the opinion page’s strong editorial line would be entitled to a place. For example, this appears to be The Wall Street Journal’s philosophy. Since we are dealing here with private companies and not government agencies, the choice is entirely at the owners’ discretion.

In addition, there is one important distinction between a public forum and a newspaper such as The New York Times. In the latter case, the very fact that the newspaper chooses to run an op-ed lends credence to the views expressed therein: it is an indication that these views are worth considering. One might reply that a view can be worth considering even if it is false and immoral. John Stuart Mill famously wrote in On Liberty that even well-argued falsehoods could aid us in our pursuit of knowledge, pushing us to defend our own views “fully, fearlessly, and frequently” and preventing them from lapsing into “dead dogma.” However, if we are to evaluate the permissibility of publishing an opinion partly on the basis of its tendency to promote knowledge, we must also register the fact that lending credence to false or immoral views can spread factual or moral ignorance.

In light of this consideration, it may be reasonable to adopt a modified conception of the opinion page, one according to which its function is as a sort of refined public forum—a forum in which certain opinions are excluded because they fail to meet certain minimal standards of factual accuracy, moral decency, and other considerations discussed below. Such a forum is still valuable because it promotes democratic deliberation and debate, but unlike traditional public forums in the United States, it also actively works to avoid spreading ignorance. And whereas on the unrefined public forum conception the default assumption is that opinions are worth publishing absent good reasons for their exclusion, on the refined public forum conception an opinion must meet certain criteria in order to qualify as worthy of publication.

Some criteria seem relatively uncontroversial. Since we reason better if our premises are clear and our arguments logically correct, opinion pieces should meet some minimal standards of clarity and cogency. Relevance is another criterion: op-eds should be about a topic of pressing or significant public concern about which there is a need for democratic deliberation and debate, rather than some extremely obscure topic.

The purpose of the opinion page also seems to suggest that editors should avoid printing op-eds that contain any factual errors, since democratic debate and deliberation are undermined when citizens reason from false premises. But more careful reflection suggests that because factual claims can themselves be the subject of reasonable public dispute, an opinion page can better help inform the public about such factual disagreements by allowing the disputants to make their cases on the page, even if doing so risks printing false claims. For example, in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, the question whether Iraq possessed WMD was a matter of reasonable debate given the information publicly available, and would have been an ideal subject for opinion pieces arguing both sides of the issue. By contrast, there is no reasonable debate to be had about the reality of the Holocaust. Thus, while there is good reason not to print op-eds containing factual claims that are clearly false, the purpose of the page is better served by giving airtime to reasonable controversies over matters of fact.

A similar point applies to controversial questions of value. On the one hand, it might be argued that democratic deliberation is hindered by false beliefs about what is good or what is right. However, in many cases matters of value are themselves the subject of reasonable public dispute; and in these cases, it is better to inform the public about the various positions being staked out on those questions and the arguments advocates are advancing for them, even at the risk of airing views that may ultimately be widely judged immoral. Twenty years ago, the morality of gay marriage was heatedly debated across the country by people of good will. At that time, it would have been appropriate to run opinion pieces arguing both sides of the issue. So, while there is good reason not to publish op-eds containing clearly indecent moral views, particularly if they do not meet the criterion of relevance, the purpose of the page is well-served by allowing reasonable debate about questions of value.

The goal of fostering informed democratic deliberation also suggests that particularly controversial views ought to be presented in a way that is best calculated to foster reasoned debate. This might involve, for example, a “point counterpoint” format in which op-eds arguing for opposing views are published side-by-side. Meg Greenfield, who edited The Washington Post’s editorial page for over 20 years, was known to employ this technique with respect to particularly controversial topics.

If we adopt the refined public forum conception of the opinion page and judge according to the criteria discussed above, Tom Cotton’s op-ed appears problematic in certain respects. It was reasonably clear and cogent—one cannot claim to be offended by its argument and simultaneously not understand what was being argued. It was certainly relevant, since it concerned events of pressing public concern and was written by a person who wields enormous power. It advanced some unsubstantiated factual claims, such as its claim about left-wing groups’ involvement in the rioting. However, it is possible that at the time it was published, the degree of involvement of these groups was still a matter of reasonable dispute.

Less clear is whether the values that Cotton espouses are a matter of reasonable dispute. In particular, there is the question whether we should take seriously the view that the U.S. military ought to use its enormous capacity for violence against those engaged in the destruction of property. One reason to do so is that this view seems to be shared by a substantial proportion of U.S. adults; this speaks to its relevance. However, given its controversial nature and the risk of lending credence to an immoral view, a different presentation of Cotton’s argument—perhaps in the form of a point counterpoint—would almost certainly have been a more ethically sound editorial decision.

Furthermore, Cotton’s rhetoric seems designed to intimidate. Specifically, Cotton recommends using “an overwhelming show of force” to deter “lawbreakers.” There is a disturbing ambiguity in that statement: are people engaged in civil disobedience included within the scope of “lawbreakers”? If Cotton’s piece can be reasonably interpreted as threatening violence against those engaged in civil disobedience, it could have a chilling effect upon open expressions of dissent, thus undermining democratic debate and deliberation. Surely, if an editor has good reason to think that an opinion piece is intended to silence others, or will have the effect of so doing to a significant degree, the refined public forum conception of the opinion page would tend to favor not running it in its current form.

A newspaper’s opinion page can, at its best, encourage the kind of frank, fair, and informed exchange of views that makes democracies function better. Yet editors have a responsibility to see that they do not spread ignorance by stamping clearly false or morally perverse opinions with their newspaper’s imprimatur. They also have an obligation to present controversial views in a way best calculated to encourage reasoned debate. For all of these reasons, the decision to publish Tom Cotton’s op-ed should be viewed as a challenging one, whether or not it is ultimately justified.

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Universities and the Burdens of Risk

photograph of exterior of classroom building at Harvard

To bring students back to the university is to knowingly expose them to risk of a dangerous disease when such exposure is avoidable. This is morally objectionable on a variety of fronts. The risk of contracting COVID-19 and the seriousness of its potential health outcomes make it very different from the realities we typically accept by engaging in other everyday activities. It is clear that COVID-19 poses a higher risk of death than other coronaviruses. A variety of underlying conditions can lead to deadly outcomes, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding of the conditions that may lead to the virus’ lethality. Even when the virus does not cause death, the respiratory impact of contracting it has put a significant burden on patient’s long term health, and can lead to the need for hospitalization and incubation for breathing support. The long-term effects of the illness even for those lucky enough to avoid these outcomes are still unknown, but appear to persist past initial recovery and seem to include lung damage and potential stroke and brain complications.

One of the most concerning things, given these serious outcomes of the virus, is how contagious it is. Because of this, there have been efforts to distance members of societies affected by the virus across the globe (with the US notoriously falling behind).

Despite the serious issues involved in contracting the virus, in order to keep society safe and healthy, multiple segments of society need to continue to interact with one another and the public. There are, of course risks for pharmacists, doctors, grocery store workers, and the essential workers that produce and distribute the necessary products that keep a society running.

When there are necessary risks, there is a responsibility of a society to support those people that are exposing themselves to these risks on the behalf of the members of society that require their services to continue in health and safety. When someone takes on a burden in order to keep you safe and healthy, we typically think either a moral obligation is formed, or, more minimally, it would be appropriate to be grateful, or, in compromise, to be obligated not to put people in a scenario where they must accrue further risks in order to maintain your safety.

We can consider non-pandemic scenarios that support these intuitions. An extreme case would if you chose to sky-dive (knowingly taking on a risk) with a tandem guide. The partner is jumping with you, exposing themselves to risk to keep you safe. As a beginner, you rely on the tandem partner for your safety. It would be morally wrong of you to act so as to put the tandem partner at further risk.

In circumstances where others are placing themselves at risk for your benefit and you knowing accept that relationship, it is wrong to exacerbate that exchange of burdens (their risk) and benefits (the service they are offering at their sacrifice).

This minimization of risk exposure supports the narrowing of operations and functioning of businesses activities in our society until we can mitigate the risk to one another that gathering together would pose. By opening your doors for business, you are posing a risk to your employees, and by frequenting the business, you are posing a risk to the fellow patrons and employees of the business. With risks like those associated with COVID-19, this threat is significant enough that such behavior, when it is avoidable and unnecessary, is morally problematic.

When a group of people comes together for activities like taking a cruise, or attending a university, the moral assessment of risk is different than for these essential operations. Universities expose students, faculty, and staff to a high risk of contracting the disease because, like cruise ships, the amount of personnel required to keep food, board, courses, and administration functioning is immense and it all occurs in relatively small areas, every day. These are specialized activities that are voluntary, and so they significantly differ from the necessary operations that provide food and services to a society to keep people safe and healthy.

Universities have acknowledged the liability issues in the Fall, perhaps most obviously by seeking legal shields or waivers from students returning to campus. However, at the end of May, according to a survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, over 2/3 of universities planned to bring students back to campus for the upcoming term. This strategy attempts to redirect the institutional burdens of risk assessment and decision-making back onto individuals.

This parallels the situation where individual businesses are placed when there is a lack of governmental or higher legislation regarding managing risk. Without a policy dictating when it is permissible to have non-essential services enter back into the risk-exchange of societal functioning, individual businesses are left to weigh the risk of their employees, their impact on societal spread, etc. Government oversight makes the decision on the basis of overall risk that society faces, which is the level at which the risk of disease exists. When individuals need to determine what risks they are willing to bear against other priorities, their choices become coercive – the cost of businesses closing due to lack of government assistance, the pressure to open when other businesses are doing so and thereby losing competition in the market, etc. By changing the systemic problem of the risk to society into individual problems of how to navigate that risk based on individual priorities, privileges, and disadvantages, we face structural injustice.

Universities face this very problem in determining the just distribution of systemic risk. Should they pursue universal policies to protect everyone regardless of privileges, priorities, or disadvantages, or should they leave individuals to navigate these decisions themselves. Giving individuals the opportunity to choose a remote-learning track does not mitigate the moral burden of universities offering face-to-face (on-campus) learning. In offering this choice, universities have simply transformed an institutional obstacle into a problem for individuals to navigate on their own. But this choice offered individuals cannot be read as an assumption of risk; these choices are not commensurable. University systems were designed for those able and willing to opt for on-campus, f2f learning, signaled by the university to be optimal.

The instructors that have opted for f2f learning have created a difference in course delivery that puts a burden on students who would ideally choose not to return to campus in their selection of courses. The disparity in support services that are optimally delivered while on-campus would also create distance between those students who return and those that cannot or would choose to avoid the risk of returning to campuses that admit the risk to which they are exposing all present.

A statement from the American Anthropological Association emphasized how the default f2f policies undermined the equitable access to education that would result for minority and underserved populations:

“Given the disproportionate representation of COVID-19 infection and death in Black and brown communities, university policies and practices that emphasize in-person work and teaching run the risk of compounding the impact of racial inequity. These policies also risk endangering already-marginalized members of university communities, including staff and contingent faculty, who are less likely to have the option to take time away from work. As a matter of equity and ethics, while we acknowledge the financial challenges colleges and universities face because of the pandemic, we encourage university administrators to keep the health and safety of marginalized people at the forefront of their decisions.”

Finally, there is the question of liability on the part of universities for allowing students back on their campuses. As noted above, some universities are seeking “liability shields” for the health risks facing their students, staff, and instructors this Fall. Despite taking precautions against the contagious virus, there are no foolproof measures that can be taken against contracting this illness, especially at a campus with students living, eating, and studying in such close proximity. It is difficult to imagine such a group acting in ways outside of the classroom that would significantly reduce the spread of the virus when research has shown that, among the young, this disease has not been taken very seriously since its very onset.

But these failings do not absolve the universities of liability for what happens on their campus. What students do in their lives has a different legal status than what they do in sanctioned activities and conditions condoned by an institution. Further, by acknowledging the likelihood of risky behavior on the part of students, a university also acknowledges that it is putting staff and instructors at greater risk than if they did not return to campus.

There is a legal and moral responsibility to provide a working environment that is safe to employees. The risk of contracting this virus is significant, due to its rate of contagion and health outcomes. With this risk of contracting a serious illness, and the coercive environment created by the justice issues raised above, universities do not satisfy this condition of safe work environments by having students, staff, and instructors return to campus. At a time when we have a moral obligation to behave in ways to mitigate the spread of the virus, or at the very least not exacerbate its spread, 2/3 of universities are taking steps to actively put students, staff, and instructors in positions that make them more vulnerable to contracting and spreading this illness.

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COVID-19 and Systemic Racism

photograph of "No Justice No Peace" sign at protest

As more information about COVID-19 and its effects comes to light, it is clear that the impacts of the disease are not the same everywhere or for everyone. Some communities are hit harder than others. In many cases, COVID-19 hot spots highlight systemic problems that existed before “coronavirus” was a household word. The public action that a society takes when things get rough reflects its values, in this case, its judgments about who and what is really important. Unsurprisingly, the circumstances of marginalized groups are not sufficiently taken into account in the construction of social programs and systems. When these social programs serve as the circulatory system of a nation during a pandemic, marginalized groups are the hardest hit. One lesson that this great tragedy should teach us is that we must recognize and embrace the diversity in our communities. Respect and appreciation for our cultural differences can help us to construct preemptive, life-saving policies.

If we’re willing to collectively put forth the work, the multiple tragedies we’ve recently gone through as a nation could give rise to transformative action. The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests to amplify the message that Black Lives Matter have cast the issue of racial justice onto center stage. The disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on communities of color can and should help people to understand what it means for racism to be systemic. One barrier to meaningful dialogue about racism is that some people think that for an action to be racist, it must be done with an explicit, hateful, discriminatory intention. Certainly, there are cases in which these conditions are met—some people are explicit, hateful racists. Systemic racism, however, has the potential to be even more pernicious and impactful. Understanding systemic racism requires us to think more holistically. We need to ask ourselves: How do we design our cities? Where do we put institutions that generate pollution and waste and why do we put them where we do? What social programs do we provide and to whom? What steps are we taking to see to it that upward mobility and human flourishing are attainable for all members of society? When answers to these questions suggest that people of color are consistently more negatively impacted by our practices, we have problems of systemic racism to fix. We find ourselves in just that situation when it comes to our response to COVID-19.

One critical component of emergency response is the transmission of information. Across the country, there have been huge challenges to information dissemination, created by a cluster of assumptions. Chief among these assumptions is the idea that everyone can speak English or is in regular contact with someone who can. For instance, meatpacking plants have been among the hardest hit institutions worldwide. As I have written in a previous article, conditions in slaughterhouses create a perfect storm for the spread of coronavirus. People work shoulder-to-shoulder doing strenuous activities that cause them to sweat and breathe heavily. Many employees at these facilities are immigrants and refugees who don’t speak English. Even if health and safety materials about COVID-19 are being created and widely disseminated, if a person can’t understand that material, they are in a poor position to help themselves or those around them. In crafting public health policy, we need to take into account the diverse nature of our communities. We need to provide information in more than one language. What’s more, we need to find ways of being proactive with these communities. We shouldn’t assume that everyone has access to television or the internet.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis made headlines last week for blaming his state’s spiking COVID-19 cases on migrant farm workers. This is a common move from the emerging coronavirus playbook—blame an outbreak on one event or group of people and imply that the spike is, therefore, somehow not real. Far from being exculpatory, increased cases among migratory farm workers is evidence of failure in governmental strategy. Florida public policy officials are aware that migrant farm workers exist in their state. However, in thinking about public health and the economy, concern for what might be happening on the margins came much too little and too late.

Racial injustice often leads to a snowball effect of harms. Consider the case of Louisiana’s infamous “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River that is home both to a majority black population and to roughly 150 petrochemical plants. The pollution in this area causes a range of health issues for those who live there. According to the EPA’s 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment, residents of this area are 95% more likely than most Americans to develop cancer from air pollution. These communities were already disenfranchised; pollution makes it worse. Pollution also causes pre-existing conditions, so, unsurprisingly COVID-19 has ravaged communities in Cancer Alley. At one point in April, a community in the area had the highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in the country.

The Navajo Nation has also been disproportionately affected by COVID-19—at one point it had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest per capita infection rate in the United States. The Navajo community has enacted strict lockdown and prevention measures, which have appeared to flatten the curve, at least for now. Help was slow to arrive. The CARES Act set aside 600 million to assist the Navajo Nation in its fight. To combat such an infectious disease, assistance is needed urgently. However, in order to receive the money to which they were entitled, the Navajo Nation had to sue the U.S. Treasury. By this point, people were already dead. Given the position in which the United States government stands to native people, swift assistance should have been a top priority.

When we say that Black Lives Matter and when we say that the lives of people of color matter, we take on responsibilities. We need to be reflective and active not just about our criminal justice system, but about the broad social and economic systems that give rise to inequity and injustice.