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Impeachment Hearings and Changing Your Mind

image of two heads with distinct collections of colored cubes

The news has been dominated recently by the impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, and as has been the case throughout Trump’s presidency, it seems that almost every day there’s a new piece of information that is presented by some outlets as a bombshell revelation, and by others as really no big deal. While the country at this point is mostly split on whether they think that Trump should be impeached, there is still a lot of evidence left to be uncovered in the ongoing hearings. Who knows, then, how Americans will feel once all the evidence has been presented.

Except that we perhaps already have a good idea of how Americans will feel even after all the evidence has been presented, since a recent poll reports that the majority of Americans say that they would not change their minds on their stance towards impeachment, regardless of what new evidence is uncovered. Most Americans, then, seem to be “locked in” to their views.

What should we make of this situation? Are Americans just being stubborn, or irrational? Can they help themselves?

There is one way in which these results are surprising, namely that the survey question asks whether one could imagine any evidence that would change one’s mind. Surely if, say, God came down and decreed that Trump should or should not be impeached then one should be willing to change one’s mind. So when people are considering the kind of evidence that could come out in the hearings, they are perhaps thinking that they will be presented with evidence of a similar kind to what they’ve seen already.

A lack of imagination aside, why would people say that they could not conceive of any evidence that could sway them? One explanation might be found with the way that people tend to interpret evidence presented by those who disagree with them. Let’s say, for example, that I am already very strongly committed to the belief that Trump ought to be impeached. Couldn’t those who are testifying in his defense present some evidence that would convince me otherwise? Perhaps not: if I think that Trump and those who defend him are untrustworthy and unscrupulous then I will interpret whatever they have to say as something that is meant to mislead me. So it really doesn’t matter what kind of evidence comes out, since short of divine intervention all of the evidence that comes out will be such that it supports my belief. And of course my opposition will think in the same way. So no wonder so many of us can’t imagine being swayed.

While this picture is something of an oversimplification, there’s reason to think that people do generally interpret evidence in this way. Writing at Politico, psychologist Peter Coleman describes what he refers to as “selective perception”:

Essentially, the stronger your views are on an issue like Trump’s impeachment, the more likely you are to attend more carefully to information that supports your views and to ignore or disregard information that contradicts them. Consuming more belief-consistent information will, in turn, increase your original support or disapproval for impeachment, which just fortifies your attitudes.

While Coleman recognizes that those who are most steadfast in their views are unlikely to change their minds over the course of the impeachment hearings, there is perhaps still hope for those who are not so locked-in. He describes a “threshold effect”, where people can change their minds suddenly, sometimes even coming to hold a belief that is equally strong but on the opposite side of an issue, once an amount of evidence they possess passes a certain threshold. What could happen, then, is that over the course of the impeachment procedures people may continue to hold their views until the accumulated evidence simply becomes too overwhelming, and they suddenly change their minds.

Whether this is something that will happen given the current state of affairs remains to be seen. What is still odd, though, is that while the kinds of psychological effects that Coleman discusses are ones that describe how we form our beliefs, we certainly don’t think that this is how we should form our beliefs. If these are processes that work in the background, ones that we are subject to but don’t have much control over, then it would be understandable and perhaps (in certain circumstances) even forgivable that we should generally be stubborn when it comes to our political beliefs. But the poll is not simply asking what one’s beliefs are, but what one could even conceivably see oneself believing. Even if it is difficult for us to change our minds about issues that we have such strong views about, surely we should at least aspire to be the kind of people who could conceive of being wrong.

One of the questions that many have asked in response to the poll results is whether the hearings will accomplish anything, given that people seem to have made up their minds already. Coleman’s cautious optimism perhaps gives us reason to think that minds could, in fact, be swayed. At the same time it is worth remembering that being open-minded does not mean that you are necessarily wrong, or that you will not be vindicated as having been right all along. At the end of the day, then, it is difficult not to be pessimistic about the possibility of progress in such a highly polarized climate.

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On the Legitimacy of Moral Advice from the Internet

Cropped, black-and-white headshot of a white woman with dark hair, pearl earrings wearing a white blouse and dark blazer.

The subreddit “Am I The Asshole?” describes itself as a “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us.” It is a forum in which users can make posts describing the actions they took in the face of sometimes difficult decisions in order to have users in the community provide their evaluation of whether they did, in fact, act in a morally reprehensible way. Recent posts describe situations ranging from complex relationships with family – “AITA for despising my mentally handicap sister?” – to more humorous situations with friends – “AITA for wearing the “joke” bikini my friend got me?” – all the way to relatively minor inconveniences – “AITA for not wanting to pick up my wife from the airport at 12:30 a.m.?” Verdicts can include “NTA” (not the asshole), “YTA” (you’re the asshole), “ESH” (everyone sucks here), and claims that there’s not enough information to make an informed judgment. Sometimes there is consensus (in the above cases the consensus for the first was that the person was not an asshole, and that they were in the third) and sometimes there is disagreement (the jury continues to be out on the second case).

Seeking moral advice from strangers is nothing new: the newspaper advice column “Dear Abby,” for example, has been running since 1956. But it is worth asking whether these are good places to get moral advice from. Can either an anonymous collective like Reddit, or a pseudonymous author like Dear Abby, really give us good answers to our difficult moral questions?

One might have some concerns about appealing to the aforementioned subreddit for moral advice. For instance, one might question the overall use of soliciting the opinions of a bunch of random strangers on the internet, people whom one knows nothing about, some of whom may very well be moral exemplars, but some of whom will almost certainly also be complete creeps. Why think that you could get any good answers from such a random collection of people?

There is, however, one significant benefit that could come from asking such a group, which is that one can reap the benefits of cognitive diversity. Here’s the general idea: you can often solve problems better and more efficiently if you have a lot of different people with different strengths and different viewpoints contributing to a solution than if you had a group of people who all had the same skills and thought in the same kinds of ways. This is why it’s often helpful to get a new set of eyes on a problem that’s been stumping you, or why sometimes the best solutions can come from outsiders who haven’t thought nearly as much about the problem as you have. So we might think that seeking advice from a massive online community like Reddit can offer us the same kind of benefits: there will be a diversity of views, with different people drawing on different life experiences to offer a variety of perspectives, and so any consensus reached will then be a good indication of whether you really are morally culpable for your actions.

Unfortunately, while the community might give off the impression of being diverse, a recent study from Vice suggests that it is a lot more homogeneous than one might like. For instance, the study reported that:

“Over 68 percent of the internet’s asshole-arbiters are in North America and 22 percent are in Europe, while over 80 percent are white. The survey also found that 77 percent of AITA subscribers are aged between 18 to 34 years old, with over 10 percent aged under 18 and only 3.4 percent aged 45 and over.”

These numbers do not exactly represent the kind of variety of life experience that would allow for the full value of diversity. One particularly telling consequence is the subreddit’s reputation for advising that fights in one’s marriage should almost always result in a divorce, advice that might be different if it weren’t the case that, according to the Vice study, about 70% of the responding users weren’t married.

This is not to say that you will never get any good moral advice from Reddit. It is, however, to say that perhaps the advice you seek from there should be taken with a grain of salt, and perhaps run by a few different types of people before coming to any conclusions. So if an anonymous mass of online users isn’t good enough, then where should one turn instead?

There are no doubt people we’ve come across who we think are good sources of moral advice – family members, perhaps, or close friends – and we might have reason for seeking out advice from these people rather than others – perhaps they are generally able to provide good reasons to support their advice, or maybe good things tend to happen when you listen to them, or maybe they just seem really wise. We might worry, though, whether a friend or family member is the best source of moral advice. Maybe what we really want is an expert. In the same way that I would prefer to get medical advice from my doctor (a medical expert), or advice about how to fix my car from a mechanic (an expert in car repair), perhaps what I should do in seeking out moral advice is to find a moral expert.

How do we find such an expert? Philosophers have debated extensively about what it would take to be a moral expert (as well as if moral experts exist at all), and while these are still open questions, we might think that, in general, a moral expert has to know a lot about the kinds of difficult situations you find yourself in and be able to convey that knowledge when needed in order to address problems that come up. Often when seeking out moral advice, then, we look to thoughtful people who have been through similar situations before, and have come out well as a result. These people might then display some moral expertise, and might be a good source of moral advice.

That we seek out moral experts can explain why people have been writing into advice columns like Dear Abby for so long: Abby is purportedly an expert, and so we might think that her advice is the best available. Abby has, however, seen her share of criticism in the past, and in some recent cases has offered up some real stinkers in terms of advice. While it would be nice, then, if there were a moral sage who could offer us the perfect advice in all circumstances, something that we might take away from the problems with seeking out advice from Reddit and Dear Abby is that the best moral advice might come from not just one source, but rather a variety of viewpoints.

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Could Gender-Blind Casting Limit Epistemic Injustice?

Photograph of Edwin Austin Abbey's painting of a scene from Shakespeare's King Lear

Following on the heels of her 2018 Tony award for her role in the revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, Glenda Jackson is set to reprise her portrayal of the title role in King Lear when it comes to Broadway next season. Lear’s extreme emotional range has led many to consider the role to be one of Shakespeare’s most difficult characters to portray, but Jackson’s embodiment of the mad king in Deborah Warner’s 2016 production at London’s Old Vic was hailed by audiences and critics alike as an artistic and cultural success. Undoubtedly, Jackson’s talent will once again have an opportunity to shine in New York, but this example of gender-blind casting (Jackson did not play “Queen” Lear) offers an interesting suggestion for addressing a problem within the world of entertainment — one that Miranda Fricker called “hermeneutical marginalization.”

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Fricker outlined various ways that an individual might be wronged when they face a disadvantage to accessing or sharing knowledge that others can access freely. Some kinds of epistemic injustice are preceded by what Fricker called hermeneutical marginalization, which are particularly evident in the case of marginalized groups, whose reports of mistreatment, for example, might be ignored or minimized by audiences with greater social power. This concept, as explained by Dr. Emily McWilliams on the Examining Ethics podcast, is what happens “when members of non-dominant groups don’t get to fully participate in the process of meaning-making as we develop our shared pool of concepts through which we communicate.”

Many examples of attempts towards this sort of marginalization can be found in wide-spread responses to recent productions of shows like Hamilton, comic books like Thor and Spider-Man, and movies like Star Wars, Ocean’s Eight and the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters. When John Boyega was named as a primary cast member of the then-unreleased Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens in 2015, white supremacists called for a boycott of the franchise on the grounds that it should be “kept white.” Donald Glover endured similarly racist criticisms after he was proposed as a possible choice to take over the role of Spider-Man in 2012, as has the cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning Broadway show Hamilton for its re-envisioning of the American founders. When Marvel Comics recast the character of Jane Foster as the new Thor in 2014, detractors criticized the move as “politically correct bullsh**,” a complaint also suffered by the rebooted Oceans Eight and Ghostbusters projects. The upcoming season of the BBC’s Doctor Who that will premiere later this year with Jodie Whittaker at the helm of the T.A.R.D.I.S. faced the same criticism. In particular, the 2016 Ghostbusters film withstood an organized campaign of sexist attacks that was specifically designed to damage the movie’s profitability, even before the film was actually released. In each case, the attempt to remove these criticized women and people of color from the meaning-making process of big-budget storytelling means that they have been likewise victimized by Fricker’s hermeneutical marginalization.

And while endeavors like the Time’s Up campaign and the #MeToo movement have offered opportunities to spread awareness and aid to victims of such marginalization, it seems unlikely that gender-bending reboots hold much promise for changing the landscape of American culture — in fact, as Alexandra Petri has argued, they may actually contribute to the problem of “the male experience being taken as a proxy for the human experience.” Instead of intentional gender-bending, perhaps Glenda Jackson’s gender-blind casting may offer an opportunity to provoke a more widespread “mooreeffoc” moment in the minds of an audience.

Coined by Charles Dickens as reported in his biography by G.K. Chesterton, “mooreeffoc” refers to the sign on the windowed door of a coffee room, read backwards from the inside, to indicate the sudden re-appreciation of something previously taken for granted. Much like how someone might at first be confused, then suddenly pleased to realize that they now understand something obvious in a new light (as when realizing that you can, in fact, read an at-first-confusing sign), the mooreeffoc moment comes uncontrollably when one recovers a “freshness of vision” (to quote J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of the effect) about something previously considered trite.

This is what is needed for representation in Hollywood and beyond: not simply more diverse roles and casts (although that is certainly crucial), but the proper appreciation of those casts on the part of the public at large. Though Fricker promoted a “virtue of hermeneutical justice” wherein sensitivity to “some sort of gap in the collective hermeneutical resources” might function to offset or even prevent the harms done by hermeneutical injustices like marginalization, gender-bending casting decisions do not seem to serve such a purpose. Unfortunately, dominant groups — members of which would do well to reconsider their marginalizing attitudes and actions – will likely continue to raise questions (however unfounded) of political intentions and suspicious concerns over subversive messaging surrounding these roles. Indeed, gender-bending productions may currently be too charged to promote reflective considerations that could precipitate a mooreeffoc.

Yet gender-blind casting might bypass such accusations entirely with its firm foundation on simple actorial merit. Although many may not realize it, gender or race-blind casting has led to some of the more memorable roles in cinematic history, such as Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Red in The Shawshank Redemption and Sigourney Weaver’s depiction of Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise. Certainly, if diverse representation is to truly become more common in Western entertainment, then even resistant audiences must come to have a freshness of vision about the possibilities for the depiction of fictional characters (and, by extension, individuals in general). Particularly in light of research that indicates the empathy-promoting power of literature and immersive storytelling, proving to suspicious members of dominant social groups that members of marginalized groups perform perfectly well in the same roles might offer the very wedge needed to provoke a mooreeffoc moment. If gender-blind-casting could bring about this effect even if only for a time — therefore offering an alternative pathway to promote a more equitable entertainment industry — then it seems like it would be worth considering more frequently.

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Trusting Women and Epistemic Justice

An anonymous woman holding up a sign that says #MeToo

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.

Over the past three months, public figures have been exposed as serial sexual harassers and perpetrators of sexual assault. Survivors of harassment and assault have raised new awareness of toxic masculinity and its effects in a short period of time.

However, as time goes on, supporters of the movement have been voicing rising concerns that something is bound to go awry. There is an undercurrent of worry that an untrustworthy individual will make an errant claim and thereby provide fodder for skeptics and bring the momentum of the movement to a halt. In response to this, it may seem like more vetting or investigation of the claims is the way forward. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be unfortunate to erode trust and belief in women’s stories in hopes of keeping the very momentum in service of hearing women’s voices?

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Who Should Decide Charlie Gard’s Fate?

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.

Charlie Gard is an 11-month-old boy suffering from an inherited and terminal mitochondrial disease. He cannot move his arms and legs or breathe unaided. At the time of writing, Charlie was still in intensive care at a UK hospital. Charlie’s parents decided that Charlie should be brought to the United States to receive an experimental treatment that may help alleviate his condition. However, the doctors at the UK hospital decided that the experimental treatment would not likely improve Charlie’s quality of life. Since the parents and the doctors disagreed on what would be in Charlie’s best interests, the courts got involved.  The UK legal system has so far ruled that receiving the experimental treatment would not be in Charlie’s best interest, and Charlie should be removed from life-sustaining treatment to receive palliative care; the legal process is still in process concerning Charlie’s ultimate fate.

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Searching for Truth in the Gaslight

Last week, I saw a group of people cross the street to avoid a guy wearing a Trump t-shirt.  On Facebook several days ago, my friend shared some pictures of a big pile of pink hats made by her knitting circle.  Her aunt, also a crafty type, asked her what they were.  When my friend replied that they were “pussy” hats for the Women’s March in L.A., her aunt replied, “Geez.  Sorry I asked.”  

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