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Is Violent Protest Ever Justified?

photograph of rioters hidden in smoke

Given a minute or two, I suspect most could recount instances of the news reporting on riots and widescale violent protests. Indeed, in the past few years, the frequency of such events seems to have increased. Think of the outrage (both immediate and continued) after George Floyd’s or Breonna Taylor’s murders by police, or the riots in France over the shooting of Nahel M., also by the police. In 2019, during the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Hongkongers protested violently against the mainland’s increasingly oppressive control. And who could forget the 2021 January 6th insurrection, where supporters of Donald Trump, spurred on by the former president himself, invaded the U.S. Capitol Building, resulting in the deaths of at least seven people. No matter where one turns, violence, rather than discourse, is increasingly the avenue through which we reconcile our disagreements and address profound injustices (be those actual or imagined).

This is not to say that it is actually the case that we’re protesting and rioting more. Simply that the news and other media appear to feature such events more often than they once had.

Violence, however, is typically seen as antithetical to the liberal democratic process so often associated with developed nations. In such nation-states, we’re not meant to solve our problems with force and intimidation but with words and impassioned speeches. If one wants to change the political system or draw attention to a systematic injustice, we’re not meant to smash up shops and set fire to cars but call upon our elected officials to enact changes or go to the media so they can spotlight wrongdoing. As Mónica Soares and others argue, violent protest simply does not have a place in the democratic process. But is this right? Are we always wrong to act violently against the state?

Well, a violence-free political system certainly sounds appealing. After all, at the heart of liberal democracy is not only the recognition that we will disagree with each other, but that we should. Through careful, structured, rigorous debate and discussion, we are meant to exorcise our demons so that we might better understand the issues at play and, crucially, what actions individuals, organizations, and society must take to address problems. You see this when elected officials argue in their respective chambers, be that the U.K.’s House of Commons, the U.S. Senate floor, or Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies. When people disagree, discussion and reason – not violence – are meant to provide an avenue to insight and compromise. In short, we should resolve our conflicts in the marketplace of ideas and not in the brutish state of nature.

And in a perfect world, this would be the case; political violence would be unheard of because it would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and regardless of where one resides, political coercion and injustice are always on the cards.

Even in countries which claim to be paragons of liberal and democratic principles, wrongs occur. And not just any injustice but those committed by state actors acting on behalf of the state against citizens and non-citizens alike. From police shootings to financial mismanagement, and draconian laws limiting free speech to surveillance initiatives, the state is always trying to increase its powers, often in the language of protecting its citizens and their interests.

So, what are we to do when the state, with all its power and legitimacy, oversteps the mark? What should you do as a citizen of your nation when those in power refuse to listen to what you have to say or act against your interests? What happens when the state excludes you from the marketplace of ideas?

According to James Greenwood-Reeves, in his recent book Justifying Violent Protest, one answer – which can be rational and grounded in moral principles – is violent protest. It is not that such actions are antithetical to the liberal democratic project but are, under certain circumstances, entirely justified and even necessary. They are examples of extraordinary course corrections in the face of equally remarkable events.

States as they exist today are not eternal or innocuous things that just are. They have come into being off the back and forth between enemies and allies over multiple centuries. Most importantly, though, they require your obedience. Each state constrains the actions of those who reside within it. Typically, we see this as a good thing as other people’s actions are equally constrained, and these constraints allow you to live together. Without them, everyone would be free to do whatever they willed, and this would cause problems because people’s desires would conflict. So, the state needs you to play by its rules, but for this to be successful, it requires you to want to do so. Its coercive effect needs to be seen as justified in the very eyes of those it coerces. If it fails to do this, disobedience emerges, and this can be anything from minor infractions to violent revolution. As Greenwood-Reeves writes:

Poor moral arguments for obedience entail greater moral reason for disobedience. Violent protest can act, like any other form of protest, as democratic dialogue, addressing these perceived legitimacy deficits and presenting a form of moral argument – even when the use of violence seems spontaneous or opportunistic.

Sometimes we see, on the news, the overthrow of oppressive regimes in far-off places, and, for the most part, we consider this a good thing. When tyrants are expelled from the halls of power by those over whom they exercised their terrible control, we cheer for those who establish a better community for themselves and their fellow citizens. But, such revolutions, by their very nature, are violent. Illegitimate political systems and nefarious state actors never relinquish their power freely; it is always pried from their hands. Yet, the fact that such revolutions involve, to one degree or another, a level of violence doesn’t cause us to balk instantly. Instead, we acknowledge that violence can be a legitimate political tool when the state becomes illegitimate and can no longer justifiably demand obedience from its citizens.

How we draw this line between legitimate and illegitimate states is, however, difficult to agree on (and not something I could hope to tackle here). Nevertheless, one need not identify the precise line to be drawn to acknowledge that some distinction must exist. What is even more important to remember is that the downward spiral towards state overreach is always present. Regardless of how restrained a government might be or how morally just a state might act, the allure of increased control or illegitimate action is ever-present. When political systems start towards a path of control, regardless of how justified it may seem, violent protest can become a justified response.

Discourse and discussion should always be the first port of call when we disagree with each other and, crucially, with the state’s actions. Violence is not, and should not be, the first tool one reaches for when they disagree with the society in which they live. But this does not mean that violence is never the right course of action. When the state can no longer expect your obedience because its actions, philosophies, and laws contradict the moral foundations to which it lays claim, when it claims to be protecting freedoms while simultaneously eroding them to secure its powers, individual actors can be justified in transitioning from peaceful to violent protest.

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Protest & Paint: What’s Wrong with Targeting Art?

photograph of van Gogh's Sunflowers

On Friday, October 14th, members of the activist group Just Stop Oil gained international attention by throwing cans of tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The two women who threw the cans were arrested and charged with criminal damage. London’s National Gallery, the home of the painting, stated that the painting was undamaged. This incident is one of numerous protests by the group, including vandalizing a luxury department store, disrupting sporting events and blocking traffic, sometimes by gluing themselves to roads and others by climbing on bridges. Targeting Sunflowers appears to have inspired copycat protests; on Sunday, October 23rd two protestors associated with the organization Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a German climate activist group, threw mashed potatoes on Monet’s Les Meules (Haystacks). This painting was also behind glass and undamaged.

These incidents have drawn backlash. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, referred to blocking traffic and slowing emergency vehicles as “completely indefensible,” calling for new legislation to counter the protests. Op-eds have called into question the means of targeting artwork, declaring that it is unlikely to drum up support. Others have argued against the mission of Just Stop Oil altogether, claiming that increased energy prices from ending oil production will simply harm the low income individuals while also criticizing the means of protest. Some on social media have adopted the conspiratorial view that Just Stop Oil is actually funded by oil interests in order to turn the public against climate activists.

However, there seems to be an unexamined assumption built into some of these criticisms.

Namely, I am interested in exploring why one would think that protests which target art would fail to garner support. This critique is often presented baldly. So, my goal is to consider some assertions one might make in claiming that protests which target art are ineffective and misdirected.

Perhaps some find fault with these protests because they are illegal. These protests are, after all, a form of vandalism. Yet this reasoning is specious for at least two reasons. First, legal and moral judgments are distinct. Few think that burning witches at the stake was moral, despite being the result of a legal process. Second, this analysis would result in a general prohibition on civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, helpfully analyzed by Giles Howdle here, is a form of protest that involves breaking laws one perceives to be unjust, and accepting the legal consequences that follow. This tactic was commonly deployed in universally approved movements, such as the U.S. Civil Rights movement and the Indian independence movement. This suggests that illegality is not, by itself, a way to demonstrate that a protest is immoral.

Another way one might object to these methods of protest is through an appeal to the harm principle. This principle states that acts are immoral if they produce harm. However, the claim needs to be further specified.

Some permissible forms of protests like boycotts may actually intend harm, although the picture is somewhat complicated.

Nonetheless, a protest’s causing harm does not seem like a sufficient reason for condemnation. Much more compelling is the claim that innocents ought not be harmed.

But first we need to identify these innocents. Perhaps one candidate is the museums themselves. Although the paintings were unharmed, there will be some costs to repair or replace their frames. Further, additional security may be needed, incurring costs to prevent incidents in the future. However, there are two issues with grounding the objection in harm to the museums.

First, museums do not seem to be the kind of entity whose interests count morally. Second, it is possible that these protests could benefit the museums in the long run.

Perhaps now more people will visit art galleries, hoping to see works before they suffer damage or to witness the next incident. So, until we have some idea of the long-term consequences, we cannot be sure that they harm the museum.

Perhaps the victims are instead the museum guests. After all, they bought tickets to see works of art. Unfortunately, their ability to do so was hampered by the actions of the protestors. Entire sections of the museum were closed following the protests. Still, these “harms” alone do not seem sufficient to show that the protests are wrong. Protests we consider justified often inflict this sort of collateral damage. Suppose, for instance, a group protested an unjust war at a local park, and this protest forced a family to cancel their annual reunion. Although regrettable, this by itself does not seem to make the protest immoral. Perhaps something like the doctrine of double effect holds here – so long as innocents are not the direct target, third parties may be forcibly and permissibly inconvenienced by protests.

One might argue that those who had their sensibilities offended by the actions of the protestors were harmed – the harm being psychological or emotional rather than physical. What would be offensive about these protests?

Well, the protestors engaged in what we might call profane acts. By profane, I mean actions that did not demonstrate the proper sort of respect or reverence towards a deserving object. The idea here being that great works of art may deserve our respect.

So, the act of throwing food on these works, even if aimed at contributing to a greater cause, demonstrates improper disrespect towards the art itself. But note, again, that the works targeted by the protestors in this particular case were not harmed. Instead, the moral fault – if there is one – must reside in what the acts demonstrated, not their results.

Why would art deserve respect? A likely reason is that they have significant aesthetic value. L.W. Sumner describes aesthetically valuable things as those “which we find in some respect appealing or attractive or admirable.”  The aesthetic value may come both from their physical appearance, as well as their significance in the history of art. So perhaps many found these protests shocking or offensive because to throw food on these artworks – even if they are protected – is to behave in a way that is unbecoming of their value.

Yet this may be precisely what the protests are trading on.

If climate change is indeed an existential threat, with consequences that threaten human civilization, many, many valuable things will be lost if we do not act soon. These losses would certainly include at least some priceless works of art. As a result, the protestors may be making a kind of trade-off.

They are willing to engage in profane behavior in hopes that it will help preserve value in the long run – not just works of art, but the many human and non-human lives that will be lost with the worst consequences of climate change.

Certainly, these protests targeting art have indeed been shocking. But before condemning them we must take a step back and reflect on the nature of the values at stake. Do works of art like Sunflowers and Haystacks have value such that we can never engage in behavior which disrespects that value? In other words, do they pose constraints on our behavior, such that certain acts are off-limits no matter how dire the circumstances? If not, then we ought to ask ourselves when we can transgress these values. Without proper assessment, we cannot be certain whether the protestors erred in selecting their target, or whether the error was made by those who offhandedly dismiss these protests.

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Fascism, Book Banning, and Non-Violent Direct Action

photograph of book burning in flames

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.

Throughout the summer, armed Idaho citizens showed up at library board meetings at a small library in Bonners Ferry to demand that a list of 400 books be taken off of the shelves. The books in question were not, in fact, books that this particular library carried. In response to the ongoing threats against the library, its insurance company declined to continue to cover them, citing increased risk of violence or harm that might take place in the building. The director of the library, Kimber Glidden, resigned her position in response to the situation, citing personal threats and angry armed protestors showing up at her private home demanding that she remove the “pornography” from the shelves of her library.

This behavior is far from limited to the state of Idaho. In Oklahoma, Summer Boismier, an English teacher at Norman High School was put on leave because she told her students about UnBanned — a program out of the Brooklyn Country Library which allows people from anywhere in the country to access e-book versions of books that have been banned. The program was designed to fight back against censorship and to advocate for the “rights of teens nationwide to read what they like, discover themselves, and form their own opinions.” Boismier was put on leave after a parent protested that she had violated state law HB1775 which, among other things, prohibits the teaching of books or other material that might make one race feel that they are worse than another race. Despite the egalitarian sounding language, the legislation was passed in part to defend a conception of a mythic past and to prevent students from reading about the ways in which the United States’ history of racism continues to have significant consequences to this day. Boismier resigned in protest.

Many states have passed laws banning books with certain content, and that content often involves race, feminism, sexual orientation, and gender identity. And prosecutors in states like Wyoming have considered bringing criminal charges against librarians who continue to carry books that their legislatures have outlawed.

Laws like these capitalize on in-group/out-group dynamics and xenophobia, often putting marginalized groups at further risk of violence, anxiety, depression, and suicide.

In heated board meetings across the country, there appear to be at least two sides to this issue. First, there are the parents and community members who are opposed to censorship or who believe that noise over “pornographic” literature targeting children in libraries is tilting at windmills; in other words, the content the protestors are concerned about simply doesn’t exist. On the other side of the debate, there are parents who are concerned that their children are being exposed to material that is developmentally inappropriate and might actually significantly harm them.

Granting that some of these books contain material that genuinely concerns parents, it simply doesn’t follow that the material to which they object really is bad for the children involved.

The fact that a person is a parent does not make that person an expert on what is best for developing minds and parents do not own the minds of their children.

For instance, one of the most commonly challenged books in the country is The Hate U Give, which is, in part, a book about a teenage girl’s response to the racially motivated killing of her friend by a police officer. Some want this book banned because they don’t want their children internalizing anti-police sentiment. However, reading this kind of a book might increase a child’s critical thinking skills when it comes to how they perceive authority, while also contributing to compassion for historically marginalized groups.

Consider also perhaps the most controversial books — books that have some sexual content.

These books may not be appropriate for children under a certain age, but reading stories in which teenagers are going through common teenage struggles and experiences has the potential to help young readers understand that their thoughts and experiences are totally normal and even healthy.

Parents who want this content banned might be wrong about what is best for their children. Some of these parents might instead be trying to control their children. In any case, the fact that some parents don’t want their children to have access to a particular book does not mean that all young people should be prohibited from reading the books in question. Some parents don’t believe in censorship and trust their children to be discerning and reflective when they read.

That said, the apparent two-sidedness of this debate may well be illusory. After all, there is a simple way to determine whether the library carries books with the kind of content that parents are concerned about — simply check the database. The librarians in question claim that the books about which these parents are complaining are not books that the library carries. What’s more, these “debates” – though sometimes well-intentioned – are more troubling than they may initially appear. More and more people across the country appear to be succumbing to the kind of conspiratorial thinking that tills fertile ground for fascism. These are trends that are reminiscent of moral panics over comic books in the ’50s and ’60s and video games in the ’80s and ’90s.

Perhaps the most pressing question confronting our culture today is not whether libraries should continue to carry pornographic or racist materials (since they don’t) but, instead, what we should do about the looming threat of fascism.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about her concern that fascist demagogues, who behave as if facts themselves are up for debate, destroy the social fabric of reason on which we all rely. This creates communities of “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.” Novelists have explored these themes countless times, and the restriction of reading material is a common theme in dystopian novels. In particular, readers see these themes explored in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaid’s Tale. In 1984, Orwell describes a “Ministry of Truth” that is responsible for changing history books so that they say all and only what the authoritarian regime wants them to say. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradberry describes an authoritarian regime that disallows reading altogether. In The Handmaid’s Tale, reading is permitted, but only by the powerful, and in this case the only powerful community members are men.

All of these dystopian tales emphasize the importance of language, writing, reading, and freedom of expression both for healthy societies and for healthy individuals.

Ironically, all three of these books are frequently found on banned or challenged books lists.

Rising aggression on the part of those who call for the banning of books has motivated some to respond in purposeful but peaceful ways. In Idaho, for instance, a small group of a couple of dozen concerned citizens – composed of both liberals and conservatives – met in a grove of apple trees to hold a read-in in support of public libraries and against censorship.

These approaches respond to violence with non-violence, an activist approach favored by Martin Luther King Jr. That said, King was also explicit about the fact that the movement he facilitated was a movement of non-violent direct action, which meant more than simply showing up and being peaceful. The strategies King employed involved disrupting society, but non-violently. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, involved refusing to contribute to the economy of the city by paying for bus fare until it gave up its policy of forcing Black riders to give up their seats to white passengers and to sit at the back of the bus. The non-violent protests in Birmingham in 1963 were intended to affect the profits of merchants in the area so that there would be palpable motivation to end segregation. Non-violent direct action was never intended to be “polite” in the sense that it didn’t provide reasons for frustration. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King says

My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.

So, while there is certainly nothing wrong with reading a book under an apple tree, if people want to roll back the wave of censorship and anti-intellectualism – both trends that are part and parcel with fascism – action that is more than “polite” but less than violent may be warranted.

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Avoiding Complicity & the NFL: Can Piracy Be Moral?

photograph of NFL logo on TV screen

On Thursday, August 18th, the NFL announced that DeShaun Watson, quarterback of the Cleveland Browns, will be suspended for the first 11 games of the upcoming season. In addition, he will be fined $5 million dollars and must enter counseling. The suspension follows an at least 25 women credibly accusing Watson of sexual assault, leading to two grand jury cases in Texas, as well as 24 civil lawsuits.

Watson has repeatedly denied these allegations, stating in a press conference after his suspension was announced that although he believes he did nothing wrong, he is sorry to “everyone that was affected about the situation. There was a lot of people that was triggered.” Both grand juries declined to indict Watson, and at the time of writing all but one civil case have been settled.

As per the collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA, the NFL Commissioner has sole authority to determine punishment. After Commissioner Roger Goodell publicly stated that the league would pursue a full season suspension and appointed former New Jersey attorney general Peter C. Harvey to hear the appeal. Yet the league, the NFLPA, and Watson’s legal team agreed on this punishment prior to Harvey hearing the appeal.

Setting this particular punishment seems cynical at best. The first game Watson will be eligible to play sees the Houston Texans, Watson’s former team, host Cleveland. This game will likely be promoted as “must-see-TV.”

Further, the NFL previously offered Watson a 12-game suspension and ten million dollar fine, which his camp rejected. Despite having all the bargaining power, the NFL apparently decided it was appropriate to reduce the punishment they initially proposed. Perhaps they sought to avoid a court case which could have drawn further attention to numerous sexual misconduct allegations against team owners.

In response to what they perceive as the NFL’s failure of moral decency, many fans are left unsure of what to do. Some Browns fans have abandoned their fandom. However, since the league is under fire, this may affect fans of any team – admittedly, supporting the NFL through my lifelong Buffalo Bills fandom feels like a source of shame.

Some fans are trying to carve out a space which lets them watch games while avoiding complicity with wrongdoing. Many highly upvoted posts in a Reddit thread discussing the suspension call for, and celebrate, pirating NFL games.

By pirating (and piracy), I mean viewing games over the internet through unlicensed means.

What does piracy accomplish? The NFL gets billions a year in revenue from TV networks. The networks are willing to pay billions because the NFL dominates ratings – in 2021, regular season games averaged over 17 million viewers, NFL games made up the entirety of the top 16 most viewed programs that year, 48 of the top 50, and 91 of the top 100. However, because pirates do not contribute to these ratings – unlicensed viewers are not counted – it’s thought that they do not help the NFL profit.

A formal version of the argument implied by these posters might look like the following. Call it the argument for piracy:

1. The NFL is morally bad.
2. One should not be complicit with morally bad organizations.
3. Pirating NFL games does not financially support the NFL.
4. Financial support is a form of complicity.
// It is not immoral to pirate NFL games.

Proponents of this argument claim that they must avoid helping the NFL profit and will pirate games to fulfill this duty. Call them “principled pirates.” The behavior of principled pirates is somewhat similar to the behavior of people engaged in boycotts – which I have previously analyzed. However, there is an important difference. Unlike the boycotter, the principled pirate still consumes the products of the organization she is condemning. And therefore the two behaviors, and their morality, are distinct.

Before considering whether the argument for piracy succeeds, we should first briefly consider the argument against piracy. Piracy is illegal, which does not immediately imply immorality. Yet piracy is commonly viewed as theft, which is usually immoral (for discussion see Beatrice Harvey’s “Can Shoplifting Be Activism“). This is because the thief takes away something that others deserve, namely, their property. Suppose you stole the cash out of my wallet. I (hopefully) earned that money through my labor or just transactions, and as a result deserve to own it. Thus, your theft violates the moral principle of desert – you take something that I deserve, despite not deserving it yourself.

The argument for piracy undercuts this analysis in two directions. First, pirates do not take something. In the case of pirating sports broadcasts, they merely access something without permission.

So piracy might be more akin to sneaking into an empty movie screening than stealing cash – the theater still has the reel, and no one’s ability to watch the movie is impeded.

Second, the argument for piracy raises questions regarding desert. The NFL, as the Watson case suggests, seems willing to engage in immoral behavior for the sake of profit. So, the money they earn is not justly deserved according to the principled pirate. Thus, we should avoid contributing to the NFL’s profits and instead ensure our money goes toward more scrupulous organizations.

Ultimately, the argument for piracy, if correct, only justifies a particular kind of fandom. Specifically, one that does not contribute financially to the NFL – no attending live games, no watching legal broadcasts of games, and no purchasing officially licensed team apparel. Further, one should avoid buying products from the NFL’s sponsors. But given their sheer number, this is a difficult task.

Yet the argument for piracy faces even greater troubles. Closely considering line 4 – that financial support is a form of complicity – makes this apparent. We might call financial support “material complicity.” This occurs when one materially contributes to a cause, action or organization. If you, say, buy a jersey, a certain amount of that money goes to the NFL. Quantifying the effect of viewership is more complicated, but theoretically operates in a similar way.

There are other forms of complicity. Suppose that I pirate a game. The next day at work, I overhear some co-workers discussing the game and join in the conversation.

By doing so, I send a message to others: despite the league’s faults, their content is worth consuming and discussing with others. In this way, I am promoting their product and contributing to their success.

Call this “social complicity.”

The argument from piracy outright ignores social complicity. Even illegal viewership, despite not benefiting the NFL directly, still promotes their interests in the long run – unless one watches the game and turns it off, never to think about it again, even piracy helps keep the sport front and center in the minds of others. And it is this primacy that makes the NFL perhaps the largest cultural juggernaut in the U.S.

Further, one might question the integrity of the principled pirate. On one hand, the principled pirate points to some moral ideal and condemns those who violate it. Simultaneously, the principled pirate is refusing to take on any burdens to promote that good with her own behavior, aside from the effort of finding streams. What she claims to value, and what her behavior indicates that she values, are at odds.

So, what motivates the argument for piracy – the moral failings of organizations like the NFL – ultimately cause the argument to fail.

Principled pirates demonstrate a lack of integrity at best and are complicit in wrongdoing at worst. If watching legally is immoral, then watching in any capacity seems wrong.

Though perhaps there is some merit to the argument for piracy. One may instead view it as a matter of harm reduction. Principled pirates are not moral saints. But complicity comes in degrees; surely the person who is both materially and socially complicit is doing something worse than someone who is merely socially complicit.

Of course, the principled pirates could do less harm overall by not watching. However, they would likely turn towards consuming other content in place of NFL games. As media ownership becomes increasingly consolidated, it is more and more difficult to find content that is not linked to some morally troubling corporate behavior. Thus, it becomes harder to avoid complicity in wrongdoing via one’s media habits; the only way to have wholly clean hands may be to stop watching, listening, and reading altogether.

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The Freedom Convoy and the Ethics of Civil Disobedience

photograph of Freedom Convoy truck blockade

Stealing money seems wrong. Speeding in a car seems wrong. Even lying on your tax return seems wrong. But is it always wrong to break the law?

Activists for women’s suffrage illegally disrupted Parliament, broke windows, and slashed tires. Gandhi led tens of thousands to the Arabian Sea to illegally gather salt in protest of the heavy tax levied on salt by British law. Rosa Parks illegally sat in the section of the bus reserved for whites under segregation. Edward Snowden illegally handed thousands of classified documents to journalists, revealing the massive surveillance program the United States government was operating. In recent days, almost 2,000 Russians have been arrested for illegally assembling to protest the war in Ukraine.

These are all examples of civil disobedience — breaking the law to protest perceived injustice. And I suspect the chances are high that you think at least some of them were justified, moral acts.

Now that it is coming to a close, it’s a good time to ask: was the “Freedom Convoy” that grabbed headlines for so many weeks another example of civil disobedience? Or was it something else?

The philosopher John Rawls thought that civil disobedience was a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act that was contrary to the law, aimed at bringing about a change in law, or fixing an existing injustice. There’s a lot in that characterization.

What did he mean that it is “public”? Civil disobedience is, fundamentally, an act of communication, “an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction.” The Freedom Convoy protesters were certainly seeking to communicate to the public and those in power that there is an injustice that needs to be rectified. The movement was ideologically diverse and perhaps unsavory in parts, but its core message was protesting vaccine mandates and vaccine passports for truckers crossing the U.S. border. The perspective of the protesters was that these laws were unjust — that the government had overreached and infringed on Canadians’ rightful liberties. They were trying to bring the attention of the public and pressure politicians to change the law. I’m not going to try to figure out if the protesters were right or wrong about these laws being unjust. Whatever the case, it seems clear that their protest was a public act. It also seems clear that it was aimed at bringing attention to a perceived breach of justice, and bringing about a change in the law to rectify the perceived injustice.

Rawls also claimed that civil disobedience is non-violent. This distinguishes it from more extreme forms of political action such as militant action and terrorism. The reason civil disobedience ought to be non-violent, Rawls thought, is connected to its function as an act of public communication. If violence occurs, it is likely to distract from the intended message and discredit the movement.

These ideas are echoes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s moving “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which the civil rights leader responds to the condemnation of his non-violent but illegal marches against racism and segregation. It is clear that King, like Rawls, sees non-violence as vital to civil disobedience’s power to rectify injustice. The civil rights protestors had workshops on non-violence, and asked themselves, before marching “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” Only those who answered affirmatively were permitted to march.

Finally, Rawls thought civil disobedience was contrary to the law, but still “in fidelity” to the law, still conscientious. This might sound paradoxical, and it’s a tension MLK Jr. confronted. He wrote,

Isn’t negotiation a better path? [Civil disobedience] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.

Those who commit civil disobedience intentionally break the law, but they do so purely to draw attention to the cause of pursuing justice. They peacefully accept being arrested and enduring whatever legal punishments they receive. This demonstration of respect for the legal system is also crucial to the communicative function of civil disobedience. The protestors, in order to change it, must show that they accept the existence of the legal and political system. They want to improve it, not to overthrow it. For this reason, Howard Zinn suggests that “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; It is absolutely essential to it.”

Once again, the Freedom Convoy seems to have largely demonstrated fidelity to the law, even while acting contrary to the law. While illegally blocking the bridge linking the U.S. and Canada, at least 100 Freedom Convoy protestors were peacefully arrested without resistance.

All in all, the Freedom Convoy does qualify as civil disobedience, at least according to Rawls’ characterization. But not all civil disobedience is morally acceptable. So the next question to ask is this: was the civil disobedience of the Freedom Convoy moral?

Once again, we can get some help with this question from Rawls. He provides three criteria that need to be met for civil disobedience to be moral.

The first is that it is sincere. Those who are breaking the law must truly believe that the policies or laws they are seeking to change are unjust. They cannot be using the cause as an excuse to break the law, or the cause as a cudgel to beat their political opponents. It’s much harder to say whether this standard was met by the Freedom Convoy as a whole. Many protestors appear to have been sincere, while others arguably used the movement as a partisan opportunity to push conspiracy theories or put political pressure on the politicians they already opposed.

The next standard that Rawls claims needs to be met for civil disobedience to be moral is that the challenge must be well-founded. The injustice that is being protested must be a genuine, serious breach of justice, of security, social welfare, rights, democracy, and so on. It must be a cause worth breaking the law for. Were the vaccine mandates and passports a breach of basic rights or a sensible health measure? This is a hard question, and a lot of ink has already been spilled (or keyboards hammered) answering it. I am sure you have your own views.

Rawls’ final criterion that must be met for civil disobedience to be moral is that it must have good enough consequences. It cannot, for example, be justified to commit murder in an attempt to condemn or change overly harsh legal penalties for murder. There must be a good balance between the benefit of rectifying injustice and any harm generated by the law being broken in protest. The disruption to ordinary citizens’ lives in Ottawa was fairly profound, and this can only be justified if the protest achieves something even more valuable than that which is destroyed.

This last criterion means that, in many cases, legal forms of protest should be favored over civil disobedience, as the former tends to generate smaller costs for both the protestors and society at large. Even so, civil disobedience can still be justified as a last resort. MLK Jr. found it important that his own civil disobedience was the last resort. “It is unfortunate that [illegal] demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham,” he wrote, “but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure led the Negro community with no alternative.”

Was the Freedom Convoy’s law-breaking a last resort? It’s a difficult question. There had been rising dissent against the coronavirus restrictions since the first lockdown of 2020 but few reductions in restrictions, which might suggest to some that the legal avenues for change had been exhausted and failed. But to others, this only shows that these legal avenues had never been fully explored and that the Freedom Convoy caused needless disruption and suffering and was never the last resort.

If you are left feeling frustrated that philosophy refuses to deliver any clear answers, I acknowledge the point. But philosophy can at least give us the tools to think about things more clearly; Rawls’s framework for evaluating civil disobedience may not be able to tell us if the Freedom Convoy was right or moral, but it does at least help us to focus on the right questions in trying to find an answer.

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On Booster Shot Boycotts and Participatory Democracy

photograph of lone wooden figurine holding sign

Recently, Daniel Burkett argued here at The Prindle Post that many people in the United States have a good reason to conscientiously abstain from receiving a booster-dose of the COVID-19 vaccine until others around the world have had a fair chance to get their initial shots. As Burkett explains, as is often the case with limited resources, the Global North has received a disproportionately high amount of the various vaccines recently developed to combat the global pandemic; for multiple reasons, ranging from duties of international care to utilitarian calculations of good-maximization to pragmatic concerns about potential virus mutations, Burkett contends that many of us have positive obligations to forgo our third jab. According to Burkett, “By refraining from taking the COVID-19 booster — at least until those in poorer nations have had the opportunity to receive their initial vaccine — we send a clear message to our governments that we will not partake in ill-gotten gains.”

Certainly, Burkett is right to identify the problem of global vaccine disparity for what it is: an injustice born from centuries of preferential treatment and abuse. In many ways, those of us in rich countries harbor obligations to reconsider how our privileged positions affect the citizens of poorer nations. So, I do not aim to disagree here with what I take Burkett’s main point to be: namely, that the COVID-19 vaccine (along with, to be frank, plenty of other things) should be made more readily available to people living outside the borders of the U.S., U.K., and EU.

I just think that a booster shot boycott is not, on its own, sufficient to provoke such a change.

For example, my current home state of Arkansas made headlines last summer when 80,000 doses of its vaccine stock expired before being administered. Despite the vaccine being readily available for months, Arkansas was evidencing one of the lowest state-wide vaccine rates in the country with just barely over a third of the population counting as “fully vaccinated.” According to CDC data, as of November 23rd, Arkansas (along with nine other states) has still not broken the halfway point to full-vaccination status for its nearly-three-million citizens. Despite pleas from the governor, local doctors, and the families of those affected by the disease, many people in Arkansas have simply refused to take advantage of the opportunity to protect themselves and their community from the novel coronavirus that has shaped so much of the last two years of our lives.

So, let’s imagine that someone in Arkansas grows convinced that the global vaccine supply chain is importantly unjust and therefore elects to forgo their booster shot as a form of protest: how might the state’s governor interpret such a choice? Even if large numbers of people join together and do this, without some clear kind of messaging or explanation defending their rationale for the boycott, it seems likely that the governor and other officials will simply believe that low booster-shot rates are additional symptoms of the already-clear problem of vaccine hesitancy in general — not that anyone is, say, protesting Moderna’s business practices. And I think similar interpretations would hold around the country, given the wide-ranging difficulties we’ve seen promoting vaccine uptake over the last few months.

That is to say, in order for a booster shot boycott to be effective at actually helping people in other countries receive the vaccine, it not only needs to be sufficiently large enough so as to attract the attention necessary to provoke action, but it needs to be clearly articulated in terms that will be relevant to the policy-makers who hold the power to affect the desired changes. At present, one key problem for global vaccine distribution involves the legal protections for pharmaceutical intellectual property; without considerable coordinated effort, it’s not clear how anyone’s individual choice to abstain from a third shot will make a difference on whether or not Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson choose to give up potential corporate profits for the sake of global well-being (or, conversely, for governments to force them to do so).

In short, in order for boycotts to be effective, they must operate within a robust sense of community engagement akin to how philosopher John Dewey understood participatory democracy to function in general. According to Dewey, democracies are not simply governments structured via the institution of citizens’ periodic voting, but manifest via the regular interaction of well-informed people sharing ideas, confronting problems, and encouraging each other to work together to develop solutions; as he says in his 1916 book Democracy and Education, “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” Without explicitly communicating the motivations for the boycott — perhaps by organizing loudly and publicly around the kinds of institutional challenges regarding booster shot limitations levied by WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — it’s unlikely that the potential boycott could substantively contribute to its intentions being actualized precisely because the other agents in our democracy would fail to realize the “mode of living” out of which the action stems.

And this is all bracketing the important question about the long-term efficacy of “full vaccination” status without a later booster: particularly with the still-live threat of breakthrough infections and high rates of unvaccinated individuals in local communities, the wisdom of a booster shot boycott should also be measured against its potential contribution to already-concerning winter forecasts.

In any case, while political activity can take many forms, misinterpretations of one’s political choices is always a risk that political agents face — preparing for and mitigating such possibilities is an important part of political organization. Without doing that kind of collective work, we wouldn’t be “protesting global injustice” by individually boycotting our booster shots; in fact, it’s not clear that we’d be communicating anything at all.

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The Ethics of Protest Trolling

image of repeating error windows

There is a new Trump-helmed social media site being developed, and it’s been getting a lot of attention from the media. Called “Truth Social,” the site and associated app initially went up for only a few hours before it was taken offline due to trolling. Turns out, the site’s security was not exactly top-of-the-line: users were able to claim handles that you think would have been reserved for others – including “donaldjtrump” and “mikepence” – and then used their new accounts to post a variety of images that few people would want to be associated with their name.

This isn’t the first time a far-right social media site has been targeted by internet pranksters. Upon its release, GETTR, a Twitter clone founded by one of Trump’s former spokespersons, was flooded with hentai and other forms of cartoon pornography. While a defining feature of far-right social media thus far has been a fervor for “free speech” and a rejection of “cancel culture,” it is clear that such sites do not want this particular kind of content clogging up their feeds.

Those familiar with the internet will recognize posting irrelevant, gross, and generally not-suitable-for-work images on sites in this manner as acts of trolling. So, here’s a question: is it morally permissible to troll?

The question quickly becomes complicated when we realize that “trolling” is not a well-defined act, and encompasses potentially many different forms of behavior. There has been some philosophical work on the topic: for example, in the excellently titled “I Wrote this Paper for the Lulz: The Ethics of Internet Trolling,” philosopher Ralph DiFranco distinguishes 5 different forms of trolling.

There’s malicious trolling, which is intended to specifically harm a target, often through the use of offensive images or slurs. There’s also jocular trolling, actions that are not done out of any intention to harm, but rather to poke fun at someone in a typically lighthearted manner. While malicious trolling seems to be generally morally problematic, jocular trolling can certainly also risk crossing a moral line (e.g., when “it’s just a prank, bro!” videos go wrong).

There’s also state-sponsored trolling, which was a familiar point of discussion during the 2016 U.S. elections, wherein companies in Russia were accused of creating fake profiles and posts in order to support Trump’s campaign; concern trolling, wherein someone feigns sympathy in an attempt to elicit a genuine response, which they are then ridiculed for; and subcultural trolling, wherein someone again pretends to be authentically engaged, this time in a discussion or issue in order elicit genuine engagement by the target. Again, it’s easy to see how many of these kinds of acts can be morally troubling: intentional interference with elections, and feigning sincerity to provoke someone else generally seem like the kind of behaviors that one ought not perform.

What about the kinds of acts we’re seeing being performed on Truth Social, and that we’ve seen on other far-right social media apps like GETTR? They seem to be a form of trolling, but do they fall into any of the above categories? And what should we think about their moral status?

As we saw above, trolling captures a wide variety of phenomena, and not all of them have been fully articulated. I think that the kind of trolling I’m focusing on here – i.e., that which is involved in snatching up high-profile usernames and clogging up feeds with irrelevant images – doesn’t neatly fit into any of the above categories. Instead, let’s call it something else: protest trolling.

Protest trolling has a lot of the hallmarks of other forms of trolling – it often involves acts that are meant to distract a particular target or targets, and involves what the troll finds funny (e.g., inappropriate pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog). Unlike other forms of trolling, however, it is not necessarily done in “good fun,” nor is it necessarily meant to be malicious. Instead, it’s meant to express one’s principled disagreement with a target, be it an individual, group, or platform.

Compare, for example, a protest of a new university policy that involves a student sit-in. A group of students will coordinate their efforts to disrupt the activities of those in charge, an act that expresses their disagreement with the institution, governance, and/or authority figure. The act itself is intentionally disruptive, but is not itself motivated by malice: they are not acting in this way because they want others to be harmed, even though some harm may come about as a result.

While the analogy to the case of online trolling is imperfect, there are, I think, some important similarities between a student sit-in and the flooding of right-wing social media with irrelevant content. Both are primarily meant to disrupt, without specifically intending harm, and both are directed towards a perceived threat to one’s core values. For instance, we have seen how right-wing media has perpetrated violence, both in terms of violent acts and towards members of marginalized groups. One might thereby be concerned that a whole social network dedicated to the expression of such views could result in similar harms, and is thus worth protesting.

Of course, in the case of online trolling there may be other intentions at play: for example, the choice of material that’s been used to disrupt these services is clearly meant to shock, gross-out, and potentially even offend its core users. Furthermore, not every such action will have principled intentions: some will simply want to jump on the bandwagon because it seems fun, as opposed to actually expressing a principled disagreement.

There are, then, many tangled issues surrounding the intentions and execution of different forms of protest trolling. However, just as many cases of real-life protesting are disruptive without being unethical, so, too, may cases of protest trolling be potentially morally unproblematic.

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Can We Heckle Unvaccinated Athletes?

photograph of Bryson DeChambeau at event with crowd in background

A lot of the pleasure I take in watching sports comes not only from seeing the teams and people I like succeed, but also from seeing those I dislike fail. For instance, I will gladly watch the Blue Jays players hit an impressive string of dingers, but will equally enjoy seeing Ben Roethlisberger get sacked. Being a sports fan means feeling both pride and schadenfreude, and it comes with the territory of being a professional athlete that some people are going to love you, and some just aren’t.

While there are a lot of reasons one might have for disliking an athlete, the pandemic has brought about a new one: being unvaccinated. There have been a number of professional athletes who have come out as having not yet been vaccinated, for whatever reason. In particular, Bryson DeChambeau, an American professional golfer, stirred up controversy recently when he was unable to participate in the 2021 Olympics due to testing positive for COVID-19, and then did not get vaccinated when he returned. He raised the ire of many golf fans even more when he said that he did not regret failing to get vaccinated, stating that he thought that since he was “young and healthy” that he didn’t need it, and that he was waiting for the vaccine to become “really mainstream.”

The result was a serious increase in heckling during his most recent tour, which resulted in an altercation with a fan during which DeChambeau sought the assistance of the police (despite the incident only involving name-calling). Some reporting on the issue have referred to the incident and others like it as “bullying.”

Others, however, have taken the opposite stance. For instance, sports commentator Drew Magary has called for increased booing of unvaccinated athletes, and singles out additional players like NFL stars Sam Darnold, Adam Thielen, and MLB star Jason Heyward, among others. “Has coddling them worked?” asks Magary. “No. And do you know why? Because these athletes SUCK. They don’t want more information. They have it. Everyone does.”

So, what’s the right thing to do in this situation? As we saw above, certainly some amount of heckling of your least favorite athlete is okay: while I would never openly insult someone on the street, the context of being a fan is such that if I got the chance to attend a Pittsburgh Steelers game I would without hesitation tell Ben Roethlisberger that he’s the worst and not feel bad about it in the least. Clearly there is a limit to sports fandom: you can’t throw stuff or kick your least favorite player as they walk past you, and it would probably be too much to shout a string of obscenities in the vicinity of young and impressionable fans. So where’s the line? And has it moved at all when it comes to heckling on the basis of being unvaccinated?

On the one hand, there is a concern that heckling players for failing to be vaccinated goes too far, in that it attacks someone’s personal convictions. For instance, ESPN notes how some of DeChambeau’s fellow golfers have been sympathetic, feeling that it’s unfair for fans to heckle someone based off a personal choice. It does seem that it might be violating some norm of sports fandom to attack someone’s personal beliefs: yelling at someone that they’re washed up is within the realm of sports, but maybe it shouldn’t extend outside of that realm. If the heckling is not only personal but also incessant, then we can see how someone might interpret it as a kind of bullying.

On the other hand, one might think that unvaccinated professional athletes deserve some degree of derision, not only because they are putting their teammates and opponents – with whom, in the case of NFL players, they are very much in close personal contact – at risk, but also because as professional athletes they are, to some extent, role models, and thus face additional obligations to set a good example for their fans. They also do not seem to have any kind of excuse: on the assumption that they do not have legitimate medical reason not to get vaccinated, they have access to information about the safety of the vaccine, as well as ready access to the vaccine itself. Perhaps, then, heckling could help encourage them to change their mind.

But wait, isn’t it just mean to heckle someone excessively, regardless of the reason? If it makes someone feel bad, isn’t that sufficient reason not to do it?

Maybe not. For instance, consider Magary’s justification for increasing heckling:

“So boo them. Call them names. Get personal from the bleachers. Hold up a giant copy of your vaccination card to taunt them with. Let them understand that there are earned consequences for being so negligent. For endangering everyone around you and then having the naked gall to act like it’s some sacred private decision you just made.”

While Magary thus conceives of additional heckling as a kind of deserved punishment, perhaps we could think about it in a slightly different way: heckling unvaccinated athletes is not a mere expression of disliking someone because they play for a rival team, but as a kind of protest. As we saw above, there do seem to be legitimate reasons to be displeased with both the unvaccinated athletes themselves as well as the professional leagues that allow them to continue to play – i.e., that they are endangering their teammates and setting a bad example. Given that there’s more at stake than just the outcome of a golf tournament (or a football or baseball game) it may very well be warranted to make your opposition to them known.

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Immoral Emotions, Intentionality, and Insurrection

photograph of Capitol mob being tear gassed outside

Psychologists believe that emotions — those physical reactions and expressive behaviors that accompany feelings like fear, disgust, and joy — are, in and of themselves, neither moral nor immoral, and neither ethical nor unethical. Rather, we assess the behaviors motivated by, or following from, emotions as being either healthy or unhealthy for the individual. Emotions in this sense serve as coping mechanisms (or ego defenses), and are identified as being positive or negative. When these behaviors are deemed negative, they result in unhealthy outcomes for the person.

One major research question that psychologists often face when studying emotional development asks which comes first: thinking or feeling? Does our physiological activity precede conscious awareness, or is it the other way around? The current research tends to suggest the latter; research supports the idea that cognition precedes emotion. The Schacter Two-Factor theory of emotion, states that an emotion, say anger, is recognized as the emotion of anger only after we cognitively interpret it within the immediate environment, and then cognitively label it as anger. (I might label the emotion as anger, or rage or annoyance, depending on the circumstance of the immediate environment since all three of these emotions are related. Rage, for example, is an intensification of anger (the basic emotion), while annoyance is anger, but to a much lesser degree.) While anger might lead one to act immorally, the emotion itself is not considered good or bad.

But this view that cognition precedes emotion might seem to put pressure on the idea we should regard emotions as being neither moral or immoral. For example, philosopher Martha Nussbaum believes that if emotions do have a cognitive component, then they must be taken into account when evaluating ethical judgments (intentions) made that precede behaviors. Jonathan Haidt goes even further by labeling emotions as either moral or immoral depending on how prosocial the resulting behaviors are, and if the emotion was elicited by the concern for others or strictly out of self-interest. If emotions are labeled as such, then the most recent events at the Capitol can be interpreted in this context.

On January 6, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building, ransacking offices of lawmakers, hunting for specific government officials, seeking to cause them harm and do physical destruction to the building itself. They were seeking to stop the official count of the Electoral College that would certify the election of a new POTUS, even if it meant that the Vice President and Speaker of the House had to be executed. It’s easy to point to this aggressive behavior as being the result of political polarization, the in-group vs out-group phenomenon, and the effects of social media on collectives. Each of these explanations refers to group behavior, collections of people who must be brought to justice. But, what role did individuals play in the fomenting of such behaviors?

Often, when individuals moralize and then find others of kindred attitudes, a moral convergence is formed. Furthermore, it is known that when the kindling of moralization and moral convergence is present, aggressive behaviors often follow, but there must be a spark to ignite the kindling. It is important to note, however, that the opposite occurs equally as often with non-violent protest groups. There the kindling is present, but there is no violent behavior by the group or any individual within the group; the igniting spark is not present in the non-violent protest group. What makes up this so-called spark? Perhaps the answer can be found by a closer inspection of immoral emotions.

Prior to the attack on the Capitol, the mob met at the Ellipse in front of the White House where the group heard emotionally charged speeches from POTUS and his attorney Rudy Giuliani for over an hour. The speeches conveyed to the group a message that the election had been rigged and stolen from their candidate, and by extension, from them. An emotion of contempt for those responsible for this supposed theft could quite reasonably have been cognitively identified by the persons making up the mob. The speech-makers used terms like “cheaters” and “liars” to generate just such an emotional response.

Anger is elicited when one sees that something is in the way of completing desired goals. If the anger is based in self-interest, then the pro-sociality of the action tendency is low, and the emotion, by definition, is immoral. The speeches were angry ones in the sense that they conveyed the idea that the perceived common goal of re-electing the sitting president was being thwarted by cheating and lying enemies of democracy. The mob was in an environment where it was easy for the individual members to experience anger and contempt as the speeches progressed. In addition, they were under the impression, according to the speech given by the sitting president, that the theft was being carried out just up the street. Anger plus anticipation most often results in aggressive behavior. The kindling was laid, and the spark that lit it came in the form of these emotion-laden speeches filled with words indicative of the emotions of anger, fear, and contempt. Giuliani’s cry for “trial by combat” coupled with these words from their president suggesting that after the count had been interrupted that they would be “the happiest people,” and that what was required was a bit of courage “because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” could very well have lit the already-present kindling. If the group saw this as a moral issue (“save your country!”), a right issue, and an issue worth fighting for, then the mob was primed to commit these violent acts. As Milgram and others showed us long ago, humans are not above inflicting harm on others as long as an authority figure encourages them to do so.

But, do the emotions experienced by the Capitol mob need to be labeled as immoral in order to explain their egregious behavior? Do we need to follow Haidt and Nussbaum in condemning the emotion and not just the resulting act? Emotions serve as coping strategies or ego defense mechanisms that motivate behavioral responses. The coping strategies used to deal with their conflicting emotions, and the ego defensive behaviors exhibited by the mob can be explained more parsimoniously by the cognitive theory of emotion: there is an emotion present, anger, (but what to do about it?), there is behavior, attack (but whom?), the function of the attack is to destruct, and the ego defense is displacement (attacking something weaker than the perpetrator) in this case, a few unarmed lawmakers. Emotions were no doubt manipulated and contributed to the mayhem, but they also aren’t the primary suspect.

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The Ethics of Escapism (Pt. 3): Searching for the Personal when Everything Is Political

image of Lebron James with "More than an Athlete" slogan

It is beyond understatement to say that anyone could be feeling overwhelmed right now. For over four months, there have been daily protests against the brazenly public murder of Black people by police officers. If the police violence and terrorizing weren’t enough, the often hateful and willfully ignorant responses to calls for change to the system are emotionally draining, constant throughout the year, and can come from surprising places within anyone’s personal circle.

We can add to this ongoing discord the divisive attitudes concerning the pandemic and a rapidly approaching national election — fewer than 40 days away! — where the stakes are presented as the highest in history. The sheer amount of noteworthy news flooding in every day makes it difficult to balance the need to act and stay informed against restorative personal commitments that are needed to reproduce this labor on a daily basis.

In recent days and weeks, there have been loud calls to have a sharper dividing line between what can or should be “political” and what shouldn’t be. There are loud public complaints that the arenas that appear to allow for the sort of personal restoration, now drudge up the very issues that many seek to escape.

At the NFL season opener, fans in Missouri booed the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans when they stood arm-in-arm on the field in support of racial unity. Angry responses to demonstrations calling attention to the unjust treatment of Black people in the US and in sports have a long history, and the response to the unity demonstration is reminiscent of the hateful response to Colin Kaepernick’s protest during the national anthem four years ago.

Also this year, Naomi Osaka won the US Open’s singles tournament while wearing masks with the names of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Philando Castile and Tamir Rice, all victims of racial injustice. British Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton wore a shirt calling for the arrest of Breonna Taylor’s murderers.

The world of sports is not the only arena where politics is “encroaching.” Media such as movies and TV are including more and more topical content and referential issues. For instance, Marvel series have made more and more direct references to the realm of government and the dynamics played out in our administration. Zac Stanton at Politico claims that escapist content is impossible at this point and recommends “leaning in.” In 2018 at the New Republic, Jeet Heer suggested that avoiding the content of the news would require the drastic measure of avoiding media completely.

The desire to cling to apolitical media and discourse is nothing new, and complaints about political encroachment similarly did not begin with the exhaustion of 2020. But it is difficult to develop an understanding of “political” that can cleanly divide entertainment that has a political message from that which doesn’t.

One sense of the “political” is the realm that you can disagree with friends but remain friends; perhaps in this sense the political denotes the particulars of policies and government, while the fundamentals of friendship can be preserved. For instance, in this sense, the “political” could address specifics of how the economy should work: should we have a progressive or flat tax? What should the brackets be? How should our tax dollars be allocated to different programs? Many can imagine disagreeing with friends over this question, especially given how much we can understand where the values of our friends originate and which issues resonate deeply and differently with each of our loved ones.

Another sense of the political is more robust. “Political” can delineate the role that power has in our society, and the importance that the relationships of power be put to use appropriately. The government wields a huge amount of power in a variety of ways, legislating support for citizens in less fortunate circumstances, articulating parameters of punishments for its citizens, and the standards for individuals to dwell in its boundaries and become citizens. The government further protects and ensures that people are respected and treated with the dignity that morality demands in domains that the public deems its jurisdiction.

When “political” denotes the power dynamics and moral reality of persons in our society, we could understand this domain as one regarding justice. On this understanding, the relevant topics would go beyond the policies that are invoked in the more minimalist sense above – where the political represents the sphere in which two people could agree on “the fundamentals” of morality, yet disagree about politics. Here, the topics and issues of politics or justice, include how people are rightfully treated, how government plays a role in how we should relate to each other in a society, who should be granted rights, how punishments should be meted out, etc.

There is media and entertainment whose content explicitly addresses the issues that are uncontroversially “political.” News is the clearest example, but films and TV shows that include political figures, revolutions, and topics related to our current situations of racist violence, corrupt leaders, and widespread illness also might qualify as “political” media at this time.

However, it is not just the explicit content of the entertainment that we consume that qualifies as political. Our interactions with one another every day reflect a particular power dynamic and moral reality. When the media we consume encourages the dehumanization of marginalized groups of people in our society, it buttresses our current power structures and propagates the unjust relationships in our society, where not everyone is equal and not everyone gets to be respected, safe, and viewed as worthy of the same rights.

The jokes in our movies and TV series whose premises are that fat people are lazy, gorge themselves on food, or are punishments to pursue for romantic pursuits at bars are a matter of politics, propagate an unjust society, or the representation of trans people as individuals “dressing up” as a different gender, or tricking people into dating them, or completely outside of mainstream society, or the overrepresentation of straight white people as the default, and non-white and queer people as struggling, or victims, or uneducated, are all matters of justice, whose continued use helps to prop up an unjust society. Media is saturated with depictions of the moral relationship between the various members of our society, and this composite picture creates and reflects the reality we see.

When people boo at a show of solidarity and inclusion at a sporting event, they are mistakenly categorizing “sports” as entertainment free from the political domain. Setting aside the billions of subsidies the NFL gets from tax-payers, the national anthem sung at every game, the fact that politicians gain political points by throwing first pitches and are seen as more “American” for luxuriating in their overpriced viewing seats, all suggest that sports are political. Players stood for racial unity, faced booing from the fans, and then performed for an unsupportive and aggressive audience in a sport that is notorious for putting its players’ health and safety at risk, which is a matter of justice.

This group of professionals face a history of racism in their organization, working for team owners who are almost exclusively white (and many of whom have deep ties to Trump), and lacking the support from their privileged white teammates during fights for racial justice. Further, 70% of NFL fans are white, and the racist attacks on shows of support for racial equality as well as the brazen display of disrespect for athletes reveals deeper issues in the fandom of the NFL.

On neither understanding of “political” can sports fans genuinely claim political encroachment.

On the minimalist understanding of “political,” where we are restricted from considering questions of human rights and respect, the recognition of racial violence and bigotry falls outside the scope, and there are not grounds for complaint on the basis of political encroachment. Anything that could be considered “political” on this account has always been there, friends simply don’t talk about it.

If, however, we have the more robust understanding of “political,” then all media and entertainment are matters of justice and a question of our obligations regarding the the rights and dignity of ourselves and others. The oppression and violence towards members of our society is relevant to justice and politics, but it is not distinct to particular arenas, or content explicitly about the news. Politics in this sense is a part of all domains of life, and friendships, entertainment, etc. are part of politics. Relationships with those close to us would not be very healthy or successful if they included deep disagreements over who was worthy of rights and dignity. Entertainment is politically laden and potentially unjust when it exploits the labor of marginalized groups, as many sports do. Similarly, when pernicious stereotypes saturate visual media and reinforce dehumanization and bigotry, this is a political issue when politics is understood as justice.

Whether we understand politics in the minimal sense or as the domain of justice, there is no clear boundary cordoning it off from between the various aspects of our lives. Entertainment, as tied up in our experience of the human condition, has always been (and will always be) “political.”

 

Part I – “The Ethics of Escapism” by Marko Mavrovich

Part II – “Two Kinds of Escape” by A.G. Holdier

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The Ethics of Escapism (Pt. 2): Two Kinds of Escape

photograph of business man with his head buried in the sand

Shortly before Labor Day this year, polling data of the American workforce indicated that a majority (58%) of employees are experiencing some form of burnout. Not only was this an increase from the early days of the pandemic (when the number was around 45%), but over a third of respondents directly referenced COVID-19 as a cause of their increased stress. Reports on everyone from “essential” workers, to parents, to healthcare professionals and more indicate that the effects of the coronavirus are not merely limited to physical symptoms. Ironically, while the steps taken to limit COVID-19’s physical reach have been largely effective (when properly practiced), those same steps (in particular, self-imposed isolation) may be simultaneously contributing to a burgeoning mental health crisis, particularly in light of additional social pressures like widespread financial ruin, state-sanctioned racial injustices, and a vitriolic election season.

Indeed, 2020 has not been an easy year.

Nearly a century ago, J.R.R. Tolkien — creator of Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins, and the whole of Middle-Earth — explained how fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings not only offer an “outrageous” form of “Escape” from the difficulties people encounter in the lives, but that this Escape can be “as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic.” In his essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien asks, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” It is true that Escape from reality can sometimes be irresponsible and even immoral (for more on this, see Marko Mavrovic’s recent article), but Tolkien reminds us to avoid confusing “the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter” — the problems of the latter need not apply to the former.

There are at least two ways we can distinguish between Tolkien’s two kinds of Escape: epistemically (rooted in what someone seeks to escape) and morally (concerning one’s motivations for escaping anything at all). Consider how a person might respond to the NFL’s decision to highlight a message of social justice during its games this season: if they are displeased with such displays because, as Salena Zito explains, they “are tired of politics infecting everything they do” and “ just want to enjoy a game without being lectured,” then we might describe their escape as a matter of escaping from information, perspectives, and conversations that others take to be salient. Depending on how commonly someone engages in such a practice, this could encourage the crystallization of their own biases into an “epistemic bubble” where they end up never (or only quite rarely) hearing from someone who doesn’t share their opinions. Not only can this prevent people from learning about the world, but the “excessive self-confidence” that epistemic bubbles engender can lead to a prideful ignorance about reality that threatens a person’s epistemic standing on all sorts of issues.

If, however, someone instead wants to avoid “being lectured at” while watching a football game because they wish to escape from the moral imperatives embedded within the critiques of the lecture (or, more accurately, the slogan, symbol, chant, or the like), then this is not simply an epistemic escape from information, but an escape from moral inquiry and confrontation. Failing to care about a potential moral wrong (and seeking to avoid thinking about it) is, in itself, an additional moral wrong (just imagine your response to someone ignoring their neighbor trapped in a house fire because they “just wanted to watch football”). In its worst forms, this is an escape from the responsibility of caring for the experiences, needs, and rights of others, regardless of how inconvenient it might be to care about such things (in the middle of a football game or elsewhere). Nic Bommarito has argued that being a virtuous person simply is a matter of caring about moral goods in a manner that manifests such caring by instantiating it in particular ways; much like the people who passed by the injured Samaritan on the road, escaping from reminders that we should care about others cannot be morally justified simply by selfish desires for entertainment.

Both of these are examples of Tolkien’s Flight of the Deserter: someone who has a responsibility to learn about, participate in, and defend the members of their society is choosing to escape — both epistemically and morally — from reminders of the duties incumbent upon their roles as social agents. But this is different from the Escape of the Prisoner who simply desires a temporary reprieve to unwind after a stressful day. In the absence of immediately pressing issues (like, say, your neighbor trapped in a house fire), it seems perfectly acceptable to take some time to relax, de-stress, and recharge your emotional reserves. Indeed, this seems like the essence of “self-care.”

For example, the early weeks of the first anti-pandemic lockdowns happened to coincide with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a Nintendo game where players calmly build and tend a small island filled with cartoon animals. For a variety of reasons, quarantined players latched on to the peaceful video game, finding in it a cathartic opportunity to simply relax and relieve the stress mounting from the outside world; months later, the popularity (and profitability) of Animal Crossing has yet to wane. You can imagine the surprise, then, when this gamified Escape of the Prisoner was invaded by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, who elected to offer virtual signs to players wanting to adorn their island in support of the Democratic candidate for president. Although it would seem an exaggeration to call this a “lecture,” insofar as someone complains about “just wanting to play a game” without being confronted with political ads, there seems to be nothing morally wrong with criticizing (or electing to avoid) Biden’s campaign tactic — probably because there is no inherent obligation to care about a politician’s attempt to get elected (in the same way that there is a duty to care for fellow creatures in need).

So, when thinking about the ethics of escape, it is important to distinguish what kind of escape we mean. Attempts to escape from our proper moral obligations (a Flight of the Deserter) will often amount to ignorant or shameful abdications of our moral responsibilities to care for each other. On the other hand, attempts to (temporarily) escape from the often-difficult burdens we bear, both by doing our duties in public society and simply by quarantining ourselves at home, will amount to taking care of the needs of our own finitude — Tolkien’s Escape of the Prisoner.

In short, just as we should care about others, we should also care for ourselves.

 

Part III – “Searching for the Personal when Everything Is Political” by Meredith McFadden

Part I – “The Ethics of Escapism” by Marko Mavrovich

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The Ethics of Escapism (Pt. 1)

photograph of Green Bay Packers stadium lightly populated before game

The NFL will imprint “End Racism” and “It takes all of us” in the end zones of stadiums in lieu of team logos. NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell stated that “the NFL stands with the Black community players, clubs and fans confronting systemic racism,” a commendable sentiment. The NFL will also allow coaches and officials to wear patches embroidered with “social justice phrases or names of victims of systemic racism.” Many coaches have signalled their support for the league’s latest policies and its general shift towards allowing sociopolitical issues into the game. Adam Gase and the entire coaching staff of the New York Jets will wear “Black Lives Matter” throughout the 2020 season. Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, used this summer’s protests to speak with his team about social justice while also calling out the league’s lack of diversity. Even Bill Belichick, who is famously averse to “off-field distractions,” has welcomed these social justice conversations into the locker room. The NFL is but one example of the invasion of sociopolitical movements into entertainment.

The politically blank pages of one’s life are disappearing. No longer can one turn on late-night television to escape politics. No longer can one watch post-game interviews without being reminded of the social discord. No longer are Academy Award acceptance speeches devoid of political advocacy. These spaces are politicized. While late-night talk show hosts, athletes, and actors have undoubtedly revealed their politics and championed social values in the past, such revelations were notable because they were atypical. Now, they are the norm. As comedy writer Blayr Austin notes, “There’s never a moment reprieve from the chaos of news.”

Perhaps this transformation of those previously unscathed spaces of entertainment ought to be celebrated. There are at least three reasons to think so. Firstly, the entertainers — athletes, musicians, actors, and business personalities — are members of society, too. It may be unfair to expect them to silo their personal political preferences from their public work so that some of their fans can enjoy an escape from the so-called “chaos of the news.” But while entertainers are not entirely removed from society’s ills, they enjoy a comfortable arm’s length distance from it and the everyday reality of average civilians. Secondly, entertainers may be necessary catalysts for the desired change. But of course, the flipside is also true: entertainers may be necessary catalysts for undesired change (See my piece, “Novak Djokovic and the Expectations for Celebrity Morality”). Thirdly, some may argue that their silence will only serve to perpetuate the social ills debated today — systemic racism and racism injustice come to mind. But using this argument as a reason to compel entertainers to be political would obligate entertainers to “speak out” and raise awareness on a whole host of ills without any sense of how the ills should be prioritized, while also assuming that the classification of some social developments as “ills” is always beyond doubt. Ending racism and sexism are goals we might all agree on, but are inclusion riders equally unobjectionable? This third reason is also problematic because it conflates permissive conditions with obligatory participation. While silence on a social ill may permit the ill to continue unabated by criticism, silence is not an instrument of enacting that ill. In other words, silence is not the act that propagates the ill — even if it permits the ill to occur — which is an important distinction to understand when discerning proper responses to social developments.

But what about the fans who may find this blending of social justice and politics with entertainment suffocating (even if they do are sympathetic to the cause)? Is it wrong for them to feel that way? Is it wrong for a fan to seek a 3-hour reprieve from the omnipresent sociopolitical tumult by watching football? There are at least three reasons to think so.

Firstly, the ability to escape from the omnipresent sociopolitical tumult is not a luxury that every individual enjoys, especially if that tumult intimately affects an individual; therefore, the escapist fan should not want such an escape or, at least, the vehicle of entertainment (e.g. the NFL) should not address his or her escapist desire (e.g. not be reminded of the unjustified police killings and destructive demonstrations while watching the game). Yet the principle that underlies this reason would imply behavioral and attitudinal changes that others would find ridiculous. I should not complain to my landlord about the malfunctioning A/C in my apartment because, after all, some people suffer in far hotter climates without it. I should not want to go to the gym to clear my head because some people do not have access to gyms or other means of clearing their head. These examples are absurd, but so, too, is the argument.

Secondly, the fan should not be critical of the blending of social justice and politics with entertainment suffocating because he or she is not obligated to watch. Social media plays host to some version of the following exchange: “I don’t like how political football/the Tonight Show/the Oscars has gotten!” which is invariably followed by the retort: “Well, you don’t have to watch!” But of course, such a statement does not resolve the conflict. Suppose the conflicted spectator only watches professional football and finds pleasure in the 21 weekends of games from September to February. To tell him or her “You don’t have to watch!” is akin to saying “You don’t have to participate in your favorite hobby/interest/game/mode of necessary relaxation!”

Lastly, the fan should be held to the same standard as the entertainer: to be silent — to escape — only serves to perpetuate the existing ills that have fomented the never-ending barrage of news and the social fractures, therefore it is wrong to seek the reprieve. Do not sports, late-night talk shows, and award shows celebrating cinematic achievement pale in comparison to the problems yet to be resolved in our community? Maybe so. But does this mean that one is wrong to seek a political-free zone of entertainment? If the answer is yes, then it seems we must always be on-watch, always be advocating, always be consuming the news, always be active in resolving all of society’s ills, and always be denying ourselves an escape — however short, however trivial — from our contentious, divisive, and oft-disappointing reality.

 

Part II – “Two Kinds of Escape” by A.G. Holdier

Part III – “Searching for the Personal when Everything Is Political” by Meredith McFadden

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Under Discussion: Right to Riot?

photograph of broken storefront window

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: Law and Order.

The climactic moment of Spike Lee’s seminal 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing,” comes when its protagonist, Mookie, hurls a trash can through the window of a Bed-Stuy pizza parlor owned and operated by Italian Americans, setting off a frenzy of destruction that destroys the restaurant. It’s an action that seems inevitable, given the simmering hostility between the parlor’s owners and certain members of the majority African-American community that the film documents in brilliant and searing detail. Yet the title of the film tells us that what looks inevitable is actually a moral choice; the question we’re left with is whether Mookie did, after all, do the right thing. Is destroying private property a legitimate, or at least excusable, form of political expression?

Joe Biden recently articulated the standard argument for the negative answer to this question, saying that “rioting is not protesting…it’s wrong in every way…it divides instead of unites. [I]t destroys businesses [and] only hurts the working families that serve the community.” An American politician’s hostility to rioting must strike us as at least a little ironic, given that we celebrate political acts of property destruction as part of our national mythos — the Boston Tea Party being perhaps the most prominent example. This example alone also shows that it is a mistake to deny that rioting can be a form of political protest. When people destroy private property in order to express their political views, that is a form of protest. Still, it is a further question whether rioting-as-protest is justified or excused. 

A more sympathetic view of rioting can be found in Martin Luther King Jr.’s now-famous line that “rioting is the voice of the unheard.” There are many ways to interpret King’s remark, but I will try to extract two arguments that might be consistent with it. The first goes like this. To begin with, we cannot reasonably expect any community to live under conditions of oppression without resorting to destructive means as a way of expressing their discontent with the situation. By “oppression” I mean a condition in which agents of government and society commit injustices against a community in a persistent, widespread, and systematic fashion. If we cannot reasonably expect this, then those who do it are blameless, or at least less blameworthy than they would be were they under different conditions. In other words, on this reading King is saying that rioters are excused, or less blameworthy, because of the conditions in which they find themselves. Notice that this argument, if accepted, might have major implications for how the justice system ought to treat rioters. It does not, however, strictly contradict Biden’s claim that rioting is wrong: an excused act is, almost by definition, a wrongful one.

One problem with analogizing rioting to action under duress is that the reason we do not blame people who act under duress is because they are faced with a choice between a wrongful option and an option that isn’t reasonable from the point of view of their own well-being — for example, allowing themselves to die or become seriously injured, or allowing someone they love to suffer the same fate. It’s not clear that not destroying property is unreasonable in this sense for members of oppressed communities: while some members of the community literally face a choice between death or serious injury at the hands of government agents and violent protest, many do not. Furthermore, unlike in cases of duress, the choice of destructive protest does not ensure that the oppression will cease. For these reasons, it is unlikely that a case for mitigated blameworthiness due to duress can be made out for most protestors who are engaged in the destruction of property.

The second argument is more ambitious in that it purports to show that rioting is morally justified. The legal system that protects private property is a part of the same system that oppresses the community. So, to attack private property is to attack that system. Furthermore, as King claims, to attack the system at this point and with these means is the only option available to people living under conditions of oppression. Every person has a moral right to try to alter the oppressive conditions in which they live by morally legitimate means. Finally, if you have a right to do X, and Y is a necessary means to X, you have a right to do Y — Y is a morally legitimate means. Therefore, members of oppressed groups have a right to riot (in order to attack the system).

The weakest link in this argument, I think, is the claim that rioting is a means to attacking the system that oppresses the community. By this logic, attacking any part of the system is a reasonable means to attacking the parts of the system that do the work of oppression. But there are clearly parts of the system that are very far removed from the parts that, for example, oppress communities of color. Would it make sense to burn down National Park Service buildings as a means of relieving their oppression? It seems doubtful. But then it can be argued that attacking others’ private property is like attacking Park Service buildings.

One response to this objection is to claim that attacking private property is a form of political expression aimed at bringing attention to conditions of oppression, rather than a means of directly attacking the system. With that amendment, we enter into the empirical discussion of whether destroying private property is a reasonably adequate means of altering oppressive conditions. Is the kind of consciousness-raising that rioting accomplishes useful, or is it counter-productive? Here is where political scientists may be able to help us, and where philosophers must take a back seat.

We might also question how far the conclusion of the argument gets supporters of rioting. Even if it establishes that members of oppressed groups have a right to riot, having a right to do X does not necessarily make doing X right. What it is for me to have a right to do something is for others to have a duty not to interfere in my doing it, but that does not mean I ought to do it. For example, I may have the moral right to verbally castigate someone who has committed a minor wrong, but it does not necessarily follow that I ought to do that. And here is where Biden’s point about the effects of rioting are relevant. Perhaps members of oppressed groups have a right to riot, but the detrimental effects of rioting — the destruction of community businesses and livelihoods — make it something that no one ought to do. At the end of “Do the Right Thing,” with the pizza parlor in ruins, one cannot help but feel that the neighborhood has suffered a real loss; the loss of the parlor feels like a tragedy. Perhaps, then, we ought to say that Mookie had the right to do what he did, but that what he did was not right.

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The “Wall of Moms” and Manipulating Implicit Bias

photograph of "Wall of Moms" protesting in Portland

Since Officer Chauvin murdered George Floyd, cities across the US and the world have protested the ongoing murder of Black men and women in public and without consequence by the police, and even by neighbors. Protesters have been met with more violence and escalation, by responding police officers, followed by national reserve units, and most recently the deployment of unmarked federal agents to multiple cities.

In the media, the characterization of these protests has been shifting since their onset. Reports of rioting, property damage, and looting contrasted with messages of the priority of the significance of human lives taken by white supremacist violence and the damage to the Black community over time. While some news stories highlighted the rowdiness of protests after dark, in response to police driving vehicles into crowds, tear-gassing groups, and shooting rubber bullets, others focused on the peaceful gatherings with speeches, songs, and non-escalating marches.

On social media, advice regarding how to stay safe in the midst of these large gatherings during COVID and in the face of military escalation proliferated. From wearing masks, to how to contact a lawyer, to what to do if teargassed, messages about how to stand up for Black Lives Matter were readily available. A common thread among these topics of advice was what to do if you are white and out supporting BLM.

The advice for white protesters frequently included the importance of reminding oneself that the protests center on experiences that are not endemic to the white population, but rather the non-white. This means that while numbers speak to support and are important, it is in the supportive rather than directive role that white protesters may be most strong. Further, as a member of the protest that is less susceptible to violence and physical threat, individuals can help others that are more at risk. Videos began to show white protesters putting their bodies between Black speakers, demonstrators, or groups of protesters and police officers in riot gear.

The white ally had a clear space in the media: protector of protesters.

On July 21st, a group of white women joined arms and formed a wall between police in riot gear and protesters in Portland on a late Tuesday night. Calling themselves a “Wall of Moms,” they shouted at the most recent show of militarized force by the police using phrases such as, “You wouldn’t shoot your mother!” They were teargassed and absolutely shocked at such treatment by “their” police.

The white individuals between militarized police and Black protesters, including the Wall of Moms, are using the biases of the police in order to lessen the likelihood that violence will break out, counting on their disinclination to harm white bodies compared to Black bodies. The effectiveness of this strategy relies on the notion that the police behave differently when faced with white members of society than non-white members, and this has been shown over and over again, both in protests and in the data on police brutality.

When faced with armed and yelling white people outside state capitals fighting public health policies, police are quite capable of de-escalation. However, people marching, unarmed, to bring awareness to, and protesting, such pernicious racial injustice that have led to systemic murder prompts such escalation as to draw extreme concern from the UN Human Rights Council. In fact, in many cases BLM protesters had to de-escalate police, rather than the other way around.

The Wall of Moms incorporates a variety of police and societal biases, which they explicitly invoked in their explanations of their strategies. As with all cases of the sort of white support mentioned above, using the privilege of one’s skin to attempt to change police’s behavior is manipulating the perceived biases of the police. The Wall of Moms evokes race, class, and gender in order to be effective.

The middle class white women who conform to the role of “mother” are attempting to draw a contrast between themselves and the protesters behind them. Many used rhetoric involving “protecting the children,” labeling the protesters in Portland as youths in need of mothering. Further, the call to “bring out the moms” itself reflects racial bias, including a de-feminization of Black women and reduction of Black individuals who inhabit the same roles as white people. It  neglects the fact that many Black mothers have played active roles in past BLM movements and been a part of the 2020 protests from the beginning.

The Wall of Moms went a step further than the other white bodies placed between protesters doing the protesting and the violent police. They created their own message, and, in the end, their own 501c3. They co-opted the idea that moms were a new and necessary part of the protests. They reinforced gender norms and the role of “Mother.” A “Wall of Dads” joined them armed with leaf blowers. The sense of white middle-class “normalcy” to play with the police’s preconceptions of people not to harm went beyond working with the underlying biases that make up the potential issues with de-escalation and underscored the roles of race and gender as real divides in our society.

In the case of the Wall of Moms, the privileges that put them in the position to potentially de-escalate the police’s racist violence also manifests the privileges regarding media coverage. The way that the Wall of Moms embraces the traditional picture of what it means to be a “normal” woman in our society plays on gendered biases involved in the hierarchies of privilege, and this in part is what leads to the ease with which they can take over the narrative of the protests in the media. White women occupy roles that call out for the need to be protected, and yet they were harmed here. This narrative takes over the story and eclipses the 125 cases of police violence against protesters before the Wall of Moms ever appeared on the scene.

The next day and into the week, media coverage of their courage, and outrage at their treatment, took over. In a piece by The Washington Post, the courage of the Wall of Moms was lauded in heroic terms:

“In front of the federal courthouse, federal agents in tactical gear used batons to push back the moms in bike helmets. Dozens were tear-gassed. Some were hit with less-lethal bullets fired into the crowd.

Still, they stayed.”

CNN reported the reaction of one participant, in disbelief that the Wall of Moms received the treatment that had been reported for weeks, this time framed in a decidedly positive light:

“The Feds came out of the building, they walked slowly, assembled themselves and started shooting [teargas] I couldn’t believe it was happening. Traumatic doesn’t even begin to describe it… Getting shot and gassed and vomiting all over myself and not being able to see, something clicked in my brain and I was like how could we collectively as mothers let our kids do this? I got home and showered and I told my husband we were going out the next night.”

A “Today” article reporting on events opened with, “The group, which includes hundreds of mothers, has said the protests are peaceful, but the police have been violent.” Such reports highlight the testimony of a group of white women after weeks of similar reporting by Black protesters that had not been compelling enough to quell dismissal or criticism of the protests.

The move from supportive role to main-story is not a novel one for white allies, especially for white women.

If we understand these behaviors in terms of implicit biases, they are relatively difficult to fit into our theoretical frameworks of moral evaluation. The biases include:

  • The police’s racist biases,
  • the “white ally” or savior’s explicit manipulation of the racist biases,
  • the Wall of Moms bringing in the implicit biases of motherhood and traditional gender roles that intersect with the racist stereotypes that don’t fit these roles, and
  • the media/audience biases that allow the story to be one not of the strategic manipulation of biases but rather reifying the roles the Wall of Moms invoke

These implicit biases pose issues for moral responsibility. When individuals endorse their behaviors and the attitudes that result in their behaviors, it is easier to hold them fully accountable for their behaviors and attitudes.

In the case where I think “Rich people are smart” and agree with the view that our society is set up in the structure of a meritocracy, it may be a simple matter to hold me responsible for the behavior that results from this perspective. The associations in our society that cast the behaviors of wealthier people in a more positive light may very well be influencing my belief, but my explicit endorsement plays a role in how we assess my behavior. If, for instance, I negatively judge and avoid individuals that have features I associate with less affluent groups, the fact that I have a belief system I stand behind that informs this behavior suggests that I am knowingly complicit. The harm I may cause to individuals is attributable to me and my beliefs, and therefore morally evaluating my behavior is relatively straightforward.

In contrast, say that while I have internalized the notion that we live in a meritocracy, and therefore rich people have in some way deserved their place in our economic and social system, I don’t actively or consciously endorse the idea that they are, in fact, smarter than those in other economic strata. These notions may come out in my behaviors – judging and avoiding personality characteristics or features associated with the less affluent, voting for policies that punish the poor or support the rich, etc. In this case, I may cause harm, but due to beliefs and attitudes that I do not explicitly endorse. They are attributable to me in a less clear or direct way: they are part of my motivational set, but wouldn’t show up in my explicit deliberation, narrative, or defenses for my behavior. This makes the behavior (and harm) resulting from the implicit biases more difficult to evaluate, and more difficult to alter in the long run.

In ethics, harm-based views have an easier time dealing with the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes, because the important part of our behavior is the result: if you cause harm, that is the focus, and what we should hold you accountable for. Views that focus on intent, or the quality of the will behind the actions, have a more difficult time distinguishing what moral evaluation we should assign behaviors that result from implicit attitudes.

In the case of the police’s racist biases, this leads to systemic murder and brutalization of non-white, especially Black members of our communities. It leads to dramatic differences in responses to groups of people protesting, and a culture of terror inflicted in non-white spaces.

For the “white ally” these biases can be manipulated to produce positive results — avoiding harm and supporting movements by making space for messages and impact to continue forward without the force of the police’s biases to run free. However, the performance can also erode these effects and do harm by perpetuating the “white savior” narrative.

The Wall of Moms echoes this duality. While they might play a supportive role – making space for safe and impactful movements – they might also reinforce the stereotypes and biases they are attempting to play on.

The media, unfortunately, is a reflection and amplification of the societal biases and stereotypes that make it less likely for white people to be subject to violence and extreme violence. Protests for racial justice are more likely to be subject to suspicion and violence than protests in support of white interests. The media picks up on the interests of its average viewer – as the Wall of Moms members put it, “normal,” in both age, class, skin tone, and gender.

A harm-based view can account for both these drawbacks and advantages of the behaviors of white participants in the BLM protests. It can recognize that these behaviors are the topic of so many discussions and come up in such problematic ways. It can direct us in how to refocus and what to refocus on.

When the interaction of so many implicit biases is necessary to make sense of these tactics, evaluating the behavior morally at individual levels defies our models of moral evaluation. The individuals and groups involved in these behaviors would likely deny or fail to endorse the underlying attitudes and bases for their behaviors. The police would deny their behaviors are rooted in a contrasting value of white and non-white lives, and the Wall of Moms likely would deny their reification of the interaction between race and gender roles, and fail to acknowledge their role in taking over the message with their privilege.

In important ways, the biases of both the police and the white allies are reflecting the biases of societal privilege back to each other and to the society. The behavior of the Wall of Moms and the other white actors discussed here wouldn’t make sense as tactics without the racism inherent in our society – either implicitly or explicitly present in police officers or systems of policing put in place by our communities. This makes bias and the systems of privilege that cultivate it the responsibility of the community, and especially those with the privilege, to dismantle.

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Complications in Our Picture of Looting

photograph of boarded up business in downtown LA

Not all opinions are socially acceptable. Oftentimes, there is a range of acceptable opinions and opinions outside that range are not given even the slightest consideration. In May of 2020, a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin murdered an unarmed man named George Floyd through suffocation over the course of eight minutes while several other officers held back the crowds from stopping him. In response, many people have protested, some people have rioted, and a small number of people have looted. Opinions about these actions vary but, in general, we tend to think that nonviolent protests are acceptable while violent riots are not. A few support riots, but almost no one supports looting. However, the morality of looting is not as clear-cut as public opinion might suggest.

“Looting” is distinguished from ordinary theft in a few important ways. First, the word itself has its origin in describing military forces pillaging a conquered area. Thus, looting implies a breakdown of the ordinary social order. Looters, military or otherwise do not much fear prosecution for their actions.

Second, looting is always associated with a context of destruction. Looting involves not only taking property, but also destroying or damaging the business or home where the property is found. As economist Alex Tabarrok argues here, looting may be a worse crime than ordinary theft since “Looters destroy intermediate goods and infrastructure and gain far less than owners lose.”

Third, theft is more or less universally objected to by the members of a community where it takes place while looting can have public support. Thus, looters less frequently hide their identities as compared to thieves. And, looting is often done by groups, pairs, and family units while theft is usually conducted individually. It may be hard to believe that looting would be supported by the community where it takes place, but this instinct toward disbelief can be explained by the flawed assumptions people have about the motivations looters have for their actions.

The conventional view is that looting is universally opportunistic: most people believe that looters see the opportunity presented by the chaos of protests, riots, and the breakdown of law and order and use it to steal things they want for their own gain. A few, more charitable people might say that looters have no ignoble motivation and act according to some instinct that takes over in times of great stress. Almost no one believes that reasonable, well-functioning members of society would engage in violent looting. Nonetheless, these are exactly the sort of people who engage in looting according to the evidence.

L. Quarantelli and Russell R. Dynes were the founders of disaster sociology and wrote on the nature of looting in an article titled “Property Norms and Looting: Their Patterns in Community Crises.” This article was written in 1970 and the authors focused their analysis on the riots and looting that occurred between 1964 and 1968 as part of the Civil Rights Movement. Given the cause of the present riots, this article’s subject, though long past, is analogous enough to the present situation for its findings to stand the test of time.

In contrast to popular belief, they found that those engaged in rioting and looting were not the most disaffected, alienated people. In cases where black people rioted in their communities, up to one fifth of the black population participated, including many employed people with strong social ties. These people did not loot out of economic need and they were not the sort of people one would expect to be overtaken by impulse. In fact, consistent majorities in these communities viewed the riots and looting as a form of protest.

Suffice to say, rioting and looting are not broadly believed to be legitimate forms of protest. People have numerous arguments against these extreme forms of protest. Let’s briefly consider a few of these, one utilitarian, one deontological, one based in virtue ethics, and one based on an appeal to law and order.

People oppose rioting and looting on utilitarian grounds because they believe that these forms of protest cause great harms in the form of destruction of property and loss of life and have no outweighing benefits. This view is especially obvious if you view all rioting and looting as opportunistic, as violence and theft perpetrated by people who want to steal and who enjoy the chaos. However, the foundation of the argument grows shaky if violent protests are capable of affecting large scale social change.

The deontological argument against rioting and looting stems from a belief that in participating in these actions, people fail to uphold their duty to maintain other people’s rights. If people are killed in a riot, those people’s right to life has been violated. Looting violates business owners’ property rights. This argument is only defeated if by rioting and looting people obey some higher duty that they could not obey without violating other people’s rights.

The argument from virtue ethics says that good people don’t riot and loot. People advancing this argument point to preferable protests: the nonviolent protestors today as well as the gold standard, MLK Jr. and those who protested alongside him. These people, like the utilitarians, depend on the idea that looters are inspired to action by selfishness. If rioting and looting serve some higher virtue, then the argument is defeated.

Finally, and perhaps most commonly, people merely appeal to a vague sense that it is wrong to disrupt the social order. These people are opposed to all forms of illegal protest. Even if they claim to agree to the righteousness of the cause of protest, they disagree with the means of protest. The weakness of this appeal is in the righteousness of the social order. It is hard to defend upholding a social order that is deeply unjust; this is, of course, the same argument that MLK Jr. came up against in pursuing his nonviolent, though frequently illegal, protests.

The arguments against rioting and looting might seem overwhelming, but they are not undefeatable. Each depends on some assumptions that are not obviously true. Furthermore, there are some positive arguments that rioting and looting are forgivable, arguments that they are justified, and arguments that they are necessary. By considering these, we may come to a more balanced assessment of the morality of extreme protests.

The easiest argument to make is that looting is, in many cases, forgivable. In making this argument, we don’t have to defend the morality of looting. It is still an important argument to make, though, since many people are advocating extreme violence toward those who are participating in extreme protest. President Trump tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” mirroring former Miami police Chief Walter Headley who used the phrase in 1967. Headley was infamous for what he called a war on “young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. … We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.” Obviously, “hoodlum” here is a dog-whistle for young black people. And, it should be obvious that using lethal force against people who are looting, essentially committing property crimes, is disproportional and unconstitutional, equivalent to executing people without trial for crimes that are never punished with execution.

Looting and rioting may be forgivable if they are prompted by incredible rage at a criminal injustice, such as the murder of George Floyd. Though many regard this rage as being misdirected when it is applied to businesses. We tend to think that a person’s judgment being clouded by emotion is enough to diminish their legal culpability. So-called “crimes of passion” are already punished less severely than premeditated crimes. We can extend this reasoning to think rioters deserve a great deal of forgiveness.

MLK Jr. gave a speech called “The Other America” where he said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Rather than being an action taken out of selfishness, rioting and looting are actions taken as a cry for help, a call for reform, albeit an extremely disorganized sort of call. He went on to ask this sharp rhetorical question: “what is it that America has failed to hear?” And he answered it thus: “It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.” Given the stunning amount of racist police violence that persists to today, it’s clear his words ring just as true in 2020 as they did in 1967. So, if any crimes at all should be forgiven, looting that causes no physical harm to anyone is one of them. We can still hold that looting is a crime, and that it deserves punishment while still maintaining that it is not unforgivable and deserving of execution by cop or soldier.

Arguing that looting and rioting are justified is quite a bit harder, though still very possible. Prominently, The Daily Show host, Trevor Noah, did this very thing in a video he posted in the midst of the protests. Noah justifies the ongoing extreme protests by appealing to social contract theory and turning the question on its ahead. Instead of asking “why do people loot?” he asks “why don’t people loot?” and attempts to give an answer. Hearkening back to seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, he argues that people are only obliged to follow the laws because they have agreed to do so in order to enjoy the benefits of an ordered, just society that cannot exist without laws. But, as Vanity Fair transcribes him saying,

“As with most contracts, the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it. If you think of being a black person in America who is living in Minneapolis or Minnesota or any place where you’re not having a good time, ask yourself this question when you watch those people: what vested interest do they have in maintaining the contract? Why don’t we all loot?”

The greatest benefit people gain from escaping the Hobbesian “state of nature” is protection of their lives and property. As black people are under constant threat of murder by the government (through the police) they cease to have any reason to obey the social contract. It’s all risk, no reward, essentially. Given that, if they can’t escape the risk, they might as well enjoy the reward of the state of nature, getting to take whatever you can by your own power.

More radically, some argue that looting is justified not because it is itself a right action, but because its rightness or wrongness pales in comparison to the institutionalized looting of the poor by the rich. Former senior adviser of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign David Sirota asks why “Working-class people pilfering convenience-store goods is deemed ‘looting,’” while “rich folk and corporations stealing billions of dollars during their class war is considered good and necessary ‘public policy.’” He compares the amount of value transferred unjustly from business owners to working-class people via looting (small) with the amount of value transferred unjustly from working-class people to business owners via the regressive tax cuts of the Trump administration (very large). Perhaps it is wrong to loot, but business owners still end up better off than those who loot their businesses via their “theft” of working-class wealth. Just because that latter wealth transfer occurs through official channels does not make it moral just as the former wealth transfer is not immoral merely because it is illegal.

Some even go so far as to say that rioting and looting are necessary for real social change to occur. Rather than appealing to the moral sensibilities of those in power, these people take a the political realist approach and seek to make the cost of reform less to these people than the cost of continuing the status quo. Self-interestedly, then, the powers that be will influence the political agenda to induce reform. Arguably, rioting and looting works to this end: looking again at the article from E. L. Quarantelli and Russell R. Dynes, we can see extreme protests raged after the assassination of MLK Jr. and less than a week later, major civil rights legislation was passed. Afterward, the frequency of large scale rioting and looting drastically decreased.

On the other hand, rioting and looting can backfire: the powers that be can stop the rioting and looting by enacting reform, but they can also stop it by increasing police repression of protestors and minorities. After the Civil Rights Movement and all the extreme protests that came along with it, there was backlash with the election of Richard Nixon who campaigned on “law and order,” whose administration oversaw the Kent State shooting of thirteen unarmed protestors, killing four, and whose domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman was quoted as saying “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.” This idea is commonly known as “the activist’s dilemma.” The evidence suggests that extreme protest actions can enact social change and diminish public support for a protest’s cause. It is paradoxical, but makes some sense if one thinks of change as being enacted by those in power, whose interests are not identical to the population at large.

Looting and rioting are extreme responses to extreme injustices. The murder of George Floyd is an unacceptable symptom of a policing system that is based on “domination” rather than the consent of the governed. It is unjust that more black people are killed than white people than would be expected given the share of each in the population. More importantly, though, it is unjust that unarmed people are being killed by police in broad daylight without trial. Something needs to be done to rectify these injustices. Ideally, change could be instituted by peacefully persuading people but given how these injustices have persisted despite decades of peaceful persuasion, there is reason to question whether more extreme protest measures are justified. At the very least, those who choose to engage in extreme protests such as by rioting and looting are forgivable. There is good reason to think that extreme protests are even justified. And, it may even be that looting and rioting are necessary for real social change. The activist’s dilemma, however, gives us reason for pause.

Ultimately, protest is a chaotic activity by nature, prompted by the rage that stems from injustice. Rather than focusing our ire on those who react imperfectly to those injustices, we ought to focus on the circumstances that prompt people to act in ways that may make things worse rather than better. No matter how many TVs are stolen, no matter how many windows are broken, it is hard to compare these property losses to the loss of human life that comes from the unjust and racist oppression of the people by the government in a country that prides itself on originating such ideas as “liberty and justice for all.”

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Novak Djokovic and the Expectations of Celebrity

photograph of Djokovic on stage at mic with trophy in front of packed stadium

Novak Djokovic created controversy amidst the coronavirus pandemic. While a vaccine for COVID-19 has yet to be developed, the world No. 1 of men’s tennis expressed resistance to possible compulsory vaccinations for professional tennis players when the tour resumes. “Personally I am opposed to vaccination and I wouldn’t want to be forced by someone to take a vaccine in order to be able to travel,” he said in a live Facebook chat.

Rafael Nadal, the world No. 2, waded into the debate and rebuked Djokovic’s apparent refusal to comply with the potential compulsory vaccination. “If the ATP or the International Tennis Federation obligates us to take the vaccine to play tennis, then we will have to do it,” Nadal said. “It’s about following the rules, nothing more than that.”

Djokovic’s resistance to vaccinations is a manifestation of his both belief in natural healing and prioritization of personal liberty. That he would risk severe penalty or possible cessation of his career, prematurely interrupting one of the greatest runs in the history of men’s tennis—and all of the complimentary millions in prize money and endorsement deals—is telling of how seriously the world No. 1 holds this conviction. That an athlete of such esteem and renown would express this conviction at a turbulent time in the health of the world is nothing short of significant. His public stand against vaccinations for himself represents an ethical dilemma about celebrity morality. This dilemma is reflected in one of his comments: “I have expressed my views because I have the right to and I also feel responsible to highlight certain essential topics that are concerning the tennis world.”

Given his fame and stature, should Djokovic exercise caution in taking moral stands? Does greater fame demand greater responsibility from celebrities? Or should they enjoy the same freedom that normal civilians do to express publicly the views they hold privately?

There are at least three reasons to believe celebrities ought to be constrained by greater responsibility. Firstly, the internet is conducive to a rapid and unfettered spread of information. A comment, phenomenon, or craze can promulgate and take hold of the public psyche before there has been a chance to assess its virtue or utility. Writing for the Journal of Business Ethics, Chong Ju Choi and Ron Berger assert that the internet has allowed the influence of celebrities to extend far beyond their respective industries of work. Now, more than ever, celebrities can be heard and listened to.

Secondly, younger generations in particular are susceptible to the influence of celebrities. Choi and Berger observe that “the younger generation is experiencing a combination of consumer crazes and bandwagon effects.” During a global health emergency, this effect could be rather damaging and dangerous. Many young people were already dismissing the gravity of COVID-19, opting to proceed with their travel plans unabated rather than help to mitigate the virus’s spread. Seeing a world-renown athlete mull over refusing vaccination could help justify their behavior or motivate similar behavior. (However, it does not logically follow from a celebrity’s public expression of a stance that the celebrity’s fans will adopt that stance as their own.)

Relatedly, celebrity morality can confer credibility and cache upon movements that are thought to be dubious. Celebrities have supplanted traditional sources of moral guidance (such as religious figures). Their endorsement is a desirable commodity for any movement. In Novak Djokovic, the anti-vaxx movement has found a spokesperson. Djokovic arguably rivals all celebrity anti-vaxxers and vaccination-skeptics in terms of global fame.

Conversely, there are at least three reasons to believe that celebrities ought not to be constrained by greater responsibility. While the attention of a wide audience and the power of global influence might be a reason to constrain celebrity morality, it is also a reason for precisely the opposite. Those blessed with the megaphone of celebrity can prove to be an effective voice for good. Attention for issues oft-ignored and progress towards a morally righteous end can sometimes only be achieved by the intervention of someone who has many followers. University of Virginia religious studies professor John Portmann argues that celebrities are able to elevate the presence of particular issues, “making ethical and moral debates important” to a public that idolizes famous people.

Among other stars of their time, Sammy Davis, Jr., Nina Simone, and Marlon Brando are credited with increasing the visibility of and spurring on the civil rights movement in the U.S. Ricky Gervais has been lauded for the attention he has brought to animal welfare and his financial support of animal charities. Just recently, former NFL receiver Anquan Boldin commended legendary quarterback Tom Brady for signing his letter asking for the FBI and DoJ to investigate the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, calling the endorsement of such a figure “significant” for the cause of racial equality. The celebrity voice can be the necessary succor that pushes moral goals across the finish line, radically transforming society.

Secondly, if one could develop a comprehensive, incontrovertible, and universalizable standard by which the public moral stances of celebrities could be evaluated and deemed as either morally “Fit” or “Unfit” for public consumption, perhaps then there could be constraints on what positions they take publicly. While that is a ludicrous near-impossibility, backlash against particular stances, such as Djokovic’s, suggest that some critics think there is such a standard. Indeed, celebrity interventions on moral issues tend to draw alarm only if they do not conform with the mainstream, however illusory that may be.

Lastly, fame does not strip celebrities of their membership in society. And as members of society, they ought to enjoy the same freedom to participate in the public debate on moral and ethical issues as those who do not possess their fame.

Since his initial comments, Djokovic has demonstrated an evolution of thought on the matter. In a recent press release, he stated: “I am keeping an open mind, and I’ll continue to research this topic because it is important and it will affect all of us.” This attitude may serve as a useful reminder for the general public, too. The celebrity voice might be simply one thing to consider while researching amidst the cacophony of moral proclamations.

Regardless of the view on expectations for celebrity morality, one thing is true: fame does not endow celebrities with moral authority. Perhaps it is best for the fans to remember that.

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Expert Suspicion: Arendt and the “Public Space”

photograph of Open Ohio protesters

In the opening days of May, health care workers reported nearly 100,000 new cases of COVID-19 in the United States; in that same time, several thousand patients died of the disease. Nevertheless, as of May 4th, at least nine states have begun to loosen restrictions on movement in public spaces placed in response to the coronavirus outbreak, reopening beaches, restaurants, gyms, and other “nonessential” businesses.

As shouted by protestors from Arizona to Wisconsin to the White House, one explanation for rolling back the pandemic response, despite the spread of the pandemic itself showing no signs of slowing, is that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Since March, more than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment and these numbers indicate only a fraction of the economic fallout from the enforced quarantines. Thus far, almost no industry — from entertainment, to higher education, to oil production, and more — has escaped unaffected and, particularly with the globe teetering on the edge of a recession, it is far from clear what sort of long-term consequences of the shutdown lie ahead.

Certainly, with their tendency towards ultra-militarized displays of aggression and their often-explicitly racist messaging,  there is much that is inexcusable about many lockdown protests, but when CNN’s Don Lemon says that people unhappy with the lockdowns just “want a haircut” or “want to go play golf,” he seems to be unfairly painting all complaints about the shutdowns as if they are as ignorant as those clearly silly concerns. A “nonessential” locally-owned art gallery or specialty construction company forced to close to prevent the spread of the disease might, nevertheless, feel terribly “essential” to the people whose livelihoods depend on those businesses being open.

Of course, medical experts agree that easing “social distancing” restrictions at this point is premature and could very well lead to an even more serious spread of the virus. The moral calculation of “millions going bankrupt” against “tens of thousands dying” is not a problem I – or, indeed, anyone – could hope to easily solve. Both of these outcomes are clearly unacceptable and most policymakers around the world seem to be trying to chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis that keeps both threats as low as possible, simultaneously. But conversations about the pandemic seem to typically prioritize only one of these two political concerns (“saving citizens’ livelihoods” vs. “saving citizens’ lives”) at a time.

Much has been said recently (including by me) about “expertise in the time of COVID-19.” Certainly, spreading pseudo- and anti-scientific information is dangerous (particularly during a pandemic) and we should think carefully about how we think about the coronavirus. Trusting experts in matters of public health and safety is a crucial part of living in a large, well-functioning society like ours — pretending otherwise, even for looming existential concerns, is simply irresponsible. But, particularly for people whose exposure to the pandemic has been primarily economic — such as those citizens in less-populated states where the spread of the virus has thankfully been less severe — it can be understandably off-putting to have your most salient personal political concerns belittled (or even morally condemned) for the sake of other political concerns, no matter how objectively important both sets of concerns may be. To denigrate your perspective for the sake of “listening to the experts” (when the perspective of those experts is simply orthogonal to your concerns) might well only serve to provoke a backfire effect that leads primarily to greater levels of frustration at the experts being touted and suspicion of the information they share.

This, I take it, was one thing that the philosopher Hannah Arendt was concerned to avoid by her treatment of politics not simply as a process of governmental operations, but as “the place and activity of shared communication based on the distinct perspectives of equal human beings.” Rather than treat politics or political decision-making as an activity properly performed by specially-trained experts, Arendt argued that wherever people gather together “in the manner of speech and action,” they create a community with power to accomplish their political purposes. In her book, The Human Condition, Arendt explains how the development and preservation of public spaces wherein we can politically engage with each other is both a fundamental element of the human experience and a necessary precondition for civic freedom. Importantly, by “public space” Arendt does not just mean physical locations, but rather the realm of discourse wherein perspectives and concerns can be expressed, challenged, debated, and legitimated. When governments seek to restrict and restrain these sociological structures, they begin to take what she calls a “totalitarian” form, thereby precipitating all manner of further oppressions and human rights abuses (on this, see her The Origins of Totalitarianism).

Just to be clear: I do not mean to suggest that Arendt would necessarily be opposed to a mandated lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (and I certainly do not mean that Dr. Fauci or other healthcare workers are totalitarian oppressors!). Of course, Arendt held no principled animus against experts as such; she simply recognized that their expertise would have to be shared within the public space wherein others would be able to respond. Artificially constraining the operation of that public space — even for demonstrably moral purposes — is a necessarily troublesome notion. And from the perspective of people concerned about the dire economic consequences of the lockdown, forcing a conversational shift to a discussion of mortality rates and other healthcare issues might come off as just such a constraining move.

So, I think that Arendt’s realistic analysis of how our perspectives shape our participation in political structures can help to explain some of the curious disagreements about the response to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the all-too-common tension in conversations about what we should do next. The clash of perspectives over what is “clearly the right thing to do” cannot simply be resolved with reference to a particular statistic (economic or scientific), but requires the sort of free speech and effortful conversation that Arendt considered fundamental to the human condition.

(I also want to note: I sorely wish that Arendt could respond to President Trump’s widely rejected assertion that “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” but that’s a different conversation!)

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Strategic Nonviolence: An Alternative to Moral Pacifism

photograph of protest in front of police station

Protest and civil resistance is quickly becoming one of the defining characteristics of the new century, from the early gains of the Arab Spring, the protest movements throughout Latin America, the Hong Kong democracy movement to Greta Thunberg’s School Strikes for Climate and the Extinction Rebellion movement in response to the climate and ecological emergency.

Philosophers began to theorize about social change in terms of methods of nonviolent social intervention in the Nineteenth Century. Henry David Thoreau, in the essay Civil Disobedience, defends the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which he claims ought to be transgressed. He writes “all men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”

Early social movements, such as the campaign led by Mohandas Gandhi against the British colonial occupiers of India, connected non-violence with pacifism and cemented that as a deontological moral principle. In the early years of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King wrote:

“non-violence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient in the moment,  [but as something] men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim.”

For Gandhi and King the practice of nonviolence is grounded in the timeless and universal values of love, compassion, and cooperation. This view is closely related to the philosophy of pacifism, which holds that all violence is immoral. Pacifism is principled, moral opposition to war, militarism or violence. As such, it arises not out of a discipline or practice, so to speak, but out of a strongly held philosophical and spiritual belief.

Conditional pacifism, which is a version of pacifism with some possibility for compromise, is utilitarian in nature, such that the bad consequences are what make it wrong to resort to war or violence. However, based on utilitarian principles, there could be a situation where violence of some magnitude is morally permissible if it prevents violence of a greater magnitude. That is, according to conditional pacifism, there could be situations where violence is necessary to prevent worse outcomes.

The idea of pacifism, and of seeking non-violent solutions to disputes between and within nations, plays a significant part in international politics, particularly through the work of the United Nations. But there is, within this structure, a recognition that sometimes (in theory at least, though this has been notoriously difficult in practice) a need for ‘humanitarian intervention.’

An anti-pacifist view would not exactly advocate war as a good in itself, but would hold the view that sovereign states have a duty to protect their citizens, and that duty may in some circumstances extend to the waging of just war – and furthermore that in this case, citizens have a duty to carry out certain tasks. The critical, anti-pacifist view holds that pacifists’ refusal to participate in war means that they fail to carry out an important moral obligation, and that the respect for human life that motivates them is an idealistic but counterproductive position.

On the other hand, there is a different alternative to pacifism, which does not sanction violence but does differentiate itself from the pacifist’s principled, moral position. This is known variously as ‘strategic non-violence’ or ‘nonviolent direct action.’

Gene Sharp, theorist and author of seminal works on the dynamics nonviolent conflict, sought to redefine it outside the context of pacifism and outside the sphere of the moral question of violence. Sharp contends that nonviolence can be employed strategically, as something that social movements can choose because it provides an effective avenue for leveraging change. For example, in overcoming a dictatorial or repressive regime, such as the popular uprisings which ended Milošević’s reign in Serbia in 2000, or in effecting social change within a broader social context, such as the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960’s.

Maintaining a strict nonviolent discipline for strategic reasons has, according to Sharp, several important strategic advantages over armed civil resistance, as does using strategic nonviolence as a method of waging conflict rather than as a moral position. Strategic nonviolence is active as a form of conflict, therefore much more likely to be effective in creating or forcing social and political change, and nonviolence maintained as a strict discipline makes a movement vastly more inclusive, allowing for widely participatory campaigns of direct action.

Maintaining nonviolent discipline is necessary against a state that has a well-developed arsenal. The state has a monopoly on violence: a group of citizens taking up arms against a regime is usually vastly outgunned. But, importantly, armed struggle legitimizes the state’s use of force against the citizens.

This is not to say that those using strategic nonviolence will not be harmed. In the conflicts mentioned above, and many more around the world, the state may turn on demonstrators or strikers. This often backfires as it creates negative public response and shows the state’s apparatus to be reacting disproportionately, which can create sympathy for a cause and can sometimes greatly strengthen it, but at a large cost.

Strategic nonviolence is therefore an effective alternative to armed struggle, conceived of as a form of resistance and, perhaps perversely, as an effective form of waging war.

A common feature of pacifism is the belief that winning adversaries over to one’s cause is necessary, effecting a change of heart, and being able to love one’s enemies. Sharp rejects this position, arguing that expecting people to love those who have wronged them or treated them cruelly is not only unreasonable, but unwise as it might lead people to turn towards violence.

Instead, our goals may need to be different. As civil rights leader James Farmer writes: “where we cannot influence the heart of the evildoer we can force an end to the evil practice.”

It is in this sense that strategic nonviolence has an overarching ethic – because King is right that there is ‘a sheer morality in its claim.’ I am not sure Sharp would make the argument this way, but you could say that the ethical rewards are the social and political improvements in principles of justice and freedom won by the more effective strategies of nonviolent resistance; that nonviolence is better, morally, is an effect, not a cause of the principle of nonviolent resistance.

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MAGA, Morality, and the Paradox of Tolerance

photograph of "Coexist" bumper sticker in back window of a BMW

In the last week, three incidents across the country highlight the central tension in the structure of the principle of tolerance. A crucial aspect of liberal society — societies that aspire to allow for a plurality of perspectives on what constitutes a good life — is that these perspectives must respect one another’s right to pursue their different visions of a good life. For a society to permit many valid ways of living, some form of toleration of those different lives must be a basic principle. When one value system considers a good life to include a restriction (such as in diet, type of relationship, clothing, or career options), those who disagree can live without the restriction while still acknowledging the restriction within that group. If another value system prioritizes a certain sort of pursuit (such as ritual, career, relationship goals, etc.), value systems that disagree can passively allow them to get on with their valued pursuit and simply not join in. Liberal societies assume that many different views on such matters are reasonable (and inevitable), and the need for tolerance will naturally arise. However, some particular conflicts between value systems don’t allow for passive acknowledgement and coexistence.

There are two potential reasons for these limitations: first, one could claim from a purportedly objective perspective that a value system was unreasonable and therefore didn’t qualify for respect or tolerance (say, it caused undue harm to its members or was based on certain empirical understanding the consensus rejected). Second, and of particular relevance this past week, society could be concerned that the value systems of some threaten either the possible pursuit of others’ good lives, or the continuation of society itself. This second form of concern with tolerance leads us to the Paradox of Tolerance, and three recent events highlight how such concern arises.

On October 9th, a student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, put up signs on windows outside the College Republican club’s meeting room. The student used painters tape to label Trump an ignorant sexist, racist homophobe, and bigot. She calmly continued to put up the signs after a university employee approached and seemed to say, “Yeah, I’m sorry, you can’t do that.” The G.O.P. Badgers posted a video of the exchange on twitter calling the protesting student an example of the “intolerance from the left.” The student attempting to highlight Trump’s intolerance of women, non-cis people, non-straight people, and non-white people itself was labeled as morally problematic for being intolerant towards those supporting Trump. (The College Republicans made a statement standing behind the president in response to the protest). UW tweeted regarding the incident, noting that policies ban the posting of unapproved signs, and saying both that the university supports students’ right to free speech and civil discourse around political issues, and that the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards is reviewing the incident and will follow up as appropriate.

After a Trump rally in Minneapolis on the 11th of October, protesters removed the red MAGA hats from attendees’ heads and burned them. Groups supporting anti-war policies as well and women’s and immigrant’s rights had been protesting since the afternoon. At around 9:30pm, there are videos of the MAGA hats burning in a small fire, and at around 10pm, some protestors were seen chasing an identified Nazi. These acts of protest against the positions represented by Trump supporters have made some people hesitant to purchase or wear the hats in public. A city employee in Madison, WI, was asked not to wear a MAGA hat to work in May. These protesters are actively attempting to make it uncomfortable to be publicly associated with positions like Trump’s or his supporters. They are not tolerating a political position.

Last week, Ellen DeGeneres attended a Cowboys NFL game seated next to former President George W. Bush, and later defended her friendly demeanor throughout the game despite their differing political views. Bush not only advocated for the PATRIOT Act, which eroded civil rights in the US, he began wars that led to human rights abuses that now the majority acknowledge were unjustified. On top of his war crimes and his actions that led to thousands of deaths and countless instances of torture, Bush was an outspoken advocate for curtailing LGBT+ rights. Ellen defended her friendly interaction with the former president on her show, saying,

“Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say, ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean, ‘Be kind to everyone, it doesn’t matter.’”

This unqualified call to kindness is in line with the principle of tolerance and the value of public civility. However, it doesn’t acknowledge that there might be any constraint on those values. We could consider the constraints to take three forms:

First, DeGeneres’ tolerance of Bush’s repeated denial of LGBT+ folks like her the human rights straight folks like him have enjoyed brings to mind the famous James Baldwin quote: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” This standard for the limit of tolerance is rooted in justice and human rights. A value system should not be tolerated if it doesn’t equally respect the humanity of all. Tolerance here has a substantive constraint: in order to qualify for tolerance, a value system must respect the right of humans to exist. (Some of Bush’s policies failed to do this, as do some of Trump supporters’ positions now.)

The second constraint on tolerance is perhaps the most well-known in philosophical circles. Karl Popper coined the Paradox of Tolerance: “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” A society, according to Popper, that tolerated intolerance would end up destroyed by the intolerant party. Therefore, acting against intolerance is a collective act of self-preservation. The intolerance of Trump supporters, Bush, and Trump, according to this standard, is potentially society-destroying and cannot be tolerated.

John Rawls has a less strong view of intolerant groups, not believing they necessarily threatened the existence of society. Therefore, it is only when intolerant groups do reach this threshold of threat to the preservation of society that there is justification for not tolerating the intolerant. The principle of tolerance must be upheld, according to Rawls, in more scenarios than for Popper. Each value system or group would be judged based on its actual impact on the health of the society overall. If tolerating the presence or activity of a group or individual didn’t suitably threaten society, then we should tolerate it. In the case of the UW Madison protester and the MAGA hat burners, some have judged it is dangerous for Trump supporters to feel comfortable in our society. Whether Rawls would agree is unclear.

What is most clear, perhaps, is that the object of the Madison and Minneapolis protests, as well as the object of DeGeneres’ kindness, are themselves intolerant. The possibility of having a purely tolerant society is off the table. When the discourse becomes about whether or the extent to tolerate these intolerant views or groups, it is important to note that we are debating the application of our paradox, not simply worrying about having an intolerant view ourselves.

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Climate Emergency and the Case for Civil Disobedience

photograph of "to exist is to resist" mural

In Plato’s Republic, during a sustained dialogue on the nature of justice and the structure of a just society, Socrates remarks that we are talking of no small matter, but of how we should live. If that question remains central to moral philosophy, any contemporary answer the question of ‘how we should live’ must acknowledge that to ask it in ‘our’ time is fundamentally different from asking it in any other time in history. The question of what a good human life is in an age of environmental crisis cannot be answered without considering our individual and collective responsibility to mitigate the damage which no longer lies ahead of us, but which is happening now.

Governments, policy makers, corporate institutions, et al, have failed to respond to decades long warnings from scientists that CO2 emissions from industrial and domestic activities pose serious risks to human life and human society, to the world’s ecosystems and perhaps ultimately to much of life on Earth. Those scientists, conservationists and activists who have understood this, have nevertheless failed to effect the change necessary to prevent an ecological and climate emergency. There are complex reasons for these failures, and though it is vitally important that we try to fully understand them, I will not speak to them here.

I want to focus on the urgent question ‘what do we do now?’ by considering the response emerging from the new and quickly growing environmental mobilizations such as Extinction Rebellion in which people are beginning to resort to techniques of disruption and civil disobedience in the face of governmental and systemic inaction. Are these measures necessary, are they are morally justified, and are they perhaps even morally required?

Civil disobedience (which I shall assume is necessarily non-violent) has historically played an important part in effecting change, as for instance in the suffragette and the civil rights movements. In one of the most famous endorsements of civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau (in 1849, after refusing to pay taxes to a government which legally sanctioned slavery) wrote:

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”

Thoreau’s point is simple and obvious: morality or justice does not necessarily line up with the law.  Are we reaching a point now at which the inefficiency of governments and the tyranny of corporate interests have become unendurable; where the refusal to adequately address the climate emergency can no longer be tolerated?

A brief (and incomplete) survey of where we are paints a sobering picture: The latest report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that countries must triple their emissions reductions targets to limit global heating to below 2C. Even a 2C increase is not safe, but on the current trajectory heating is likely to result in an increase of between 2.9C and 3.4C by 2100. This will bring about catastrophic climate change globally. The social and geopolitical outcomes of such a scenario are deeply frightening. Rising seas will displace billions of people. Not only will costal habitations be inundated, arable land will be poisoned by salinity and made barren by drought. The effect will be devastating, widespread famine, which, along with water scarcity, will almost certainly cause political instability and conflict. It is likely that humans cannot adapt to an increase of 4C.

Clearly, urgent and serious action is needed. Two of the things that most threaten the possibility for action lie at opposite ends of the spectrum of responses to these predictions. The first is climate denialism  – including the views that climate change is not real, is not caused by human activity or that the likely effects are being wildly exaggerated. The other is climate defeatism – the view, (espoused by Jonathan Franzen in a recent article) that we are already too late. However, many argue that there is still a cause for hope because there is still a window in which to act to keep warming below 2C. Scientists and activists including Tim Flannery and Naomi Klein, are calling for radical action because that window is small, and vanishing quickly.

The question of what kinds of radical action we need brings us back to the question of what role acts of disruption and civil disobedience can play, and how those actions are to be morally reckoned with, given the situation we face.

Civil disobedience can be defined as “a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about change in laws or government policies.” The main objection to engaging in civil disobedience is that in a stable, functioning democracy there are effective and non-disruptive pathways to change through campaigning and electoral process. Indeed, the democratic system itself is based on the principle that citizens hold a type of sovereign power in that governments receive their legitimacy through ‘the will of the people.’

But what if democracy is not functioning properly? What if politicians, rather than representing the views and interests of their constituents, seek to dictate those views and interests. And what if they do so to advance their own views and interests? For democracy to function properly, for a citizenry to be self-determinate, citizens need the opportunity to make informed choices about their own welfare. People can only make informed choices if they are in fact informed, and governments have a responsibility, which they are currently abrogating, to tell the truth.

The Australian government is not telling the truth about the climate emergency, and has absolutely no intention of addressing the problem. It is resisting and frustrating renewable energy investment while actively pursuing new fossil fuel projects, of which coal is a major part. In Australia (as elsewhere) the powerful vested interests of the fossil fuel lobby have direct lines to government. The country’s policies and laws under these circumstances do not represent the best interests of the people but rather, at their expense, advance the interests of the few. This triple whammy of government obfuscation, policy inaction, and active support of heavy carbon emission activities is creating intense anger and frustration for climate realists from across the political and social spectrum, and support for disruptive, direct action is rapidly growing.

There is, of course, the question of how creating disruption by, for example, blocking bridges, swarming intersections and surrounding government buildings or corporate offices, would achieve the desired results. On one hand it is unlikely that the government will cave to the demands of protestors. On the other hand, Extinction Rebellion’s sustained protests across London in October 2018 resulted in the UK government declaring a climate emergency. Some dismiss this as merely symbolic, as indeed without meaningful policy change it is – but nevertheless, it is not nothing, and it has given impetus and hope to the movement for solving the climate crisis.

Those engaging in acts of civil disobedience do not know with any certainty if these tactics can or will work, but they do know that ordinary, legal forms of protest can not now be effective enough quickly enough. In this sense civil disobedience is a resort taken by people to express their anger and frustration at a destructive and intransigent system. Disruptive action has a cost – to the individuals risking arrest by disobeying the law and also to society. Those taking such action recognize that the stakes are very high, and that the costs of inaction are far greater.

I do not think it is difficult to make a case that under these circumstances civil disobedience is morally justified. Can we, though, defend the stronger claim that it is morally required?

Ahead of the September 20 School Strike for Climate, an open letter was published from over one hundred Australian academics from a variety of disciplines and universities endorsing and supporting Extinction Rebellion and its activities. The letter concluded that:

“When a government willfully abrogates its responsibility to protect its citizens from harm and secure the future for generations to come, it has failed in its most essential duty of stewardship. The ‘social contract’ has been broken, and it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty, to rebel to defend life itself.”

This statement clearly makes the move from acts of civil disobedience being justified to their being required – as a moral duty. Though I agree with the claim, its defense is trickier.

For example, exactly whose duty is it? Who is morally required to engage in civil disobedience? Even if someone feels that they, morally, have no choice – are they justified in making that demand of others? Our moral intuitions would suggest that there are reasons for rejecting that inference. And this appears to put it – as a moral duty – into conflict with one of the fundamental features of moral duties, which is that they are universal. If I recognize something as a moral duty for myself, then, all things being equal, I recognize it as such for others as well.

I do not see this as an insurmountable problem for the claim that we have a moral duty to rebel against a fundamentally unjust system in the face of looming existential catastrophe. Perhaps one way of fleshing out an answer would be to return to the ‘all things being equal’ clause. Perhaps also there is a way to acknowledge that while each person must freely choose – and be free not to choose – to take such action, there is still a collective responsibility governing the moral musts. These are difficult philosophical issues and they require further reflection.

I began by saying that at the core of ethics is the Socratic question of what it means to live a good human life. Humanity is at a crossroads, and how we understand Socrates’ question, and how we choose to respond to what it asks of us, needs to be reassessed in light of where we are. It seems clear that, given the current situation, living a good human life cannot mean going about one’s business as if the world might not be ending.

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The Ethics of Climate Change Protest: Should Protest Be Funny?

climeme protest sign

The Global Climate Strike, which took place last September and involved over 150 countries, counted nearly 4 million young people among its numbers. This admirable show of support perhaps seems less shocking given the increasing prominence of young people in climate change activism. Greta Thunberg is perhaps the most famous of these, but others like Autumn Peltier and Xiye Bastida have also become important advocates for the fight to save the planet.

Because political protest itself has become increasingly visible online, signs from the climate strike inevitably went viral. The vast majority of signs spoke to the unblunted rage and helplessness inspired by political ineptitude (a perfect example, seen in the header of a Vox article on the climate strikes, simply reads “DON’T FUCKING KILL US”). However, many other drew on the language of memes and online humor to articulate frustration. In one example, a teenage girl holds up a sign with the words “THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT WHEN I SAID…DIE LIT” floating above a planet half-engulfed in flame. Another sign reads, “Winter is Not Coming,” a distortion of a Game of Thrones quote that has become a meme in itself. These signs, and many others like them, require fluency in the language and culture of social media. Almost all young people are equipped with this form of literacy. As Bridget Read notes in an article for The Cut, “Gen Z has a knack for incorporating its politics into its internet-inflected, ironic, and earnest self-expression so uncannily, so it’s to be expected that its IRL signs would be as funny, charming, and devastating as the best ‘climemes’.”

Read coins a startling new word in that last sentence, though climate change memes were hardly invented by the protests of last September. While “climemes” is a useful way of describing the ever-growing phenomenon of climate change memes, it should prompt us to ask what the moral ramifications of “memeifying” political protest are. Does humor have a place in our collective reckoning with the environmental catastrophe, or does it impede active and sustained engagement in social change?

On the one hand, memes are more likely to be seen by younger people who aren’t already actively engaged in environmental activism. Because they are made to be shared, memes certainly increase the visibility of issues like climate change for a diverse audience. If many people didn’t read lengthy articles about the climate protests, most at least saw images of funny protest signs on their Twitter feeds. However, memes inherently have an expiration date, and it eventually becomes blasé to share older memes. Given that climate change will have long-lasting ramifications, is such a short-lived format really best for fostering long-term engagement?

This leads into another question, of whether or not memes encourage those who share them to physically participate in activism. The idea of “armchair activism,” or activism that involves nothing more than sharing information with others online, has become controversial in recent years, but one could argue that sharing memes falls under this category. However, it should be clear that the protestors who make such signs are by no means working against their own cause, or that encouraging engagement is even the goal of climemes. A bitter sense of humor may be all we have in the face of looming catastrophe, a way for us to vent frustration and grief.

This issue is rooted in a much older debate about the overall purpose of humor. Aristotle, for example, was skeptical about the purpose of humor, and separated it sharply from tragedy. In Chapter 5 of The Poetics, he states that,

“The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction […] the comic apprehension evokes the contradiction or makes it manifest by having in mind the way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. The tragic apprehension sees the contradiction and despairs of a way out.”

His argument is that both tragedy and comedy are rooted in contradiction. This could be the contradiction between appearance and truth on which much of comedy hinges, or the contradiction between desire and reality which is often at the center of tragedy. Contradiction is just one thing climate change protests are pushing back against; namely, the contradiction between grim reality and the insulated world in which many politicians are living it, the contradiction between the urgency of the situation and the lack of response to it.

Aristotle’s definition of humor vehemently excludes pain. However, the kind of humor utilized by protestors has a painful edge. As Aristotle said, tragedy and humor are closely linked, but as climate change alters every aspect of life on earth, the lines between tragedy and comedy become indistinguishable. This is evident in all climemes, and whether or not circulating them is fully ethical, their existence speaks volumes about the modern day tragedy of environmental destruction.

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Toronto vs. Chick-Fil-A: Only About Chicken?

photograph of Chick-fil-a storefornt

My hometown of Toronto, Canada recently saw its first Chick-Fil-A restaurant open, to a very mixed reception. While some were excited to try a new take on fast food fried chicken (with some even going so far as to line up for hours beforehand), many others attended the opening in protest. There were a few different reasons for the protest, although the most prominent was the owners of Chick-Fil-A’s well-documented financial support of evangelical Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage and have funded so-called “gay conversion therapy” (a number of protesters were also there to express the view that the killing of animals is morally wrong, although this is not a transgression solely committed by Chick-Fil-A).

Some did not take well to the protesters. For example, in response to protesters who chanted “shame!” at those leaving the restaurant, Canadian evangelical Christian personality Charles McVety – who was leading the city’s annual “Jesus in the City” parade – encouraged people to show their support for Chick-Fil-A, instead. When interviewed, he expressed his view that:

It’s upsetting that people want to stop a business simply because it adheres to Christian values. The business is only about chicken. It should only be about chicken…It should not happen in Canada, if you just want to get chicken, you shouldn’t be shamed.

Is this a business that is “only about chicken”, though? Is there reason to think that someone should, in fact, feel ashamed when they visit Chick-Fil-A, or is it really as morally unproblematic as those like McVety think it is?

There are a couple of things to say about McVety’s statement right off the bat. First: protesters, of course, have every right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate in support of their cause, so McVety is straight-up wrong that such protests “should not happen in Canada.” Second, while Chick-Fil-A does not hide the fact that it is run by those who identify themselves as Christians, there are many Christians who would deny that supporting anti-LGBTQ causes is coherent with Christian values. McVety himself avows numerous views most typically associated with right-wing Evangelical Christianity, which, in addition to his opposition to same-sex marriage, also includes the denial of evolution and global warming. There is plenty of room, then, to be Christian and not agree with McVety, and no reason to think that in protesting Chick-Fil-A one is trying to thwart a business simply because it is run by self-identified Christians.

More to the point, though: why should someone feel ashamed, just because they want to try out a new chicken sandwich? Consider what one of those visiting the restaurant said when interviewed:

I do not agree with [Chick-Fil-A’s] ideology and the policies of the owners, but I’m not here to support the policy of the owner. I’m here to have a meal that I really enjoy.

So, here’s one way to think about the situation: one should not be shamed or feel ashamed for eating at Chick-Fil-A because the business should be kept separate from the values of the owners, and people have a right to eat what they want without being harassed. If they were supporting anything, then, it would be the consumption of fried chicken.

It is difficult to find these lines of thinking persuasive. In supporting the business, one does, of course, support the policies of the owners insofar as the money one spends profits the owners, who in turn use that money to support anti-LGBTQ causes. This may not be your overt intention, of course – you may just want to eat some chicken – but what you intend and what ends up happening as a result of your actions can be two very different things. That you are part of a larger customer base whose collective spending on Chick-Fil-A actively support these causes means that you are, at least in some way, supporting those causes as well.

But can’t someone just be neutral on the matter? Can I not just go and eat a greasy chicken sandwich in peace without having to worry about politics or being judged? Maybe I’m like the patron interviewed above: sure, all that stuff about supporting groups working against gay marriage sounds bad, and gay conversion therapy is not something I would ever endorse, but my buying fried chicken is not about that, it’s just about being hungry and stuffing something palatable down my gullet.

Again, while one’s ideologies can certainly be opposed to those endorsed by the owners of Chick-Fil-A, one’s actions may say something different. It would be nice if the business side could be separated from the ideological one, but when the profits from that business are used to directly support the ideology, it is difficult to find room to draw a line.

Okay, but wait: I order things from Amazon all the time, despite their well-documented horrendous working conditions; I like to take Ubers despite their well-documented horrendous working conditions; I buy all kinds of products from places that are no doubt not terribly concerned with the health and well-being of their employees. I don’t really feel bad about that, so why should I feel bad about buying some B+ chicken from a new restaurant in town? Is this really that big of a deal?

This is a tempting way to think about the problem insofar as it is a tempting way to get oneself to stop thinking about the problem. That one has supported a bunch of businesses with questionable business practices in the past does not, of course, excuse adding another one to the list. We may indeed wonder whether any ethical consumption is possible under late-stage capitalism, but the fact that there are problems everywhere does not mean that there are not still problems in specific cases, either.

While these are big problems to think about, what should I do when it comes to Chick-Fil-A? Perhaps the take-home message should be this: even though one’s intentions may be apolitical, and even though one may very much disagree with the causes that Chick-Fil-A’s owners have chosen to support, one does not simply get to choose to remain a neutral party if one willingly gives their money to the business. One cannot have one’s chicken and eat it, too.