| By Casey Dorman |

I was listening to NPR recently and an interviewer was talking to Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian professor of political science, who had just published an edited collection of essays/research studies called Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists. One of the interviewer’s questions was “Aren’t you afraid that your book will humanize jihadists?” This struck me as strange. Could seeing anyone as human, even someone who engaged in systematic killing, be harmful? We often describe the most horrific crimes, such as genocide in terms of one group viewing the other as less than human. We are all aware of Hitler’s genocidal actions against Jews, whom he believed were biologically inferior to what he called the Aryan race. When Hutus in Rwanda killed nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors, they described them as “cockroaches.” Even the American founding fathers were only willing to count each African American slave as worth 3/5 of a White person. These are instances, not uncommon in history, when embracing an ideology that involved viewing others as less than full human beings led to systematic mistreatment, killing or enslavement of people. But should we then turn around and view those who subscribe to such ideologies as also less then human?

What does it mean to regard another person as a human being? Although many racist ideologies have based their prejudices on notions of “inferiority,” most of us reject such views. Some individuals are stronger, taller, smarter, slower, fatter, etc. than others, but it does not lessen their humanity in most people’s eyes. We tend to see others as less human when we see the trait they express as “evil”—when they show themselves as capable of cruelty that we do not regard ourselves, or any “normal” person, as capable of producing. To many Westerners and also to many from other parts of the world, including mainstream Muslims, jihadists such as al Qaeda or ISIS are seen as “evil.” They rape women, chop off heads, and they conduct deadly terror attacks on civilians. After recent White Supremacy demonstrations in places such as Charlottesville, VA, many Americans view those who espouse neo-Nazi or KKK-like racist views as evil enough that they have become unrecognizable as fellow human beings. They have crossed a line beyond which normal human beings never tread. We view all or most members of such groups as, in the words of Chloe Valdary, “hateful monsters.”

Dr. Philip Zimbardo. CC0 license.

There are two broad theories of how people can embrace actions we typically regard as “evil” as a way of behaving toward their fellow men: One theory, embodied by the work of British psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen (2011), is that some people lack or suffer from a reduction in empathy, and those people are not sensitive to how others feel. At this extreme of the distribution of empathy, along with some people with relatively rare developmental disabilities, are psychopaths. The other theory, embodied by the work of American psychologist, Philip Zimbardo (2007), famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, is that anyone can be coaxed into behaving evilly toward his fellow man, using the proper social techniques. Baron-Cohen’s theory is a dispositional one; Zimbardo’s is a situational one.

Baron-Cohen defines empathy as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” He claims that, “we all lie somewhere on the empathy spectrum (from high to low). People said to be evil or cruel are simply at one extreme of the empathy spectrum.” Despite describing empathy as “more like a dimmer switch than an all-or-none switch,” he also describes people with “zero degrees of empathy,” who may be “Zero-Negative.” Those who are Zero-Negative include psychopaths, those with borderline personality disorder and narcissists. Their lives, and the lives of those around them, are affected negatively by their lack of empathy combined with impairment in their experience of emotions. Although Baron-Cohen does not dismiss the role of social pressures, such as conformity, in producing cruel acts, he insists that “when cruel acts occur, it is because of malfunctioning of the empathy circuit.” This may be only temporary, but in those who are truly evil and capable of long-term, systematic cruelty, he says the empathy system is “permanently down,” due to a variety of biological and environmental factors and their interaction. In other words, the truly evil are not like the rest of us.

Stanley Milgram. Photo by Jewish Currents.

Philip Zimbardo describes what he calls, “The Lucifer Effect,” or “How Good People Turn Evil.” His point is that evil behavior, as demonstrated in examples such as the behavior of Nazis killing Jews or the inhumane treatment of prisoners by the American guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is something of which we are all capable, and he tries to show the social forces that contribute to it. He uses many examples, but three are particularly telling: his own 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s experiments on obedience, and psychologist Christopher Browning’s 1992 account of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

In Zimbardo’s own experiment, college students and young men from the community around Stanford were randomly divided into “guards” and “prisoners” and within a week the behavior of the guards became so abusive toward the prisoners that the experiment had to be stopped. Milgram famously asked a variety of people in a series of experiments to administer what they assumed were real electric shocks (they weren’t) to “learners,” and the majority of his subjects were willing to follow the instructions of those in charge and administer the shocks even when they were aware that the levels were potentially lethal and the recipients were heard to scream and beg and finally become unresponsive. Many participants thought it would have been “unethical” to refuse to follow instructions once the experiment began, even though they knew the supposed consequences to the person they were shocking. In Browning’s account of a group of 500 German civilian and career policemen who, when ordered to do so, either shot or herded onto trains for death camps, 83,000 Polish Jews, the psychologist found that the pressure for conformity and the fear of damaging their careers by refusal to do the killing, led “ordinary men” to become routine executioners.

Photo courtesy of Albert Bandura, CC0 license.

In a set of experiments by Albert Bandura in the 1970’s, college students were instructed to administer (fake) shocks to other students in an experiment that was purported to teach “decision making.” The supposedly to-be-shocked students were either described as members of “an animalistic rotten bunch” or “a perceptive, understanding… group.” The object was to see if the use of dehumanizing labels affected the likelihood of administering severe shocks. In fact it made a dramatic difference with the “animalistic” students being shocked much more severely. It was also found that students were more likely to administer severe shocks if they thought that the administered shock was an average response of they and their fellow students rather than just their own individual response. In other words, lessening personal responsibility made it easier to administer greater shocks. Bandura analyzed his results in terms of what he called conditions that elicited “moral disengagement” from the consequences of one’s actions. These conditions were “dehumanizing” the object of the behavior and lessening individual responsibility for the action.

For Zimbardo, “dehumanization is the central construct in our understanding of ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’” Based on Bandura’s (1999) model of dehumanization and moral disengagement, Zimbardo posited four “cognitive mechanisms” he says are involved when we “disengage morally from any sort of destructive or evil conduct.”

1. We shroud our cruel actions in euphemistic language that makes them honorable, righteous or morally imperative.
2. We “minimize our sense of a direct link between our actions and its harmful outcomes.” We do this by “diffusing or displacing our personal responsibility” in the actions (e.g. “we were only following orders;” we act as part of a group).
3. We “ignore, distort, minimize, or disbelieve any negative consequences of our actions.”
4. We “reconstruct our perception of victims as deserving their punishment.” By dehumanizing them, often using pejorative labels for them, we perceive them “to be beneath the righteous concerns we reserve for fellow human beings.”

Photo in the public domain, U.S. Department of Defense, Wikimedia commons.

While Baron-Cohen’s research reveals some of the developmental events and neurobiological correlates of empathy and the lack of it, and may be applicable to certain apparently conscienceless psychopaths or other types of destructive character disorders, the extensive history of interpersonal cruelty on a large scale makes it clear that it is often “good people” who become evil. Zimbardo’s own research and that which he cites, demonstrates this time and again. This means that, in understanding those we regard as doing evil things, especially on a large and systematic scale (e.g. neo-Nazis, KKK, al Qaeda, ISIS, American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, racist policemen perhaps), labeling them as inherently “evil,” as “monsters,” or as “animals,” not only discourages our understanding of how they can do what they do, but it encourages us to disengage our own moral standards when dealing with them. We can deplore violence but approve of “punching a neo-Nazi in the face,” because of the evil he personifies (we may feel more comfortable doing this when we are masked and part of a group, so our individual responsibility is lessened). Israel can make an exception to its policy of not employing the death penalty when it comes to Adolph Eichmann, because he is “the embodiment of evil,” despite Hannah Arendt’s (1963) description of him as “banal.”

The danger in not recognizing that most of those who do evil are very much like us, rather than inherently evil misfits, is that it does not prepare us with ways to combat the conditions and methods that lead people to behave in evil ways. This is something that Muslim communities must face as they worry about their young people becoming radicalized and White American communities must face when they worry about their young people becoming followers of White Supremacists.

Photo by Clare Black, Creative Commons license.

We appear to have an aversion to recognizing our own vulnerability to engaging in morally repugnant behavior. Although in every experiment recounted by Zimbardo there were some “heroes” who did not succumb to the psychological techniques and retained their moral compasses, such heroes were a tiny percentage (less than 10%) of participants; yet nearly 100% of people, when told about the experiments, predicted that they would be immune to the psychological methods. We are not good judges of ourselves.  Haslam et. al. (2005) have related this to what they call a “self-humanization bias.” We view ourselves as possessing more “human essence” than others. Leyens (2000) has studied “outgroup infrahumanization,” which refers to the tendency to view members of an “outgroup” as less human and less capable of the full range of emotions than members of the group to which we belong. Viki et al (2012) found that dehumanization of sex offenders led to the belief that they could not be rehabilitated and this view supported ill treatment and exclusion of them; likewise, Viki et al. (2013) discovered that guards were more likely to torture prisoners  of war if they saw them as infrahuman, and Christian guards based such judgments on the prisoners being Muslim. Demoulin et al (2009) found that any meaningful dimension of group membership can serve to produce infrahumanization of those in the outgroup. Park, Haslam and others (2016) found that, for some, the self-humanization bias could be reduced by encouraging empathy with others.

Creative Commons license.

It is one thing to hypothesize that so-called “evil” people may be similar to the rest of us and to try to understand what social psychological forces led them to pursue their cruel activities. But there is also the issue of whether recognizing the humanity of someone whose behavior is evil interferes with our ability to combat his or her behavior. In short, if the best defense against an evil force is to be ruthless in our fight against it, does seeing those who embrace evil as similar to us inhibit our ability to be ruthless? Can we afford to see Nazis as humans, or by doing so do we lose something in our fight against acts of radical evil?

It may be pertinent to keep in mind that, of the 500 men involved as “police” in German Battalion 101, only 18 were ever indicted for war crimes and two were executed. The rest returned to normal lives in post-war Germany. The same was true of most Nazi soldiers and members of the Nazi party. Although the KKK still exists, it is significantly smaller than it was 60 years ago, and many of its former members now remain at a distance and no longer engage in active racist activities. As ISIS is defeated and its territory diminished, no doubt many of its members will be reabsorbed into the communities from which they came. In other words, just like the students in Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s experiments, those who acted horrifically will resume their lives as normal citizens. What are we to think? Are these people monsters who have now gone underground, or was their monstrous behavior simply a reflection of  the societal influences that acted upon them?  The research and findings from studies such as Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s and Browning’s suggest the latter, and if such is the case, then it remains a possibility that in combating evil, our goal can be to rescue the perpetrators of it and bring their behavior back into the range of benign normalcy. Even more pertinent, it means that our first priority should be to attack the societal influences that promote such behavior in otherwise normal humans.

Celebration in front of the White House on the day that Osama Bin Laden was killed, May 1, 2011. Photo courtesy of Bektour, Creative Commons license.

If evil behavior is simply the consequence of allowing people who are inherently evil to gain power, then we protect ourselves from it by identifying such people and preventing or removing their access to power and influence. In fact, that is how most people think the fight against evil should be fought. But if evil behavior is the consequence of allowing evil influences to have sway over normal people, then we protect ourselves by removing or neutralizing those influences in our society. What are those influences and how can they be countered? If we go down the Bandura/Zimbardo list of ways in which we, as ordinary humans, may be led to “disengage morally” from the consequences of our actions, some protective actions seem evident: in terms of shrouding our cruel actions in euphemistic language, we can do such things as stopping sanctifying violence as a routine remedy to injustice, or “celebrating” the death of our opponents (e.g. Osama bin Laden), even if they are demonstrably bad actors. We can avoid euphemisms for morally questionable behaviors, e.g. “collateral damage” for deaths of civilians in war, “capital punishment” for killing a fellow human being, “white nationalism” for racism. We should encourage and protect “whistleblowing” activities that represent an employee or group member speaking out against or refusing to follow policies that he or she believes may cause harm to others. We can expose and publicize negative consequences of social policies that result in limitations of educational or economic opportunity, perpetuation of income and wealth disparities, or poor health outcomes, especially if they affect one segment of society to the benefit of another, rather than claiming that one segment (to which we, perhaps, belong) is more deserving of the benefits than another.

Photo by Alexandra Milgram, copyright 1991.

Most importantly, we can refrain from labeling anyone as less than human, regardless of the malignancy of his or her behavior. Clearly, labeling people as “animals” or “monsters” allows us to pursue whatever cruelty we want and we habitually do this to terrorists, child abusers, gang members, foreign leaders who commit violence against their own people… and it easily reaches over to those with malignant beliefs, such as neo-Nazis, White Supremacists or Islamic jihadists.

Once we begin to think of one segment of our society, or one ideological group, as less than human we give ourselves permission to “disengage morally” from our actions toward them. In the pursuit of fighting those who dehumanize others, we dehumanize them and allow ourselves to engage in, or even celebrate, cruelty that otherwise would fall outside of our own boundary of decent behavior. That is why there is no danger in humanizing our opponents, be they jihadists or neo-Nazis. In fact, there is a much greater danger in dehumanizing them.

Casey Dorman is the editor of Lost Coast Review and has retired as a faculty member from United International University and Alliant International Univeristy in Alhambra, CA. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Washington and is a member of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA).

References

Arendt, Hannah (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press (originally published as a series of articles in The New Yorker).

Bandura, A., Underwood, B., & Fromson, M. E. (1975). Disinhibition of aggression through diffusion of responsibility and dehumanization of victims. Journal of Research in Personality, 9, 253-269.

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 193-209.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books.

Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York : HarperCollins.

Demoulin, S. et al. (2009). The role of in-group identification in infra-humanization. International Journal of Psychology, 44, 4-11.

Haslam, N., Bain, P., Douge, L., Lee, M., & Bastian, B. (2005). More human than you: Attributing humanness to self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 937-950.

Hegghammer, T, Ed.  (2017). Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leyens, J. Ph., Paladino, M. P., Rodriguez, R. T., Vaes, J., Demoulin, S., Rodriguez, A. P., & Gaunt, R. (2000). The emotional side of prejudice: The attribution of secondary emotions to ingroups and outgroups. Personality and Social Psychology Review. 4 (2): 186–197.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.

Park, J., Haslam, N., Kashima, Y. and Norasakkunkit, V. (2016), Empathy, culture and self-humanising: Empathising reduces the attribution of greater humanness to the self more in Japan than Australia. International  Journal of Psychology, 51: 301–306.

Valdary, C. (2017, August 22). Why I refuse to avoid white people. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Viki, G.T., Fullerton, I., Ragget, H., Tait & Wiltshire, S. (2012). The role of dehumanization in attitudes toward the social exclusion and rehabilitation of sex offenders. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42, 2349–2367.

Viki, G. T,  Osgood, D, & Phillips, S. (2013).  Dehumanization and self-reported proclivity to torture prisoners of war. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 45. 325-328.

Zimbardo, P.  (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

| By Dale E. Miller |

I consider myself a Millian—that is, a follower of the Victorian philosopher of morals, social life, and politics (and much else besides) John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Usually I’m a fairly confident Millian; some might even say smug. Mill’s work has, like the work of all important philosophers, been subjected to numerous serious objections. But I believe that many of these objections have already been adequately answered and that the prospects of our finding satisfactory answers to the rest are at least as good as the prospects of our finding satisfactory answers to the equally serious objections that have been pressed against the work of Aristotle, Kant, etc. Still, today my confidence is beginning to show some cracks. Recent events in the U.S. are casting serious doubts on one of the most celebrated and influential elements of Mill’s thought, his defense of the freedom of expression.

Mill’s defense of the liberties of speech and the press appears in the second chapter of his 1859 essay On Liberty.[1] His case is grounded not on something like a “natural” right but rather on the social benefits of freedom of expression. This doesn’t mean that Mill believes that every use that people make of this freedom—every published article, every sign, every utterance—makes the world better off. But what he does believe is that there is great value in a vigorous marketplace of ideas, for which thoroughgoing freedom of expression is a prerequisite. According to Mill, the marketplace of ideas is a powerful engine not only for correcting intellectual errors and discovering truths of all sorts but also for motivating individuals who hold true ethical beliefs to base their lives on these beliefs. And the greater the extent to which people do this, Mill maintains (albeit without much argument), the happier that human life will be. This, for Mill, is the ultimate standard for moral rightness.[2]

Mill’s case for freedom of expression unfolds in three stages; he asks first what society loses when it suppresses the expression of true ideas, next what it loses when it suppresses false ideas, and finally what it loses when it suppresses ideas that are both true and false in parts. I’m primarily interested in his answer to the second of these questions. It might seem surprising that Mill would believe that society loses anything of value when it censors ideas that genuinely are entirely false, as opposed to ideas that are thought to be entirely false but are in fact at least partly true. Yet he takes there to be several sources of loss in such cases.

One way in which society loses when it suppresses false ideas is that when these ideas cannot receive “any fair and thorough discussion … such of them as could not stand such a discussion, though they may be prevented from spreading, do not disappear.”[3] In other words, when false ideas cannot be brought into the light and openly confronted in fair and free debate, because defending them or perhaps even discussing them is proscribed, they fester. One of the benefits that Mill therefore claims for the liberties of speech and the press is that they enable us to (eventually) extinguish false doctrines, in the sense of bringing it about that they aren’t believed.

A second way in which society loses from restricting the expression of false ideas concerns how ethical beliefs are held. Suppose that society has made it impossible to challenge some widely accepted moral doctrine, so that contrary doctrines cannot be “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed.” In this case, Mill says, even if the widely accepted doctrine is completely correct it will be “held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”[4] When we know that we’re likely at some point to be called upon to defend our creed against an opponent, he writes, we’re more likely both to ensure that we understand the considerations that favor that creed and to give the creed an important place in our thoughts and actions. On the other hand, “as soon as there is no enemy in the field,” we tend to lapse into giving our beliefs little more than lip service.[5] As evidence Mill points to the many “Sunday-morning” Christians in countries in which Christianity is the dominant faith. If such Christians are animated by anything in their religion through the rest of the week, he maintains, it is only by those parts of it that are distinctive to their particular sect and that they might need to defend against other sectarians. Thus another respect in which the liberties of speech and the press are beneficial is that they make it more likely that people who hold true moral doctrines will be “penetrated” by them, in the sense of holding them as more than dead dogmas.

U.S. Department of Defense photos.

There is some tension between these two claims of Mill’s. After all, if false moral doctrines are extinguished, then no one will need to worry about debating their adherents. It therefore appears that freedom of expression can at most yield only one of these benefits with respect to any particular false moral doctrine, not both. The tension between these claims doesn’t rise to the level of contradiction, however. It can be true both that the long-run tendency of protecting the marketplace of ideas is to extinguish false views and that until a particular false ethical view is extinguished the fact that some people hold it will give those who hold the true view, or at least a truer one, a livelier appreciation of their own commitments. This is Mill’s stance; he observes that while it’s desirable for false moral doctrines to be extinguished, when this happens something of value is lost that society ought to try to replace to the extent possible. For instance, teachers may need to learn to defend certain false doctrines forcefully, to approximate for students the experience of debating someone who holds them.[6]

Mill’s claims about the freedom of expression license certain predictions. Suppose that some false moral doctrine was introduced into a society a considerable time ago. Suppose further that in this society it has always been possible to discuss and debate this doctrine freely. Then Mill’s claim would seem to suggest, first, that over time we should expect this doctrine to have moved some significant distance in the direction of being extinguished, and, second, that if this doctrine does still persist to some degree then people whose views about the matter in question contain more of the truth will be more strongly motivated to think, feel, and act in conformity with those views. Mill’s claims thus serve as a comforting answer to the question of whether it is safe to extend the freedom of expression to wrongheaded or even evil extremists, as American First Amendment jurisprudence does: the “invisible hand” of the marketplace of ideas will move them toward eradication, and until it gets them there, they will actually contribute to the moral improvement of the majority.

Photo by Anthony Crider, 2017, CCO license.

But are these predictions borne out by recent political experience? Consider one particular false moral doctrine, namely white supremacy. While broader definitions are possible, I’m using ‘white supremacy’ to refer to the ideologies that we associate with groups such as the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, ideologies marked by features like Holocaust denialism, enthusiasm for William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, and support for laws that explicitly deny basic rights to non-whites and/or Jews. (I won’t entertain the notion that this doctrine might not be false.)

White supremacy so understood has a long history in the U.S., and the First Amendment protects the freedom of white supremacists to promote their views in public. At first glance, it seems that if Mill is right then the doctrine of white supremacy should be well on its way to being extinguished here. Failing this, it appears that we should at least expect that Americans who reject that doctrine should not only have a solid grasp of their grounds for doing so but should also be more strongly committed to racial equality. In other words, white Americans who aren’t supremacists should be disinclined to treat phrases like “all men are created equal” as empty pieties—dead dogmas.

Were Mill alive today, it would be hard not to ask him “How’s that working out for you?” White supremacists in America today clearly believe that they have a fellow traveler in the White House (and if they are wrong then President Trump has hardly labored to disabuse them of the notion). With this “high cover” they are bolder and more brazen than they have been in decades, and it is apparent now that they are more numerous than most Americans expected. Any consoling fantasies that we might have had about how their positions were moving toward being extinguished have been punctured. Moreover, there is little evidence that white Americans who reject white supremacy as I have defined it—and I believe that this is still the great majority, even among Trump voters—have the lively appreciation of racial equality that Mill’s claims seem to suggest that they should. The ample body of evidence for the contrary conclusion includes a July 2017 poll showing that 65% of white respondents had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter protests and protestors[7] and a recent meta-analysis conforming that discrimination in hiring against African-Americans exists (and isn’t becoming any less common).[8]

Dr. David Shih.

Given this, it’s no wonder that doubts are being raised about whether we can safely trust the marketplace of ideas where extremist views are concerned. In an editorial defending student protesters who “shout down” talks on college campuses by speakers with racist views, David Shih argues that “The ‘marketplace of ideas’ fails when we cannot make objective choices about racism.”[9] He maintains that racism is so pervasive in the world view of (at least) Americans that they frequently fail to recognize it as such, with the result that they cannot be relied upon to “reliably reject a shoddy product — here, the snake oil of racist expression.” And if they do not, this “might mean that racist hate speech is not a ‘necessary evil’ that jumpstarts racial justice within a liberal marketplace but is—for the foreseeable future—nothing more than state-sanctioned injury of people of color.”[10]

While Shih doesn’t mention Mill, his criticisms of the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas are directly applicable to Mill’s defense of free speech. I’m far from dismissing these criticisms; it’s precisely because of points like those that Shih raises that, as a Millian, I’m increasingly nervous. But it’s worth considering what can be said on Mill’s behalf.

Photo by Craig O’Neal, 2006, CCO license.

One possible reply is that people are so prone to racist thinking, for whatever reasons, that the fact that white supremacy has not moved any closer to being extinguished is not surprising and does not undermine Mill’s claim that false moral doctrines tend to move in this direction where the freedom of expression prevails. Given that the bias is widespread and deep-seated—one might say insidious—and for that reason easily unnoticed and so not reckoned with, we should expect progress in this area to be at best slow and incremental, with occasional backsliding. To this one might add that while it has been legally permissible for white supremacists to openly express their views in the United States, it has for some time not been socially acceptable. Even in the absence of active interference with their communication, the social disapprobation that people publicly identified as white supremacists would suffer largely forced them to restrict the expression of their views to clandestine newsletters or, more recently, dark anonymous corners of the Internet. Perhaps it’s only now that more of them feel able to emerge from hiding that we can have the fair and free debate regarding their views that Mill takes to be capable of convincing people to recognize and reject false moral doctrines. A recent editorial in the Washington Post optimistically proposes that

There is no surer way to expose extremism’s malice and toxicity than to let it bask in the sunlight, where all Americans can examine it plainly. The more Mr. [Richard] Spencer spouts his gospel of hatred—he advocates “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” by which he means Jews and nonwhites should have no place in the United States and should be induced to leave—the more his countrymen will be repelled.[11]

Dr. Erik Bleich.

A second reply is that suppressing the expression of white supremacy hasn’t proven to be efficacious as a way of preventing people from subscribing to it. Throughout much of Europe, hate speech laws significantly restrict the ability of white supremacists to disseminate their views. As Erik Bleich writes, “In most European countries, it is against the law to assert in public that a racial, ethnic or religious group is to be feared or hated, and in many countries illegal to say that the Holocaust never happened.”[12] Yet Europe’s problems with the racist “ultra-right” are arguably just as grave as those of the United States. For instance, despite Germany’s restrictions on white supremacists’ freedom of expression, including bans on the use of Nazi-era slogans and symbols, the country’s most recent annual report on its constitution documents increasing numbers of “violent offences motivated by right-wing extremism.”[13] A right-wing anti-immigration party, some of whose leaders have a penchant for Nazi-era language, just won nearly 13% of the vote in the German national election.[14] Large neo-Nazi demonstrations, with more arcane symbols, are occurring there as well.[15] Admittedly, the degree to which the freedom of expression is regulated is not the only relevant difference between the United States and Europe; that a far-right party could garner seats in the Bundestag with 13% of the vote points to pertinent differences in electoral systems. Thus care is needed in trying to draw any inferences about the effectiveness of these regulations from cross-cultural comparisons of the currency of white supremacist views. Still, it’s at least not obvious that they are any more successful than a reliance on the marketplace of ideas in preventing the contagion of white supremacy from spreading.

Finally, if this stage of history is one when we must take seriously the threat of white supremacists and fascists more generally, then this may be precisely the worst time for us to weaken the legal and social protections afforded to the freedom of expression. Once we decide that it’s acceptable for the proponents of unpopular views to be silenced, whether by law or the heckler’s veto, then the precedent this creates will make it easier for the opponents of equality to justify silencing progressives and liberals if they can. If we want such an event to trigger popular outrage in the future, to be seen as crossing uncrossable lines, then we may need to do all that we can now to entrench the inviolability of the liberties of speech and the press. (Shih dismisses this worry, asserting that the students he defends “may not, in fact, long for their First Amendment rights should the tables turn on them.” His reasoning seems to be that in the past progressive protesters have been most effective when they’ve gone beyond what the First Amendment protects anyway. But this complicates his larger argument; if expressive activity is most persuasive when it takes forms that exceed First Amendment protections, then denying these protections to racist speech might increase its influence.)

I take these replies, especially the last two, to cut some ice. It’s because of them that, for now at least, I still count myself a Millian—albeit an increasingly anxious one—where the freedom of expression is concerned. But admittedly, none of these responses gainsay Shih’s worry that we can’t trust individuals to choose well when confronted with competing racist and anti-racist views, and there is no guarantee that enough of them will do so to prevent white supremacy from gaining an even firmer toehold in our country. If this is a damning indictment of our efforts to instill critical thinking skills in our citizenry, it may not be unjust.[16] Relying upon the marketplace of ideas is a gamble, and a large one. The stakes of the 1977 controversy over whether a ragtag group of neo-Nazis could march in Skokie, Illinois now seem trivial. When Jimmy Carter was president, what was the worst that could have happened? Today it feels like much more is at risk—maybe our liberal democratic order.

But if relying upon the marketplace of ideas is a gamble, so too is abandoning the First Amendment jurisprudence and social norms that protect even the speech and writings of white supremacists against interference. No safe option exists. While I’m increasingly nervous that Mill might be wrong, I’m no less nervous that he might be correct and yet go unheeded when it matters most, that we might panic in the face of a tiki-torch-bearing rabble and abandon one of our most potent weapons against them.[17]

Dale Miller is a Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University in Norfolk VA. Much of his work has focused on John Stuart Mill’s moral and social-political philosophy. His book J. S. Mill: Moral, Social and Political Thought was published by Polity in 2010. He has also co-edited A Companion to Mill (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism (Cambridge, 2014), John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life (Oxford, 2011), and Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh, 2000). In the summer of 2016, Professor Miller became the editor-in-chief of Utilitas.

Notes

[1] Mill, On Liberty, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill v.18, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 228–59. PDFs of Mill’s Collected Works are available for free in Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty: http://oll.libertyfund.org/people/john-stuart-mill.

[2] For an explanation of how and why this is true, and a wide-ranging account of Mill’s “value theory,” see my John Stuart Mill: Moral, Social and Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity 2010).

[3] Mill, On Liberty, 242.

[4] Mill, On Liberty, 243.

[5] Mill, On Liberty, 250.

[6] Mill, On Liberty, 250–1.

[7] “July 2017 Poll: Crosstabs Memo,” HarvardHarrisPoll.com, available at http://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Crosstabs-HCAPS_July-Wave_Topline-Memo_Registered-Voters_Custom-Banners….pdf.

[8] Lincoln Quinlan, Devah Pager, Ole Hexel, and Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, “Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments Shows No Change in Racial Discrimination in Hiring Over Time,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, published early online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/11/1706255114.full.

[9] Shih, “Hate Speech and the Misnomer of ‘The Marketplace of Ideas,’” Code Switch: National Public Radio (3 May 2017), available at http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/05/03/483264173/hate-speech-and-the-misnomer-of-the-marketplace-of-ideas.

[10] Shih’s suggestion that racist speech injures people of color raises important issues that I can’t consider here, but if it is true that racist speech damages the interests of its targets then even Mill might concede that this speech should be restricted, the virtues of the marketplace of ideas notwithstanding.

[11] Editorial Board, “Let the White Nationalists March—and Their Ideas Die,” The Washington Post (12 October 2017), available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/let-white-nationalists-march–and-their-ideas-die/2017/10/12/6dbbded0-adef-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?undefined&utm_term=.ca4369164292&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1.

[12] Bleich, “Freedom of Expression versus Ethnic Hate Speech: Explaining Differences Between High Court Regulations in the USA and Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40 (2014), 297.

[13] Federal Ministry of the Interior, “Brief summary: 2016 Report on the Protection of the Constitution” (4 July 2017), available at https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/public-relations/publications/annual-reports.

[14] See Anthony Faiola and Stephanie Kirchner, “In Germany, the Language of Nazism is no Longer Buried in the Past,” Washington Post 9 December 2016), available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-germany-the-language-of-nazism-is-no-longer-buried-in-the-past/2016/12/09/d70bce74-bc85-11e6-ae79-bec72d34f8c9_story.html.

[15] Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “What Happens When You Ban Nazi Symbols at a Nazi March?,” Foreign Policy (21 August 2017), available at http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/21/what-happens-when-you-ban-nazi-symbols-at-a-nazi-march/.

[16] A related cause for concern, which I can’t consider here, is whether the marketplace of ideas is vulnerable to a flood of shoddy counterfeit “goods” from abroad—say, from Russia. This too may largely depend on how well we’ve trained citizens to think critically.

[17] I would like to thank Andrew J. Cohen for a number of helpful comments.

| By John Lachs |

When our ancestors lived in caves, every tool was a prized possession. Furs for comfort and drawings to decorate the cave were difficult to come by. They were passed down from generation to generation.

Photo courtesy of Paul Brennan, CC0.

Later, when human productivity made the goods of the world readily available, our grandparents became collectors. Growing control over nature enabled them to stockpile everything imaginable, converting their homes into storage units.

Some claim this was in response to the tough times of the Great Depression. Others attribute it to smart shopping:  buying on sale is a great saving, even if you never use the item.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Keith, CC0.

The important idea is that the twenty-eighth sweater and the 5-pound Ketchup bottle are there, ready to be used…if, that is, they can be found. “You never know when it’ll come in handy” is a great justification if what you look for is not lost in the clutter.

We feel it impossible to discard perfectly usable clothing even if we have no intention of ever using it. Surely, there is nothing wrong with keeping food that is only a few months past the expiration date. And though we have no interest in the second treadmill a friend wants to give away, we’ll manage to find a place for it.

Courtesy of Flickr, CCO, some rights reserved.

There is always room for the next coffee table and, after a good sale, the clothes in the closets just have to be compressed a little more.  Eventually, the stuff we collect invades all rooms and peaks out from under the beds.

The moment of truth comes when we have to move. The death of a loved one or a divorce reveals the momentousness of the collection.  Every item has memories attached, everything cries to be preserved. Discarding anything feels like losing a friend.

Photo courtesy of Dwight Burdette, CCO.

Is there a solution? Only one as radical as surgery is for cancer. Take ten items you cannot live without. Leave everything in place and get a couple of friends to bring their friends to carry away whatever they want. What is left can go to charity.

What we value says a lot about who we are. Look over the ten objects you kept. What do they say about you?

Dr. John Lachs is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA).

Journal Archive

| By George R. Lucas |

A Moral and Legal Challenge in the Cyber Domain |

Skeptics (e.g., Thomas Rid, 2013) have cast doubt on the notion of authentic cyber warfare.  Cyber conflict consists, the skeptics argue, solely of activities which fall well short of full scale warfare:  e.g., crime, vandalism, “hacktivism” (political activism by individuals and organizations carried out in the cyber domain), industrial espionage, and military espionage. Talk of cyber “warfare,” they complain, is largely conceptual confusion, coupled with misplaced metaphorical exaggeration.

Against such criticisms, I have argued by contrast that there is a distinctive category of cyber conflict that qualifies as warfare – or, more correctly, which rises to the level of the “use, or threat of use, of force by states; or, the equivalent of an armed attack” in international law (Lucas 2017).  This new kind of warfare has thus far manifest itself in two distinctive forms:

1. effects-based weapons (such as Stuxnet) which can be deployed to damage or destroy military targets; and
2. weapons and attacks in the cyber domain intended to produce political effects similar to those usually sought as the goal or objective of a conventional use of force by states against one another.

I have labeled this second class of cyber hostilities “state-sponsored hacktivism” (SSH).  SSH is one of the principle tactics of a wider phenomenon, recently dubbed “soft war,” or unarmed conflict (Gross & Meisels, 2017) [Note]. It qualifies as warfare because it is deployed to compel an adversary to yield to the political aims of the state utilizing it.  SSH is perfectly capable of achieving the equivalent of occupying an enemy’s cities, destroying his army, and breaking his will to fight.  It is fully capable of moving a political center of gravity from a given posture prior to the attack, to one more in keeping with the attacker’s own political aspirations vis á vis the victim’s in the aftermath.  In short, this form of cyber conflict satisfies the classical definition of Clausewitz (1830) regarding war as politics carried out by alternative means.

SSH is not identical to, nor can it be merely reduced to acts of vandalism, crime, or espionage, although it utilizes such components within the framework of an SSH attack.  One might say that SSH is either none of the above, or else it involves all of the above “on steroids.”  Considerations of scale and magnitude, as well as of ease of access, are important in understanding this category of warfare, much as such considerations have been, in the past, for differentiating between “private” and domestic uses of conventional lethal force (e.g., as criminal acts by individuals or organizations), and those of “public” warfare that are state-sponsored.

The Rise of State-Sponsored Hacktivism

With the benefit of hindsight, we can identify what was likely the first clear instance of SSH in the DDoS attacks, allegedly by agents of the Russian Federation, carried out against Estonia in 2007.  The most recent examples include the North Korean attacks upon Sony Pictures and (using similar cyber techniques) on the SWIFT banking system in Europe; the Russian interference in the U.S. and French elections; and the Iranian attacks on ARAMCO and (under the guise of the anonymous “Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam”) on the U.S. banking system in 2012.  Yet another dramatic example of SSH was the theft of some 22 million civilian and military personnel files from the U.S. Office of Personnel management by PLA Unit 78020 in Kunming, China in 2015.

It is extremely important, as Jessica Wolfendale demonstrates, to recognize this and other tactics of “soft war” as authentic warfare, so that one may determine just exactly how to understand and respond to such events (Wolfendale 2017).  In this instance, one might think it possible to subsume SSH in particular, and other elements of soft war, under the relatively new category of conventional uses of force that fall short of full-scale war, termed jus ad vim (Frowe 2015).  But Valerie Morkevičius has shown decisively that soft-war tactics like SSH cannot be so understood or subsumed, because they involve no use whatsoever of conventional force (Morkevičius 2017).  In particular, unlike effects-based cyber weapons and attacks, SSH attacks do not cause physical harm.  Instead, they disrupt normal social functions, cast doubt and sow fear among the general population, and spread confusion, undermine morale, and otherwise interfere with the normal conduct of government and military personnel and operations.

Ever since the alarm was raised by cyber experts like John Arquilla (1993) and Richard Clarke (2010), we have been anticipating the onslaught of effects-based cyber attacks: a so-called “Cyber Armageddon,” or “cyber Pearl Harbor.”  While poised to defend and counter such attacks in our cyber strategy, we have been largely silent on how to understand and respond to SSH.  Former CIA and NSA director, General Michael Hayden (U.S. Air Force, retired), delivering the annual Distinguished Haaga Lecture (“Russian Meddling in the U.S. Election”) at the University of Pennsylvania Law school on 18 April 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt36R6DR7Hc), described the U.S. posture toward these alternative attacks as confused and disorganized, admitting that we do not yet know even what to call these types of cyber attacks, let alone has the U.S. developed any kind of coherent strategy to defend or retaliate against them.

Cyber Warfare and Cultural Bias

Some of this difficulty stems from an underlying organizational and cultural bias that blinds us to the significance of SSH.  Consider that Israel, the U.S., and its allies in the “Five Eyes” signal intelligence alliance are, collectively, supreme masters of the first kind of cyber warfare.  Effects-based weapons like Stuxnet, tactical operations like “Olympic Games,” and the recent repeated “mysterious failures” of North Korean intercontinental missile test launches, are all complex, sophisticated, and resource-intensive operations.  Very few nations possess the combination of technical expertise and national resources (and perhaps patience) to develop and deploy such weapons.  Feeble attempts in this realm by less well-resourced states (an alleged Iranian attack on a small dam in upstate New York in 2013, for example: http://time.com/4270728/iran-cyber-attack-dam-fbi/) did not prove effective.

Large-scale, effects-based weapons are, in short, “our” kind of weapon:  big, bold, expensive, intricate and technologically sophisticated, and fully equivalent to conventional war and weapons.  By contrast, the weapons and tactics of SSH are comparatively small-scale.  These rely more on cleverness, stealth, and deception bordering on perfidy.  They are affordable, accessible, and attainable, and (in comparison to effects-based weapons) easily within reach of adversaries who lack the essential resources, or do not choose to invest those resources, let alone the time and energy necessary to develop high-quality effects-based cyber weapons.

And indeed:  why should they bother?  SSH attacks have demonstrated that they can accomplish nearly as much “political bang,” for only a fraction of the investment “buck.”  Perhaps most significantly, these SSH operations take place just below the threshold of full attribution and retaliation.  General Hayden described the months of confusion and uncertainty within the Obama administration over how and when to acknowledge and respond, as the Russian assaults on the presidential election of 2016 were detected and ongoing in the weeks and months leading up to the November 2016 election itself.  Officials wondered, “What exactly are they up to, and what should we do about it?”  While we ponder these questions in confusion, our adversaries are literally “eating our lunch!”

No effective defense or counter-attack can be readily instituted against a kind of warfare about which we are largely ignorant, and for which we are, at present, wholly unprepared.  While we have worried about and waited for the coming “cyber Armageddon,” our adversaries have figuratively “snuck up behind us” and have cleverly instead created disarray in our cyber defenses, ironically by utilizing tactics once thought to be the domain of alienated teenagers and vigilante groups.  And they have done so effectively.  We are presently engaged in what has proven to be a years-long war in the cyber domain in which we (i.e., the U.S., NATO, the E.U., and our allies) have been and are being roundly defeated at every turn.

The Failure of International Law

Unlike the advent of effects-based cyber weapons, international law has no clear jurisdiction over SSH.  The first Tallinn Manual (2013) devoted to examining the application of international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) to operations in the cyber domain, clearly identified cyber weapons like Stuxnet as “weapons” in the conventional sense of the term, even though composed of software instead of explosives (Jenkins 2012).  It was largely silent on what we are calling SSH, other than commenting that what turns out to be the first incident, the 2007 attack on Estonia, did not rise to the level of a use of force, or an armed attack.

A conference presentation on Tallin 2.0., by Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken.

Just as the broader public discussion conflated key elements of cyber conflict, so legal and policy experts now routinely conflate and confuse two very different modes of legitimate warfare in the cyber domain.  Lacking this key category of analysis, for example, the successor project, Tallinn 2.0 (2017), failed to encompass SSH under any of the remaining regimes and resources of international law that it otherwise attempted to bring to bear on cyber conflict generally.  Even had SSH been properly identified and differentiated in this otherwise impressive effort, it is not at all clear that present international law would offer much in the way of guidance, governance, or restraint. But no guidance of any sort is possible if we fundamentally misunderstand, and fail to identify and distinguish the sort of behavior we are trying to govern and control.

Ethics and Moral Norms

In Ethics and Cyber Warfare (Oxford UP, 2017), I document the rise of SSH, and also attempt to trace the gradual evolution of norms of responsible state behavior in this new and novel context.  The (alleged) attack on Estonia in 2007, for example, was utterly indiscriminate and wholly disproportionate to the degree of harm inflicted by the victim state on the aggressor (which itself – the Estonian government’s decision to relocate a Russian war memorial – could hardly be said to constitute a causus belli).  This attack could have been extremely destructive and harmful, although fortunately it ceased before it became so.  But had it persisted even a few more hours, let alone spread to other vulnerable cyber sectors of Estonian civil society, it could have resulted in grave injury, massive suffering, immiseration, and even loss of life.  Despite some of the more amusing features of the North Korean attack on Sony Pictures, the political implications of that action were potentially serious, and the highly similar cyber techniques subsequent employed to disrupt the SWIFT banking system in Europe (resulting in the theft of $81 billion from an impoverished country which had done nothing whatsoever to bring on such an attack) were extremely grave.

SSH is no laughing matter.  It has become the military tactic of choice for an increasingly wide array of unprincipled nation-states, and they, in turn, are becoming ever more proficient  masters of this novel warfare tactic.  We need to take this threat seriously, and move quickly to avail the international community of the appropriate moral and legal norms with which to understand and restrain this new form of warfare.  These, as I argue, have already been embodied in some of the previous and subsequent forms of attack:  e.g., an increased willingness to distinguish between military and dual-use targets on one hand, and wholly civilian objects and institutions on the other, as well as to refrain from engaging in such cyber attacks without legitimate provocation.

These are fragile and tenuous achievements, however, which need to be acknowledged, ratified, endorsed, and strengthened by all parties to cyber conflict.  That, to say the least, is a tall order within a domain of otherwise unrestricted conflict, within which warring adversaries claim their right to do whatever they please, to whomever they wish, whenever they want, with little fear of accountability or retaliation.  Nevertheless it remains the case, as with conventional warfare, that the recognition and modest restraint of war is the first step toward a just and lasting peace.

Dr. George R. Lucas is Visiting Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values in South Bend, IN. Dr. Lucas will conclude his term of service at the Reilly Center at the conclusion of the 2016-17 academic year.

Note

Policy experts in the U.S. Department of Defense include a variety of soft war tactics, including the various instances of SSH I discuss here, within a general category of conflict they term “grey war”: http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/12/fighting-while-friending-grey-war-advantage-isis-russia-and-china/124787/.  This is not a very precise or useful classification, in my view, because it lumps too many disparate tactics under a single umbrella, and thus also fails to distinguish among other important but distinctive types of  “soft war.”  The latter is the better general descriptor for all of these approaches to unarmed conflict, while SSH is a unique and important element that demands separate attention, for reasons I specify in this article.

References

Arquilla 1993.  John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt.” Cyberwar is coming!” Comparative Strategy 12 (no. 2): 141–65.

Arquilla 2012.  John Arquilla, “Cyber War is Already Upon Us,” Foreign Policy: (March-April): http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar_is_already_upon_us.

Clarke 2010.  Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Kanke, Cyber war: the next threat to national security and what to do about it. New York: HarperCollins.

Clausewitz 1830.  On War. Translated and edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1976.

Frowe 2015.  Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction.  Oxford:  Routledge, 2^nd edition.

Gross and Meisels 2017.  Soft War: the Ethics of Unarmed Conflict, eds. Michael L. Gross and Tamir Meisels.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Jenkins 2012.  Ryan Jenkins, “Is Stuxnet Physical? Does it Matter?” Journal of Military Ethics 12 (1): 68-79.

Lucas 2017.  George Lucas, Ethics and Cyber Warfare: the Quest for Responsible Security in an Age of Digital Warfare.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Morkevičius 2017.  Valerie Morkevičius, “Coercion, manipulation and harm: civilian immunity and soft war,” in Soft War: the Ethics of Unarmed Conflict, eds. Michael L. Gross and Tamir Meisels.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press: ch. 2.

Rid 2013.  Thomas Rid, Cyber War will Not Take Place.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Tallinn Manual 2013.  The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Ed. Michael N. Schmitt. New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Tallinn 2.0 2017. The Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Ed. Michael N. Schmitt. New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Wolfendale 2017.  Jessica Wolfendale, “Defining Soft War,” in Soft War: the Ethics of Unarmed Conflict, eds. Michael L. Gross and Tamir Meisels.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press: ch. 1.

Journal Archive

| By Sergia Hay |

Dr. Shane Courtland.

I’d like to thank Shane Courtland for his reply to my response to his original posting, “Faith and Betrayal of the Philosophical Method.” I’m eager to continue this conversation about an important and timely subject: free speech in the classroom, and perhaps more broadly within public discourse. As such, it is also connected to other current debates about the appropriateness of trigger warnings, perceived over-sensitivity of some students and fellow citizens, explicit and implicit censorship, and political correctness. (Editor’s note: Check out SOPHIA’s online symposium on trigger warnings here!).

At the end of his reply, Courtland wrote, “It is for the sake of progress, not in spite of it, therefore, that I champion first and foremost the philosophical method over and above any particular view that has come from it.” I agree that philosophical method should be used as a means for progress, but I don’t believe the method itself is value-free or neutral. On the contrary, I think that philosophical method and the subjects we choose to examine with the method are already biased, even if for good reason.

Most of us who teach philosophy, I would venture to guess, have adopted classroom discussion guidelines that are similar to the ones described by Courtland. Most of us, I trust, have been trained to emphasize the role of reasoning over opining in the construction of arguments, to temporarily suspend judgment to weigh evidence, and to have a basic requirement of civility. I do this because I share John Stuart Mill’s optimistic attitude that “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.” Also like Mill, I don’t believe that the argumentative methods of philosophy alone can prompt us to revise our erroneous thinking, but rather “discussion and experience” and further discussion “to show how experience is to be interpreted” are all added together in a complex recipe of genuine and lasting persuasion. Argumentation is but one ingredient along with human relationships, values, identities, our historical circumstances and systems, and our understanding of these things.

These guidelines we choose for classroom discussion are not value neutral since they reflect pre-established commitments such as the view that unsupported, purely emotional and anecdotal responses are not as good as ones that rely on evidence or other more stable forms of justification. The method itself discriminates against and excludes certain kinds of response- and this discrimination goes way beyond the exclusion of hate speech, no matter how narrowly defined. By laying out formal rules of engagement, we indicate correct classroom speech while suppressing and discouraging other kinds of speech. These value laden guidelines are part of what it means for philosophers to be gatekeepers of integrity (from my earlier post).

The central and difficult issue Courtland presents in his response to me has to do with our freedom and responsibility to examine all views. The position Courtland presents, via Mill, is two-fold: 1) if someone holds the correct view and it goes unchallenged, then the view is in danger of becoming dead dogma, and 2) if someone holds the wrong view and it goes unchallenged, then the view cannot be revised. I am certainly not opposed to challenging views, since I agree that is the business of philosophy. However, I am opposed to challenging views just for the sake of challenging them alone without the exercise of proper judgment and an understanding of people and their intentions for participating in discussion in the first place.

John Stuart Mill.

In the case of someone who may hold the right view, I wonder, contra Mill, whether it is really possible or desirable to maintain a completely unsettled stance about everything at all times. It is one thing to honestly acknowledge our propensity for error; it is another to hang all ideas in equal suspension of doubt, particularly when our actions and other beliefs need some ideas to be held with some sort of solidity. In other words, can I acknowledge my fallibility (i.e. that I may be wrong about what I think and so constantly must be willing to change my mind) and my finitude (i.e. that I must believe and do stuff here and now) at the same time? Why does the correctness of a view have to be constantly won, when other views I hold are in more urgent need of testing? Furthermore, some things do seem to be more settled because they don’t inspire much serious debate or even seem like viable questions to discuss in the first place. If everything is really to be on the table for conversation, it seems that some topics never get to the table because they are so settled. For example, the view that white, land-owning males should have the right to vote in the United States has a historical basis, but over time has calcified in such a way that it has become a non-issue. But other issues, like equitable pay for the same tasks by women or minorities, are left open for more consideration. The issues we choose to discuss and challenge provide yet another way in which we are already including and excluding certain kinds of discourse.

In the case of someone who holds the wrong view, challenging that belief can sometimes lead him or her to hold even more firmly to it. In order for revision to take place, the person who holds the view has to have committed himself or herself already to the relevance of evidence and argumentation and to have cultivated moral qualities like open-mindedness and courage which are needed to admit to the wrong. Sometimes we don’t enter into discussions in good faith, particularly when we’re unwilling to revise our thinking. This is why I am suspicious whenever the term “political correctness” is invoked. Not always, but often, “political correctness” is used to defend the articulation of a view the speaker already knows on some level is potentially offensive and problematic. To say something like “I know this isn’t politically correct, but…” is often the rhetorical equivalent of saying something like “I don’t have a problem with (insert any group here), but…” The same sort of justification is happening when we excuse inappropriate language, like saying “grab them by the pussy,” as merely benign “locker room talk.” Both sides on the issue of political correctness claim the other side to be disingenuous. On the one hand, critics of political correctness fear the silencing of unpopular views, while on the other hand, skeptics of political correctness (like me) fear the excusing of language meant to cause harm. Both fears reveal that the trust which is the grounding condition for genuine discourse to take place has eroded. This is both sad and dangerous for our classrooms and our political moment. Perhaps the solution to this is better elementary and secondary critical thinking education, but I think it takes more: a shared value of critical thinking.

The pressing question of how someone may be able to revise his or her wrong view remains. If the view is deeply held and intimately connected to one’s identity, I think the process of revising it can take many forms and is hard work. In reflecting on my own experience of times when I’ve been able to change my mind on issues of any magnitude, I have not been convinced by rational argumentation alone. I have been persuaded by the complex recipe that Mill noted: discussion, experience, and more discussion about how experience is to be interpreted. This process can take a long time and requires sincere and patient conversation partners. This is why I think education can only take place in a context of love. This is also why I am sometimes disappointed in my discipline when its practitioners insist on the value of pure philosophical argumentation in isolation from all else, because then philosophy dwindles into intellectual bullying.

There really is no shortcut through this strenuous and rewarding process of changing one’s mind. If philosophical method is to have any value, I believe it has to be connected with the purpose of philosophy—and maybe this is where our conversation could proceed next.

Dr. Sergia Hay is SOPHIA’s Membership and Chapter Development Officer and is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University. She is representing only her own point of view in this essay. For more information about Dr. Hay, visit her profile page in SOPHIA’s Directory. 

Journal Archive