Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana March 18, 2025
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. Continue reading
An Addendum on Institutional Neutrality
I wanted to add a sort of postscript to my March 17 post on institutional neutrality, meant to clarify an inference that is slightly (but only slightly) more complicated than I made it in the original post. The post was already somewhat long, and I didn’t want to burden it with over-complications by addressing every possible objection, or chasing down every twist and turn in the argument. But I also don’t want to burden it with misunderstandings.
March 2025: Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of “Institutional Neutrality”
Last month, I started a series here called “Stirring the POT,” designed to announce forthcoming events and summarize notable recent happenings. In my last installment, I mentioned that I was giving a paper on–a critique of–“institutional neutrality” at the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) in Norfolk, Virginia. That was fun, so I figured I’d report on what happened. Continue reading
Controllers, Stakeholders, and the Claims of Justice
This is part 5 of a five-part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here.
I began this series by distinguishing between an Institution and its Stakeholders, and have made two basic assumptions throughout: (a) that “stakeholder” is a legitimate concept, and (b) that stakeholders can legitimately make moral claims on corporate institutions. Though widely regarded as conventional wisdom, the assumption is in some quarters deeply controversial: a minority of dedicated critics have argued against both (a) and (b). Against (a), it’s argued that “stakeholder” is a vague and rationally unusable concept. Against (b), it’s argued that to the extent that “stakeholder” means anything, it fails to identify anyone who has a legitimate moral claim to make against, say, a corporation.(1) Continue reading
Rectificatory Justice and/vs. Business-as-Usual
This is part 4 of a five part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here.
In part 2 of my post, “Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity,” I discussed the common objection that activist demands for rectificatory justice like divestment are objectionable because they disrupt business-as-usual. As I say there, I don’t think disrupting business-as-usual is necessarily objectionable. If business-as-usual is sufficiently unjust, then a continuation of business-as-usual is just a perpetuation of some terrible injustice. We can reasonably argue about the threshold that must be crossed before it’s reasonable for an injustice to disrupt business as usual, or argue about the kind of causal contribution that a given institution has to make before it can be regarded as complicit in injustice. But absent such a discussion, pleas to continue business-as-usual should not strike anyone as persuasive. They should be regarded as rationalizations for moral complacency, and dismissed as such. Continue reading
Complicity, Exposure, and Activism
This is part 3 of a five part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here.
At this point, the Stakeholders have criticized, the Institution has half-responded, and the Stakeholders have rebutted that half-response. What’s most likely to happen next is that because the Institution controls the terms of the debate, it will insist on a purely procedural discussion. The substantive issues are to be set aside as “too complex and controversial.” The issue of complicity is quickly to be submerged in a broth of procedural acids and left to corrode. The Institution, it will be repeated, must be governed in an orderly fashion—a fashion that just happens to give a systematic, unyielding presumption to stasis and the status quo, that places a nearly impossible burden of proof on anyone who seeks to change it, and that then describes doing so as a binding norm. Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post here called “Academic Hiring and Genocide,” in which I argued that genocidaires should, at the very least, be excluded from academic life, but ideally should be excluded from gainful employment itself. Whatever anyone thought of the argument, readers might have wondered about its practical relevance. “So Khawaja’s calling for the on-campus cancellation of ‘genocidaires’. Interesting vendetta, but how many genocidaires are there, anyway? And how many are actively seeking employment right now, including academic employment?” The New York Times reports that the “Defense Department [Is] to Cut Over 5,000” workers due to the Musk-Trump rampage against the “Deep State.” Could I possibly have meant them? Take a wild guess. Continue reading
Stakeholders, Politicization, and Standing to Complain
This is part 2 of a five part series. For part 1, go here.
Background context: an institution accused of complicity in injustice counter-accuses its accusers of politicization and lack of standing.
Start with the politicization objection. The Stakeholders have two separate responses here.
Responding to the politicization objection. First, they point out that it’s not clear that the politicization of a previously apolitical scene is necessarily objectionable. Productiveness, order, and justice are three separate values whose relative value is far from self-evident. Given this, it’s obviously not the case that the value of productiveness and order so outweigh justice as to trump it altogether. Continue reading
Complicity and the Strategy of Evasion
Imagine that an institution (“the Institution”) maintains a set of investments in various enterprises that make a clear and demonstrable contribution to some indisputable injustice. Now suppose that a set of stakeholders (“the Stakeholders”) objects to these investments, calling on the Institution to divulge the facts in a fuller way, and demanding divestment from the clearly objectionable investments. Continue reading
“In the literature of complaint and reform, and in the endless reports from distinguished groups identifying a crisis in some element or all of higher education in America, a key defect is often the absence of practical solutions.”
–John V. Lombardi, How Universities Work, p. 31.
In an essay I posted here a few weeks ago, I argued that genocidaires seeking lower-level electoral office should be denied such offices at the ballot box. The argument was framed as a response to Jason Brennan’s account of the ethics of voting, which he describes as “the ethics of voting in political contexts.”(1) Though he doesn’t quite define “political contexts,” it’s obvious enough that he means voting in democratic elections for governmental office, e.g., for U.S. President, for legislative offices, and in some cases for judicial offices, taking U.S. electoral politics as the paradigm. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 