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
Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon.
“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did. Continue reading
They say, you know when you know
So let’s face it, you had me at hello
Hesitation never helps
How could this be anything, anything else?
–Elvis, in a slightly different context
Are we living under fascism? Are we on our way to it? It’s natural to ask these questions, but hard to answer them, mostly because it’s hard to know what they’re asking. To know whether we’re living under or en route to fascism, we need a workable definition of “fascism,” but strangely enough, decades after the defeat of the worst of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century, that’s what we seem to lack. We know that fascism was defeated, but still don’t know what it was. In what follows, I simply want to canvass some of the problems involved in answering my opening question, not so much to provide a conclusive answer to it, as to figure out why it’s so hard to come up with one. Continue reading
(This post gives away the whole plot of the movie “The Sea of Trees.”)
My wife Alison took her life four years ago today in Toronto–March 4, 2021. She was discovered, still alive, during a pre-scheduled building inspection of her townhouse. She was rushed to the hospital but died there. She’d been hospitalized for an earlier attempt on her life in February of that year, and had made at least one yet earlier attempt several years before we’d been married. Suicide was a preoccupation of hers for the duration of our admittedly brief marriage. She brought it up repeatedly in conversation in ways that are easy enough to remember, but also in ways I ended up suppressing. Continue reading
My dissertation advisor and grad school mentor, William David Solomon (he went by “David”), died this past Wednesday, February 26th. He was 81. I learned a great deal from him, and regret that we hadn’t spoken in over a decade.
He became my advisor somewhat by accident. I went to Notre Dame primarily to study with Alasdair MacIntyre, which I did for several years, until MacIntyre left Notre Dame for Duke. At that point, I had to change advisors and dissertation topic. I’d originally thought to write a dissertation on Aristotle, but ended up writing one on the connections between epistemic foundationalism and the project of finding a ‘foundation’ for ethics. It was an unusual topic, and many people didn’t ‘get’ it. Solomon by contrast was enormously enthusiastic about and supportive of the project (and of me), and let me write it my way. 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
Policy of Truth 