Stirring the POT (2)

Posted on by under activism, Big Data, cancel culture, Election 2024, General announcements, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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 →

You Can’t Burn Down Neapolis

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Palestine, Ramadan, slices of life

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 →

I Think They Call This Fascism

Posted on by under Election 2024, political philosophy

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 →

The Sea of Trees

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

(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 →

W. David Solomon (1944-2025), RIP

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

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 →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (5/5)

Posted on by under activism, liberty and the left, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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 →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (4/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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, Neutrality, Atrocity (3/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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 →

Let Them Eat Each Other

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, Fatwas, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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 →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (2/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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 →