by Todd May
3 A similar disturbing possibility is discussed in McMahan’s Ethics of Killing, 359–60.
4 See http://www.projetogap.org.br/en/.
5 The philosopher Larry Temkin has complicated examples like this with what are called “spectrum problems” in his book Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a summary of these, see the section on “Intransitivity and the Nature of the Good,” on his wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Temkin.
6 Cora Diamond offers sensitive approaches to this issue in several articles: “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, Animals Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); “Experimenting on Animals: A Problem in Ethics,” in Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge: Bradford Books, 1991) 335–65; and “The Importance of Being Human,” in David Cockburn, ed., Human Beings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–62.
7 McMahan gives this response to Diamond’s work in “Our Fellow Creatures,” 374.
8 Cora Diamond, cited in note 6 as an opponent of moral individualism, is an example of someone who is at the same time sensitive to the needs and interests of nonhuman animals. See, for instance, the closing lines of “Eating Meat and Eating People,” where she writes, “What might be called the dark side of human solidarity has analogies with the dark side of sexual solidarity or the solidarity of a human group, and the pain of seeing this is, I think, strongly present I the writings I have been attacking” (106).
9 This case is presented by Clare Palmer in her book Animal Ethics in Context (New York: Columbia, 2010). For a related but different approach, see Elizabeth Anderson’s “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights, 277–98.
10 “The Era of ‘Biological Annihilation’ Is Underway, Scientists Warn,” Tatiana Schlossberg, New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/climate/mass-extinction-animal-species.html.
11 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin.
Chapter Five
1 For more on this, see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/us/uc-berkeley-milo-yiannopoulos-protest.html.
2 For more on this, see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/us/middlebury-college-charles-murray-bell-curve-protest.html.
3 Todd May, Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 51.
4 Much has been written on civility in politics. Two important recent works are Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Mark Kingwell’s A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008). Allen introduces the idea of “political friendship” as a friendship that must take place between people of very different viewpoints and orientations, often through various and complementary sacrifices. Kingwell’s more traditionally philosophical work seeks to understand civil dialogue among those with very different views as a way to move toward more just social arrangements.
5 Lest we get too comfortable about the US’s overcoming of slavery, until recently slavery of undocumented workers was practiced by a number of the tomato plantations in southern Florida. To learn about this, and also about the courageous efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that ended the practice, see Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit (Andrews McKeel Publishing, 2011).
6 See, for instance, the statistics in this New York Times editorial: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/sunday/black-income-white-privilege.html. For a fuller picture, Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
7 Among the numerous articles and books addressing this issue, see for example two short pieces from the New York Times in 2013: Eduardo Porter’s “America’s Sinking Middle Class” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/business/americas-sinking-middle-class.html) and Annie Lowery’s “The Rich Get Richer through the Recovery” (https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/the-rich-get-richer-through-the-recovery/). A longer analysis is offered in Heidi Schierholz and Lawrence Mishal’s “A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class” from the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epi.org/publication/a-decade-of-flat-wages-the-key-barrier-to-shared-prosperity-and-a-rising-middle-class/).
8 An excellent and comprehensive history of recent nonviolent movements is Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall’s A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).
9 Gandhi’s term satyagraha (roughly translated as “truth-force”) as he said, “was coined in South Africa to distinguish the nonviolent resistance of the Indians of South Africa from contemporary ‘passive resistance’ of the suffragettes and others” (Non-Violent Resistance [New York: Schocken Books, 1951], 3).
10 For more on this see my book Nonviolent Resistance, especially chapters 4 and 5.
11 This is a point insisted on in Joan Bondurant’s remarkable study of Gandhian nonviolence, The Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), esp. 9–11.
12 In his magisterial three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973 [first two volumes] and 1985 [third volume), Gene Sharp discusses a number of different ways in which nonviolent action can take place. His second volume, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, offers nearly two hundred different methods, often with numerous examples.
13 Among the many articles covering this incident is Matthew Haag and Jacey Fortin’s New York Times piece, “Two Killed in Portland While Trying to Stop Anti-Muslim Rant, Police Say,” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/us/portland-train-attack-muslim-rant.html.
Conclusion
1 Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul Kottman (New York: Routledge, 2000).
2 For some folks, the idea that there are facts there is just as implausible as the idea that there are stories there waiting to be told. Isn’t the idea of uninterpreted facts just as controversial as the idea that there are stories waiting to be discovered? I am sympathetic to this hesitation. But even if we want to reject the idea that there are just uninterpreted facts, we will all probably still agree that certain things happen in our lives, however we conceive them, that constrain the kinds of stories we can tell about them.
3 Richard Moran, The Story of My Life: Narrative and Self-Understanding (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2015) 42–43.
4 Michael Billig, Freudian Repression (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Index
Achebe, Chinua, 17
Amnesty International, 153
Appalachia, 88
Aristotle, 8–11, 14, 25–27, 32
Athens, 2
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 17
benevolence, 74–90, 92, 100–101, 103, 135, 167, 172–73
Billig, Michael, 186
Black, Derek, 35–38, 48, 61
Black, Don, 35
Black Lives Matter, 152
Brown, James, 26
Canada, 88, 90
care ethics, 54–64, 169, 190
categorical imperative, 6–8, 17, 24–25, 49, 59–60
Cavarero, Adriana, 176, 180, 187
Chicago, 80
civility, 138, 144–49, 151, 189
climate change, 19, 69, 71, 73–74, 92–105, 118, 126, 134, 138
common decency, 44–50, 66, 69, 138, 144, 166
Confucius, 44
consequentialism, 4–10, 19, 21–24, 30
Copenhagen, 1–2, 37–38
Dakar, 80
Denmark, 139
deontology, 4, 6–10, 19, 24–25, 30
depletion, 92–93
dig
nity, 154–59, 161, 172
duty, 3, 12, 28, 50, 54, 59, 62, 88, 99–100
Gandhi, Mohandas, 152, 154
Gardiner, Stephen, 94, 104
Gilligan, Carol, 54–57
Graham, Lindsay, 171
Grandin, Temple, 134
Great Britain, 94
Held, Virginia, 57–60, 63–64, 66, 72
Hendrix, Jimi, 26
imagination, 64–69
instrumental value, 155
intention, 3, 6–8, 21, 25, 29
intrinsic value, 155–61
James, Aaron, 47–48
James, LeBron, 17
Joplin, Janis, 26
Junger, Sebastian, 94
Kagan, Shelly, 77–79
Kant, Immanuel, 6–8, 14, 21, 50, 59, 155–56, 161
Kathmandu, 80
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 152, 154
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 54–56, 59
Kolkata, 42
Mali, 102
Marcos, Ferdinand, 152
Milgram, Stanley, 46
moral individualism, 110–30, 135
moral luck, 6, 8, 21–22
Moran, Richard, 185
Mubarak, Hosni, 152
Murray, Charles, 142
New York, 1, 41, 42, 185
nonviolence, 139, 151–69
Obama, Barack, 140
obligation, 3, 12–13, 49–50, 54, 60–61, 64, 83, 88, 99–100, 105, 124
Palestine, 88
Parfit, Derek, 95–98
Philippines, 139, 152
Pittsburgh, 62–63
pollution, 92–93
Protevi, John, 40
Quito, 80
racism, 113, 114, 140–42, 148–51, 162–67
Rush, Molly, 62–63
satisficing, 21–24
self-deception, 181, 184–88, 190
Singer, Peter, 11–14, 17–19, 30–31, 52, 77–79, 105, 112–13, 118
Snyder, Mitch, 42
South Africa, 90
Stevenson, Matthew, 35–38, 48–49, 61
Sweden, 139
Trump, Donald, 58, 140, 147
van Gogh, Vincent, 17, 155
virtue ethics, 4, 8–10, 19, 25–27
Williams, Serena, 17
Wolf, Susan, 66, 78–79
Yiannopoulos, Milo, 141–42