Oedipus and Ion as Outsiders: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship Oedipus and Ion: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship An Analysis of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles and Ion by Euripides Claire Holland University of Chicago Author Marysol Fernandez Harvey Tathyana Mello Amaral Antonio Almazan Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (12 pages) Introduction In ancient Athenian society, the collective myth of autochthony[1] provided the basis for social order, determining who got the benefits of citizenship and who was excluded from the polis [2]. According to their autochthonous myth, the citizenry of Athens did not emigrate from elsewhere, but instead arose from the earth upon which ancient Athens stood. Theirs was not a city of immigrants; from their very origins, the people of Athens believed themselves to be the only population that had always belonged to Athenian soil. Thus, each true-born Athenian carried within them the essential spirit of the Athenian people, passed down from generation to generation. To determine and confirm their citizenship on an individual level, each Athenian had to demonstrate their autochthonous familial descent when they came of age in a dokimasia, an examination wherein citizen tribunals collected testimony from friends and family members in support of one’s claims to citizenship[3]. In this way, one’s lineage became the sole factor determining one’s inclusion in the polis . Once blood became the basis for citizenship, citizens who were established as autochthonous could not be excluded from the polis on the basis of class. The poorest citizens had the same right to participate in Athenian government as the elite, although in practice the higher classes enjoyed special privileges, such as training in rhetoric, which poorer citizens did not. For ancient Greek city-states, this level of inclusivity was groundbreaking; most city-states did not consider their lower- or even middle-class members to be citizens, even in democratic systems of governance. However, this is not to say that Athens was entirely without social divisions, for more than just fully-privileged citizens lived within the city walls. Overall, inhabitants were sorted into three groups: citizens, metics, and slaves. While citizens enjoyed all the rights and benefits of the polis , including the right to vote and to participate in public forums, metics were an in-between, catch-all group, not subjugated like slaves but not as privileged as citizens. They could not participate in government or vote, for example, but were still able to participate economically in Athenian society. Metics were what we today might call a migrant class, as they did not meet the full requirements for blood-based citizenship but were still free. Metics were not confined to only the lower classes; like citizens, metics existed in every economic stratum, from the poorest to the richest. However, regardless of economic class, citizens, being true-born Athenians, were more socially vaunted. While lauded by political theorists for its groundbreaking inclusivity, the Athenian genealogical grounds for inclusion, like any other such system, necessitated that some be excluded so that the polis might be defined and unified rather than indistinct and anarchic. This exclusion, at least theoretically, was to be on the grounds of blood-based requirements for citizenship[4]. However, as Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, the second in his trilogy about the eponymous protagonist, and Ion by Euripides make abundantly clear, this distinction did not always play out as it ought. In fact, the existence of exceptions to the rule of blood-based citizenship reveals that its apparent legitimacy was, at its core, fallacious. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is in that the knowledge of their parentage, which should have moved them out of their marginal social positions and into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually prevented them from claiming their rightful places within society. This is due to the fact that in practice, blood did not stand alone in determining membership to the polis . Athenian society instead relied upon adherence to socially-codified, secondary behavioral implications of blood-based membership, as shown through a further examination of the Athenian city-state and the plays Oedipus at Colonus and Ion. What’s more, the rule of descent necessarily meant that any violations of these secondary behaviors were inheritable and thus contaminated an individual’s entire genetic line from their transgression onward. In examining the social structures as they are presented in these two works, in light of the historical context of ancient Athens, it is clear that the lineage-based autochthony myth was only the beginning of the implied social order. Literary Background Before diving into the social structure of Athens, a short summary of each play is in order, which will highlight the most relevant plot points. Thanks to Freud, most are familiar with Oedipus, or at least with his infamous acts: killing his father, marrying his mother, and fathering her children. Once he discovers all that he has unknowingly done, Oedipus blinds himself and is outcast from Thebes, his home and onetime kingdom. All of this takes place in Oedipus Rex , the first in Sophocles’ trilogy of plays about Oedipus and his family. Following these events is Oedipus at Colonus , which shows Oedipus in exile from Thebes as he approaches the Athenian acropolis. During the course of the play, Oedipus encounters a pair of Athenian citizens, who fetch Theseus, the Athenian king, to determine if Oedipus will be allowed to stay in Athens. After a lengthy debate, Theseus decides to accept him, thanks in part to the pleading of Oedipus’s daughters, who have been helping him in his blindness. At the conclusion of the play, Oedipus is led away into the forest of Athens where he dies without leaving a trace, with Theseus as his sole witness swearing not to say a word about what happened to him. The themes of Oedipus at Colonus reach their pinnacle in Antigone , the final play in Sophocles’ trilogy, wherein Oedipus’s children are all killed, save Ismene, whether it be by their own hands or those of their political rivals. Ion by Euripides centers around another family drama, although perhaps not as well known as that of Oedipus. In the play, Ion is an orphan like Oedipus, raised in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The play starts when Creusa, forebear and Queen of Athens, and her husband Xuthus, a war hero and metic, visit the Temple to ask for a prophecy concerning Xuthus’s prospects of having any children. There, the couple meets Ion, and the prophecy leads Xuthus to assume that the now-grown orphan is his true-born son. By the end of the play, however, Creusa and Ion discover his true parentage: that it is she who is really his mother, and that his father is actually the god Apollo, who raped her before she married Xuthus. Following council from the goddess Athena, they choose to keep this knowledge secret from Xuthus for reasons that will later be discussed, and Ion goes on to eventually found the Ionian race. The Athenian City-State With the above summaries in mind, we will begin our analysis of the Athenian city-state. Athenian democracy, while more inclusive of lower classes than any prior sociopolitical structure, necessarily imposed limits on those allowed into the privileged citizenry. Voting could only be meaningful if it were limited; absolute freedom to participate in the polis would be, as Jacques Derrida says of unconditional hospitality, “a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, for short.”[5] For order and social duty to exist, there must be a specific group to whom these imperatives apply, or else all is unordered chaos. The necessary trade-off in this collective unification is the creation of an out-group against which the citizenry can be defined and assert its exceptionalism. In this way, the social order itself creates the outlaw, the metic, the orphan, and the bastard: broad, inferior social categories designed to include those who do not adhere to the implied social code. Those considered “outside of the law” are not actually so, for they fall into categories created by the social order. The only individuals truly outside of the law are those who cannot be defined by it, which we shall see is the case for Ion and Oedipus. The social rule creates the social rulebreakers, and at the same time the rule-breakers throw the rule itself into relief. Each is the inverse of the other’s positive assertion, becoming a co-constitutive axis. They provide legitimacy by means of a relation of difference through which to define themselves, while in reality neither category exists outside of the artificial, dyadic social construction. In order for a society to function, however, it must be able to overlook the arbitrariness of social delineation and instead see it as legitimate, even inherent to its subjects. To that end, Athens turned to a system of social order that on its face seemed absolute, inherent, and infallible: blood-based citizenship dependent upon genealogical descent from an autochthonous original populace. In the way of legitimacy, autochthony appeared acceptable to its citizens because it could not be disproven, even though it was just as much of a social construct as any other conception of citizenship and justification of exceptionalism. Because the mythical original autochthonous population from which Athenians claimed citizenship was ancestral, its supposed existence could not be called into question based on facts, since there were none to confirm or deny its existence. Like the founding myth of any society, the lie at the core of Athenian structure not only persisted but, interestingly, added legitimacy to the regime. Autochthony also provides a reason to see status as inherent to the citizen, since it “grounds difference in claims of nature—specifically, in earth and blood—[which gives] these categories the appearance of an ontological status.”[6] That is, Athenian exceptionalism appeared justified since it was traceable back to inherent natural differences between people. The lie of one’s social status being inherent, especially in a system based on blood, means that both adhering to its standards and violating them are not seen as merely shifting status, but are actions sublimated into the person themself. Oedipus, answering the question the Chorus poses as to his identity, does not say, “I am in exile”—that is, inhabiting an external, imposed state—but “I am an exile” (italics added).[7] His status has become his being, since blood determines both. Just as Thomas Kuhn conceives of paradigm shifts in science as not only incorporating past scientific information, but also as proclaiming past paradigms unscientific, so too do new information and actions that cause a change in status retroactively re-write one’s entire self. Everything that previously signaled one’s status becomes a lie, and, in a world where statuses can change, passing becomes both possible and inevitable.[8] This is the unavoidable fallout of the idea of social status as inherent and blood based. While autochthony’s claims of being inherent certainly rested on shaky ground, these were not the only fallacious premises upon which Athenian self-conception depended. Because autochthony was meant to order, it centrally imposed its structure down to even the level of individual family, and in doing so, manifested itself as a myth of unity. Above all, genealogical claims were meant to be objective and clear, “largely to guard against the kind of mingling and confusion of identities that blurs discrete lines of demarcation in the social order.”[9] The ideological primacy of a clearly-ordered and unified family structure was designed to make orderly life possible, with a cohesive overall clan structure which mirrored the internal structure of the family. In this way, the polis functioned ideologically as a single entity, its uniform organization all the way down to the individual level supplementing its unifying claim to one collective heritage. This ideology is far from abstract, and is in fact visible in much of the literature Athenian citizens produced. In Pericles’ Funeral Oration, for example, “the ‘populus,’ in the general sense of the term, is not politically divided,” and, indeed, “is never divided in the works of the tragic poets.”[10] This broad claim of unity is seen in Oedipus at Colonus as well, when Theseus, reacting to Creon’s abduction of Oedipus’s daughters, proclaims, “Your [Creon’s] behavior is an affront to me, / A shame to your own people and your nation,” and that “the whole city [Athens] / Must not seem overpowered by one man.”[11] In a unified citizenry, any citizen exemplifies that citizenry, and thus the actions of one man can impact the reputation of the entire polis . In this way, the citizen is metonymic of the polis , and conflating one with the other is both an easy and powerful move in a mythically-unified city like Athens, especially by its figurehead Theseus. What this means, however, is that the broad-reaching social order determines not only social status, but behavior. One must act in accordance to its social prescriptions, or else one endangers the social ideal of collective unity. Thus, those who violate the social norms, especially those important enough to be codified into law, must either be expelled from the polis by being placed into one of the excluded classes—in extreme cases, such as with Oedipus, this meant being expelled from the city itself and branded an exile—or eliminated entirely. In a society founded on absolute, broad-reaching, inherent order, any person whose very presence defies that system of order threatens the entire conception of the polis, a conception that must be kept in place so that democracy and the state as a whole can function. In order to see why Oedipus and Ion are not able to take their rightful places, then, it is necessary to examine exactly which secondary social prescriptions they violate that threaten the order and unity of the polis .[12] The Social Implications Of Blood While the primary concern of a genealogical social organization is creating a clear order, it must also be a self-sustainable system. What this means is that in order to reproduce viable citizens, and thereby the entire social order, secondary behavioral prescriptions become necessary. A system meant merely to determine whether or not one was citizen (i.e., pure lineage) became instead a guiding social principle, dictating not only social standing but also desired social behavior. To borrow a term coined by James C. Scott, the requirement of pure lineage in a genealogical society set into motion “a process by which ‘a measure colonizes behavior’”—that is, what is meant to be descriptive becomes prescriptive.[13] In the quest to create social order and obtain clarity through kinship organization, a blood-based society generated secondary regulations that helped further its own existence. No longer did it merely order society, but the desire to adhere to the blood standard now shaped the ways Athenians lived their lives. For example, the stringency of claims to autochthony biased societal perceptions of preferable marriages. Athenian-Athenian matches, or, more generally, marriages between members of the polis with clearly-defined statuses were considered more appropriate in ancient Athenian society. These biases played into the need for social order: if one was certain who one’s parents were, one’s own status was clearly defined. Conversely, if one was uncertain about their parentage, their social status was diminished due to the social order. We see this bias throughout history, with orphans and bastards historically being treated as lower-class citizens, inferior to those of straightforward lineage. With unclear parentage, one is not immediately stateless, per say, but one experiences a sort of social statelessness. As Creusa says of Ion, “It was for your good that Loxias settles into a noble house. If you were called the god’s son, you would not have had a house as your inheritance or a father’s name.”[14] Because Athenian women could not hold property, Ion must pass as the son of a metic in order to inherit a name of any meaning. Indeed, we see at the beginning of the play that Ion has no name at all until Xuthus gives it to him.[15] Naming is a familial claim, but as a bastard of Apollo, Ion has no name to claim whatsoever. While his Athenian mother ought to make him Athenian as well, revealing his true parentage would render Ion not only destitute, but without any form of social identification. To have a subordinate place in the social order is better—at least as Ion is coerced to believe by Xuthus and Athena—than to have no place at all. While his parentage is clear, Ion’s social status is not, revealing one of the major failures of a blood-based system. Inheritance can only deal with facts that it was built to incorporate for it is based on the grounds that it stems from absolute fact. While being the son of a god ought to have positive effects on his social standing, the fact that Apollo has entered the social order from a place completely external to it means that Ion and all of his progeny are also unable to fit into the social system at all. Ion cannot even be defined by one of the catch-all categories such as “orphan” that have been built into society for extreme, non-standard cases. A social order based on genetic lineage “expresses a demand to repeat (over generations) what can only happen once (the original birth).”[16] Genealogical in-grouping made both citizenship and violations of its reproductive practices iterative: if one’s ancestors made a mistake in marriage or reproduction, it would be reproduced throughout the entire genealogical line with no chance of correction, save through covering it up. Once revealed, Apollo’s original sin of impregnating Creusa—or, as it was more likely to be seen in this society, Creusa’s original sin of giving birth to Ion—would haunt Ion’s family line forever. Ion therefore must follow Athena’s advice and pass as a metic until the end of his days, his knowledge of his true parentage keeping him from fully joining the polis lest he become disenfranchised and lose his social classification of orphan, along with the protection that classification affords. While Ion’s crime against the social order is his very birth, Oedipus’s crime is more nuanced, hinging on his transition from ignorance to knowledge of his own parentage. Oedipus at Colonus thus explores what happens when that which goes against the social order is revealed, instead of staying safely hidden. While Ion confounds orderly overall social classification, Oedipus hopelessly confuses the internal family ordering upon which the whole of Athenian society was based. Oedipus not only confuses this order by killing his father, upending the proper power dynamic and sinning against the polis ’s conception of the ideal family, but also by marrying his mother and having children by her. This creates social positions untenable within Athenian society: sister-daughters, son-brothers, father-siblings, grandmother-mothers, etc. In his ignorance, Oedipus commits crimes that, upon coming to light, make both himself and his entire family socially unclassifiable, for the social order has no way of coping with the complications of incest. Just as Ion’s potential outing could contaminate the legitimacy of his entire line, Oedipus’s revelation does contaminate his entire family structure because of the supposedly inherent and unifying qualities of blood. This inherited contamination is evident in the ill fate of Oedipus’s daughters in the following play, Antigone . What brings people together in the social order can just as quickly spread social contamination. Oedipus and his family, especially his offspring, each inhabit multiple social categories, which contradict each other in their implications of exclusion and inclusion. Despite Oedipus and by extent his children being at least doubly Theban, the revelation of Oedipus’s parentage means they cannot be allowed to remain in the polis . Society has no outcast category in which to put the members of this family, so they must be expelled. They have violated the social order and thus cannot stay in the city since their continued presence threatens the myth of broader social unity. While the concept of unity was not as important in Thebes as in Athens, at least from an Athenian perspective, incest was still taboo. To some extent, Oedipus’s family had to be Theban since Thebes served as Athens’ dramatic foil, a place where scenes were allowed that couldn’t play out in Athens, even mythically.[17] Thebes was a place to explore social possibilities. If Oedipus’s stories took place within Athens’ idealized system, even in fiction, they risked exposing too directly its fragility. The slight distance between the two cities, both physically and ideologically, was what made such socially-shattering myths as Oedipus palatable. They were allowed to explore the potential effects that taboo events such as incest could have within Athens without threatening the social order with its intense emotional baggage. Conclusion The Athenian social order tolerates certain types of aberrations as long as they fall within the outcast categories it has created so that its myth of unity can persist despite inevitable anomalies. If an individual falls outside of these catch-all categories then they must be eliminated. Indeed, we see this occur through the plays as Oedipus’s children—who break no laws but whose very existence as daughter-sisters and brother-sons exposes the fragility of blood-based social order—eventually kill themselves and each other. The sin must be cut off at the source or else it will grow exponentially with every following generation. All of Oedipus’s family must end to cleanse the blood and the city. Unlike with Ion, Oedipus’s familial social transgressions are known, precluding him from the approved social order. Therefore, Oedipus faces no other socially-viable option but to be expelled from the polis . He threatens the polis ’s behavioral unity, the myth of unity that the entire polis is founded upon, and therefore, the polis itself. The mythically-unified polis, for whom all included individuals are metonymic representatives, cannot include an individual who has violated its secondary socio-familial prescriptions even if those transgressions are not intentional. Interestingly, Oedipus is asked to conditionally rejoin Thebes after his expulsion because the metonymic power the polis has over its citizens supersedes all other considerations. The claim which Athens newly asserts over Oedipus infringes upon that primary consideration, and so his secondary sins can be overlooked in favor of his primary birthright. Oedipus’s parentage is revealed, while Ion’s is not, and these revelations are what shaped their tragic fates. However, in a genealogical system that gains legitimacy based on the claim that blood is objective, inherent, and unfakeable, how is it possible that either of their lineages, at any point, not be revealed? The answer, in short, is that despite its apparent objectivity, blood does not speak for itself. One cannot look at someone and tell who their parents are, and, like Ion, individuals might be mistaken about their true parentage. This opens up the possibility of acting and passing as a citizen, even unintentionally, when one is not. This possibility threatens the autochthonous myth of blood being self-evident and inherent—thereby threatening the entire Athenian social order. As the bastard child of a god and an Athenian, Ion, while objectively an Athenian, does not fit neatly into the social narrative. Revealing his parentage may lead to questions about his autochthony. To secure his high position of power, a palatable lie must be constructed to ensure the propagation of his own line and the social order as a whole. Blood in this case is a performance, willing or not, for the sake of the social order to which his own exceptional circumstances must be subsumed. Because the autochthonous genealogical citizen myth is founded on the basis that it has no exceptions, having a questionable figurehead at one of the most important family lines might incite social crumbling from the top down. As an inevitable consequence of the need to preserve the mythical unity that this society was founded on, Ion, whose familial transgressions can be subsumed into pre-existing social categories, is able to be a metic as long as he hides his familial transgressions under a socially-acceptable genealogical narrative. Oedipus, on the other hand, who reveals his familial transgressions under extreme emotional duress[18], must necessarily be evicted from his polis for his violation of its secondary prescriptions since the assertion of his status along family lines implicates his other behavior. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is that the knowledge they gain of their parentage, which should shift them from their marginal social positions into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually means that they cannot claim their rightful places in society. The knowledge of their parentage is inextricable from the knowledge that either they or their parents violated the secondary prescriptive norms of their genealogically-based society. Despite its claims to being inherent, providing clear order, and unifying the polis , (blood) autochthony failed in almost every one of these respects, as does any other basis for social organization and delineation of citizenship. In order to preserve and reproduce this order, the reproduction of individuals needed to adhere to secondary behavioral prescriptions that blood-based membership entails, lest their entire family lines be contaminated. Due to the different natures of Ion’s and Oedipus’s social crimes, as well as the secrecy of sensitive information or lack thereof, Ion is able to pass within the polis while Oedipus must be expelled in order to preserve the social myth. However, neither is able to claim what is rightfully theirs: the title of citizen. Endnotes [1] Autochthony: n., The quality, state, or condition of being autochthonous; an instance of this. Autochthonous: (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists. Oxford English Dictionary, “autochthony” and “autochthonous,” OED Online, December 2018. [2] Polis refers to a Greek city-state. Here, more specifically, it refers to the people allowed within government in Athens, the people who constituted the voter base and who were included in all aspects of civic life. [3] Dokimasia : n, The term δοκιμασία and the related verb dokimazein were used in various Greek contexts to denote a procedure of examining or testing, and approving or validating as a result of the test. Oxford Classical Dictionary , 2016, "dokimasia." [4] At the time in which Ion is set, the requirement for citizenship was having one Athenian parent, not two, as it was after Pericles’ citizenship law. For Oedipus, the distinction is irrelevant because both of his parents are Thebans—or, in his father’s case, a naturalized Theban ruler. [5] Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond , Trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83. [6] Demetra Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion,” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013), 15. [7] Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus , trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 92, line 9. The exact blood-based social conventions Oedipus violates that lead to his expulsion from Thebes will be explored later. [8] Passing, or being perceived and accepted as something other than what one actually is, is certainly an important part of any strictly-delineated social order. For example, in the post-Jim Crow era, certain people who would legally have been considered African American could “pass” in their daily lives as white. Passing is especially important in relation to Euripides’ Ion, but further discussion is not within the scope of this paper. [9] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 15. [10] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus,” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, eds. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 331; 334. [11] Sophocles, 132, lines 8-9; 136, lines 14-15. [12] Ion is the son of the sun god Apollo and the Athenian princess Creusa; Oedipus is the son of two Theban monarchs. Thus, both theoretically should be included in their respective poleis on the basis of blood, especially since it is the blood of the elite. [13] James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 114. [14] Euripides, Ion , trans. H.K. Lee (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997), 503. [15] Euripides, Ion , 403. [16] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 13. [17] Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities,” 334: “There is one place where stasis [social division] finds a special home: It is Thebes,…an anti-city.” [18] Euripides, Ion , 104, lines 17-18: “Nothing so sweet / As death, death by stoning, could have been given me.” Oedipus’s distress comes from his internalization of the prescribed external social standards, which hold so much weight as taboo that he, as a metonymic citizen, feels anguish from actively breaking these rules, even if unaware he was doing so. References Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Euripides. Ion . Translated by H.K. Lee. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997. Kasimis, Demetra. “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion.” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013). Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University Press, 2014. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus . Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus.” In Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Edited by Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

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Ria Modak Khadi Capitalism: Gandhian Neoliberalism and the Making of Modern India Ria Modak The postcolonial invocation of Mohandas Gandhi brings to mind a singular image: Gandhi dressed in a simple dhoti and shawl made from khadi, or home-spun and home woven cloth, sitting in front of his spinning wheel. This recollection of Gandhi positions him as both the embodiment of Indian national consciousness as well as a figure outside or above modernity, insulated from the hegemonic influence of Western reason and secularism. Modernity, encapsulated by the socio- political, economic, and cultural institutions and frameworks birthed by post-Enlightenment rationality, is seen as incompatible with the fundamental tenets of Gandhian political philosophy. Yet, in researching the massive corpus of Gandhi’s collected writings and speeches, I found that his entanglements of modernity, cap- italism, and nationalism were less straightforward than conventional Indian historiography might suggest. Gandhi’s political philosophy offers an entry point to address fundamental questions about nation thinking, modernity, and postcolonial futurity: can the postcolonial subject articulate political possibilities that move beyond the nation state without sacrificing the material considerations of global capitalism? Put differently, is it possible to imagine and enact a world order that transcends the hegemonic structuring forces of Western modernity? These questions are particularly resonant as we come to terms with the price of modern progress, which, in the stark words of Horkheimer and Adorno, has left us a world “radiant with triumphant calamity” (1). Critiques of modern living are boundless, ranging from Frankfurt school critiques of its reification of reason to Subaltern Studies’ lamentations of Western epistemological hegemony (2) to arguments from the Black radical tradition that colonialism and modernity are inextricably linked (3). However, as scholars look beyond the modern Western intellectual tradition and locate alternative ways of being to create more liberatory political realities, it is crucial that we think critically about how radical these alternatives truly are. Some alternatives, like those found in Gandhi’s political philosophy, cannot help but be, to invoke the work of David Scott, conscripts of modernity. While historians and political theorists of contemporary India alike argue that Gandhi summarily rejected modern frameworks of nationalism, industrialism, and rationality itself, I contend that Gandhian political philosophy, rather than existing above the conceits of Western modernity, is intimately tied to Western civil society and its social, political, and economic manifestations. More specifically, it closely resembles neoliberal forms of social relations and economy. The fundamental methodologies and frameworks undergirding Gandhian political philosophy ultimately reinscribe the hegemonic global capitalist order even while they seem, on inspection, to articulate a radically different futurity. This paper’s critical intervention, then, challenges the underlying assumptions of conventional Indian historiography by exposing its inability to reckon with Gandhi as a fundamentally modern political figure entrenched in the machinations of globalized neoliberalism. I suggest that a more critical reading of Gandhi-- one that accurately locates his political philosophy as a modern intellectual contribution-- is necessary in order to make sense of India’s postcolonial future. After an outline of conventional Indian historiography and its fixation with Gandhi within the nationalist paradigm, I turn to elements of Gandhi’s political philosophy and political economy to expose its similarities to modern neoliberal ideology and economics. Nationalist Historiography: A Dominant Discourse The conventional story of the Indian nationalist movement emphasizes the role of prolonged popular struggle; the diverse political and ideological visions of its leadership; and a uniquely revolutionary atmosphere of freedom and debate (4). The first stage of the independence movement was defined by the cultivation of an elite consciousness and the emergence of moderate nationalist activity; statesmen and politicians like Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale sought to achieve piecemeal reform through constitutional methods while keeping faith in the British justice system (5). As these gradual efforts failed to bring about substantive change, a more extremist brand of nationalism emerged. Through the swadeshi movement, militant nationalists like Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak fomented wide-spread political agitation by boycotting British institutions and goods (6). In this highly charged political context, Gandhi launched several satyagraha , or non-violent resistance, campaigns, including the non-cooperation movement and the Quit India movement, successfully mobilizing the masses (7). The culmination of this protracted struggle for freedom was, of course, Indian independence and the ensuing violence of Partition. This dominant narrative of the Indian freedom struggle foregrounds nationalism as a guiding principle, first to unify the social, economic, and political demands of a vastly heterogeneous population, and later to create a sovereign and secular nation state that embodies the will of the people. In depicting nationalism as the primary structuring force in the making of modern India, the mainstream approach to Indian history is representative of other, more extreme, approaches to historiography, including Hindu nationalist, Marxist, and even subaltern perspectives. All Indian history, in other words, is told as nationalist history. Hindu nationalist retellings of the independence movement represent Indian nationalism as a brand of ethnic nationalism in which nationality is an inherent genetic characteristic (8). By villainizing Muslim subjects, it replaces the secular liberal state of conventional historiography with a Hindu state: the Indian nation is the Hindu nation (9). Marxist historiography, in contrast, traces the rise and fall of India as a socialist state through retelling history from below, analyzing the role of peasant revolts and general strikes in inciting nationalist fervor. It conceptualizes the positive aspects of the nationalist movement (i.e. the bourgeois-democratic values of secularism, women’s rights, freedom of the press etc.) as the initial points for a people’s front (10). While subaltern historiographical approaches drew inspiration from Marxist methods, their characterization of the nationalist movement splits Indian politics into elite and subaltern spheres, each of which articulated a unique form of nationalism (11). Each of these historiographical approaches, in summary, insist on reifying the defining characteristic of national- ism according to the field’s preeminent scholars: congruence between the political and national unit (12). Within this discourse, the figure of Gandhi emerges as the very embodiment of nationalist consciousness. During the freedom struggle, he acquired the informal, but highly popularized, title of Father of the Nation, an appellation which continues to inform Gandhi’s central role in Indian postcolonial imagination. Countless films, television programs, plays, and documentaries continue to memorialize his life and work both within and outside of India. From Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi to Doordarshan’s 52 episode-long teleserial Mahatma, the figure of Gandhi continues to pervade India’s nationalist project (13). Gandhi plays a crucial role in the symbolic consolidation of state power: his birthday and death day are both celebrated as national holidays; his image appears on paper currency of nearly all denominations issued by the Reserve Bank of India; and the International Gandhi Peace Prize is awarded annually by the Government of India as a tribute to Gandhian ideals. From the independence movement to our own political moment, Gandhi and the nationalist project have fused into an inseparable unit. Contemporary theorists of Indian nationalism argue that the conflation of Gandhi and the nation can be attributed to Gandhi’s refusal to adopt the values and assumptions of Western modernity. Partha Chatterjee suggests that by rejecting the modernizing ethos of Western rationality, Gandhi remained unencumbered by the Enlightenment thematic: “[n]ot only did Gandhi not share the historicism of the nationalist writers, he did not share their confidence in rationality and the scientific mode of knowledge” (14). Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar argue that Gandhi’s reliance on the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, allowed for the articulation of a novel religio-ethical orientation in the realm of politics, which he saw as intrinsically linked to Western modernity (15). This seemingly wholesale rejection of Western modernity, according to many historians of modern and postcolonial India, is clearly visible in Gandhi’s public image (16). As he embraced his role as a satyagrahi, he traded the Western robes of the barrister for a simple dhoti and shawl made from khadi. Gandhi’s khadi attire was transformed into a material artifact of the nation defined in terms of the contemporary politics and economics of self rule (17). Gandhi’s physical appearance, in other words, paralleled his ideological distance from Western modernity. Gandhi’s rejection of modern social, political, and economic frameworks is often contrasted to other leading statesmen and intellectuals of Indian freedom. He is most frequently counterposed with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Conventional Indian historiography narrates the differences between Gandhi and Nehru as such: where Nehru was a proponent of statist secular socialism driven by industrial growth, Gandhi was profoundly ambivalent about state intervention in agriculture and industry; where Nehru located India’s future in the creation of the modern city, Gandhi presented the self-sufficient and autonomous village as an alternative to modern civilization; where Nehru saw economic development as central to Indian independence, Gandhi sought self-purification and the cultivation of individual ethical consciousness (18). Scholars of modern India also juxtapose Gandhi’s religious orientation and appeals to Hinduism with the anti-caste, radical democratic humanism of B.R. Ambedkar, renowned Dalit leader and the architect of India’s constitution (19). Where Gandhi revered village life as a revival of the old social order, Ambedkar saw the village as a model of oppressive Hindu social organization which segregated upper caste communities from lower caste communities; where Gandhi turned to religion as a source of ethics, Ambedkar glorified the secular humanist ideals of the French Revolution; where Gandhi urged spiritual and religious education in Hindustani, Ambedkar demanded that English be used in schools to counter the Brahmin tradition of denying education and literacy to lower caste communities (20). In comparison to Nehru, Ambedkar, and others, Gandhian political philosophy is depicted in mainstream Indian historiography as irrefutably anti-modern. However, as I argue below, this characterization of Gandhi does not accurately reflect his political philosophy. Defining the Gandhian Problem Space Rather than articulating a radical alternative to Western modernity, Gandhian political philosophy was entrenched in the systems, structures, and frameworks of modernity, and more specifically, those of neoliberal capitalism. Before addressing the specifics of Gandhi’s political philosophy, it is first necessary to locate Gandhi more comprehensively within his problem space to better establish the stakes of my argument. In his work Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott introduces the idea of the problem space, which he defines as “an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs” (21). Theoretical work cannot be read, in other words, without identifying the questions to which that work responds. Even while actors within a particular problem space may disagree on the answers in a particular scenario, they are all responding to the same set of unspoken questions while maintaining a shared sense of the stakes. Intellectuals, statesmen and activists may disagree on how to decolonize, for example, while implicitly agreeing that something must be done to address the condition of colonized people. In the previous section, I gestured to one aspect of Gandhi’s problem space by outlining the background against which he formed his ideas in the space and time of the Indian freedom movement; in that spatio-temporal location, Gandhi’s problem space was constructed by Hindu scripture and the formation of religion as ethics. However, the Gandhian problem space was not circumscribed by the borders of the Indian nation; rather, it existed concomitantly with other approaches to decolonization during the mid-twentieth century. On the whole, these other projects struggled, mostly unsuccessfully, to articulate a postcolonial future out- side the terms of nationalism and modernity. In the Anglophone Black Atlantic, statesmen and intellectuals like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams proposed federalism and non-domination on the global stage as solutions to the problem of empire (22). In the Francophone Black Atlantic, Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor sought to transform imperial France into a democratic federation with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity (23). Within this internationalist problem space of decolonization characterized by “an attitude of anticolonial longing, a longing for anti-colonial revolution,” actors from all over the decolonizing world sought to engage in a radical project of worldmaking. However, many reinscribed colonial legacies by adopting the institutions, bureaucracies, and borders of colonial domination. Within the context of this problem space, then, Gandhi’s apparent rejection of modernity took on additional stakes as one of the few truly radical alternatives to nation thinking and capitalist state formation, not just in the Indian context but in the decolonizing world as a whole. However, this perception of Gandhi’s ideological distance from modernity is fundamentally misguided. In the three sections that follow, I analyze some of the fundamental tenets of Gandhi’s political philosophy and political economy to draw conceptual linkages to neoliberal capitalism. I first consider Gandhi’s attention to the individual as a unit of analysis in the struggle for independence, and argue that his conceptualization of swaraj as self-purification elided a structural understanding of colonialism as an oppressive force. Next, I critique Gandhi’s political ideal of Ramarajya and analyze his rejection of Western civilization. Finally, I turn to his visions of political economy, and in particular, his fixation with khadi to argue that Gandhi’s economic programme was, in fact, far closer to neoliberalism than most scholars would admit. Before addressing Gandhi’s political philosophy in full, it is helpful to first situate my argument within the field of Gandhi studies and critiques of Gandhi. Beginning in the early twentieth century, trade unionists like Shripad Amrit Dange took issue with the conservative strains within Gandhi’s economic thought, comparing it to the ideology of Soviet leaders like Vladimir Lenin (24). Contemporary scholars of India have taken up these critiques, pointing to his defense of the propertied classes, his ambivalence toward trade unions, and his philosophy of trusteeship as evidence of his imbrication in modern systems of capitalism and nationalism (25). However, few scholars have taken a theoretical approach to Gandhian political philosophy as a whole; those that do characterize his anticolonialism as fundamentally opposed to the modern state (26). My intervention complicates both of these approaches by engaging in a theoretical and deeply normative consideration of Gandhian thought. Swaraj as Self Purification and the Cultivation of Neoliberal Social Relations In his seminal treatise on political philosophy, Hind Swaraj, Gandhi puts forth a unique definition of swaraj , or self rule, that offers several dimensions through which to understand the stakes and motivations of the freedom struggle. First, Gandhian swaraj must be understood through the praxis of the individual, who is “the one supreme consideration” (27): it is “in the palm of our hands... Swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself” (28). The practitioner of swaraj is the individual, not society or community (29). Gandhi’s focus on internal moral transformation leaves ambiguous the role of coalitional organizing and community building. In addition, Gandhi’s notion of swaraj is not generated in reaction to the brutality of colonial rule, but rather it emerges from an inner commitment to self improvement: “What we want to do should be done, not because we object to the English or because we want to retaliate, but because it is our duty to do so” (30). The political power derived from swaraj, in other words, must not be regarded as an end in itself. Indeed, a third characteristic of Gandhian swaraj is that it is not predicated on self determination or economic independence: “Now you will have seen that it is not necessary for us to have as our goal the expulsion of the English. If the English become Indianised, we can accommodate them” (31). Rather, swaraj depends on moral development and ethical formation. As such, it is intimately tied to the cultivation of spiritual and religious sensibilities (32) rather than the material considerations of development and industry: “Impoverished India can become free, but it will be hard for an India made rich through immorality to regain its freedom” (33). Gandhian swaraj is not constructed exclusively by material forces, nor does it demand exclusively material solutions. Gandhi’s focus on the individual obfuscates the role of colonialism as a structure of domination. He locates the origins of colonial exploitation in the moral failings of the Indian populace: “The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them” (34). Gandhi’s discussion of the emergence of colonial rule is, unsurprisingly, limited in scope; the subject of his analysis is the upper class, upper caste colonized elite: “Who assisted the Company’s officers? Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this. In order to become rich all at once, we welcomed the Company’s officers with open arms” (35). His myopic focus on the individual blinds him to the many revolutionary movements led by farmers, mill-workers, and tribal communities to overthrow British rule that were organized on the basis of economic exploitation (36). Gandhi also absolves colonial officers from their role in fomenting religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims through a divide-and-rule policy: “The Hindus and the Mahomedans were at daggers drawn. This, too, gave the Company its opportunity, and thus we created the circumstances that gave the Company its control over India” (37). This revisionist retelling of Hindu-Muslim relations ignores the crucial role of colonial policies in exacerbating religious tensions. The Census of British India of 1871-1872 constructed modern Hindu and Muslim identities as incompatible while the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms created separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims (38), thus fracturing political power (39). Gandhi’s conceptualization of swaraj does not adequately address the systems that continued to uphold the violence of colonial rule through law, bureaucracy, and state violence. By privileging the individual over the systemic, Gandhi’s formulation of swaraj closely resembles the cultivation of neoliberal social relations. While neoliberalism as an economic principle only gained traction in the 1970s after the dissolution of post-war Keynesianism, it also embodies ideological principles which marshal values of human dignity, individualism, and freedom to theorize the free market as a force of domination (40). Ethics and morality under the ideology of neoliberalism, in other words, become highly individualized, as in the case of Gandhian swaraj . This moral dimension has been central to neoliberalism since the beginning of the twentieth century (41), and became particularly salient in the aftermath of the Second World War, when human rights discourse began to interface with neoliberalism to produce a modern version of the colonial civilizing mission by facilitating the emergence of a globalized market civilization in which individual rights and competitive market relations would spread across and within national borders co-constitutively (42). Neoliberalism as a method of understanding and critiquing social relations offers a theoretical framework through which to analyze Gandhian swaraj. To be clear, I am not conflating all forms of religiously inflected self making with neoliberal social relations. I am arguing specifically that Gandhian swaraj, in failing to attend sufficiently to the structural forces of colonial domination, mirrors the highly destructive individualism that constitutes a central feature of neoliberalism. In fact, the very religio-ethical orientation that Gandhi gravitated toward was used as a tool for collective liberation in the context of the Indian freedom movement itself. For example, Muslim revolutionaries like Ashfaqullah Khan and Abul Kalam Azad invoked Islam and Islamic liberation theology to mobilize In- dian Muslim subjects in the independence struggle by centering the mosque as a site of resistance and reciting the Quran and fasting for Ramadan while jailed as political prisoners (43). In contrast to Gandhian swaraj, their religious sensibilities confronted the colonial state by producing solidarity among many diverse Muslim communities. A Critique of Ramarajya: Caste, Capitalism and Gandhi’s Ideal Civilization To reiterate, Gandhi is understood by most scholars as rejecting modernity because of his scathing critiques of modern civilization. Modern civilization, rather than the violent state sanctioned brutality of colonialism, was responsible for India’s downfall according to Gandhi: “It is not the British people who are ruling India, but it is modern civilization, through its railways, telegraphs, telepoles, and almost any invention which has been claimed to be a triumph of civilization” (44). The West fell prey to the forces of materialism, hyperrationality, and uncompromising secularism, which are all the inescapable after-effects of modernity. Gandhi expresses his disdain for this civilization in no uncertain terms: “This civilisation takes note of neither morality nor of religion: this civilization is irreligion” (45). Even more lamentably, the West mapped these values onto the East through the process of colonialism. As such, he writes, “India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, law- yers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper classes have to learn to live conscientiously and religiously and deliberately the simple peasant life, knowing it to be a life giving true happiness” (46). These critiques of modern civilization are taken as evidence of Gandhi successfully rising above the conceits of modernity (47). However, it is not enough to consider Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization; rather, we must also analyze his alternative to modern civilization to assess whether or not it breaks free of the very systems Gandhi is opposed to. The fundamental values of Gandhi’s civilizational ideal are distinct from those of what he refers to as modern or material civilization, but their enactment reinforces neoliberal values. He defines true civilization as “that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty” (48). True civilization is morally inflected, and therefore spiritually inflected. According to Gandhi, India once adhered to the tenets of true civilization and must work to recover them: “The tendency of Indian civilisation is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilisation is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so believing, it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilisation even as a child clings to its mother’s breast” (49). True civilization was achieved in the past and can be achieved again if, Gandhi argues, India returns to its original methods of governance, agriculture, industry, and labor while modifying some of its less progressive elements like untouchability: “In order to restore India to its pristine condition, we have to return to it. In our own civilisation, there will naturally be progress, retrogression, reforms and reactions, but one effort is required, and that is to drive out Western civilisation” (50). The fundamental values of Gandhi’s civilization ideal defined a type of morality that was dependent on acting according to one’s duty. The fixation on duty as a morally and religiously constituted ideal is, as I hope to prove, entirely compatible with capitalism and casteism in their modern formulations. Before considering the theoretical implications of Gandhi’s civilizational ethos, it is first necessary to understand how he envisioned their political manifestations through Ramarajya, “ the non-violent state of Gandhi’s vision” (51), his most concrete articulation of an alternative to nation thinking. Admittedly, Gandhi was less concerned with the details of postcolonial institutions, instead preferring a “one step enough” approach (52). However, he wrote extensively on his conceptualization of the ideal state, which he derived from the ancient ideal of Ramarajya, the divine kingdom of Lord Ram. Ramarajya in Gandhi’s formulation consisted of a federation of self governing and semi-autonomous panchayats , or village councils. The authority of the federation would be limited to the coordination, guidance, and supervision of matters of common interest (53). As in the case of swaraj, Ramarajya asserted the supremacy of individual freedom; this individual freedom was to be manifested in each panchayat and the state itself (54). Yet, these individual freedoms were tempered by Gandhi’s insistence on maintaining the caste system. In order to overcome the “life-corroding competition” of materialism and capitalism, each individual must follow “his own occupation or trade” (55). The law of varna “established certain spheres of action for certain people with certain tendencies,” thus at once naturalizing and institutionalizing caste (56). The shadow of caste, a concrete manifestation of Gandhi’s civilizational ethos of duty and morality, hung over his Ramarajya. Caste as a structuring force in Gandhi’s Ramarajya was not simply an unsavory vestige of pre-modern India; it was central to creating a reformed political and economic system in the postcolonial context. While Ramarajya was highly idealized, in the decades following Gandhi’s death, the Indian government has tried to implement many of its elements through campaigns, most notably the 2014 Clean India Mission ( Swachh Bharat Abhiyan ). The Clean India Mission is a country wide campaign aimed to “achieve universal sanitation coverage” by eradicating manual scavenging, improving the management of solid and liquid waste, and sustaining open-defecation free behavior (57). It is undoubtedly inspired by Ramarajya: it was initiated on the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday; volunteers are known as swachhagrahis, clearly in reference to satyagrahis ; and its messaging invokes Gandhian ideals of morality and duty (58). Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself proclaimed, “I must admit that if I had not understood Gandhi’s philosophy so deeply, the programme would not have been a part of my government’s priorities” (59). Yet, the Clean India Mission relied on coercive state action in its interactions with Dalit and Adivasi communities because prevailing ideas of purity and pollution drawn from the caste system perpetuate open defecation in rural India. To spread its message to lower caste and tribal communities, the Clean India Mission relied on the spirit of neoliberal capitalism, aggressive branding, and the monetary aid of multi-million dollar conglomerates like Hindustan Unilever (60). Neoliberal capitalism was the vessel through which casteism could inflict harm (61). The very ideals of morality and duty, when enshrined in the caste system, allowed Ramarajya to exist in accordance with the principles of neoliberal capitalism and state violence. When put into practice, Gandhi’s Ramarajya was not a rejection of modernity and materialism, but rather a manifestation of the most oppressive elements of Western modernity. His ideal form of political governance was invoked to complete a fundamentally modernist project. Khadi Capitalism: A Critique of Gandhi’s Political Economy Just as Gandhi’s political philosophy was highly compatible with neoliberal capitalism, so was his political economy. Like his conceptualization of Ramarajya and political philosophy, Gandhi understood political economy as inseparable from ethical and religious pursuits. Through this religio-ethical lens , individual and societal economic interests were to be collapsed to avoid conflict between the two. Economic progress in the material sense was antagonistic to “real progress” in the ethical sense (62). As part of his political economy, Gandhi urged plain living, which entailed the curtailing of material desires to lead a more sustainable lifestyle: “More and more things are produced to supply our primary needs, less and less will be the violence” (63). He urged small-scale and locally-oriented production that would not require large-scale industrialization or the use of machinery. Gandhi also emphasized the dignity of all forms of labor and suggested that every person, no matter their class status, should engage in manual labor, which he called, after Leo Tolstoy, “bread labor,” to understand the plight of agricultural laborers (64). Plain living, small-scale production, and bread labor, in summation, formed the basis of Gandhi’s political economy. The khadi programme was essential in enacting Gandhi’s political economy. Khadi was meant to be the national industry to benefit the masses by providing supplementary work to unemployed rural hands. The economics of khadi included a plan to produce, distribute, exchange, and consume hand-spun yarn and cloth. Its effects were meant to diminish unemployment, augment economic productivity, and increase the purchasing power and of the poor. As it was geared towards India’s rural population, khadi could rely on only the most simple and accessible technologies: the loom and the spinning wheel. It also had to rely on a local re- source base for production and consumption (65). As such, khadi played a crucial role in defining the structures of exchange in Gandhi’s political economy: each village had to be self supporting and self contained to adhere to the khadi programme. According to this highly fragmented doctrine, villages should only exchange necessary commodities with other villages where they are not locally producible (66). Although khadi was meant to deliver material economic benefits to India’s rural population, as with other elements of Gandhi’s political economy, it also took on a profoundly moral dimension. It was integral to establishing what Gandhi referred to as a “non-violent economic order” (67). While mill-made cloth was cheaper than khadi, it relied on “dishonesty,” “violence and untruth,” which is why it had to be opposed (68). In the scope of Gandhi’s political economy, khadi was necessary to address the economic and moral needs of the Indian masses. In promoting the khadi programme, Gandhi articulated an unequivocal opposition to industrialism and, by extension, state socialism. Labor-saving machinery, according to Gandhi, was highly detrimental to the lives of rural Indians; it was antagonistic to both man’s labor and true civilization: “Machinery has begun to desolate Europe. Ruination is now knocking at the English gates. Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation; it represents a great sin” (69). While states- men like Nehru urged state-sponsored large-scale industrialization to bring India’s economy onto the globalized stage (70), Gandhi insisted that “India does not need to be industrialised in the modern sense of the term” (71). His apathy towards state socialism was grounded in this uncompromising opposition to industrialism: if industrialism was a necessary step in implementing socialist policies, he would reject those policies. However, while khadi was avowedly anti-industrialist, it was not unambiguously anti-modern. Just as Gandhi’s political philosophy resembles neoliberal ethical formation by erasing the structural role of colonialism, khadi does the same by erasing the structural role of capitalism. Gandhi’s political economy addressed the problem of inequality primarily on the individual level by pleading for necessary changes in lifestyle to limit one’s needs and conceptualizing the economy in moral terms. The cultivation of individual economic health apart from the travails of industrialism and heavy machinery was the guiding principle in Gandhi’s political economy: ethics and morality became co-opted by the logic of neoliberal individualism. The more structural features of khadi -- its production, distribution, exchange and consumption schemes-- also reinforce aspects of neoliberal economy and ideology. The confluence of a lack of state regulation and the supremacy of individual will in the context of atomized, self-sufficient villages is not far from the neoliberal ideal that reifies individual rights and competitive market relations (72). Just as neoliberal ideology obscures class conflict by dissuading class consciousness through the vocabulary of individualism, the moral and ideological ramifications of khadi portray class warfare as an instrument of social violence and disharmony (73). Gandhian political economy sought to resolve economic inequality by pre- serving human dignity rather than ensuring material gains (74). Gandhi’s political economy, in sum, was not so distant from modern neoliberalism. Conclusion: Confronting the Postmodern Turn in Postcolonial Studies Thus, Gandhi’s political philosophy and political economy were not divorced from Western modernity. Contrary to the writings of most historians and political theorists of contemporary India, I suggest that Gandhi’s political thought closely resembles neoliberal ideology, social relations, and economy even while it may seem, on inspection, unequivocally anti-modern. The methodological individual- ism that undergirds his conceptualization of swaraj, the centrality of caste and labor division in his political ideal of Ramarajya and his khadi programme all point to significant conceptual linkages to neoliberal capitalism. Through a critical reading of his work, I contend that Gandhi was not above modernity: he was entrenched in the systems, structures, and ideologies of modernity. Understanding Gandhi’s political philosophy as a modern intellectual contribution is crucial in confronting the recent postmodernist and poststructuralist turn in postcolonial studies, which seeks to replace class analysis or history from below with textual analysis and cultural theory (75). This new orientation, through its methodological individualism, depoliticization of the social from the material realm, and wholesale refusal of programmatic politics, is both conservative and authoritarian (76). By prioritizing ideology over existing structures of domination, in other words, it fails to engage with the material realities of colonialism and capitalism. This brand of scholarship, as I prove, uses Gandhi as its shining example. In my paper, I have attempted to dislodge this conventional perception of Gandhi as the embodiment of pure Indian nationalism untouched by Western modernity by pointing to the material implications of his political thought. In doing so, I hope to challenge the postmodern impulse within postcolonial studies. More importantly, I strongly believe that a critical reading of Gandhi is necessary in our contemporary political moment. More than 250 million farm workers in India went on strike in November 2020 to demand better working conditions, including the withdrawal of new anti-farm bills that would deregulate agricultural markets by giving corporations the staggering power to set crop prices far below current minimum rates. Farmers are confronting neoliberal excess in its most globalized form, facing off against Prime Minister Modi as well as dozens of multinational corporations. While invocations of Gandhian political philosophy by far-right figures like Modi are often characterized as erroneous distortions of his thought within liberal nationalist scholarship, in reality they are the logical conclusions of his arguments (77). Within the corpus of Gandhi’s work lie the seeds of neoliberal exploitation. As farmers come to terms with an ever-growing and exploitative globalized economy, a careful examination of Gandhi’s political thought may inform what a just postcolonial future should, and shouldn’t, embody. Endnotes 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1. 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 3 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 9. 4 Bipin Chandra, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947, (New Delhi, India; Viking, 1998), 14. 5 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 92. 6 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, (Routledge, 2017), 92. 7 Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, 110. 8 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11. 9 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Bombay, India: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1969), 2. 10 Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, (New Delhi, India: Tulika, 1995), 10. 11 Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1478. 12 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 13 Shanti Kumar, Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television, (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 17. 14 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 96. 15 Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar, “Gandhi’s Gita and Politics As Such,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 338. 16 For a good scholarly overview, see Sanjeev Kumar, Gandhi and the Contemporary World, (Taylor and Francis, 2019). 17 Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), xx. 18 Surinder S. Jodhka, “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 32 (2002): 3347. 19 Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and The Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste: The Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 2. 20 Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 338. 21 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. 22 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 107. 23 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 10. 24 Shripad Amrit Dange, Gandhi vs Lenin (Bombay, India: Liberty Literature Company, 1921), 15. 25 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 282. 26 Karuna Mantena, “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 535. 27 Mohandas Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 25 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989), 252. 28 Mohandas Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71. 29 Koneru Ramakrishan Rao, Gandhi’s Dharma, (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2017), 105. 30 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 116. 31 Ibid, 71. 32 I conflate these terms carefully: according to Gandhi, religion and morality could not be disentangled. Throughout Hind Swaraj, he emphasizes that they are entirely co-constitutive. 33 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 106. 34 Ibid, 38-39. 35 Ibid. 36 Subho Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers Resistance in Bengal, 1890-1937, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 238-62. 37 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 40. 38 Rajmohan Gandhi, Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 6. 39 Of course, in reality this narrative is not so simple.There was a clear sense of difference and tension between Hindu and Muslim communities long before British rule. However, I argue that Gandhi’s telling of this history erases the role that British colonialism played in intensifying these tensions for political gain. 40 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12. 41 Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, (La Vergne: Verso, 2019), 4. 42 Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 8. 43 Pran Nath Chopra, Role of Indian Muslims in the Struggle for Freedom, (New Delhi, India: Light & Life Publishers, 1979), 6. 44 Gandhi, “Letter to H.S.L. Pollack” in Hind Swaraj, 128. 45 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 36. 46 Gandhi, “Letter to H.S.L. Pollack” in Hind Swaraj, 129. 47 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 98. 48 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 65. 49 Ibid. 50 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 104. 51 Rao, Gandhi’s Dharma, 210. 52 G.N. Dhawan, The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, (Bombay, India: Popular Book Depot, 1946), 126. 53 Ibid, 282. 54 Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, (New York: Oxford University Press), 86. 55 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 66. 56 Ramarajya also poses interesting and important questions about gender and patriarchy in village life, but unfortunately this line of inquiry is outside the scope of this paper. 57 “Swachh Bharat Mission,” Government of India, https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm. 58 Swachh Bharat Mission,” Government of India, https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm. 59 “PM Modi: Gandhi inspired me to launch Swachh Bharat,” Economic Times, Published October 2, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pm-modi-gandhi-inspired-me-to-launch-s wachh-bharat/articleshow/66045561.cms?from=mdr. 60 “Hindustan Unilever Limited: Spreading the message of Swachh Aadat across India,” The Hindu, Published April 30, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/hindustan-unilever-limited-spreading-the-message-of-swachh-aadat- across-india/article23729983.ece. 61 Anand Teltumbde, Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva, (New Delhi, India: Navayana, 2018), 24. 62 Gandhi, “Economic and Moral Development” in Hind Swaraj, 154. 63 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 22, 143. 64 Ibid, vol. 12, 51. 65 Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 81. 66 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 51, 92. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 106. 70 Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 249. 71 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 51, 93. 72 Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 12. 73 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 16. 74 Madan Gandhi, Marx and Gandhi: Study in Ideological Polarities, (Chandigarh, India: Vikas Bharti, 1969), 32. 75 Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies,” in Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 83. 76 Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20:2 (1994): 334. 328-56. 77 Mihir Bose, From Midnight to Glorious Morning? India Since Independence, (London: Haus Publishing, 2017), 122. Works Cited Basu, Subo. Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers Resistance in Bengal, 1890-1937. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Bose, Mihir. From Midnight to Glorious Morning? India Since Independence. London: Haus Publishing. 2017. Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. Routledge, 2017. Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chakrabarty, Dipesh and Rochona Majumdar, “Gandhi’s Gita and Politics As Such,” Modern Intellectual History, 7, no. 2 (2010): 335-353 Chandra, Bipin. India’s Struggle for Independence , 1857-1947. New Delhi, India; Viking, 1998. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013. Chopra, Pran Nath. Role of Indian Muslims in the Struggle for Freedom . New Delhi, India: Light & Life Publishers, 1979. Dange, Shripad Amrit. Gandhi vs Lenin. Bombay, India: Liberty Literature Company, 1921. Dhawan, G.N. The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Bombay, India: Popular Book Depot, 1946. Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20:2 (1994): 328-56. Gandhi, Madhan. Marx and Gandhi: Study in Ideological Polarities. Chandigarh, India: Vikas Bharti, 1969. Gandhi, Mohandas. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Edited by Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 12. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 22. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 25. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 51. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. Gandhi, Rajmohan. Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). Gellner, Ernst. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Habib, Irfan. Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception. New Delhi, India: Tulika, 1995. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. “Hindustan Unilever Limited: Spreading the message of Swachh Aadat across India.” The Hindu. Published April 30, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/hindustan-unilever-limited-spreading-the- message-o f-swa- chh-aadat-across-india/article23729983.ece Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Oxford University Press. Jodhka, Surinder S. “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 32 (2002): 3343- 3353. Kumar, Aishwary. Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Kumar, Shanti. Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Mantena, Karuna. “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures.” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 535-563. “PM Modi: Gandhi inspired me to launch Swachh Bharat.” Economic Times. Published October 2, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and- nation/pm-modi-gandhi-inspired-me-to-launch-swachh-bharat/ articleshow/66045561.cms?from=mdr. Rao, Koneru Ramakrishan. Gandhi’s Dharma. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2017. Roy, Arundhati. The Doctor and The Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste: The Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017. Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India: 1885-1947. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Bombay, India: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1969. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. “Swachh Bharat Mission.” Government of India. https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm. Teltumbde, Anand. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi, India: Navayana, 2018. Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Whyte, Jessica. The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. La Vergne: Verso, 2019). Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Previous Next

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Health/Disease Distinction Normative Uses Margot S. Witte Brown University Author Matthew Flathers Fengyi Wan Alex Vaughan Williams Editors Fall 2018 I consider the question of whether or not it is permissible to intervene, given a particular medical condition. Typically, we argue that healthy conditions do not permit interventions, while disease conditions do. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between “healthy” and “diseased” is too slippery to be practically useful, and suggest that we should do away with it in clinical practice, substituting a model of asking whether an individual needs help. Introduction Every time a physician faces a condition in clinical practice, they must determine whether or not to intervene. This is an ethical question: “When ought I to intervene?” The centrality of the question in the practical world means that it merits philosophical consideration. In this essay, I will be focusing on the distinction between conditions for which intervention is permissible and conditions for which it is not permissible. The first category of conditions can be further divided into conditions for which intervention is required and conditions for which it is merely permissible, but I will not be addressing this second distinction. It is also important to note that I am concerned in this paper with the question of whether or not intervention is permissible, not whether or not a physician will intervene. The answer to the second question relies on issues like resource allocation and standard practices, which are outside the scope of this paper. The distinction we draw between conditions that do and do not permit intervention ought to align with our general intuitions. There are two main reasons to pick an intuitive distinction over an unintuitive one. First, intuition is acceptable evidence in ethical decisions. We can see one simplistic reason for accepting this by considering ethical propositions that we take to be true independent of ethical analysis. For example, someone who isn’t familiar with moral theory would say that, all things being equal, it is worse to kill indiscriminately than not to kill indiscriminately. This person’s primary evidence is their moral intuition, and we think that they are justified in their conclusion. The second reason we should accept intuition as evidence in finding a normatively useful distinction between conditions that permit and do not permit intervention is that we require a practical theory. The intention of this distinction is for it to be used practically by real physicians in real clinics. If the distinction goes against general moral intuition, it will not be followed by the majority of physicians. Often, the distinction between “health” and “disease” is used to make decisions about intervention, where intervention is permissible in the case of disease and impermissible in the case of health – or, in some theories, we should be agnostic about whether to intervene in cases of health . The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate how helpful this health/disease distinction is and whether we need an alternative. I will consider various conceptual analyses of disease and see which, if any, are most helpful. Just as there are different definitions of what qualifies a state as diseased, there are different definitions of what qualifies a state as healthy. The World Health Organization defines health as more than just “the absence of disease and infirmity.” It is also a “complete physical, mental and social well-being” that every human has the right to.[1] This creates three categories: diseased, healthy, and an in-between category, in which people are neither diseased nor infirm, but lack complete well-being. Because I am focused on whether health/disease distinction works to guide us in determining whether or not it is permissible to intervene, a situation with only two options, I will be discussing the theories that have only two categories: healthy and diseased. The first part of my paper will be concerned with different versions of the health/disease distinction and specific counterarguments to each distinction. I will then consider the possible problems that arise from using the health/disease distinction, however it is drawn, to make the normative decision about whether or not it is permissible to intervene. Finally, I will propose another way to make this distinction and evaluate the shortcomings and potential areas of further investigation for this new theory. The “Health”/“Disease” Distinction There are three primary approaches to conceptualizing disease: naturalism (sometimes called objectivism), constructivism (sometimes called normativism), and the relatively recent addition of embedded instrumentalism. In this section, I will consider these three theories of disease and analyze their abilities to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for disease, with the assumption that if there are serious weaknesses with the theory as a definition, it is not advisable to employ it as a normative guide to distinguish between conditions that do and do not permit intervention. The first theory I will consider is naturalism. Naturalists believe that the label “disease” represents an objective, intrinsic category of conditions and that we can determine whether a condition falls into the category by making empirical observations. Proponents of the theory claim that it is completely value-free and non-normative.[2] Dominic Murphy summarizes naturalism with a two-step classification system meant to determine whether a condition is a disease.[3] The first step is to determine whether a biological organ or system is malfunctioning. The second step is to determine whether the malfunction is harmful to the person it is affecting. As Murphy formulates naturalism, a condition is a disease if and only if the answer to both questions is yes. Most accounts of naturalism follow a similar structure, even if they do not break it down as clearly as Murphy. There is some variation within naturalism about what counts as a “malfunction.” While some theorists appeal to a common sense notion of “functioning,” most argue that a system is functioning if it is working in the way it was evolutionarily intended to work. Under this definition, the structure of the eye was naturally selected for because of its ability to pick up a given range of wavelengths and activate the optic nerve in a given way. Christopher Boorse, a major figure in naturalism, argues for what he calls a “Bio-Statistical Theory” of what qualifies as normal functioning.[4] He claims that, for any system, we can determine a species-specific standard based on a reference class with an acceptable level of variation. If a particular organism’s system significantly varies from the standard, it is malfunctioning. So, if an eye fails to pick up a wavelength that the statistically standard eye in the appropriate population picks up, it would be considered malfunctioning. Boorse defends his Bio-Statistical Theory on the grounds that it allows us to determine whether or not a system is malfunctioning in an objective manner without inserting our own beliefs about what constitutes “normal.” The philosopher Elselijn Kingma points out that naturalism, especially as formulated by Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory, is not at all free of subjective value-judgments. She claims the organisms that we choose to include in the reference class are determined through normative ideas about what proper functioning is, so it would be circular to use the standard class to make determinations about what qualifies a system as properly functioning.[5] The Bio-Statistical Theory only moves the value judgment problem up a level: instead of making a value judgment about what functioning is normal, we make a value judgment in selecting which organisms are normal and should constitute our reference class. Besides the problem of circularity, general naturalists face another problem: an organ can be functioning in its proper way according to evolutionary biology, but still be considered “diseased.” Kingma gives the example of an overdose of paracetamol, an over the counter pain reliever that causes liver damage. A properly functioning liver will reduce in function when flooded with the drug. In this case, the liver certainly is not healthy, but it is functioning appropriately, given the unfortunate situation it is in. Even if an organ is functioning properly, external conditions that Kingma calls “stressors” can cause an organ to become diseased.[6] If someone came into a clinic with an overdose of paracetamol and the physician extended the naturalist theory of disease to a normative theory, she would find that the liver was not diseased and that it would be impermissible to treat the patient. The problem of circularity and the practical problem of a somewhat limited idea of diseased both seem to be major weaknesses that stand in the way of using naturalism as a normative guide in clinical practice. The second conceptual analysis of disease I will consider is constructivism, which makes no attempt to shy away from a value-based, normative conception of disease. Constructuralists see disease categories as formulated based on social constructions about which physical conditions are healthy and which are not. They claim that we cannot understand disease independent of social concepts like “culture, history, meaning, and the constructed nature of medical phenomena.”[7] Because this definition of disease is so rooted in social constructions, constructivists accept (and expect) that the conditions that are diseases will vary across cultures. Some constructivists, like Lawrie Reznek, explicitly reject the idea that a malfunction is necessary for a condition to be a disease. To support their theory, constructivists often cite conditions that used to be considered diseases but are no longer. A common example is that of homosexuality. Reznek explores the way that conditions can move between the categories of disease and healthy across time and space and uses that as evidence that these are not mere category mistakes, but that the categories themselves are variable.[8] Naturalists respond to this claim by maintaining that they really are category mistakes, and that the removal of homosexuality from the “disease” category was an example of psychologists realizing that they had mislabeled a condition in which all systems are properly functioning a disease, not that the category “disease” had changed to exclude homosexuality.[9] Constructivists claim that while a disease can be traced back to a real biological process, the determination of whether a specific biological process is a disease relies on social considerations. This determination is based on a shared idea of what constitutes a “normal” and “valued” state. The problem with this approach is that there is variation about what these states are even in a specific community. This begs the question, “What counts as a community?” which naturalists disagree on. It seems excusable that the variation of “normal” across cultures might bleed into a sense of variation of “normal” within a culture, but the theory is meaningless without an idea of “normal” specific to a culture. There are also structural problems with the constructivist position. Constructivists are most likely correct that some diseases, particular psychological disorders, are based on social ideas about what conditions are valuable, but are they right that the entire category of disease is socially constructed without any naturalistic basis? It seems possible that there are some conditions that are classified as disease merely due to social factors, but that there are others that are true biological malfunctions. This means that constructivists cannot make their case by pointing out individual conditions that have moved into or out of the “disease” category; they need to prove that the entire category is based on social norms and that there are no diseases that can be categorized as such by only empirical evidence without social judgment. The constructivists do not seem concerned with making that sort of argument, though. Constructivist Peter Conrad writes that he is “not interested in adjudicating whether any particular problem is really a medical problem… I am interested in the social underpinnings of this expansion of medical jurisdiction.”[10] This structural problem of constructivism may be accounted for by the fact that most constructivists are more concerned with social issues than with philosophical definitions, so their arguments sometimes read more as descriptions of the medical method, rather than “necessary and sufficient condition” based arguments. This problem may dissolve if we read constructivism in the tradition of social critique rather than philosophy, but if we are to consider using the theory as a normative – and necessarily philosophical – guide that can help us determine which conditions permit intervention, we must read it as a philosophical theory, and its structural problems become unavoidable. The second structural problem of constructivism is that society already makes a distinction between those who we think are diseased and those that we disapprove of for other reasons. We do not pathologize every norm-breaking condition (general laziness, ugliness, poor taste in house decor, for example) and when people do things we ethically disapprove of, we often question their morals, rather than their sanity. So if constructivists want to argue that those we classify as having diseases are merely breaking social norms, they need to account for why we classify them differently from other norm-breakers who we don’t classify as diseased. They must explain why those who are diseased are norm-breakers in a health-related way without appealing to biological notions of “health.”[11] This is a difficult explanation to provide, and there is no standard constructivist answer. The third and final analysis of disease I will consider is that of embedded instrumentalism. Kenneth Richman, who developed embedded instrumentalism, borrowed some elements from constructivism but worried that any theory of disease that is based on culturally-contingent factors could not be universal. He proposed a theory in which health is indexed to goals, such that how healthy an agent is determined by how well they can fulfill their goals. He wanted to propose “a theory of health which characterizes certain states as being valuable neither intrinsically nor merely because they are useful, but rather because of their being in an appropriate relationship to an individual’s actual values.”[12] Richman rejects the view that certain goals are intrinsically valuable. He argues that if we begin with fairly agreeable goals like “The proper functioning of a heart is an intrinsically valuable goal”, we will eventually get to more troubling organs and will have to make claims like “The proper functioning of a set of ovaries is an intrinsically valuable goal.” Of course, about 41.5% of reproductive-age people with ovaries in the United States use some form of hormonal birth control, with the specific goal of ensuring their ovaries are not functioning.[13] Richman thinks that it is impossible to form a coherent argument that a heart functioning is intrinsically good but a set of ovaries functioning is not. One possible objection to this argument is that someone with very low ambitions might be considered healthy merely by virtue of their laziness. Richman tries to account for this problem by introducing the Richman-Budson view of health. According to this view, a person’s health is not indexed to their actual goals, but to the set of goals they would choose for themselves if they were fully aware of their “objectified subjective interests,” by which he means the goals they would set for themselves if they were perfectly rational and had full knowledge of themselves and their environments. There is a counterexample to the Richman-Budson view, however. What if the goals we have are unreasonable? If I have the goal of playing 48 simultaneous chess games while blindfolded, but I can’t achieve that goal due to my poor visual memory, lack of practice, etc., am I ill? It seems like obviously, I am not, but that goal is compatible with a full (though generous) understanding of myself and my environment. Is a concept of disease helpful in deciding whether to intervene? Beyond the specific problems that each individual theory of disease faces, the structure itself of the healthy/disease distinction may not be a helpful guide for clinicians trying to decide whether or not it is permissible to intervene when faced with a specific condition. I will look at four potential issues with using the health/disease distinction to determine whether to intervene in a specific condition. First is the threat of circularity. Some philosophers of medicine explicitly use the normative distinction of whether or not a condition allows intervention to ground their healthy/disease distinction, which would make it circular for us to use the health/disease distinction as an ethical guide to determine whether intervention is permissible, and most implicitly use it. One example of the explicit use is John Harris’ “ER test,” in which he argues that a condition is a disease if the condition makes someone worse off and if we would think medical personnel would be negligent if they did not treat this person if they came into an ER.[14] If we were to try to use such a distinction to determine whether or not to treat someone, we would be stuck in a circular argument. Germund Hesslow makes a related argument that the concept of disease is not normatively useful in clinical practice because it “does not coincide with any clinically important or morally relevant categories.”[15] Regardless of what theory of disease we choose, there are examples of conditions that are not diseased that permit intervention and diseases that do not permit interventions. Hesslow considers three types of conditions where this nonequivalence surfaces. First, doctors regularly treat patients in healthy states. He cites the examples of plastic surgery, gender affirmation surgery, and vaccination. Surely, we do not think that a too-big nose, gender, or a natural susceptibility to infection make a person diseased. Second, there are conditions that are technically pathological which physicians rarely treat, including benign tumors like birthmarks. Third, physicians sometimes intentionally induce pathological symptoms. Hasslow gives the example of sterilization, but we can also consider Richman’s argument about birth control. According to Hasslow, if disease was a clinically useful category, then physicians would never intentionally induce disease-symptoms. A third argument against using the healthy/disease distinction to guide clinical practice is that the version of the distinctions discussed so far includes too much information in some ways and too little information in others. A theory of disease gets caught up in all the issues of a conceptual analysis. For instance, every theory requires a value-laden discussion of “norms” and “normality.” (Recall that naturalism claims that norms are biologically determined, constructivism claims that they are socially determined, and embedded instrumentalism that they are indexed to personal goals.) If we are only concerned with deciding whether or not it is permissible to intervene, it would be ideal to develop a theory that we can use as a clinical guide without having to develop an entire theory of disease. In other ways, the theory has too little information to provide practical clinical guidance. If we only consider “disease,” we have no way of determining whether to intervene in cases of disability or injury. But there is no obviously philosophical, ethical, or even ontological distinction between disease and injury or disability. It seems likely that the ethical norms that govern disease should also govern disability and injury, and conceptual analyses of disease fail to provide guidance in these cases. Ereshefsky makes a fourth argument again the entire project of a conceptual analysis of disease. He claims that there is a structural problem with the health/disease distinction.[16] The distinction must take into account at least two factors: the physical state of the individual and the social value or disvalue of that state. On one extreme is naturalism, which values only the former, and on the other is staunch constructivism in the vein of Conrad, which values only the latter. There are some approaches that try to balance the two, like instrumentalism. But like any philosophical problem of distinction, however we try to balance the two factors, there will always be counterexamples. In this way, Ereshefsky thinks that the project is doomed to fail. The distinction between health and disease does not map onto a permissible/impermissible intervention distinction. At best, it distinguishes between conditions that permit intervention (diseases) and conditions that require more consideration (health). If we say that all healthy conditions do not allow for intervention, we make preventative medicine impermissible. It would be much neater if we had a single theory that could give us normative guidance on whether or not it is permissible to intervene. A New Theory: “Do you want help?” I propose a new approach that is still normatively useful in that it helps decide between when intervention is permissible and when it is not, but it does not run into the same difficulties as a conceptual analysis of disease. On my account, the distinction between whether or not intervention is permissible comes down to the question of whether an agent wants help. If they do want help, one is permitted to intervene. If not, one is not permitted. This approach is most closely related to that of embedded instrumentalism but tries to eliminate the aspects of it that are not relevant to the normative distinction between intervening and not intervening. For now, I will take a relatively general view of what qualifies as “wanting help.” I imagine the theory would be used in clinical practice in which a particular symptom is brought to a clinician's attention and they have to determine whether or not it is permissible to intervene. Whether or not help is wanted would be determined by the agent, and “help” would be whatever the intervention the physician is considering. Typically, we think that the phrase “I need help” as remedying some status that the agent considers troubling, but what qualifies it as troubling is up to the agent. This approach solves some intrinsic problems of using a theory of disease as a moral guide. Although it may seem that this approach is just as circular as using a conceptual analysis of disease, it is not. To see this, we can consider the difference between asking whether someone wants help and whether one ought to help them. The first is a practical question, and therefore can be used to answer an ethical question – “Will I intervene?” – without the threat of circularity. The second is an ethical question and results in circularity when we try to use it in this case. With this new distinction, we are not substituting one distinction in for another; we are using the question of whether someone wants help as a guide to help us understand when we are permitted to intervene. Additionally, the question of whether someone needs help has exactly as much information as we need to determine whether or not to intervene. It is not bogged down by the complications of a conceptual analysis, but it covers disability and injury. Because the theory is not supposed to be used as a definition, only as a guide for action, there is no need to hold onto any “intrinsic idea of health” and we can limit the scope of our consideration to the agent’s desires. The theory is also immune to Hesslow's criticism that theories of disease are irrelevant to clinical practice. This approach is built with use in mind such that part of the theory itself is a normative guide for clinicians that clearly determines whether or not they are permitted to intervene. Although the theory draws significantly on instrumentalism, it doesn’t face the same problems. The primary counterarguments to instrumentalism are that it fails to provide a coherent conceptual analysis, which simply is not a problem for a theory that is explicitly not a conceptual analysis – the theory doesn’t have the same definitional burdens. Unlike instrumentalism, this theory doesn’t have to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to classify a condition as a disease. This new theory also aligns better with our intuitions about intervention than the normative extensions of the conceptual analyses of disease. As discussed in the introduction, it is in our interests to develop an intuitive theory both because intuition is valid evidence for ethical reasoning and because a theory that is unintuitive is much less likely to be followed and therefore considered useful. We can use case studies to test our intuitive distinction between who wants help and who does not. We can compare how closely the “help” distinction and the normative extension of the theories of diseases align with our intuitions. Case 1 : A person who knows they are pre-diabetic Intuition: Intervention (education, for example) is permissible. Case 2 : A person seeking an abortion for themselves Intuition: If we put aside the abortion debate, intervention is permissible. Case 3 : A person with delusion and hallucinations who is isolated from society (i.e. not a danger to anyone; harm to him does not impact others) and does not want help Intuition (crowd-sourced for three college students): Intervention is impermissible. A theory that relies on an evolutionary biology definition of “function” would respond that intervention is impermissible in both Case 1 and Case 2 because no system is (yet) malfunctioning. They would likely answer that intervention is permissible in Case 3 because some element of the delusional person’s psychological or physical systems is malfunctioning. These responses are the exact inverse of our intuitive responses. A constructivist based in a community similar to the one at Brown would respond that intervention is permissible in Cases 1 and 3 and not in Case 2. In Case 1, we value the condition of being pre-diabetic as undesirable. In Case 2, while we do not necessarily value the state of someone who has an unwanted pregnancy, we certainly do not pathologize the state as a disease. In Case 3, we generally see hallucinations and delusions as unacceptable. An instrumentalist would most closely align with our intuitions. They would likely respond that intervention is permissible in Case 1, assuming the person has some goals that would be more attainable if he were not diabetic. They would certainly respond that intervention is acceptable in Case 2 because we can conclude from the fact that the person is seeking an abortion that they have goals that would better be accomplished if they were not pregnant. The answer to Case 3 would depend on whether the instrumentalist subscribed to the Richman-Budson theory. If they accepted it, they would say that intervention is permissible because if the person had perfect knowledge of themselves, they would most likely have goals that would be better attained if their delusions and hallucinations stopped. If the instrumentalist accepted a more basic idea of instrumentalism where health is indexed to an individual’s actual desires, then they would claim that intervention is impermissible because the person does not have any occurrent goals that are better achieved by the cessation of their delusions. Independent of its comparison to the theories of disease, there are other reasons to adopt the “wants help” approach to intervention. By focusing on whether or not someone wants help, we are zeroing in on the normatively useful part of the much wider question of whether or not someone is in a diseased state. That is to say, when we ask whether or not someone has a disease in the context of deciding whether or not it is ethical to intervene, what we are really asking is whether or not they need help. Additionally, the theory is more humane and less pathologizing and paternalistic. It focuses on the individual and their self-determination, rather than a particular diagnosis, and it assumes that most people can properly practice their right to bodily autonomy most of the time. Shortcomings and areas of further investigation In this paper, I have laid out a new way of determining whether or not it is permissible to intervene in certain conditions, and there, of course, are major shortcomings of this theory. Some of them can be patched up, but most will require substantial consideration and reworking of the theory. The first potential problem is that if we keep the vague definition of “wants help” that makes paternalistic, value-laden ideas of “normal” and “healthy” unnecessary, we have to accept that some degree of “enhancement” (genetic, pharmaceutical, etc.) is morally permissible. If the agent finds their current situation troubling and wants an intervention that would help them, assuming that they understand the side effects, this theory would permit the intervention. This may be an acceptable conclusion, though, because the “wants help” question would be asked in a clinical setting and would not overrule any external rules or laws. So for example, a “neurotypical” person could not get a cognitive enhancer like Adderall for their SAT because it is against the rules of the College Board, but they could maybe get a prescription to keep themselves focused during a grueling day-long interview at a tech company. Another more serious problem is that our intuition about who needs help can sometimes differ from who actually wants help. Admittedly, there are significant benefits of posing the question as whether someone wants help, rather than whether someone needs help. It solves the problem of having to determine what it means for someone to need help, and it centers the agent’s autonomy and self-determination. However, someone who we may intuitively think “needs help” may not “want help.” The theory is threatened when we question someone’s ability to decide whether or not they need help. There are four types of cases in which we might think the agent lacks the ability to make these decisions: Someone who had the ability and lost it (e.g. someone with dementia) Someone who never had the ability (e.g. someone with a rare genetic disorder) Someone who may have the ability in the future but lacks it now (e.g. very young children) Someone who may be a reliable decision-maker but cannot communicate it (e.g. someone in a coma) When faced with these situations, we have two possible options. We could try to determine whether the person (or some proxy for them) wants help for themselves, or we could appeal to an idea of who “needs” help. In the first case, we have a reference of who the person was before they lost this ability, and they may even have a written account of what they want. Even though this is unlikely to answer the specific question of whether they want help in that moment, it may serve as a guide. The problem with trying to use what someone expressed in a previous state is that desires and values can change. Someone who we may not think can properly exercise their right to bodily autonomy due to illness may still be able to express feelings about whether or not they want help. The occurrent views may differ from those that they expressed in the past. In these situations, it is not necessarily clear which account to use. In the second, third, and fourth cases it seems reasonable to use a surrogate, ideally someone who has the agent’s best interests at heart and who we have reason to believe would make similar decisions to the agent if the agent had the ability (i.e. people in their normative community, family members, etc.). We could then base our action on whether the surrogate wants help for the agent. The benefit of this solution is that it resists a didactic idea of who “needs” help and places the responsibility as close to the agent as possible. On the other hand, there is no way of knowing who really has someone’s best interests at heart, and it opens up too much room for variation between what a surrogate wants and what the agent would have wanted in a counterfactual in which they could express whether or not they want help. Using a surrogate in the third case of the young child introduces new problems. The agent will actually regain the ability to express whether or not they want help, so having someone else make that determination for them is riskier because both the surrogate and the clinician are more accountable to the agent than in the first or second cases. On top of the accountability, it is difficult to determine whether an agent can exercise their bodily rights. With children especially, there is disagreement about what rights children at various developmental stages can exercise, and there is contentious literature to match.[17] ,[18] ,[19] How much bodily autonomy children, and particularly adolescents have, varies greatly across cultures and even across philosophical theories within cultures. Using a surrogate in the fourth case of the person in a coma introduces even more problems. In this case, a clinician would be overruling someone’s occurrent wants, even if they were to make the decision to intervene or not intervene that corresponded to the person’s wanting or not wanting help. Despite the fact that we have no access to them, there is something intuitively troubling about this. This new approach of asking whether or not an agent wants help and making a decision based on that information has advantages over appealing to a conceptual analysis of disease. The question of wanting help cuts straight to the normative question without being caught up in categorical issues and it aligns better with our intuitions. However, the theory has some structural problems, and it cannot account for any situation in which it is not clear what someone wants or in which we have reservations about what they want. Not only that, but fitting the theory into clinical practice would be difficult, if not impossible. Before we can consider what the theory would look like in practice, we must develop a coherent response to the situations in which what the person wants differs from what we think the person ought to have. Endnotes [1] Preamble to the Constitution of WHO as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19 June - 22 July 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of WHO, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948. [2] I mean “normative” in the sense of prescribing a specific state as “normal,” as opposed to “normative” in the sense of prescribing a specific course of action. [3] Murphy, Dominic. Psychiatry In the Scientific Image. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. [4] Boorse, Christopher. “On The Distinction Between Disease and Illness.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 58, no. 45 (1975): 49–68. [5] Kingma, Elselijn. "What Is It to Be Healthy?" Analysis 67, no. 2 (2007): 128-33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25597789. [6] Kingma, Elselijn. “Paracetamol, Poison, and Polio: Why Boorse's Account of Function Fails to Distinguish Health and Disease.” Br J Philos Sci 61, no. 2 (2010): 241-264. [7] Gaines, A.D. “From DSM-I to III-R; Voices of Self, Mastery and the Other: A Cultural Constructivist Reading of U.S. Psychiatric Classification.” Social Science & Medicine 35, no. 1 (1992): 3-24. [8] Reznek, L., 1987. The Nature of Disease, New York: Routledge. [9] Murphy, Dominic. "Concepts of Disease and Health." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/health-disease/ . [10] Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. [11] "Concepts of Disease and Health." [12] Richard, Kenneth A. and Budson, Andrew .E. “Health of Organisms and Health of Persons: An Embedded Instrumentalist Approach.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 339, no. 21 (2000). [13] "Contraceptive Use in the United States." Guttmacher Institute. September 23, 2016. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-united-states . [14] Harris, John. Enhancing evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. [15] Hesslow, Germund. “Do We Need a Concept of Disease?” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 14, no. 1 (1993). [16] "Defining ‘Health’ and ‘Disease’." [17] Diekema, Douglas S., M.D., M.P.H. "Parental Decision Making." Parental Decision Making: Ethical Topic in Medicine. 2014. https://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/parent.html [18] Worthington, Roger. “Standards of Healthcare and Respecting Children’s Rights.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99, no. 4 (2006): 208–210. [19] Ruccione, Kathy; Kramer, Robin; Moore, Ida K; Perin, Gail. “Informed Consent for Treatment of Childhood Cancer: Factors Affecting Parents' Decision Making .” Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 8, no. 3 (1991): 112-121.

Sheldon Whitehouse is the junior United States Senator from Rhode Island. A Democrat, Sen. Whitehouse was elected in 2007, after having served as the Attorney General of Rhode Island between 1999 and 2003. He takes an active interest in environmental issues, advocating the need to find solutions to *Feature* Sheldon Whitehouse Sheldon Whitehouse is the junior United States Senator from Rhode Island. A Democrat, Sen. Whitehouse was elected in 2007, after having served as the Attorney General of Rhode Island between 1999 and 2003. He takes an active interest in environmental issues, advocating the need to find solutions to climate change. As of March 2018, Sen. Whitehouse gave over 200 speeches on the topic, urging his collogues to take concrete action. Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (3 pages) Every week that Congress is in session, I head to the Senate floor to urge my colleagues to take action on preventing climate change. In more than 225 of these speeches delivered since 2012, I have emphasized the mounting scientific evidence that our carbon pollution is driving dangerous changes in the atmosphere and oceans. I have also called out the powerful fossil fuel industry, which the International Monetary Fund reports enjoys a nearly $700 billion annual subsidy just in the United States. That immense conflict of interest—protecting that subsidy—is the reason the industry has marshalled its massive resources to promote climate change denial and prevent Congress from doing anything to reduce our dependence on dirty energy. Under President Donald Trump, former industry operatives fill executive branch posts, working to roll back climate protections. When the administration released its legally mandated National Climate Assessment in November, officials timed it for Black Friday during the Thanksgiving holiday, when it would be unlikely to get public attention. The report, written by 13 federal agencies, described the monumental damage the United States faces from climate change. It contradicted nearly every assertion Trump and his fossil-fuel-flunky Cabinet have made about climate change. Tellingly, the administration tried to bury the report, rather than contest it. That may be because the science of climate change is incontrovertible. (Back in 2009, even Donald Trump said it was “irrefutable.”) Damage from climate change is already occurring. There is no credible natural explanation. Human activity is the dominant cause. Future damage from further warming will be worse than we previously thought. Economies will suffer. And as the report declares, we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. The effects of climate change are felt in every corner of the nation. From the Ocean State, we’re already seeing sea levels rise, as oceans warm and land ice melts. If fossil fuel emissions are not constrained, the National Climate Assessment says, “many coastal communities will be transformed by the latter part of this century.” Along coasts, fisheries, tourism, human health, even public safety are under threat from increasingly extreme weather events and rising seas. Out West, “more frequent and larger wildfires, combined with increasing development at the wildland-urban interface portend increasing risks to property and human life.” We need to look no further than the massive wildfires Californians battled last year for stark evidence. More than 100 million people in the U.S. live with poor air quality, and climate change will “worsen existing air pollution levels.” Increased wildfire smoke heightens respiratory and cardiovascular problems. With higher temperatures, asthma and hay fever rise. Groundwater supplies have declined over the last century, and the decrease is accelerating. “Significant changes in water quantity and quality are evident across the country,” the report finds. The government assessment finds that Midwest farmers take a big hit: warmer, wetter, and more humid conditions from climate change; greater incidence of crop disease, and more pests; worsened conditions for stored grain. During the growing season, the Midwest will see temperatures climb more than in any other region of the U.S. Climate change will “disrupt many areas of life,” the report concludes, hurting the U.S. economy, affecting trade, and exacerbating overseas conflicts for our military. Costs will be high: “With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states.” Danger warnings already flash in some economic sectors. The huge federal home loan corporation Freddie Mac has warned of a coastal property value crash, suggesting economic losses from climate change are likely to exceed those of the housing crisis and Great Recession. The Bank of England, as a financial regulator, is warning of a “carbon asset bubble.” The solution to climate change is to decarbonize, invest more in renewables, and broaden our national energy portfolio. A carbon price would allow this big shift to happen, all while generating revenues that could be cycled back to citizens, and help the hardest-hit areas of transition. The smart move we need to make does not have to be painful. It can actually be a big economic win. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has testified: “Retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth. Climate policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent with growth, development, and poverty reduction. The transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful, attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher resilience, more innovation, more livable cities, robust agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.” Or we could do it the hard way, continuing to do the fossil fuel industry’s bidding and racking up the dire economic consequences of flooding, drought, wildfires, and stronger storms. The status quo is not safe. Which way we now go depends on whether Congress can put the interests of our people ahead of the interests of the polluters. The record is not good, I’m afraid. Since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, which unleashed unlimited corporate money into our elections, the politics of climate change is a tale of industry capture and control. So far, despite the industry’s massive conflict of interest and provable pattern of deception, and despite clear warnings from scientists and economists, the Republican Party has proven itself incapable of telling the fossil fuel industry “no.” So it doesn’t look good. But the climate report does say we still have time—if we act fast. There is one major development gives me great hope for the future. Survey after survey shows that the generation coming of political age today overwhelmingly supports taking action on climate change. They have longer to live on this planet than members of my generation, and they are determined to make it a better place. I expect they will. I’ll close with a reference to The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill’s legendary book about a previous failure to heed warnings. Churchill quoted a poem, of a train bound for destruction, rushing through the night, the engineer asleep at the controls as disaster looms: “Who is in charge of the clattering train? The axles creak, and the couplings strain. . . . the pace is hot, and the points are near, [but] Sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear; And signals flash through the night in vain. Death is in charge of the clattering train!” We are that sleeping driver; the signals of a changing climate flash at us, so far in vain. It’s time to wake up.

American Jews The Political Behavior of American Jews A Public Choice Approach to Israel-influenced Voting Jake Goodman Brown University Author Eli Binder Audrey McDermott Ethan Shire Editors Spring 2018 The paper analyzes the voting incentives created by the relationship between American Jews and American-Israeli foreign relations. At the founding of the Jewish State in 1948, the United States recognized the establishment of a Zionist state through a press release from President Truman on March 14, 1948 (U.S. Recognition of the State of Israel). The two main political parties in the United States— the Democrats and Republicans—have both since maintained consistent political, economic, and military support for Israel. This support has come to be viewed by American Jewish voters, most of whom desire support for Israel, as a public good provided by the United States Government. This public good has direct ramifications on voter incentives. However, despite bipartisan support for foreign aid to Israel, American Jews have remained consistently liberal. While social scientists have offered various theories of why American Jews became and remain Democratic, a cogent explanation can be offered through the lens of public choice economics. Indeed, Jewish liberalism demonstrates a political anomaly that can be explained through the framework of voter incentives. Before explaining the impact of pro-Israel policy on Jewish voting, it is necessary to identify some additional factors that evidence how Jewish voting behavior remains a political anomaly. American Jews, despite job and social discrimination, have become the highest per capita income of any religious group in the United States (Wright, Ethnic Group Pressures in Foreign Policy, 1982, 1655-1660). While affluence in America generally tends to correlate with Republican affiliation, this trend does not hold true for American Jews (Cohen, American Jewish Liberalism, 405-430). Steven Cohen and Charles Liebman, in their research, also noted that more religious Jews tend to be less liberal, inclining religious Jews toward conservatism. They identify only a few issues on which Jews assert themselves as decidedly liberal: political identity as liberal, church-state separation, social codes, and domestic spending. Cohen and Liebman’s research illustrated that aside from pro-Israel policies, Jews have additional incentives to shift to the Republican party, yet they have remained consistently Democratic. On the other hand, Jews have higher education levels, which correlate with liberalism, compared to the general populace provides a common explanation of Jewish liberalism. Thus, while Jews demonstrate anomalous behavior, they also demonstrate typical associations that explain Jewish liberalism. While many incentives influence Jewish political behavior, a single-issue factor that unites Jews remains the support of Israel from the United States government. Professor Lawrence Fuchs defined American Jews as an “ethno-religious group,” which forms attitudes on social and political policy that align group interests with national interests (Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 1980). American Jews, as “partisans of Israel,” were thus instrumental in having the United States recognize the state of Israel (Fuchs, 1980). As Professor Steven Bayme noted, the pro-Israel consensus in the American Jewish community has been maintained remarkably well over the past sixty plus years, with the two primary oppositional sources, classical Reform and Satmar Hasidism, remaining largely uninfluential (Bayme, American Jewry and the State of Israel, 2008). To court the Jewish vote, Democrats and Republicans have functioned as “entrepreneurs selling policies for votes” — the policy, in this case, being bilateral economic assistance for Israel (Downs, An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy, 1957). If we assume that American Jewish citizens behave as expected utility maximizers, Jewish voters gain extra expected utility from electing the more pro-Israel candidate, aligning with the Jewish voters’ preference for a pro-Israel public good. The gain to the Jewish voter would be defined as the preferred more pro-Israel candidate (Ferejohn & Fiorina, The Paradox of not Voting, 1974). Indeed, due to American Jewish attachment to Israel, there is a rational reason to vote; by voting for a more pro-Israel candidate in the political market, the Jewish voter ensures a higher quality public good that suits the Jewish voter’s preference for a more robust pro-Israel political platform. An initial investigation must depict the nature of the collective good thus described. As the natural monopoly on tax spending and military power, the government provides public goods to citizens. The United States government, having such a monopoly, becomes the sole provider of military and economic support to Israel for American citizens. Israel first received U.S. government assistance in the form of a $100 million loan from the Export-Import Bank in 1949 and aid remained modest for the next two decades (Sharp, Federation of American Scientists, 2016). After several consecutive Arab-Israeli wars, US aid to Israel increased dramatically, with Israel becoming the largest recipient of US aid in 1974. Middle East Specialist Jeremy Sharp reported that Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since World War II, receiving $124 billion of bilateral assistance in non-inflation adjusted terms (2016). An additional State Department directive this year has pledged $38 billion over the next ten years to Israel. The majority of this assistance has come in the form of Military aid, which has led to a qualitative military edge for the Israeli military, developing anti-rocket technologies such as the Iron Dome, Arrow I and II, and David’s Sling. The United States has also provided economic aid to Israel in the form of emergency aid packages during times of recession. Aid from the United States has thus allowed Israel to transition from a fledgling nation-state to a modern industrialized nation. (Sharp, Federation of American Scientists, 2016). While the United States government is not the sole supplier of aid to Israel, it functions as a monopoly within the US political market as a government supplier of aid. Jewish voters thus form preferences and expected utility functions based upon the differing levels of aid provided by the US government, a monopolistic supplier. To further analyze the impact of US foreign policy toward Israel on Jewish voting patterns, it is necessary to examine the historical political alignment of Jews, from Jeffersonian Republicans to Democrats to Republicans, prior to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. While Jewish political equality did not emerge directly out of the American revolution, Jews achieved political equality in the five states they were most numerous in, and the growing movement in revolutionary America for the separation of church and state worked to the Jewish community’s advantage (Fuchs, 1980, p. 24). The first instance of Jewish political alignment began with a Jewish attachment to the Jeffersonian Republicans; in the 1830s, Jackson and the new Democratic party gained the Jewish devotion Jefferson and Madison had maintained (Fuchs, 1980, p. 29). By 1840, a large majority of American Jewry, around 15,000 at the time, joined Martin Van Buren’s coalition, buoyed by Van Buren’s protection of Jews in Egypt (Fuchs, 1980, p. 30). With the immigration of as many as 100,000 German Jews to the United States between 1848 and the beginning of the Civil War, Jewish political alignment shifted, splitting support between Democrats and the Whigs (Fuchs, 1980, p. 33). By 1860, Jews in the North, particularly German-Jews, welcomed the new Republican Party, as many Rabbis and Jews opposed slavery (Fuchs, 1980, p. 35). In the four decades after the Civil War, Jews were widely divided with a slight major party preference for the Republican Party (Fuchs, 1980, p. 50). With the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s Jewish majority in 1916, Jews continued to lean Republican in presidential elections from 1900 to 1928 even with an influx of nearly two million Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitism and poverty in Europe (Fuchs, 1980, p. 51). However, the 1920s showed a growing trend of Jewish support for the Democratic party, more rapid in certain cities but generally solidified by the Jewish commitment to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (Fuchs, 1980, p. 71). For example, in Boston’s Ward 14, a heavily Jewish area, 78 percent of enrolled voters were Republican in 1928, while only 14 percent of voters were Republican in 1952 (Fuchs, 1980, p. 72). The proportion of Jews who voted for the Democratic Party peaked at 90 percent for FDR in the 1940s (Rebhun, 2016, p. 141). To maintain Jewish support, the Democratic Party committed itself to fighting fascist anti-Semitism in Europe and to ensuring the military and economic security of the State of Israel (Schnall, 1987, p. 77). In all Presidential elections since 1932, 60 to 90 percent of American Jews voted for the Democratic candidate. (Rebhun, 2016, p. 141). While Jewish-American Democratic support has been in decline since the late 1960s, the Jewish vote has remained solidly within the Democratic camp (Rebhun, 2016, p. 143). Additionally, the Jewish vote declined in Republican support between 1980 and 2000 but has since risen from 2000 to 2016 (Kent, 2016). As evidenced by the above historical charting of Jewish political alignment, the Jewish community has shifted in partisan alignment multiple times in American history. Why then have Jews maintained their allegiance to the Democratic Party since 1932? While many factors are involved in addressing this question, a key factor absent in other eras of American history is the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the consequent United States’ support of Israel. The median voter theorem becomes especially relevant in addressing the Jewish-Democratic alliance. Anthony Downs observed that voters can cut the cost of information by comparing ideologies rather than policies — the lack of information thus engendering a demand for ideologies in the electorate (1957, p. 142). Downs reasons that stable government in a two-party democracy requires a distribution of voters approximating a normal curve in which both parties resemble each other closely (1957, p. 143). In terms of US-Israeli foreign policy, Democrats and Republicans resemble each other closely in that they have both maintained military and economic aid for Israel. According to the Median Voter Theorem, with both parties exhibiting similar ideologies of a pro-Israel consensus, one would expect the distribution to resemble a normal curve, but this has not been the case. Surprisingly, Democratic and Republican Israeli policy has had more in common than not; yet, a normal curve does not represent the Jewish vote. In the election of 1948, both party candidates were committed to Zionism, with both parties adopting pro-Israel positions in their national platforms (Fuchs, 1980, p. 81). Truman’s election allowed the Democratic party to yield pro-Israel results, beginning with Truman’s recognition of Israel, the $100 million loan from the Export-Import Bank in 1949, and the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 (Sharp, 2016, p. 36). Lawrence Fuchs identified 1952 as a key moment in the political market for the Jewish vote, in which despite being as “well paid, fed, and educated as the most successful Republican denomination groups” Jews continued to vote for Democrats (1980, p. 99). Eisenhower’s term, however, allowed for product differentiation in the political market; Jews could now compare the quality of the collective good provided by the United States government, economic and political aid to Israel, under two different political parties. Indeed, while several factors, as Lawrence Fuchs noted, contributed to Jewish loyalty to the Democratic party, the Eisenhower Administration's policy toward Israel hurt Republican chances with Jewish voters; Zionist rallies were held in October of 1954 protesting the Eisenhower Administration’s policy towards Israel (Fuchs, 1980, p. 117). Fuchs indicated that Zionist leaders criticized the Eisenhower Administration's decision to ship arms to “feudal Arab leaders” while holding back on Israeli military aid (Fuchs, 1980, p. 117). The Suez Canal, in which the United States strengthened its bond with Egypt and forced military Israeli withdrawal, provided another demonstration of Eisenhower’s lukewarm position toward Israel (“Suez Crisis, 1956,” n.d.). Weak Republican support for Israel did not shift Jewish political alignment to its benefit; American Jews thus exhibited a lopsided preference for Democratic US-Israeli policy during the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, with around 80 percent voting for Kennedy and 18 percent voting for Nixon — a major shift from the 1956 election in which 60 percent voted for Stevenson while 40 percent voted for Eisenhower (Weisberg, 2012, p. 217). Post-1948, several Republican administrations have seen fluctuations in their capturing of the Jewish vote. Professor Theodore Wright, writing in 1982, noted that in recent years Republicans had sought to “outbid the Democrats” in their promises to the Zionist state. Indeed, the election of Ronald Reagan demonstrated a partisan shift in the political market in reaction to the Israel policies of the Democratic Carter Administration. Professor Weisberg cited data showing that many Jews felt Carter was too hard on Israel and consequently 39 percent voted for Reagan and 45 percent voted for Carter (Weisberg, 2012, p. 228). This represented a major shift in the partisan distribution of Jewish voters, nearly approaching Downs’s normal distribution curve. However, despite Reagan’s policies being more pro-Israel than Carter’s, the Democratic party regained the Jewish vote in the 1984 presidential election, with 67 percent voting for Walter Mondale and 31 percent voting for Ronald Reagan (Weisberg, 2012, p. 228). Professor Weisberg notes that while Republicans saw a boost in their attainment of the Jewish vote in the 1970s and 1980s, it was followed by subsequent loss of the Jewish vote in the 1990s and 2000s (Weisberg, 2012, 232). However, another interesting data point occurred in 2012. The highly-publicized testiness of Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “dissatisfaction with Obama’s Middle East policy” during his first term boosted the Jewish Republican vote by 9 percentage points, from 21 percent for McCain to 30 percent for Romney (Rebhun, 2016, p. 144). The Republican resurgence was squashed in the 2016 election, falling to 24 percent for Trump despite visible strain in the Obama-era US-Israeli diplomatic relations. These various historical examples indicate that shifts in the partisan alignment of the Jewish vote occur in accordance with a greater expected utility of Republican Israeli policy after a strain in Democratic-Israel relations. Nonetheless, while Jewish voters demonstrate small shifts in political alignment, they often return to a high percentage of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate. This is a noteworthy behavior; if Republicans have proven to Jewish voters that they can successfully compete with Democrats with their pro-Israel policies, why have more Jews not shifted to the Republican party? Arye Hillman accounted for such a phenomenon by considering the expressive-voting hypothesis, which posits that certain people vote “to obtain the expressive utility from confirming identity” to themselves or a group rather than to decisively sway an election (2011, p. 250). Because American Jews have historically aligned with the Democratic Party, Hillman assumed that Jews, with exceptions, rationally vote for Democrats, though it is against their self-interest, in order to gain the expressive utility associated with expressing group identity (2011, p. 256). Hillman offered a variety of historical examples from Podhoretz’s book Why Are Jews Liberals?. In the 1960’s election, he noted that Kennedy’s father was openly anti-semitic, yet Kennedy secured 82% of the Jewish vote (Hillman, 2011, p. 254). In 1972, he cited that the Democrat McGovern received two-thirds of the Jewish vote despite McGovern favoring racially-based quotas in education that would have been disadvantageous to Jews and be inimical to the state of Israel (Hillman, 2011, p. 254). Additionally, in 2008, 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama despite Obama having “anti-Israel associations” and a record that showed less concern for Israel than his Republican opponent (Hillman, 2011, p. 255). There are obviously limits to how much Jewish identity impacts voting decision and how much Jewish identity is tied to Israel. However, despite its assumptions about Jewish identity, Hillman’s evidence provides a theoretically relevant public choice explanation of why Jews may rationally vote for Democrats despite competitive pro-Israel policies from the Republican Party. Rather than functioning as a singular issue which ultimately sways the Jewish voter, the Jewish preference for a robust pro-Israel policy represents a unique and influential indicator within the multifaceted preferences of the Jewish voter. By examining historical presidential voting data, specific instances when Jewish voters could have voted according to a pro-Israel preference based upon the partisan performance of the previous administration can be identified. While this analysis has been largely driven by market outcomes – Jews evaluating their voting decisions based off of the Israeli policy of the current administration – it highlights the impact of information on voting patterns. If a Jewish voter is provided with more information, via four years of governance by a certain party, about the perceived ideology of either political party, they will adjust their preferences according to this new information. While Downs notes there are costs to acquiring such information, the marginal return, or the increase in utility from making an improved decision concerning partisan Israeli-relations ideology, would presumably exceed the marginal cost of acquiring such information for Jewish voters who decide to vote. However, while it is important to analyze the behavior of Jews as an ethnic group, there exist differences within the Jewish community which should also be examined. Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz and Lawrence Sternberg researched the influence of the centralized institutions of the American Jewish community on political cohesion and division amongst Jews (2000, p. 23). The researchers amalgamated data proving that the political activists within major Jewish institutions in the United States, such as the Jewish Community Relations Council and the organized Federation system, display differences in measures of ideology, partisanship, political and social attitudes, and policy preferences than most synagogue members and donors and are decisively more liberal (2000, p. 40). Their research demonstrated that the participants in the most centralized set of Jewish institutions display political preferences “within a fairly narrow range, denoting political cohesion” (2000, p. 44). Kotler-Berkowitz and Sternberg’s research also showed that while Jews tend to lean liberal, the degree of cohesion within the American Jewish community should not be assumed to be absolute. For example, political division among American Jews, despite the overall liberalism of Jewish institutions, allows for the opportunity of Republican competition in the markets, specifically in the more traditional Jewish communities. Republicans have particularly thrived among Orthodox Jews, who are the most Republican in their voting (Weisberg, 2012, p. 225). Eytan Gilboa traced the historical arc of Jewish support for Israel and the complicated relationship between Jews and specific Israeli policy preferences. Beginning in 1948, he notes that 90 percent of American Jews supported the establishment of Israel and the decision of President Truman to recognize the State of Israel (Gilboa, 1986, p. 113). According to public surveys from 1957 to 1983, Jews remained highly favorable toward Israel, with all but one of the pro-Israel results ranking above 90 percent (Gilboa, 1986, p. 113). Gilboa’s research also notes that all surveys of American Jews in his research show overwhelming support for US aid to Israel — around 91 to 96 percent from 1971 to 1985 (Gilboa, 1986, p. 117). However, Gilboa also investigated public opinion surveys that show a less unified American Jewish community from 1967 to 1982 concerning positions and policies in the Arab-Israeli conflict (Gilboa, 1986, p. 121). Surveys between 1980 and 1984 further evidence a split Jewish opinion on the question of a Palestinian state (Gilboa, 1986, p. 123). The conclusion of Gilboa’s paper highlights the remarkable stability of Jewish support for economic and military aid for Israel despite diverging foreign policy positions of American Jewry. Gilboa’s data and conclusions highlight an interesting complication of the Jewish political market; American Jews, while supporting aid, may not uniformly support the same policy results. The complex interactions between Zionism, ethno-religious political behavior, and political support for Israel highlights the lack of information politicians acquire about the Jewish community and also provides evidence of why US aid for Israel has been sustained for so long. An additional complication is that the Jewish voting is not the only group incentivizing pro-Israel policy. In fact, since 1989, Israel’s favorability among general Americans has vacillated between 45 percent and 79 percent (Saad, 2016). Republicans have additional political incentives to support Israel that may influence the Jewish vote. Evangelical Christians, who number about 75 million in the United States, have become “increasingly mobilized” in support of Israel (Waxman, 2010, p. 15). Since the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, the Christian Right has become increasingly influential in the Republican political market. According to Professor Murray Friedman, the Christian Right, while showing strong support for Israel, disincentivized Jews from joining the Republican party out of fear that the Christian Right has become “too influential” in the GOP (2003, p. 436). The influence of the Christian Right on Republican foreign policy highlights that while Republicans compete with Democrats for the Jewish vote with pro-Israel policy, they also compete for the vote of the Christian Right through pro-Israel policy. Additionally, the bedrock of evangelical support for Israel has shifted incentives for Jews to vote as single-issue voters; support for Israel remains ensured for by the prominent support for pro-Israel candidates on the Right vying for the support of evangelists, allowing Jewish voters flexibility to vote for Democrats who may not be as pro-Israel as the Republican candidate. In recognizing that pro-Israel policy has not yielded strong Jewish electoral results, Republicans have continued to maintain pro-Israel policy because the Christian Right has incentivized them to do so. Thus, while the political market for the Jewish vote remains influenced by a multitude of factors, the widespread preference among Jewish voters for a pro-Israel collective good shifts incentives in the political market. How Jews collectively vote remains complex, and the historical Jewish alignment with the Democratic Party despite competitive pro-Israel policy from the Republican Party highlights this complexity. It seems likely that two trends will continue based on the political incentive structures described in this paper: Jews will continue to predominantly align with the Democratic Party and both Democrats and Republicans will continue to offer competitive pro-Israel ideologies. The public choice approach to Jewish political behavior thus offers insight into why these trends continue by examining the incentives that shape how Jews vote and how politicians respond in turn. References Aldrich, J. H. Rational choice and turnout. American Journal of political science, 1993: 246-278. Bayme, S. AMERICAN JEWRY AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL: HOW INTENSE THE BONDS OF PEOPLEHOOD? Jewish Political Studies Review, 20(1/2), 2008: 7-21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25834774 Baker, P. For Obama and Netanyahu, a Final Clash After Years of Conflict. 2016. Retrieved April 02, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-barack-obama.html Cohen, S., & Liebman, C. American Jewish Liberalism: Unraveling the Strands. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 61(3), 1997: 405-430. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2749579 Downs, A. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, 65(2), 1957: 135-150. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1827369 Ferejohn, J. A., & Fiorina, M. P. The paradox of not voting: A decision theoretic analysis. American political science review, 68(02), 1974: 525-536. Fuchs, L. H. The Political Behavior of American Jews. Westport, CT: 1970. Greenwood Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4371453 FRIEDMAN, M. The Changing Jewish Political Profile. American Jewish History, 91(3/4), 2003. 423-438. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23887289 Gilboa, E. Attitudes of American Jews Toward Israel: Trends Over Time. The American Jewish Year Book, 86, 1986: 110-125. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23604779 Hillman, A. Expressive voting and identity: Evidence from a case study of a group of U.S. voters. Public Choice,148(1/2), 2011: 249-257. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41483691 Kent, D. Presidential vote by religious affiliation and race. 2016. Retrieved March 28, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a- preliminary-2016-analysis/ft_16-11-09_relig_exitpoll_religrace/ Kotler-Berkowitz, L., & Sternberg, L. THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN JEWS: COHESION, DIVISION, AND REPRESENTATION AT THE INSTITUTIONAL LEVEL. Jewish Political Studies Review, 12(1/2), 2000: 21-54. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25834469 REBHUN, U. POLITICAL ORIENTATION. In Jews and the American Religious Landscape (pp. 134-164). 2016. New York: Columbia University Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/rebh17826.9 Saad, L. Americans' Views Toward Israel Remain Firmly Positive. 2016. Retrieved April 06, 2017, from http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-israel-remain-firmly-positive.aspx Schnall, D. REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS AND AMERICAN JEWS. Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, 22(4), 1987: 75-87. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23259491 Sharp, J. M. Federation of American Scientists [Scholarly project]. 2016. Retrieved March 20, 2017, from https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdF Suez Crisis, 1956. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2017, from https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/lw/97179.htm U.S. Recognition of the State of Israel. (n.d.). Retrieved March 20, 2017, from https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/us-israel Waxman, D. The Israel Lobbies: A Survey of the Pro-Israel Community in the United States. Israel Studies Forum,25(1), 2010: 5-28. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41805051 Weisberg, H. Reconsidering Jewish Presidential Voting Statistics. Contemporary Jewry,32(3), 2012: 215-236. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43549743 Wright, T. Ethnic Group Pressures in Foreign Policy: Indian Muslims and American Jews. Economic and Political Weekly, 17(41), 1983: 1655-1660. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4371453

The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics *FEATURES * FROM GREG FISCHER Mayor of Louisville, KY Jorge O. Elorza Mayor of Providence, RI Economics Cannabis By Kaid Ray-Tipton Latent Effects of Cannabis Legalization: Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Washington State Drug Convictions, 2000-2015 Click to flip through the journal Philosophy A More Perfect Union Economics Energy By Benjamin Seymour Inclusive Norms and the Future of Liberal Unity By Jingpeng Shao Embracing Renewable Energy for Sustainable Job Growth in West Virginia economics Politics A.S.E.A.N Philosophy Transcendental Self By Hisyam Takiudin The Long Game: ASEAN, China's Charm Offensive and the South China Sea Dispute By Jennifer Kim Reconceptualizing the Idea of the Self Within Western Philosophy: The Existence-Reason Binary and the Nonrational Transcendental Self Politics Racial Capitalism Politics American Jews By Olerato Mogomotsi Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Challenging the Fallacy of Black Entitlement under Service Delivery Protests. By Jake Goodman The Political Behavior of American Jews A Public Choice Approach to Israel-influenced Voting

In Favor of Entrenchment Justifying Geoengineering Research in Democratic Systems Samantha M. Koreman Dartmouth College Author Filippo Zinni Lori Kohen Antonio Almazan Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (10 pages) Abstract This paper critically evaluates the ability of structurally democratic governments to address long-term, existential problems such as climate change using the example of geoengineering. The solution to these problems is to curtail strict democracies and, instead, entrench the right of future generations in valid constitutions. Theoretical Framework Climate change is a problem that harms current generations and that will continue to harm future generations. Current generations are harmed as a result of changing temperatures, rising ocean levels, and unpredictable weather patterns. Future generations will experience much more severe effects. Most ethical theories acknowledge that individuals have some obligation to future generations. Unfortunately, this acknowledgement does not always translate into the field of political theory. Because of moral facts about representation and non-moral facts about the motivation that individuals have for stepping foot in the political arena, current democratic political institutions are ill-equipped to implement policies on behalf of current generations. This is a serious problem when it comes to solving for the harms caused by climate change. One potential solution to climate change is geoengineering—the new realm of “deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change.” However, democracy has difficulty justifying this solution. In order to rightfully implement long-term climate change solutions like geoengineering research, it is necessary for democratic political institutions to entrench the rights of future generations in their constitutions. This paper will first establish a two-pronged problem for democracy. Then, it will apply that problem to geoengineering. After addressing potential solutions to the geoengineering dilemma, this paper advocates for entrenching the rights of future generations into a democratic constitution as a solution for the two problems discussed in the first two sections of the paper. Finally, this paper addresses multiple counterarguments to entrenchment and concludes that entrenchment is, in fact, a viable solution to justifying geoengineering research in the policy arena. I. A Problem for Democracy If we assume that we have some obligations to future generations, then it is necessary to solve a two-pronged problem for dealing with claims of intergenerational justice in modern democratic societies. Although some people claim that democracy has many benefits related to the idea that citizens get to have input in important political decisions through electing representatives and voting on specific policies, a major downside of the democratic procedure is that on a purely structural level, it is ill-equipped to solve long-term problems. The first prong of this democratic dilemma is that procedural accounts of representative democracy require that representatives be responsive to their constituents. This occurs through voting and tests of public approval. Neither of these methods allow representatives the leeway to directly make decisions on behalf of future generations as future generations are not the constituents of political representatives—as they do not yet exist. It is impossible for future generations to elect representatives or even have any measurable approval or disapproval for current policies. For policies with long time horizons, it will only be after the policies are implemented that future generations will weigh in on whether they approve of said implemented policy. This concern over time horizons establishes the second prong of the problem of integrating concerns about intergenerational justice in democratic procedures—because representatives want to be elected and maintain high approval ratings, they will often choose to focus on short-term projects. These short-term projects are policies that current people prioritize in their day-to-day lives. While this prong is an issue in general for democracy’s ability to pass policies that address long-term problems, it is especially problematic in the case of policy concerning climate change. While many people are in favor of addressing climate change, they rarely vote for a politician based on a policy to address climate change. Even if a small portion of the population did vote in this manner, it would still be difficult for policymakers to collectively act to pass policies that mitigate climate change as they need to cater to all constituents. For example, as in the case of America’s coal industry, politicians will often advocate for investing in economic advances that lead to increased resource use. One might have an easy answer to this and say that politicians can simply invest in decoupling in order to satisfy both current and future peoples. However, this two-pronged problem is not so easily addressed in cases where these sorts of justifications for certain environmental policies in a representative democracy reach counterintuitive conclusions that run in opposition to the interest of current people. II. The Dilemma of Geoengineering If we are to accept the context above claim that democracy is unable to establish a stable obligation to future generations, then a dilemma regarding geoengineering becomes apparent—geoengineering research to “arm the future” is unjustified and undesirable while actually implementing geoengineering is justified. Current geoengineering research focuses on the possibility of manipulating the Earth in such a way as to mitigate—or, hopefully, to solve for—the effects of climate change. While there are many proposals in the scientific community regarding specific forms of geoengineering such as injecting sulfate aerosols into the Earth’s atmosphere to increase the Earth’s albedo and decrease the Earth’s temperature, all forms of current geoengineering research are affected by the dilemma of democratic procedure. There exists an important higher-order claim in discussions of policy justification that the rationale for certain advocacies and the way that those rationales interact within an overarching political framework is important for determining the extent to which policies are justified. Proponents of geoengineering research often make the argument that even if our current population is not in favor of actually implementing geoengineering, it is important to “arm the future” with the information needed to implement geoengineering if future generations are put into a position where they must implement geoengineering for their own survival. Contrastingly, a rationale for implementing geoengineering does not categorically ignore the overarching context of democracy. An argument of this sort could proceed in the following fashion: current people are being harmed as a result of climate change. Constituents also have an interest in mitigating climate change. There has already been substantial research into geoengineering policies that prove it is both feasible and cost-effective. Therefore, there is a justification for politicians to support the implementation of geoengineering to benefit current people. This is not mere conjecture—in recent memory, members of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States have lobbied for funds for real-world geoengineering testing and testified to congress proclaiming the wonders of geoengineering. Members of the Trump administration and high-level Republicans have publicly advocated for geoengineering as a method of solving for climate change and some pundits claim that their reason for doing this lies in protecting the interest of constituents in the oil industry. Current people have an interest in implementation and would benefit from a successful deployment of, for example, stratospheric spraying—the introduction of “small, reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight before it reaches the surface of the Earth” would act as a way to almost immediately decrease the temperature of the planet and mitigate the current effects of climate change. The question then becomes why politicians have not made more of an attempt to secure funds to create a real-world test for geoengineering. The answer is deceptively simple—people may not like climate change, but they also do not like the idea of messing with the environment or they believe that there exists a slippery slope in geoengineering, potentially leading to continued adjustments of the environment. While public opinion might be in favor of the idea of researching geoengineering, they are wary of implementation. III. One Potential Response to the Geoengineering Dilemma One might claim that interest in geoengineering research within the current population is reason enough for politicians to advocate for it. This is not a categorical solution—it is only contingent on the beliefs of current people and those beliefs could change. If geoengineering research proved to be useful and effective, it might be the case that current people would lose interest in its novelty. Support for policies can fade, and in the case of climate change it would be a mistake to let solutions be determined solely by what could be transient interest. If one accepts that a successful implementation of geoengineering will take time, resources, and extensive research then it can be argued that choosing to stop researching geoengineering is a harm to the future generation that requires that research for its survival. IV. Addressing the Democratic and the Geoengineering Dilemmas Up until this point, this paper has put forth two problems—democracy’s two-pronged dilemma and the geoengineering paradox. The two-pronged dilemma states, first, that democracy does not have a structure to address the interest of future citizens and, second, that it is ill-equipped to work on long-term projects to address long-term issues. The geoengineering paradox has been presented as an application of democracy’s two-pronged dilemma and states that democracy justifies implementing geoengineering but not researching it. If one accepts these problems and believes that we have some obligation to future generations, then a solution is needed. A solution to democracy’s two-pronged dilemma and the geoengineering paradox is for democratic states to entrench the rights of future generations in their constitutions and laws using legal language that requires policymakers to maintain a certain element of respect for future generations. This would entail positively affirming that human rights extend to the future. Ideally, this entrenchment would be flexible and focus on ideals of intergenerational equality—it would prioritize the interest of future generations to maximize their ability for free choice and maintain a standard of living that is at least at the median of the standard of living of current generations. The content and interpretation of the entrenchment of the rights of future generations is somewhat variable, but the benefits to entrenchment are multifold. First, entrenchment would allow policymakers to permissibly make decisions in the interest of future generations and avoid the first prong of the democratic problem. It would provide a structural justification for pursuing policies beyond that which can be justified by an obligation to be responsive to their constituency. Although future generations still cannot express approval or disapproval for current policies, a policymaker has reason to virtually represent their interests to the best of their ability. The second benefit is also clear—entrenchment solves the second prong of the democratic problem. Entrenchment provides a constitutional obligation to give care towards future generations and take on long-term projects. Even in cases where short-term projects might support a bid for reelection, policymakers must consider whether these short-term projects conflict with the rights of future generations. A practical example can be seen in a political debate on whether to invest in jobs in coal or green energy. Although coal jobs might have some small, short-term benefits to a single politician’s constituency, it would be impermissible to make a conscious choice to support an industry that has the ability to exacerbate environmental harms. Instead, the politician might advocate for investing in renewable energy and training programs to transition coal miners to work at a new renewable energy plant. In cases where there are geographic concerns about the feasibility of renewable energy, the burden of the politician would be to determine whether any industry practices could be changed in order to improve the sustainability of the local coal plant. Entrenchment implies consideration of the future rather than a categorical prioritization of interests. Third, and most relevant to the geoengineering dilemma, entrenchment allows for there to be an overarching political context that legitimizes the rationale for research in the name of “arming the future.” It allows politicians to support geoengineering research even in the context where the benefits of the policy will not be realized for decades-long after their time in office is done. It represents fulfilling a contractual obligation. If a politician were to propose a policy that would violate the constraints of entrenchment, then she would be liable to something like impeachment. Impeachment acts as a way to punish politicians who break laws. As entrenching the rights of future generations would be akin to proposing a law constraining conduct, the violation of entrenchment would be a violation of the law. This would give individuals and structures within the government the ability to impose sanctions on those policymakers who would seek to disrespect future generations. V. Responding to Potential Objection to Entrenchment Even if one accepts that entrenching basic rights for future generations addresses democracy’s two-pronged dilemma and the geoengineering dilemma, there are still a few powerful objections to entrenchment. A. Entrenchment is Undemocratic One could make the argument that any entrenchment of any value into a constitution is undemocratic as it could constrain the ability of policymakers to be responsive to their constituents. Values that are entrenched in a constitution—a document made by one group of people that often continues on to future generations—do not always represent the views of current people. To entrench the rights of future generations in a constitution would be to impose values on future generations; something inherently undemocratic. This is a relatively weak argument for two main reasons. First, entrenchment in this case is something that allows for procedural fairness and respects democratic tenets of equality. If one was a proponent of democracy, then she would advocate for both of these features as prerequisites for a democratic process to take place. Second, and most powerfully in the context of this paper, entrenchment explains the reason that the paradox of geoengineering exists. People often recognize respect for future generations as a value that they either have or ought to have. Although they themselves may disagree with implementing geoengineering, that does not mean that they categorically want to take that choice away from others. Although democracies do not necessarily need to possess liberal values, they often do because of concerns about fairness and equality. In order to ensure that future generations maintain an ability to choose, it is necessary to implement certain political protections against current generations unknowingly limiting the options of future generations. B. An Epistemic Worry One more powerful objection to entrenchment is the notion that current people do not even know what is in the interest of future people. After all, one of the benefits of democracy is that people can voice their own interests and concerns to policymakers. Future people cannot do this as they do not yet exist. Norms and values change over time, and opinions about policy can often be shaped by these changes. Apart from a concern about what interests future people will have, there may also be a second, purely epistemic worry that consists of something akin to the following: we cannot know what the future holds with any certainty, and we cannot make policy to address problems that we do not know about. Therefore, any policy to help the future will rely on incomplete information. First, this epistemic question applies to current people too. If individuals do not vote, policymakers are still tasked with considering them in their decisions. We do not say that they have done something wrong if policymakers make an imperfect decision—we only say they made a mistake when the decision they make directly violates the rights of those people who are not their constituents. For example, a decision to invest in infrastructure in one town that 40% of the town refrained from voting on. That by itself is not a problem. If the infrastructure investment requires bulldozing the home of someone who did not vote for this plan, then that person could say that her personal rights were disrespected and the policymaker did something wrong. Second, certain interests have remained the same. Basic goods that are key to survival are a prerequisite for having higher order interests, interests that relate to ethical determinations of what a good life would entail. In terms of higher order interests, “although moral variety undoubtedly exists, it is less extensive than is often supposed…[as] commonalities define the distinctively human forms of life.” Certain interests are human interests, and entrenchment focuses on the consideration of these interests. Even if one disagrees with the idea that there can be one common conception of the “good life” as espoused by the Skidelskys’, approaches of determining a good life based on what a rational individual would want or what capabilities we wish individuals to have also require attention to ensuring basic goods. Basic goods are “in general necessary for the framing and the execution of a rational plan of life” and capabilities require asking “what is so-and-so able to do and be?” Food, clean water, and shelter are all requirements for safe living, and all of those requirements are threatened by climate change. Third, in terms of the specific policy of “arming the future” with geoengineering research, current people are not telling the future what to do. Instead, current people would be maximizing the choices that the future can make by providing them with information. Entrenchment as a justifying account of why it would be permissible to “arm the future” does not entail an epistemic overreach as no decision is being made; the future does not need to use the information that they would be given. They have the freedom to refuse to implement geoengineering if they do not believe it is what is best for them. Finally—to address the purely epistemic worry that nobody can predict the future on a policy level—it is important to recognize that it is likely the case that climate change will pose an existential risk to some future generation. Although it is always difficult to calculate epistemic uncertainty, it is plausible to say that we are relatively certain that if climate change is currently affecting people, it will likely affect future people as well. It is also worth noting that in our current democratic system, policymakers do recognize climate change as an existential risk to future generations and often act in the international arena to combat it like with the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Accords. C. Prioritizing the Present Another strong objection to entrenchment is the worry that policymakers would be prohibited from prioritizing the present. If there are side constraints against harming the future, policymakers may feel like they either cannot make any decision or can only make decisions that benefit the future for fear of being impeached for shirking their duties to the future. First, this misunderstands the goal of entrenchment. Entrenchment states that there is a prohibition against harming future generations with current policies. It prohibits policymakers from ignoring future generations in their calculations. It allows policymakers to permissibly take action that benefits future generations without someone claiming that they are shirking their obligations to the present. It does not state that policymakers should only prioritize future generations; it simply places a side constraint on what sorts of policies can be permissibly implemented. We still may not harm the present with our policies. Second, stating that a certain group has rights that should be protected does not imply that the current generation does not have rights. Entrenching the rights of future people does not take away the rights of current people. Certain policies might prioritize future people over current people, but in the case of justifying climate change policy that is not the case,especially when it comes to geoengineering research to “arm the future.” Third, to address the worry about undue prioritization in regard to taxation, there is a mistake in assuming that geoengineering research does not benefit current people. Scientific research has numerous fringe benefits. It benefits scientists and educational institutions in terms of providing funding and jobs as well as attracting new talent. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that an individual’s taxes go towards something that will benefit her in specific terms. If someone agrees to exist within the bounds of government and pay taxes, she agrees to pay for a set of government services rather than a specific service. There is no real mechanism to withhold a person’s taxes from being used towards services that do not directly benefit her as money is fungible. Finally, a worry about considering the interests of future people is akin to worrying about the interests of current people. A democratic system gives everyone input into the decision-making process, but equality of input does not entail that everyone’s input will be included in the final decision. Consideration of future interest does not imply that those interests will always override current interests; it is the job of policymakers to make reasoned decisions rather than a problem with entrenchment. To this final response, there is a separate worry, namely the way that democracy often considers interests is via some majority rules system. It is because of this that there can exist a tyranny of the majority where the interests of the minority are systematically discounted. If consideration of future people is meant to mean that policymakers are to consider each of the votes of the infinite future people, then it may mean that in a democratic system would always side with the infinite future people because they numerically outweigh current people. This interpretation of entrenchment is a mistake. First, consideration of basic interests does not require counting individual votes as the interests remain the same and simply act as a constraint. Second, side constraints on what policymakers can permissibly vote for exist in our current system in order to curtail the harms of the tyranny of the majority. While individual policies can fall into the trap of the tyranny of the majority, policymakers do not have the right to infringe on the basic rights of the minority. VI. Conclusion If one wishes to justify funding geoengineering research to “arm the future,” then it is necessary to solve democracy’s two-pronged problem and address its relationship with the dilemma of geoengineering. While policymakers have the ability to make any law, it is important that the laws they create are justified by a broader framework. By entrenching the rights of future generations to basic necessities that would be harmed by climate change, policymakers would have a codified reason to invest in policies that can “arm the future” with information about how to quickly counteract climate change. Works Cited Gardiner, Stephen M. “Is ‘Arming the Future’ with Geoengineering Really the Lesser Evil?” Climate Ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2010. Keith, David. A Case for Climate Engineering. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2013. Keith, David W. “Toward a Responsible Solar Geoengineering Research Program.” Issues in Science and Technology. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: The University of Texas at Dallas, Arizona State University, 2017. Lukacs, Martin. “Trump presidency ‘opens door’ to planet-hacking geoengineer experiments.” The Guardian, 27 March, 2017. www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/mar/27/trump-presidency-opens-door-to-planet-hacking-geoengineer-experiments Oxford Geoengineering Programme. “What is geoengineering?” University of Oxford Martin School. 2018. www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/what-is-geoengineering/what-is-geoengineering/indexd41d.html Skidelsky, Edward and Skidelsky, Robert. How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life. New York, NY, 2012.

Financial Literacy, Credit Access and Financial Stress of Micro-Firms Evidence from Chile Lucas Rosso Fones University of Chile Author Christopher (Casey) Lingelbach Emily Belt Orly Mansbach Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (23 pages) Abstract In Chile, as well as in the majority of the economies in the world, there exists a wide range of programs targeted towards the support of micro-entrepreneurs, providing either funding for their projects or business training. Using the 2006 and 2009 Chilean Social Protection Survey (EPS) dataset, data from the Superintendence of Banks and Financial Institutions (SBIF), and using an instrumental variables (IV) approach, this article presents evidence against financial literacy training programs as it finds no significant relationship between financial literacy on credit access or financial stress of micro-firms. Moreover, using a subsample of the data, this article shows that the results must be interpreted as an “upper bound,” thus strengthening these conclusions. I. Introduction In Chile, as in most of the world, micro-firms—firms with 10 or fewer employees—play a substantial role in the performance of the economy by their contribution to production and employment. Therefore, over the last few years, authorities have developed several policies targeted to encourage entrepreneurial activities. These policies include business skills training, asset transfers and credit subsidies. For example, since 2010, a large-scale government program run by the Chilean Ministry of Social Development offers an in-kind transfer of start-up capital plus 60 hours of business training to approximately 2,000 micro-entrepreneurs each year. Due to this governmental interest in micro-firms, there is a wide literature that has studied the effect of micro-firm support on growth, unemployment, poverty, productivity, and other economic variables. Overall, the evidence leans toward a positive and statistically significant effect of credit-access programs on these variables; however, the evidence with respect to business skills is weaker. Conversely, other studies have linked financial literacy with the probability of having access to credit and the level of debt, though these studies are usually at the individual or family level. For instance, Alvarez & Ruiz-Tagle provide evidence that financial literacy is positively related to credit access, but they find no significant evidence for financial stress. Economic models of investment often rely on the assumption that firms decide the amount of capital and labor that maximizes their profit. This assumption is called the rationality of firms. Furthermore, these models evaluate the present value of the expected cash flows in relation to the initial investment. From the work of Modigliani & Miller it follows that, in a world with taxes, levered firms (companies with more debt than equity) have a greater value than non-levered firms, at the expense of a higher bankruptcy probability. However, under the assumption of rationality of firms, these models are unable to take into account the lack of financial skills of those who run the firms, which might affect their decision-making and lead them to choose sub-optimal levels of debt. This issue is especially important in micro-firms due to the often limited human capital of their owners. Thus, it is likely that micro-firms with limited financial skills hold high levels of debt or fail to renegotiate their debts, which can affect the individuals’ utility through larger levels of poverty or unemployment, among other effects. From a policymaker’s standpoint, there are two possibilities to support entrepreneurs: business training or funding support. On the one hand, business training intends to provide skills for better management of the business. For example, such training programs may provide client negotiation skills, marketing skills, working capital management, growth strategies, and more. On the other hand, funding support seeks to fix liquidity constraints which diminish the rise of new business and the prevalence and growth of existing ones. This paper intends to establish a causal relationship between financial literacy and both credit access and financial stress of micro-firms. Evidence in favor of a causal relationship would encourage the design of business training programs as a complement to the existing asset-transfer programs for micro-entrepreneurs. Using data from the 2006 and 2009 Social Protection Survey (EPS) and information from the Superintendence of Banks and Financial Institutions (SBIF) this paper presents evidence against financial literacy programs for micro-firms given that it does not find statistically significant coefficients for either credit access or financial stress. Nevertheless, a sharp reader may have concerns about the internal validity of the results as data restraints do not allow an experimental design for a specific policy. However, this paper tries to provide evidence regarding the effect of greater financial literacy on micro-firm financial decision making, giving broad conclusions on this matter and contributing to future policy design. In addition, as there are very few financial skill programs, it is unlikely that this may drive this paper’s results. Additionally, due to the endogeneity of financial literacy (the correlation of the variable and the error term used in this model), this paper proposes an instrumental variable (IV) approach, using the number of banks at a township level as an instrument for financial literacy. As it will be argued later, this instrument satisfies both the relevance and exogeneity conditions. Likewise, given the limited amount of observations that this sample contains, it is not possible to estimate the coefficients using the fixed effects model, which may drive this paper’s results. For instance, it is reasonable to think that those who appear as micro-firm owners in both years are the ones with more financial literacy, causing biased coefficients due to a non-random attrition, the process by which the strength of the relationship gradually decreases. Hence, by comparing a pooled model with a subsample of individuals only from the EPS 2006, this paper establishes an “upper bound” for the estimated coefficients. Given that this paper finds no significant results, this work supports the evidence found on other business training studies, such as the results presented by Karlan & Valdivia. The rest of the paper is divided into seven sections. Section 2 carries out a brief literature review. Section 3 describes the data, defines the main variables and presents some stylized facts. Section 4 presents the underlying economic model that sustains this investigation. Section 5 presents in detail the empirical model and discusses the main estimation problems. Section 6 shows the main results and robustness checks. Finally, section 7 presents conclusions and public policy recommendations. II. Literature Review There is a rich literature related to studying the effect of micro-entrepreneur support on poverty alleviation, unemployment, and other variables, especially regarding the evaluation of financial aid programs (credit subsidies, asset transfers, and more) and business training programs. For instance, Bruhn & Love exploit the almost simultaneous opening of more than 800 bank branches in Mexico targeted to low-income individuals, using this event as a “natural experiment.” With this experimental design and using a difference-in-difference strategy (comparing areas that received banks to similar ones that did not across time), they present evidence of a positive relationship between credit access and poverty alleviation. In the same way, Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt & Levine, using a dynamic panel at country level, find a negative and statistically significant relationship between credit access and inequality. This relationship is due to the heterogeneity in the improvement of credit access, being low-income individuals the ones who benefit the most from improved credit access. Likewise, Levine, Loayza & Beck use both cross-section and dynamic panel approaches, as well as instrumental variables to find a negative relationship between financial intermediary development and economic growth. These results are in line with Aghion et al. which finds that higher credit restraints affect economies’ mean growth. We now turn our attention to the mixed evidence of business training programs for micro-entrepreneurs, which cover a wide range of useful managing skills such as promotion skills, working capital management, and negotiation strategies. The work performed by Karlan & Valdivia or Almeida & Galasso fail to find significant evidence of business training programs for micro-entrepreneurs in Peru and Argentina. In contrast, Berge et al. and Bjorvatn & Tungodden find positive effects of human capital accumulation programs for micro-firm owners in Tanzania, while Mano & Iddrisu find the same in Ghana. Moreover, considering micro-firm owners in Chile, Martinez, Puentes & Ruiz-Tagle use the MESP program and an experimental design to provide useful evidence regarding a positive relationship between a combination of an asset transfer and business training on employment and wages of low-income micro firm owners, most of whom are women. However, they are unable to study the effect of each component of the program by itself. Examining financial literacy levels, literature focuses mainly on individual or family level. For example, Alvarez & Ruiz-Tagle, using an IV identification strategy, find some evidence related to wider credit access for households with higher financial literacy; however, they find no evidence for the levels of financial stress. Regarding individuals, some evidence shows that lower understanding of financial concepts can trigger larger levels of debt and higher probability of default. Nevertheless, it is also important to consider that lower levels of financial literacy might suggest a lower propensity to sustain relationships with financial institutions. Finally, considering micro-firm support programs, the work performed by Drexler et al. studies the effect of two types of financial skill training programs in the Dominican Republic. The first provides standard classes covering accounting and financial contents while the second offers basic classes teaching rules of thumb of finance and accounting. Among their results, the authors conclude that lower-complexity courses are more effective on financial decision-making of the treated. Despite not finding significant effects on profit or sales of any of the programs, they find some evidence of an increase in bad week sales. Overall, literature tends to lean in favor of a positive relationship between credit access and different variables related to utility of economic agents. However, evidence is mixed regarding business training programs. Further, these programs rarely focus on financial literacy or link this variable to the probability of having access to credit (at least not at a micro-firm level) despite its potential relevance in explaining the firm's liquidity constraints. Therefore, this paper seeks to provide evidence for the relation between financial literacy and the two dependent variables of interest: credit access and financial stress, with the purpose of public-policy recommendations. III. Data and Stylized Facts The data used for this work comes mainly from the Chilean Social Protection Survey (EPS), specifically the surveys of 2006 and 2009. This paper also uses data from the Superintendence of Banks and Financial Institutions (SBIF), which provides information on the distribution of bank branches at a township level, to create the instrument proposed in this paper. In both the EPS 2006 and the EPS 2009, the surveys interview roughly 15,000 households with a total of 81,096 and 74,047 observations, respectively. That being said, this paper only considers individuals that declare being owners or partners of some business. Furthermore, defining micro-firms according to the amount of workforce, this paper drops every business with more than 10 workers. Ultimately, after cleaning the database, 935 observations remained, of which 575 come from the EPS 2006 and 360 from the EPS 2009. One of the greatest strengths of the EPS is that it has a section of questions related to financial knowledge and the risk aversion of the individual. That section allows this paper to develop a Financial Literacy Index (FLI) and a risk aversion index, both in line with the ones presented by Flores, Landerretche & Sanchez. Moreover, consistent with Alvarez & Ruiz-Tagle, this paper defines financial stress as the debt to income ratio. In this matter, financial stress is defined as the total amount of debt related to business reported by the interviewee, divided by his mean annual income. Moreover, a proxy for the formality of the business is created by generating a dummy variable that takes the value of one when the firm declares sales taxes and zero if not. In Table 1 there is a summary of the main variables used for this investigation. Regarding FLI, on average, individuals interviewed answered correctly to 41 percent of the questions. Table 2 shows the distribution of correct answers. Surprisingly, just 1.07 percent of the sample answered correctly to the six questions of basic financial concepts and less than 25 percent of those interviewed responded correctly to more than half of the questions. Moreover, regarding the compound interest rate question, which is arguably the most important question when establishing a relationship with a financial institution because loans are calculated over a compound interest rate, just a 2.78 percent answered correctly. This number is considerably lower than the one found by Lusardi & Mitchell for baby boomers in the US, which was around 18 percent. Looking at credit access and financial stress, only 16 percent of the sample has some debt when interviewed, while the mean debt represents 19 percent of the individual annual income. Nevertheless, this last number is mainly driven by the relationship (or lack of relationship) with the financial institutions. Moreover, conditional on having a loan, financial stress rises to 14.3. However, despite the magnitude of the mean, it is important to consider that this debt considers long run loans such as land or equipment loans. Appendix 3 shows the means for these variables by sex and age, showing that individuals between 24 and 54 years old have greater levels of financial stress as well as the largest share of individuals that participate in the financial markets. Now this paper proceeds to look at the township-level distribution of bank branches. Townships have on average 36 bank branches. However, it is important—especially for a geographically unique country like Chile—to consider the heterogeneity of the data given the concentration of bank branches within the wealthiest, more urbanized and more educated townships, like the ones in the Metropolitan Region. Appendix 4 details the distribution of bank branches by regions. For example, there are 75.8 bank branches in each township from the Metropolitan Region, while in the third region the number goes down to 6.1. IV. Theoretical Framework For a better understanding of the empirical strategy, it is essential to rely on a theoretical model that provides an economic interpretation for the results obtained. As mentioned earlier in this paper, assuming that the firms evaluate business projects using a simple stochastic model of present value, this statement can be formalized with the following equation: (1) Yt=-I0+i=1niEtt Where Yt is the expected present value of the project in t, yt is the cash flow on period t, δ∈ (0,1) corresponds to the discount rate, and Et is the expectation operator, conditional on the set of information t. This expression is a simplification of the one proposed by Campbell & Shiller, which is very useful for the purposes of this investigation. If we assume that not all of the individuals have access to the same set of information t, or they do not understand completely all the information available, it is reasonable to think that some entrepreneurs might forecast their cash flows incorrectly. This will likely affect the expected present value of the project; thus, these estimations can compromise the firm’s liquidity or restrain their access to external funding due to lack of information. Likewise, wrong cash flow estimations might affect the firm’s decision whether to invest or not, as well as their growth possibilities given that projects are subject to the condition Yt > 0. A key assumption of this model is that individuals overestimate their cash flows as the result of a smaller set of information, which will be called t'. This can be taken from the evidence presented by Agarwal, Driscoll & Laibson who show that on the mortgage market, individuals fail to minimize their debt costs, which can be extensible to other types of debt. In that case, individuals underestimate the debt cost as they do not understand how much they pay nor their options associated with their loan. One clear example is that, on the compound interest question (see Appendix 1), 96.3 percent of those interviewed answered incorrectly and 29.3 percent of those interviewed answered as if it was a simple interest rate, which reaffirms the conclusions of Agarwal et al. Therefore, considering the assumptions mentioned above, we have that: (2) Yt-Yt'=i=1niEtt-Ett'<0 In which the right-hand expression would be the present value of the estimation error, which depends on the information gap t-t'. Thus, the bigger the information asymmetries, the less accurate the estimations for projects run by entrepreneurs with limited access to information—or in this case, entrepreneurs with low financial literacy—will be. In addition, this model, sustained by the evidence presented by Agarwal et al. predicts that the transmission channel for illiteracy will be related to costs, not income. Another important factor is the decision of individuals to increase their stock of financial knowledge. It is easy to see that increasing financial skills endowment has costs and benefits. On the one hand, benefits are related to the model shown above as they allow better access to information and hence allow the individuals to make better investment decisions. On the other hand, the process of acquiring basic financial knowledge takes time and resources, which implies costs. Overall, theory predicts that individuals optimally choose the stock of financial knowledge that maximizes their welfare, as formalized by Jappelli & Padulla. However, this model runs out of the main goal of this investigation. Finally, it is important to mention that, according to the theoretical model presented by Modigliani & Miller, in the presence of information asymmetries between firm owners and the market, levered companies are more valuable as they signal a low bankruptcy probability to the market. This would generate, consistent with the work of Ross, an incentive to be levered. This statement generates some concern regarding the prediction that firms with bigger financial stress have owners with lower financial literacy. V. Identification Strategy For the identification strategy, two models are estimated in parallel: one for financial stress and the other for the dummy variable of credit access. As such, this paper estimates the following equation: (3) Yit=Xitβ+δFLIit+t+it In which Yit represents the two dependent variables, financial stress and credit access, for each specification. Xit is a vector of individual control variables (such as education, age, or gender) and firm control variables as a dummy for formality, business age, and amount of workforce. t corresponds to a dummy variable that takes value 1 for year 2009 and 0 for 2006, to control for year-fixed effects. Our parameter of interest, FLI, corresponds to the financial literacy index, which consists of the amount of correct answers from the set of financial questions of the EPS (see Appendix 1 for more detail). it is the error term of the model. Finally, I use robust standard errors to control for possible heteroscedasticity. Regarding the variable of interest of this work, there are reasons to believe that it presents endogeneity issues due to measurement errors of the index or spillovers from those who participate actively in financial markets, as explained by Alvarez & Ruiz-Tagle. The first issue is a result of the noisy nature of financial literacy, while the second occurs because some financial concepts might be learned by participating in financial markets. It is well known that measurement errors on right-side variables will tend to bias the coefficients towards zero, while spillovers are expected to bias the FLI upwards. Therefore, given that both sources of bias operate on opposite directions, the end result will depend on which effect is dominant. In order to tackle the problem of endogeneity, this paper suggests an IV approach, using the amount of bank branches at a township level as an instrument for the FLI. This instrument can be considered exogenous for the financial stress variable as there is no theoretical reason to believe that this might correlate with the level of financial literacy of the interviewee. However, when analyzing access to credit, the relationship is more plausible, because micro-entrepreneurs can choose where to set up their business. That being said, the EPS dataset does not ask for the township in which the business is located, but for the township where the individual lives. Individuals likely did not decide to live in a township due to the supply of financial institutions, but rather due to the accessibility of the township, supply of education establishments, green area supply, compatibility with neighbors, and other variables. Thus, this IV fulfills the exogeneity condition on both specifications. Then, the first stage regressions can be written: (4) FLIict=Xitβ+δBct+t+ict In which Bct would be the number of bank branches on the township c. Another problem related to the estimations is that, when using a pool sample with observations of the EPS 2006 and 2009, it is likely that there will be non-random attrition bias if the reason to disappear from one survey to another is correlated with the FLI. Furthermore, one can think that those interviewed with lower financial literacy will have a higher bankruptcy probability and therefore lower probability to declare being a business owner on the EPS 2009, generating upward biases. The next section tackles this issue and reaffirms the robustness of the results obtained. VI. Main Results and Robustness Checks Table 3 shows the main results of both dependent variables. Columns 1 and 3 show the estimations using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) with year fixed effects while column 2 and 4 show the results using IV. We notice that for none of the specifications is there a statistically significant coefficient for the FLI; however, in column 2, the coefficient is almost significant at a 10 percent level (p-value of 0.117). Also, we can see that coefficients are considerably larger when using an IV approach, which suggests that the attenuation bias (the underestimation of the absolute value of this data caused by errors in the independent variable) dominates the spillover effect of those who participate on the financial markets. These results are similar to the ones obtained by Alvarez & Ruiz-Tagle, in which they argue that the positive relationship between financial literacy and financial stress might be explained by greater credit access or overconfidence of the more literate individuals. The positive relationship between the FLI and the probability of having access to credit also has the expected sign; however, the significance is weaker than the one presented by Alvarez & Ruiz-Tagle. The lower panel of Table 3 shows the main results of the first stage. Shown in both models, the number of bank branches fulfills the condition of relevance as the F test is greater than 10 and the coefficients are highly significant in both specifications. Regarding the control variables, the reader can see that they all go in the expected directions. However, this paper believes it is important to discuss in detail the formality dummy variable, given that the coefficient is negative and statistically significant for credit access. At first, intuition would suggest a positive relationship between the formality of the business and the probability of getting a loan and its financial stress. Further, one would expect that formally constituted companies should have better access to request a loan on a financial institution. However, it is likely that for micro-firms as the ones studied in this paper, obtaining a loan as a formal company is more of a restraint than an advantage. The reason is very simple: an individual can leave personal assets such as his/her house or car as collateral, which reduces the bank’s risk, so unincorporated companies would take more loans than formal companies. Overall, these results suggest that business training programs related to financial skills would not be effective to diminish the financial stress (and with that the survival probability) nor the probability of having access to credit of micro-firms, as better financial literacy has no significant effect on either of these variables. Thus, a more effective policy design would be related to providing asset transfers and loan subsidies, consistent with the empirical evidence shown in the literature review. A. Robustness Checks Given that the pooled model presented in the previous subsection has observations for micro-entrepreneurs from years 2006 and 2009, it is likely that these results may be biased due to non-random attrition, in which the results gradually decrease in strength. Intuitively, it is reasonable to think that those who report themselves as micro-firm owners on both the 2006 and 2009 surveys are the ones with higher financial literacy levels (as financial literacy would be a useful tool for making optimal financial decisions and diminish the probability of bankruptcy), which would generate upward bias on the estimations presented in Table 3. In that case, results shown before should be interpreted as an “upper bound,” proving solid evidence against a causal relationship between financial literacy and the two dependent variables studied for this investigation. In order to test this hypothesis, this paper estimates again columns 2 and 4 of Table 3, but only for a subsample of year 2006 observations. If the hypothesis is true, both the significance and the coefficients must fall on this new specification. Table 4 shows the results obtained from this subsample, using the IV approach as on columns 2 and 4 of Table 3. From the table above, one can see that the results obtained are consistent with this paper’s hypothesis, as the coefficients (and their p-values) fall on both specifications when using the subsample of observations from 2006. For financial stress, the estimated coefficient falls from 3.899 to 1.698 (and the p-value increase from 0.12 to 0.36), while credit access falls from 2.693 to 2.117 (p-value changes from 0.21 to 0.30). One possible concern regarding these results is that they can be driven by the narrowing of the sample, as for the pooled model the sample was already limited on observations. However, one can see that the standard error falls when the regressions are estimated for the subsample of the year 2006, despite reducing the size of the sample. Furthermore, the instrument bank branches on township is still highly significant (at a 99 percent level for both specifications) and has an F test of 11.54. This implies that the results shown on Table 3 should be interpreted as an “upper bound,” due to the attrition bias, presenting robust evidence against financial training programs, as there is no significant relationship between financial literacy and access to credit or financial stress of micro-firms. VII. Final Conclusions This paper intended to establish a causal relationship between the financial literacy level of micro-entrepreneurs, their probability of having access to financial markets, and their financial stress. Based on the literature regarding this subject and given the large empirical evidence in favor of financial aid programs for micro-firms, as well as the mixed results in business training programs, this paper intended to contribute new evidence relative to the effectiveness of policies that involve business training for micro-firm owners. By using an instrumental variables approach, this paper tried to tackle the endogeneity problems that the financial literacy index (created following Flores, Landerretche & Sanchez) is exposed to. This paper uses the number of bank branches at a township level as an instrument for the index, which fulfills both the exogeneity and relevance conditions. Overall, my results suggest that there is no causal relationship between financial literacy and the two dependent variables studied. Further, due to non-random attrition bias, these results must be interpreted as an “upper bound” which provides solid evidence against financial training programs. 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 • Question 2: Lottery Division. If five people hold the same winning ticket from a lottery of $2 million, how much will each receive? 
 • Question 3: Interest rate. Assume that you have $100 in a savings account and the annual interest rate that you receive for this savings is 2 percent. If you keep the money for 5 years on this account, how much money will you have in five years from now?
 a. More than $102 b. Exactly $102 c. Less than $102 
 • Question 4: Compound rate. Let’s say you have $200 in a savings account, which accumulate 10 percent in return each year. How much would you have after two years? 
 • Question 5: Inflation. Suppose you possess $100 in a savings account which gives you a return rate of 1 percent yearly. If the inflation is 2 percent, after one year you could buy:
 a. More than $100 b. Exactly $100 c. Less than $100 
 • Question 6: Risk diversification. Please answer if the next statement is true or false: buying a stock form a company is less risky than buying the same money on several stocks from different companies 
 (b.) Likewise, I use the following risk aversion index proposed by Flores et al. (2011). Risk aversion: 
 • Is 0 if the interviewee prefers a fixed and stable income for the rest of his life 
 • Is 1 if he/she prefers a job in which he/she can, with the same probability, have twice his income 
or 3/4 of his income for the rest of his life. 
 • Is 2 if the interviewed prefers a job in which he/she can, with the same probability, have twice his income or 1/2 of his income for the rest of his life 
 • Is 3 if the interviewed prefers a job in which he/she can, with the same probability, have twice his income or 1/4 of his income for the rest of his life 
 (c.) Type of debts considered for the Financial Stress variable: 
 • Machinery
 • Land and/or agricultural facilities • Animals (cattle)
 • Bank credit line
 • Other 
 Appendix 2: Financial Literacy Index Appendix 3: Descriptive Statistic for FLI and Dependent Variables Appendix 4: Bank Branches Distribution in Chile Appendix 5: Regressions for Financial Stress and Credit Access Detail Appendix 6: Regressions for Subsample Year 2006 Appendix 7: Instrumental Variables

A Gravity Model of Civic Deviance: Justice, Natural Duties, and Reparative Responsibilities Woojin Lim Harvard College Author April 2021 Abstract: This paper presents a ‘gravity model’ of civic deviance and the principle of reparative responsibilities, addressing the question of when citizens are justified in shirking their civic obligations. Provided an unjust state, I raise the proposal that principled civic deviance (CD) should be, at the very least, permissible to varying levels as determined by a gravity equation. In select cases, I argue that CD may be obligatory. The gravity model, which sets to define the degree of permissible CD, features considerations such as the unfairness of the basic social structure, the individual extent of injustice faced, and the balance of CD-enabling natural duties against CD-restricting natural duties. In responding to one’s natural duty of justice, I claim that reparative responsibilities (RR) consign varying degrees of CD obligations, depending on the individual’s stake in injustice, beneficiary and contributory status, capacity to prevent and respond. Hence, individuals affected by an unjust state may permissibly, or necessarily, shirk their civic obligations only in line with their natural duties and RR. “[O]ne has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” — Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail What conditions justify a citizen’s deviance from their civic obligations in a constitutional democracy? And more importantly, whom does the scope of justified civic deviance encompass? A common way of justifying uncivil actions is to accept that we are only under a prima facie duty to obey particular laws (i.e. when incivility poses seriously untoward consequences or involves an act that is mala in se) and that we have no such obligation to obey all its laws. When some laws surpass a given threshold of injustice, we may be justified in disobeying those laws. On this justification, some have argued that all individuals who are subject to unjust institutions in some manner should be allowed to challenge injustice by shirking their civic norms of reciprocity. Others have argued that only those who fall beyond the scope of tolerable injustice should be allowed to shirk their civic obligations. So, where should the threshold for justified civic deviance be drawn among members bound to a scheme of reciprocity and social cooperation? Is there a way to account for the level of injustice suffered individually along some sort of tolerability gradient while also extending the scope of justified civic deviance to all those within the broader scope of unjust institutions? In this paper, I explain why an approach that selectively permits civic deviance (henceforth ‘CD’)—proposed in Tommie Shelby’s “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto”—has to be reconsidered. I then outline the structure of what I have come to think is the correct one. My most significant response to Shelby’s argument focuses on his failure to offer details on setting thresholds as to when deviant behavior is justified or at least excused. That said, I recognize that the main aim of Shelby’s paper is only to stake out the conceptual grounds for these claims and to illustrate that these are conceptual categories worth mining. I aim to engage further in that mining process and to offer an original contribution to the debate by re-examining Shelby’s threshold account. I introduce what I call a ‘gravity model’ of CD and the principle of reparative responsibilities to permit varying degrees of CD for particular oppressed groups, while sustaining permission for all to exercise CD—provided an unjust social structure, and a positive difference of natural duties wherein CD-enabling natural duties outweigh CD-restricting natural duties. By CD-justified, I will come to mean ~ (CD-forbidden) or CD-permissible, and in select cases, CD-obligatory. This paper is organized as follows. In Part I, I draw upon Shelby’s article, “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” and review some of the basic building blocks of CD. In section 1, I outline Shelby’s Rawlsian justification for CD, and in section 2, I reconstruct his application of CD to the “black ghetto underclass” of the United States. Section 3 is dedicated to pinpointing the inadequacies of Shelby’s view. When only a particular subset of the population is permitted to deviate from their civic obligations, there arises an imbalance of burden-sharing. I claim that it is unfair for those who do not suffer from intolerable injustice (and those who suffer from greater levels of intolerable injustice) to continue upholding reciprocity wherewith unjust institutions, especially if continuing to do so clashes with their natural duties. In Part II, I lay out the elements of what I believe is a more adequate approach. I begin by advancing on Shelby’s conception of the natural duty of justice. In this light, I come to understand CD as that which extends to those within the limits of tolerable injustice, and the differences in the level of intolerable injustice will be accounted for through the gravity model of CD along with the principle of reparative responsibilities (RR). Provided an unjust social structure, all affected individuals are justified in shirking civic obligations but nonetheless remain bound to natural duties and reparative responsibilities. I will finally elaborate on what I take to be the guiding conditions of permissible and obligatory CD, drawing from the modern analytical political philosophy literature. Part I: Reflections on “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” 1. Let me begin with an explanation of the preliminary concepts underlying CD. In “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Shelby advances on Rawls’s apparatus of justice as fairness. Shelby builds his argument from the premise that within a liberal framework, justice, at least in part, is rooted in the political value of “reciprocity between persons who regard each other as equals,” bound together under a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage (p. 129, emphasis mine). The social, political, and economic institutions of the basic structure of society fix an individual’s initial position within society, more or less favoring some individuals in the distribution of benefits and burdens—of liberties, duties, opportunities, and material advantages. Given that the basic structure bears an immense and wide-ranging influence over an individual’s lifetime prospects, which are deeply shaped by a social structure each individual did not choose, Shelby argues that the social arrangement should be formed by institutions, i.e., governments, schools, firms, markets, and families, as to provide each individual with a “fair chance to flourish” (p. 130). In this grander scheme of reciprocity, each participant of the social structure has a legitimate claim to a fair chance not to have their life prospects diminished by the social scheme in ways that cannot be justified on impartial grounds. It is in virtue of this groundwork of reciprocity, or the principle of fair play, that ‘civic obligations’ have normative force. As a beneficiary of the primary goods afforded by the cooperative enterprise, each citizen is expected to shoulder an obligation to do their share as the arrangement requires, such that costs and benefits are divided in an equitable way. Citizens then have a duty to bear a share of the costs that are involved in the production of collective public goods. For example, they should pay taxes, obey the law, and so forth. This obligation is owed to those with whom one is cooperating, in order to maintain a fair basic structure. Each citizen of a democratic polity is ipso facto bound to civic obligations as required by the basic institutions. When a citizen evades or refuses to fulfill her civic obligations, she attempts to gain from or exploit the cooperative labor of others (‘free-riding’) without doing her fair share. The law-breaker acquires an unfair advantage over her fellow citizens, and this, in turn, warrants punishment to remove this advantage and re-establish a fair distribution of benefits and burdens among all members of the society. Shelby further claims that an individual’s fair chance to thrive is a necessary condition for reciprocity. Each citizen is bound to civic obligations only “when these institutions are just” (p. 145). Citizens therefore are modus tollens not obligated to submit to unjust institutions, or at least not to institutions that “exceed the limits of tolerable injustice” (p. 145). Institutions that bring about injustice that is so serious as to be intolerable allows special civic permissions for disadvantaged individuals, that is, deviance from civic obligations or—as I term it—CD. Since those who suffer from intolerable injustice have been deprived of their fair share of benefits from the social scheme, they are not bound by the civic norms of reciprocity they have as citizens. As to determine who falls beyond and beneath the radius of intolerable injustice, Shelby proposes the constitutional essentials standard, based on a loose criterion of adequacy. These include the basic rights of a liberal democratic regime, such as freedom of speech, conscience, assembly and association, political rights and other supplementary rights. For all citizens to be provided adequate exercise of these rights, Shelby adds, these rights should be impartially and effectively enforced, not merely codified in law, such that all citizens can have confidence that their rights will be respected by those with institutional power (p. 150). Consider a society wherein constitutional essentials remain unsecured for certain peoples, that is, the social structure deprives certain peoples of their fair share of benefits. Shelby contends that in such a society, those affected by intolerable injustice should not be expected to fulfill the civic obligations demanded by unjust institutions. This is not to say, however, that those affected by intolerable injustice should be released from moral duties altogether. Here, Shelby provides a clear distinction between civic obligations required by all proper citizens, versus natural duties, which unconditionally bind to all moral persons regardless of their associational or institutional ties. Thus, while an individual beyond the limits of tolerable injustice may deviate from civic obligations, at no point in time can any person permissibly abandon natural duties. One striking natural duty that Shelby highlights is the natural duty of justice. Drawing from the Rawlsian project, the two sub-principles of this natural duty are as follows: for each individual (1) to uphold and comply with just and efficient institutions when they do exist, and (2) to support the establishment of just and efficient institutions when they do not yet exist. The ‘positive’ natural duty of justice provides reason for CD, while its ‘negative’ form provides reasons for individuals not to deviate from their civic obligations. 2. Implementing these concepts into practice, Shelby pictures the plight of the black ghetto underclass in the United States. Shelby describes a widely assumed narrative about the urban poor, wherein residents live in the dark ghetto due to their self-defeating attitudes and malicious conduct, and thus violate legitimate expectations for civic reciprocity, including a duty to obey the law and support themselves through licit jobs. Under such misinformed narratives, when the ghetto poor engage in criminal activity (i.e., theft, drug-dealing, prostitution) or refuse to accept menial, low-paying, unsatisfying jobs, these actions appears to be “a failure of reciprocity on their part” (p. 146). Such attitudes call for acts of CD to be characterized as irresponsible lawbreaking and unenterprising criminality, and for such acts to be rightfully prosecuted and punished. Shelby contends that this is the wrong conclusion to draw, however, since the mere existence of the dark ghetto—with its “combination of social stigma, extreme poverty, racial segregation… and shocking incarceration rates”—proves its incompatibility with any meaningful form of reciprocity among free and equal citizens (p. 150). There is sufficient reason to believe that the constitutional essentials standard is not currently met in dark ghettos of the United States. Since the black ghetto poor live under the rule of institutions that exceeds the limits of tolerable injustice, they thereby have a legitimate claim of deviance from civic obligations. That is to say, when the ghetto poor engage in criminal activity, refuse to accept menial jobs, or bear contempt for society, disrespecting the authority of the law qua law, they do not “violate the principle of reciprocity or shirk valid civic obligations” (p. 151). If the social scheme miserably fails to embody the value of reciprocity for a certain group of peoples, those who are deprived of their fair share of benefits from social cooperation should not be required to reciprocate in civic obligations. There exist no valid civic obligations demandable from the victims of intolerable injustice, especially when the unaffected others—albeit unknowingly—profit from the unjust social structure. Again, even if a society is deeply stained by injustice, moral duties remain owed to one another in the form of natural duties. Natural duties, including the duty not to be cruel, to help the needy and the vulnerable, not to cause unnecessary suffering, to respect the moral personhood of others, to help bring about just institutions, must be satisfied in the enactment of CD. Forms of deviant behavior that are compatible with natural duties, for instance, shoplifting and petty theft, may be conceived as permissible. Other extremes of deviance—for instance, some forms of gangsterism, which involves the use of “violence, threats, and intimidation, to forcibly extract money, goods, and services from others... [maiming] and even [killing]” (p. 137)—violate natural duties, namely the duty not to be cruel, not to cause unnecessary suffering, to show respect for the moral personhood of others, etc., and thus are always morally unjustified for all people, regardless of the inequity of a social scheme. On this regard, we may rule out forms of CD that involve mala per se, while still permitting CD acts that involve mala prohibita. To briefly recapitulate, Shelby’s discussion brings into light a discussion of fairness and political obligations. Shelby’s view is that the empirical facts show that the conditions of political obligations do not hold. He proposes that in unfair, oppressive, or unjust social structures, individuals are no longer bound to a scheme of reciprocity, while nonetheless having natural duties. 3. Up to this point, my discussion—and certainly that of Shelby’s—has revolved around the implications of justifiable civic deviance for the ghetto poor, or those beyond the threshold of intolerable injustice. The question now extends to what civic obligations, permissible deviance, and natural duties are to be for those within the limits of tolerable injustice, including the benefactors of the unjust social regime. For individuals who are not themselves affected by intolerable injustice, Shelby’s understanding of CD asserts that they should nonetheless remain bound to the duties of the unjust regime, and they would not be justified in shirking their valid civic obligations. On Shelby’s account, such individuals remain bound to a cooperative reciprocal scheme to do their fair share as a beneficiary of the primary goods afforded by the social scheme, even if there are those who may not be bound to it (i.e. the ghetto poor). Let me invoke a hypothetical example to illustrate this point. Imagine a team of laborers— Dongbaek, Yongsik, and Jongryul—who sign a contract to work cooperatively under a scheme of mutual advantage in a table-lifting business. If laborer Dongbaek does not receive a fair share of benefits for the work that she performs in lifting an equivalent proportion of the table’s weight, and if this were to amount to Shelby’s standard of intolerable injustice, then Dongbaek may permissibly deviate from her civic obligations, that is, to drop her end of the table and walk away without being subject to moral criticism on this basis. Shelby’s argument continues in the implication that Dongbaek’s deviance does not render null the civic obligations (to move the table) owed by laborers Yongsik and Jongryul, who remain fairly compensated for lifting the table. Since Shelby’s standard of fairness is merely that of adequacy, let’s imagine that Yongsik well-beyond meets the fairness requirement (i.e. Yongsik receives an attractive bonus on top of his standard compensation), whereas Jongryul barely meets the adequacy threshold (i.e. Jongryul is provided with minimally adequate wage compensation for his labor). Regardless of Yongsik’s and Jongryul’s differing proximities from the threshold of tolerable injustice, insofar as they are fairly compensated—according to Shelby’s definition, not the Rawlsian standard—as beneficiaries of the (unjust) reciprocal scheme, Yongsik and Jongryul, who are not themselves affected by intolerable injustice, may not exercise CD. There seems to arise an interesting conflict here. Shelby’s initial words on what establishes civic obligation is as follows: “[E]ach citizen has an obligation to fulfill the requirements of the basic institutions… when these institutions are just” (p. 145, emphasis mine). This implies, in converse, that when these institutions are unjust, each citizen bears no obligation to fulfill the civic requirements of the basic institutions. Extending on this suggestion, perhaps the standard of appropriate CD should be set at a lower bar, more broadly, such that the mere existence of unjust institutions invalidates a baseline of civic obligations for all citizens. As to delineating precisely what set of civic obligations consists of this threshold is a subject for further study. When Yongsik and Jongryul—after Dongbaek’s departure—now must lift heavier weights of the table for the same wage, they may decide that this entire table-lifting venture is fundamentally exploitative, skewed from the ground up, since the social structure generates enormously unfair distributions. In continuing to uphold this scheme along with its unjust institutions, Yongsik and Jongryul sustain injustice, perhaps contravening on positive natural duties, notably that of justice. All the while, other negative natural duties, for instance, the duty not to cause unnecessary suffering, prevent an extended of abuse of CD for the wrong reasons. There is sufficient reason to think that those unaffected by intolerable injustice may be permitted to shirk a baseline of civic obligations given a persisting unjust social structure (defined by some standard of unfairness). On the other side of the spectrum, imagine workers Sangmi and Gyutae, who similar to Dongbaek, suffer from Shelby’s conception of intolerable injustice: the lack of constitutional essentials. Both Sangmi and Gyutae suffer from great intolerable injustice, falling far beyond adequacy conditions. Whereas Sangmi exercises CD, Gyutae does not. Here, Dongbaek’s exercise of CD, which seems to extend symmetrically for all those affected by intolerable injustice, takes advantage of Sangmi and Gyutae (and Yongsik and Jongryul), while Sangmi’s exercise of CD gains from the persisting social cooperation of Gyutae (and Yongsik and Jongryul). Imagine a case where Dongbaek steals a loaf of bread for herself, having starved for three days. For the purpose of illustration, let’s presume that the number of days starved—of one’s and one’s dependents—is the dimension by which we measure ‘unfairness.’ If Sangmi also hopes to steal a loaf of bread for himself and his entire family who have starved for seven days, but if Dongbaek’s deviance necessarily prevents Sangmi from doing so, it seems as if Dongbaek’s CD (indirectly) takes advantage of Sangmi, and wrongly so. Both Dongbaek and Sangmi would be taking advantage of Gyutae, who, having already completed one excruciating day of work, still has no purchasable food from the bakery to feed himself and his family, starving for 12 days. Given that Gyutae continues to hold onto the table while suffering from greater intolerable injustice—defined by a more pressing need for constitutional essentials—than compared to Dongbaek and Sangmi, it seems that Dongbaek harms the innocent Sangmi and Gyutae, and Sangmi takes advantage of Gyutae, and in both cases, the worst off is harmed. Thus, a CD permissibility condition of proportionality to one’s status of injustice faced appears relevant here. Given an initial baseline of permissible CD, I find it necessary that an additional permission to CD considers the level of intolerable injustice each individual suffers as a result of the unjust basic structure, establishing a gradient of tolerability. Part II: Outline of a more adequate approach The real puzzle of CD is, then, not how to draw a threshold line for the fairness of institutions and for the adequacy of constitutional essentials, but instead, how we should be accounting for the level of injustice suffered by individuals while also extending the scope of justified CD to all individuals within the broader scope of unjust structures and institutions. I thus propose a gravity model of justified CD. This model is not intended to be taken as a literal, mathematic formula that citizens can employ to meticulously calculate their degree of permissible CD. Rather, I provide this model in the spirit of opening up alternative ways to think about CD and its implications. The model (first pass), taking into account the discussion on burden-sharing (§I.3, supra) is as follows: Permissible CD (first pass) = extent of the unfairness of the basic structure (measure of unfairness of institutions) • extent of injustice faced (measure of tolerability) The first equational factor is the baseline concerning the fairness of the rules, laws, principles, and institutions that constitute the basic social structure, or the fairness of the basic structure itself. Since this first factor is more broadly applicable, Rawls’s somewhat more demanding standard of justice as fairness could be applied here. The second factor refers to the individual measure of injustice faced: those who are subject to greater forms of (intolerable) injustice may be allowed greater CD permissions. This relation is modeled in Figure 2.1. Both Rawls’s and Shelby’s standards of fairness, the FEO and DP versus constitutional essentials, are not mutually exclusive, for they may be modeled on the same gradient as follows in Figure 2.2, with steeper inclines for each threshold crossing. Other models of fairness could be introduced here (i.e. insert dimension-D along the x-axis or add in threshold-T in place of Rawls and Shelby’s standards). In Figure 2.2, Rawls’s threshold is positioned to the left of Shelby’s since it is an ideal of justice that makes it harder for unjust societies to fulfill: it is more likely for unjust institutions not to meet the requisites of Rawls’s standard of justice as FEO and DP (footnote 7, supra) than to achieve Shelby’s fairly looser standard of adequacy. Natural duties, particularly that of justice, also play a significant role as a factor regulating CD. The second sub-principle of the natural duty of justice holds that each moral agent has a duty—in helping to bring about just rules, laws, principles, and institutions—to fight against unjust rules, laws, principles, and institutions, plausibly by means of CD. These CD-enabling (positive) natural duties may also be limited by CD-restricting (negative) natural duties, for instance, to not be cruel, etc., which impose restrictions on the exercise of CD. Considerations of alternative (i.e. legal) forms of resistance to the unjust basic structure (i.e. peaceful protests, petitions, authorized public events, and other law-respecting acts of solidarity) also fall under the category of CD-restricting natural duties. On this basis, indiscriminate and unwarranted forms of ex ante violence on the innocent can be restricted. What I call the difference of natural duties (ND difference) thus permits CD if and only if the CD-enabling factors outweigh the CD-restricting factors; if the natural duty of justice to upturn severely unjust structures compels the exercise of CD over all other natural duties. If the CD-restricting factors override the CD-enabling features, then CD may, at the very least, face moral limits. If the CD-restricting factors are so great as to cancel out the extent of the unfairness of the basic structure and the extent of intolerable injustice faced, then CD may not be justified. At this point, there arises another relevant concern on whether or not CD could be, in select cases, not only permissible or encouraged but also necessary or required. Building upon the brief mention of alternative forms of action (subsumed under ND difference), I have come to believe that certain forms of CD may be morally necessary to fulfill natural duties when all other alternatives to CD and its weak forms have been completely exhausted (footnote 26, supra). When a member of the ghetto poor, having exhausted all other (i.e. legal) alternatives of securing adequate resources to feed himself and his family, decides to steal a morsel of bread from the bakery next door, he may not merely be permitted but rather obligated to do so. For if he refuses to steal bread and feed his family, he violates the natural duties of self-respect, respect for the moral personhood of others, and duty not to cause unnecessary suffering, among others. The pressing immediacy of respect and preventable suffering for his family outweighs the dues of respect for the bakery-owners. Under some circumstances, a failure to exercise CD represents a failure to do one’s own part in upholding one’s natural duty of justice: those who blindly obey, rather than those who disobey the law, may be accused of perpetuating and sustaining vehement forms of injustice, and be accused of free-riding on their fellow citizens’ cooperative moral efforts. The need for solidarity may call upon CD not merely as a supererogatory act but rather as an obligation: when Gyutae, for instance, fails to exercise CD—which incurs on his, others’, and their shared natural duties—he might be contravening valid CD obligations. By invoking familiar normative categories, we may formulate ‘CD-justified’ in the following forms: CD-permissible or ~(CD-forbidden), and CD-obligatory. At the very least, provided an unjust social structure with its set of unjust institutions and so forth, we necessarily have CD-permissible—though to varying degrees depending on the gravity model equation—and ~(CD-forbidden). In select cases, determinable by when a neglect of CD seriously contravenes on ND, we may have CD-obligatory. I propose a further original condition to CD: the principle of reparative responsibilities (RR). Provided a case of justified CD, not only do citizens retain their natural duties (i.e. to respect others’ humanity, etc.) but also come to bear a new set of obligations—in varying degrees—to restore or re-establish reciprocity, trust, and civic cooperation in the long run. This need not be immediate. Let’s return to the table-lifting example. When a member drops their portion of the table, and when others express solidarity by dropping their portion of the table in an act of radical reform, all members are still due respect to another as equal moral persons (and perhaps the table-dropping is a vehement expression that this has not been the case), and now may be tasked with another duty to work in reallocating the burdens (or benefits) so as to provide for a fairer share of benefits (or burdens). In addition, all individuals—including those who do not eventually engage in CD—now bear the responsibility to amend these damaged social bonds, restore justice, and provide closure to affected victims. RR imposes a duty on all to work towards the adjusting and redrafting of the fundamental social conventions so as to reduce unjust laws and practices in a continued process of reflective equilibrium. In carrying forth the duty of justice, individuals equipped with greater powers and benefits (as a result of unjust institutions) should be bound to a correspondingly greater set of RR to countermand injustice; individuals (i.e. Yongsik in the table-lifters case) with a greater capacity and ability to prevent or counter injustice, in a better situated position to influence change, as well as those who are greater beneficiaries of and contributors to injustices, should be held to a greater degree of responsibility in amending unjust institutions. That said, the underlying RR extends also to the victims of intolerable injustice, as they play a part, albeit small, in sustaining unjust social structures. The ghetto poor, for instance, may not be held to the same degree of RR as the uber rich, provided that RR varies depending on an individual’s relational status in the social scheme. Since justice as fairness demands an unequal distribution of primary goods, RR extends unequally depending on the individual stake in injustice, capacity for political sway, beneficiary, and contributory status until at least society is tolerably just. RR, like any obligations, compel individuals to take action. Given these additions, my gravity model of CD may be revised as follows: Justified (Permissible/Obligatory) CD = [extent of the unfairness of the basic structure • extent of (intolerable) injustice faced] • [ND difference] in line with [ND • RR] An act of CD is justified if and only if—and to the extent that—the basic structure is unjust and the individual faces an extent of intolerable injustice, or CD-enabling factors override CD-preventing factors. Acts of CD should be undertaken with natural duties of justice and reparative responsibilities in mind, which—to varying degrees—impose the normative considerations of respect for humanity and the (eventual) restoration of social cooperation. Acts of CD are obligatory, as opposed to merely permissible, provided the exhaustion of non-CD alternatives and of the least harmful forms of CD, or when unanimously called for by the natural duty of justice. Working together, the ND difference and RR ensure that CD does not arise out of cathartic or exploitative motivations or aims (supra footnote 20) but rather occurs in line with ND and RR. It is important to note that in the equation of justified CD, I preclude concerns of political effectiveness or pragmatism. Similar to Rawls’s reasoning, the effectiveness of CD does not establish the right of deviance, but once that right is independently established, CD should be shouldered with political effectiveness in mind. As Shelby declares, if street capital is to be converted into “political capital in a resistance movement” (p. 160), the oppressed should, whenever possible, publicly register dissent. The justification of CD provides an inquiry into the nature of justice, civic obligations, natural duties, and reparative responsibilities. My gravity model of CD provides a different way of thinking about questions of civic and moral agency, and the duties that individuals should carry depending on the justness of their social structure, alongside the special obligations and responsibilities that follow from their unique standing in the basic structure. Members within unjust structures who exercise CD with respect to their natural duties and reparative responsibilities should not be, echoing Shelby’s words, “demonized, stigmatized, or otherwise dehumanized, just as surely as they should not be romanticized” (p. 160). The ultimate goal is, after all, to shape meaningful bonds of solidarity, to build meaningful political alliances, and to invite the joint action needed to establish and maintain justice.