by Thomas Rodham Wells

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like good person. In fact the more you try, the more you may feel like a failure. Thanks to egalitarianism, globalisation, activist NGOs, the internet and over-active moral philosophers the calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an absurd rate.

Everywhere we turn there are people demanding that we take moral responsibility for ever more features of our lives and the implications of our actions. Almost everything we do turns out to be involve a moral choice, or more than one, in which our deepest principles are at stake. If you're an egalitarian, how come you help your kids with their homework? If you're against child-slavery, how come you still eat chocolate? If you're against racism, how come you enjoy ‘white privileges' like not being afraid when the police pull you over? And so on. Want to put milk on your breakfast cereal? There's a moral philosopher out there who wants you to read about murdered baby cows first.

Enough! These demands would challenge the forbearance and commitment of a saint. Trying to satsify them all would leave no room for getting on with your own life.

But it gets worse. Although they are presented as moral challenges, as tests of your principles, many of these demands are actually moral puzzles with no right answer. Flying to England to visit your sick grandmother, perhaps for the last time, is absolutely the right thing to do, but it's also absolutely the wrong thing to do if you care about the environment and justice for future generations.

You just can't win no matter how hard you try!

The rising tide of moralisation has been rather more successful in making us feel constantly guilty about everything we do than in inspiring us to live morally better lives. And this is not surprising since it demands that we take on the burden of extended moral responsibility – for the well-being of children in Cote d'Ivoire, for future generations, for the survival of rare species, and so on – without giving us the tools we need to manage that responsibility. Unfortunately feeling guilty all the time is morally debilitating. It undermines our ability and motivation to make good moral decisions in the first place.

If everything we do is wrong, why bother to even try to do the right thing?

Fortunately the solution is at hand. Here at Moral Tranquillity plc we believe that good people should be able to live a life free from guilt. That's why we have developed a range of Moral Offsetting™ products that make meeting your moral responsibilities simple and affordable.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Is travel a cure or a placebo? Maybe just a place to be.

Sometimes when I close my eyes, the towers of the Alhambra stand gleaming beyond our hotel garden where we picked a lime from a low-hanging bough. Other times, the noisy crush of Bodega Castenada comes back, how its neighborhood crowd parted slightly to let us squeeze through its front doors for a taste of salty tapas and a swallow of sherry.

Best, though, is the indelible image we found in Arcos de la Frontera. After climbing up and around its narrow streets, intermittently glimpsing through open doors or windows, women sizzling sofrito or kids playing video games, the cathedral San Pedro looms over the town at its highest point. Cold enough inside to preserve the moldering body of Saint Fructoso (3rd century) and statues of saints — including the beautifully clothed marble Virgin who holds her heart in one hand pierced by seven swords — the church is hammered with half an acre of Aztec gold for a dazzling refuge of superstition and repository of prayers.

In one of the cathedral's recessed chapels, aptly named Our Lady of Loneliness, we lit a votive before a glass case where a rosy porcelain infant Jesus rests his downy head on a human skull. I lost my breath for a second while contemplating this image of innocence at peace with death for it embodied the consolation I hadn’t known I was seeking.

Feliz Navidad.

photo by R. Zinn

by Hari Balasubramanian

On Oscar Martinez's “The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail” — the English translation of “Los Migrantes Que No Importan” (The Migrants Who Do Not Matter). Translation by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington.

—-

From 2000-2006, I was a graduate student at Arizona State University in the Phoenix metro area. My neighborhood, a ten minute walk from the university, had cheap apartments where Asian students lived alongside immigrants from south of the US-Mexico border. We students had visas, had made safe journeys on flights, and now worked and studied on campus. Many Hispanic immigrants, in contrast, had made life threatening journeys and had crossed the border illegally. They now did construction, farm, and restaurant jobs for a living. At the neighborhood Pakistani-Indian restaurant, I remember seeing – through a decorative window shaped as a Mughal motif – three Hispanic workers in the kitchen patiently chopping the onions and tomatoes that would go into the curries that I enjoyed.

Some Indian students looked down on these immigrants, blaming them for petty bicycle thefts and how unsafe the streets were at night. And just as all East Asians were “Chinkus”, the immigrants from south of the border were “Makkus” – a twist on “Mexican”, used mostly (but not always) in a negative sense. No one, though, had a clear sense what the stories of these immigrants were. While it is true that a large percentage of those who cross the border are from Mexico, tens of thousands each year come from the troubled countries further south – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. This year, an estimated 60,000 unaccompanied minors from Central American countries, fleeing violence in their home towns, will cross the border. Surprisingly, even hundreds of undocumented South Asians cross via Mexico – but more on that later.

In the long view of history, this is how things look. First, European immigrants ethnically cleanse most of North America of its American Indian inhabitants. This was illegal immigration – just consider the number of land treaties broken – but at the time it was glorified as Manifest Destiny. With help from Africans kidnapped and enslaved against their will (coerced immigration) European settlers eventually create a powerful country that now draws people from all continents. Among modern trends in immigration, it is the Hispanic one that stands out. Undocumented immigrants – the numbers are hard to estimate, but there seem to be 10-12 million of them in the US – have altered the demographic and culture in many states, much to the consternation of American conservatives. An interesting fact, though of no practical consequence, is that the mixed race (mestizo) and indigenous immigrants of Mexico and Central America, crossing over in their tens of thousands, happen to be the closest genetic relatives of the North American Indians.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I can hear the Hallelujah man down on Broadway near the subway station. Ha-Le Lu yah—Ha-Le-Lu-Yah! Gee—Zuz! Gee Zuz! Gee-Zuz! I love you—-I love you—I love you—Ha—Le-Lu Yah—Ha-Le-Lu-Yah.

And I'm reminded suddenly of that time one evening when Jesus walked into a bar with a Pakistani and an Indian in Sarajevo.

I guess it's a good time to tell you this story.

Jesus looked very serious that evening a decade ago and formal too as Sanjay invited me to supper with them.

‘We're taking you to the finest restaurant in all of Sarajevo!' Sanjay said. And before I could say it was a tourist trap or anything like that Jesus solemnly added,‘It is my favorite.'

I think that was the first time I had heard him speak. He never uttered a word during staff meetings—just took notes and nodded from time to time. He wore Save the Children ties.

Now who was going to argue about where to go and what to eat with Jesus? Not me. Not with Jesus from Procurement or Sanjay from Financial Management both of whom, had my project document on their desks for review and which I needed back from them cleared and approved by c.o.b the next day. If this was the finest and the favorite restaurant in town who was I to show them the error of their ways or contradict them at nine p.m. on a cold and quiet night when I had nowhere else to go to. So be it. Done.I braced myself for the boring evening ahead.

On the short walk to the restaurant I stopped at an ATM machine. As I withdrew a couple of hundred Convertible Marks, I commented to them ‘This probably functions as surveillance. Someone somewhere knows that I'm standing at the corner of Olitsa such and such at such and such time in such and such city.'

Sanjay laughed ‘You are so paranoid. There is no such thing. This is the year 2004 not the book 1984!'

Jesus remained silent.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Remember Plato's allegory about the cave? Prisoners, chained inside a cave, sit facing a blank wall with a fire lit behind. All they know of the world is through shadows cast on the wall, by whatever it is that moves between them and the fire. The entirety of their knowledge is constructed from observations of these moving silhouettes. For them, reality consists of flat images, devoid of color and and (three-dimensional) form.

But of course the fallacy must be exposed, and so one prisoner somehow breaks free of his shackles. He turns and sees the fire, and the objects that cast the shadows. Suddenly, he is confronted with things far more complex than he could have conceived, with qualities he lacks the vocabulary to describe. Should he venture out of the cave, his confusion and disorientation increases by several orders of magnitude. Bathed in light and color, he is assaulted by the unfamiliar sensory richness that surrounds him. Were he now told that he had been harboring a delusion his entire life, and that this is in fact reality, he would have a hard time wrapping his mind around it.

The point of this story, of course, is that we are prisoners of our experience. Imagination helps us explore extrapolations and combinations of the familiar, but what if there are things that lie beyond our ken? Who's to say that what we perceive isn't just a sliver of the whole truth? Plato's millennia old allegory remains relevant, because even now we are haunted by the insecurity that we might be missing out – that the universe is more than we can know. So here's an interesting twist: what if our perception adds a dimension, instead of slicing it out? How could that happen? Let me give you an example.

About twenty years ago, stereograms were all the rage. On the surface, these ‘Magic Eye' pictures were merely repeated patterns, but if you stared at them long enough and in the right way, a three-dimensional image would pop out of the paper. In case you haven't seen these before, here's one you can practice on.

The only advice I have to offer, if you're new to this, is that it generally works best if you hold the paper (or screen) relatively close to you. Beyond that, it just takes some patience. As with all illusions, once you've seen through it, it's much easier the second time around. (Hint: this particular stereogram hides a single word.)

But how do these images work? The answer lies in the way we perceive depth. As we look out onto the world, both our eyes form individual images, from their own spatially separated viewpoints. (To compare the difference between the image formed by one eye and the other, try holding a pencil up, a foot or so in front of you. First close one eye, and then the other. The pencil appears to move.) The brain processes both these images and combines the information to form a judgement about depth.

Stereograms create the illusion of depth by tricking the brain. Because of the repeated patterns, the eyes might each be looking at two distinct points, but be confused into thinking that they are the same. The brain, as it processes the images from each eye, assumes those two points should overlap and, as a result, conjures up an illusion of depth. So human physiology leads us to add a perceived dimension, even when it is not physically present.

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By Namit Arora

On how caste patriarchy in urban India hijacks and distorts the reality of gender violence.

Delhi now lives in infamy as India’s ‘rape capital’. In December 2012, the gruesome and fatal gang rape of a young woman, named Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the media, unleashed intense media and public outrage across India. Angry middle-class men and women, breaking some of their taboos and silences around sexual crimes, marched in Delhi shouting ‘Death to Rapists!’ The parliament scrambled to enact tough new anti-rape laws.

Many Delhiites have since grown fearful of their city’s public spaces. Spotting an emotionally charged issue, opposition politicians promised to make Delhi safe for women. Campaigning for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2013, Narendra Modi told Delhiites, ‘When you go out to vote, keep in mind “Nirbhaya” who became a victim of rape.’ The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, even promised private security guards with ‘commando training’ in every neighborhood. All this might suggest that a rape epidemic has broken out in Delhi’s streets, alleys, and buses. Mainstream media outlets in India and abroad seem to agree.

Anyone trying to analyze the issue must at least ask three questions: who are the rapists, where do they rape, and how common is rape in Delhi? The 2014 Delhi Police data on rape is a great place to start, not the least because it challenges the conventional wisdom of Delhiites and their media and politicians. It shows that, as in other countries and consistent with previous years in Delhi, men known to the victims commit the vast majority of rapes—96 percent in Delhi. These men include friends, neighbours, ‘relatives such as brother-in-law, uncle, husband or ex-husband and even father.’ More than 80 percent of them rape inside the victim’s home or their own. Strangers commit only 4 percent of rapes, which are also likelier to be reported. Yet so many people fixate on this latter scenario and take it as proof that Delhi is unsafe for women to go out by themselves.

The hard truth is that sexual predators are not so much ‘out there’ in the faceless crowd as among the familiar ones. ‘Statistically speaking’, journalist Cordelia Jenkins wrote in August 2013, ‘the problem [of rape in Delhi] is not on the streets at all, but in the home; the greatest threat to most women is not from strangers but from their own families, neighbours and friends.’ According to Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, a women’s rights organisation in Delhi, ‘This data compels us to look at what is happening in and around our homes and workplaces.’ In other words, we ought to worry about rape less when women enter public spaces on their own, and more when they return home or hang out with friends. Why do so few Indians—men and women, including policy makers and public figures—seem to realize this? Some feminists have argued that this blend of pious concern with plain denial is the modus operandi of patriarchy itself.

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Poet Builds a House

all that we are arises with our thoughts,
the Dhammapada says,
with our thoughts we make the world

…….thing one: tour the foundation,
…….scrape down its roughness
…….with the edge of a hammer head,
…….dis the mason who left behind a lumpy job,
…….who forgot what a trowel is for,
…….who was halfway home already when he bent into his forms
…….smoothing like a dilettante, fatigue calling the shots,
…….the day’s dregs, the ache in his legs

with our thoughts we make the world

…….two: eyeball the foundation top
…….to get a handle on what you’re up against
…….noting bulges humps and dips, or not—
…….with luck you've been left the work of a perfectionist
…….a Michelangelic cement mechanic
…….doing god’s work as he smoothed loose Portland
…….to a chalk line while in the background
…….the symphonic smell of oil-soaked wood
…….played to a concrete vibrator’s percussive drill
…….driving trapped air from aggregate,
…….time and chemistry turning wet concrete to stone
…….upon which a carpenter will set a sill

all that we are arises through our thoughts

…….three: set sill straight to lines struck on the top of the wall
…….parallel and square and fix with bolts

the world is made with thought

…….four: make cycles to the lumber pile grabbing two at a time
…….whip to shoulder and carry over sun-baked soil raising dust
…….until the need for sweat and beams has been fulfilled
…….and the house is framed by god’s good must

all that we are by thought arises, says the Dhammapada.
we make the world with thoughts

…….thus a house, conceived and brought about
…….by hammer blows in the skull of a carpenter
…….driving nails through a sawyer’s vision of cut joists
…….its walls and roof arranged in geometric imagination, arises

…….because, as the Dhammapada says,
…….the world is brought about by thought

with our thoughts the world arises

…….when you think about it (as the verse apprises
…….and Buddha taught)
…….our home —our world, is built by thought
.

by Jim Culleny
8/16/13

Dhammapada

by Leanne Ogasawara

“…..all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.”

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by Bill Benzon

Talcott Parsons

I am going to continue the psycho-cultural argument I introduced in my previous 3DQ post, American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore. The core of my argument somes from an old article in which Talcott Parsons, one of the Grand Old Men of 20th century sociology, argues that life in Western nations generates a lot of aggressive impulses that cannot, however, be satisfied in any direct way. Rather those impulses must be redirected. Parsons was interested in how nationalist sentiment directed those impulses against external enemies, such as the Soviet Union, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, Iraqi and the Taliban. But Parsons also recognized the existence of internal enemies, such as African-Americans from slavery up through and including the present day.

In that post I pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s foreced Americans to redirect the aggressive impulses that had been absorbed in the Cold War. I argued that those impulses were focused, once again, on African Americans. Since then I’ve been reading danah boyd’s recent study of cyberculture, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). I was struck by her argument that teens spend so much time online because they’re physical lives are restricted in way that mine had not been.

That prompted me to write Escaping on a Raft in Cyberspace, in which I agued, in effect, that some of the aggressive impulses that had been directed toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War have now become directed at our own young, with the Internet serving as the “trigger” for that redirection. I reprise that argument in the first section of this post. I go through Parsons’ argument in the second section, this time a bit more carefully. I wrap up that section by arguing that the logic of our response to teens in cyberspace is the same as our response to the bombing of the world trade center. In both cases anxiety caused by a real danger is amplified by repressed aggression resulting in actions that are inappropriate to their ostensible cause. In the final section I ask how can we, as a society, better distinguish between real danger and projected fantasies.

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by Eric Byrd

A few years ago I found a copy of the 1990 English translation of Guido Ceronetti's The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine in a used bookstore's Humor section. Those are usually dead zones of joke books, cartoon compilations and political jesters, over which the eye skims. I had never before heard of Ceronetti, who on reading turned out to be my favorite kind of writer, an “admirable monster” like Baudelaire and Cioran, an anatomist who finds cheer in perfection of phrase, monstrous because he so elegantly exposes our monstrosities, and I have idly wondered, when drawn to my copy, hunting after a half-recalled aphorism, why the book had been put where it was, how this unclassifiable thing was so classified (a librarian, I think this way); and then, this week, while Googling for a cover image to insert into this column, I noticed that the dust jacket says, “Translated by Michael Moore.” Michael F. Moore is a prize-winning translator from the Italian, of Manzoni, Moravia, Levi and Eco. Sub-sub-Borgesian mystery solved.

“Admirable monster” – by contemporary lights, sure, but by others, simply a humanist. In the world Ceronetti evokes, and to which he truly belongs, painters slice and study cadavers and the philosopher reads by Caravaggian candlelight, a skull at his elbow; the comedian is a poet of venereal and urologic affliction, and the tragedian devises serial slaughters and eulogistic pomp; and all who are literate transcribe remedies. It is a tradition increasingly macabre, marginal, and self-conscious as a society begins to believe in perfectibility, to conceal or euphemize bodily horrors, becomes accustomed to surgery as a polite profession and adopts the taboo of mortuary secrecy. As we suffer less visibly and live longer and hope more and more to defeat death, “the curse of dragging about a corpse” – what Cioran identified as the “very theme” of The Silence of the Body – recedes as a mainstay of literature.

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by Josh Yarden

Translation has its limitations

how do you say…

we stumble, severely at times

We do not realize when we do not realize

understanding stands down

misunderstanding stands in

The translator pretends to be Superman

disguised as a reporter for the Daily Planet

able to leap tall constructs in a single bound

Translators transcend boundaries

across time and place

we have all sorts of advantages

Just one mysterious weakness

we are vulnerable to the substance of our planet

Kryptonite is a cryptic message

Once free of the burden of place

eternal outsiders are never stuck at home

odd ducks can swim in any lake or just fly away

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by Matt McKenna

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is a gorgeous and wry dramedy about a 90s-era movie star attempting to regain relevancy in a media landscape to which he can no longer relate. This description may make the film out to be yet another highfalutin take on upper-class midlife crises in the 21st century, and perhaps to some extent that is true. However, as tempting as it is to read Birdman as a trite story about a rich guy having a tough go at it, the film is best understood as a metaphor for Hillary Clinton's rise to fame as the wife of President Bill Clinton and her subsequent struggle to realize her political potential in the subsequent years.

In Birdman, Michael Keaton plays Riggin Thompson, a Hollywood actor who may have some talent but has hitherto squandered it by performing in mass-market drivel, particularly in his career-defining role as a superhero wearing a bird costume. (The parallels to Keaton's own career-defining role as a superhero in Tim Burton's 1990s Batman films is an interesting footnote, however coincidental and irrelevant to the discussion at hand.) While apparently lucrative for Riggin, the fictional Birdman franchise typecasts him as an action movie buffoon rather than the impassioned, serious actor he sees himself as. To prove to his fans (and dare I say–himself?) that he is indeed a real actor with real creative talent, Riggin stages a Broadway rendition of Raymond Carver's short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Riggin hopes that the intellectual nature of the story and the nuanced performances its stage adaptation requires will finally help him escape from behind the long shadow cast by the Birdman films.

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Until 25th January, 2015

by Sue Hubbard

Some years ago I was commissioned by the Royal Academy magazine to write ‘a feminist appraisal' of Allen Jones' work. As an RA, Jones had the privilege of reading the piece before it went to press. Although he's referred to himself as a feminist on a number of occasions he seemed uncomfortable with this perspective. He vetoed the article and it was never published. I decided, therefore, to take the opportunity to revisit the work of this 77 year old pop artist to see if my response was any different a number of years on.

As I walked through the Royal Academy I remembered how the Viennese painter, Oscar Kokoschka, returned from the First World War to find that his lover Alma Mahler had married the founder of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius. To deal with his unrequited passion Kokoschka ordered the doll-maker Hermine Moos to make an exact, life-size replica of his ex. When the mannequin finally arrived, Kokoschka was horrified to find that, far from being life-like, it had furry limbs. Yet despite the doll's hirsute appearance they made trips to the opera, took long carriage rides and, it was said, had intimate rendezvous. Eventually Kokoschka threw a champagne party and afterwards wrote: “When dawn broke – I was quite drunk, as was everyone else – I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.”

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by Gerald Dworkin

I have been thinking and writing about lying and deception for a number of years. Readers with a long memory may recall these two blog posts written for 3QD when I first started my thinking on the topic:

Lying Around — Part I

Lying Around — Part II

Along the way I have encountered many passages in my rather eclectic reading that bore on the topic. Some of them were aphoristic or humorous. Some were real cases in which people decided to lie or not. Some were literary or philosophical. All were attempts to say something interesting and true about when we must be honest and when we should not.

Facts are for people who lack the imagination to create their own truth.

—Anon

Every lie must beget seven more lies if it is to resemble the truth and adopt truths aura.

—Martin Luther

When the philosopher Henry Sidgwick started teaching at Cambridge in the 19th century every Fellow had to subscribe to the the 29 articles of the Anglican Church. He no longer accepted these beliefs. Since he did not want to sign this “best-motivated perjury” he wrote to John Stuart Mill for advice. MIll did not offer any but advised him to turn to the larger question of what utilitarian exceptions there were to the rule that we should tell the truth. See what you get when you ask a philosopher for some moral advice?

*

Dan Ariely Is a psychologist who has written a very interesting book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty which is more about when we cheat than when we lie–although there is a lot of lying going on in his experiments. He also writes about his experience recovering from terrible burns over most of his body. One of his stories concerns a procedure he had to undergo which involved putting pins into his fingers to support them while skin grew back. The procedure will take place two weeks later and, in fact, will be very painful. When he asks about how painful the nurses lie and say that the current removal of burned skin is the hard part. The procedure will be a snap.

In fact the removal proves to be extremely painful. Ariely, looking back, is grateful that they lied to him. He believes he would have had two weeks of agonizing anticipation which would have been both terrible in itself and would have possibly damaged his immune system. He does not comment on the fact that this deception can only be used once!

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Humans have existed for a brief time no matter how you count
the eons. Ten thousand years ago there were perhaps some three million humans on earth. Today there are seven billion. It was only in the last century that population growth seemed unbounded, but in reality the average rate of population growth per year in the twentieth century was only a few percent. Quite frankly overpopulation is a myth. It is a dangerous idea that is demonstrably wrong. In developed countries it is actually population decline that presents social and economic challenges. In some underdeveloped nations the population is indeed growing extremely rapidly, however, the situation is ameliorated by humanist efforts such as education (particularly for women), access to contraceptives, and general economic and social empowerment of the population. Overpopulation isn't a problem, but even if it was, the solution would be to give people, particularly women, choices about their own destiny.

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In the Middle of a Cycle
.
everything comes in waves
— some of which break like 70 footers at Portugal’s
Nazaré

.… “Invest in a good surfboard”
she said as if she’d already read
the morning edition of tea leaves, coffee grounds,
or whatever her most knowledgeable herb

my father, late in life,
during his period of popping nitros,
having sludged his lungs with tar
having bequeathed his heart limited breathing
—back then my father said, “I think life comes in cycles,”
which I never expected from he-who-
never-revealed-to-me-a-metaphorical-side
at least not in showy ways as far as I recall

he was more boots on the ground
then —a man who knew work

I have a drawing of the last time I saw him
standing behind the open door of his Buick
saying goodbye forever (as it turned out)
I drew it from a photo

….. a minute later in another
….. he’s holding Leah

….. heading back to NJ, Peg drove him
….. straight to a hospital bed

from there a short hop, skip and a jump to heart failure
found him in a thicket of hoses and other paraphernalia
tended by a surgeon, only to come fully breathless,
without baggage, to no avail

I cried —I sobbed really, core-of-earth-sobs
full of magma and white hot stone
looking for a mountain to blow apart, but
soon became centered in another spot

lost

in the middle of a cycle

.

by Jim Culleny
12/1/14

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The title of this post might look peculiar. People frequently think of politics as a winner-take-all clash between conflicting interests, something akin to a football game, where the sole aim is to win, and the only rule is to not get caught cheating. Indeed, in a democracy, politics often feels like a game. There are teams, game plans, coaches, trainers, and winners and losers. Further, as citizens we are inundated with appeals from parties and lobbies designed to get us to pick sides and root. We root and cheer by means of votes.

So the idea of an “ethics of citizenship” may seem odd — something on the order of an “ethics of cheerleading.” However, there's a crucial sense in which democratic politics is not a football game, and citizenship is not akin to cheering for a politician or policy. This difference accounts for the fact that our activities as democratic citizens are indeed morally assessable.

Democracy is a philosophical response to an age-old problem: How can there be political rule among individuals who are by nature free and morally equal? Political rule is always coercive; the state forces individuals to do things that they otherwise would not do. But if we are naturally free and morally equal, no one is subordinate, and no one is anyone's boss. Political rule, then, seems inconsistent with the freedom and equality of all. That is, it seems that wherever there is a state, there is an unacceptable violation of individual freedom and equality.

Democracy is the attempt to resolve this tension, to reconcile political rule with the freedom and moral equality of each citizen. The contours of this reconciliation should be familiar: In a democracy, the will of the state is in some sense the will of the people. We must obey the law because, in a democracy, laws are in some sense self-imposed. And so the identification of the political will with the popular will renders the state's rule consistent with the freedom and moral equality of each citizen. Problem solved, right?

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