1
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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question
I assume that you are a citizen, in the sense of someone who belongs to one or
more communities that you hope to improve. Your communities may range
from a city block or a religious congregation to the whole earth. As a citizen of
these communities, you seek to address their problems and influence their directions; but more than that, you want to make them through your thought, your
work, and your passion. You want to be a co-​creator of the human world.
As a good person, you ask, “What should I do?” But as a good citizen, you must
ask, “What should we do?” The question becomes plural for two reasons: no one
can accomplish much alone, and we must reason together to improve our opinions and to check biases and self-​interest. Reasoning together is an indispensable
way to think well about matters of public concern. To be sure, the individual perspective never vanishes, because people should reflect on which groups they belong to (membership is not always explicit, obvious, or voluntary), which ones
they should seek to join, and which ones they should exit. Those are matters of
individual ethics. But to be a citizen, one must also adopt the plural “we.”1
The citizen’s question—​“What should we do?”—​ends with an action verb because it is not enough to form and express opinions; citizens must actually affect
the world. They must decide under conditions of uncertainty and limited time,
and then act. (Refraining from action is a form of action for which members of a
group are responsible.) Acting and then reflecting on the results is an important
way to a make a group’s discussions and learning serious.
Importantly, the question is not “What should be done?” or “How should
things be?” These are the predominant questions in political theory, political philosophy, and the study of public policy. They are often far too easy. For instance,
what should be done about the threat to the global climate? Carbon should be
taxed everywhere to reduce production, and the proceeds should be used to mitigate the harm of rising temperatures, with most of the funds going to the world’s
poor. The carbon tax might not even have to be very high, and other tax cuts
could offset it.2 I think this proposal is correct, but it is also empty. I cannot actually tax the world’s carbon; neither can you. We are not influential in any group
that has that power. Our responsibility and accountability vanish if we ask what
1
2
Portions of c­ hapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared in Levine 2019 and are reprinted here with permission.
Metcalf 2019.
What Should We Do?. Peter Levine, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197570494.003.0001
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2
What Should We Do?
should be done instead of what we should do, where “we” refers to a group in
which we have tangible agency.
The opposite pitfall is to be satisfied with individual actions or shared voluntary decisions by small groups. A family or a few friends can agree to turn off
their lights and stop eating beef to save carbon, but 7.5 billion other human beings will go on as before. The hard question is how any group in which I have
genuine agency can affect large problems. A good citizen does not shy away from
that question because it is difficult.
The “should” in “What should we do?” is also essential. Good citizenship is
not about doing what we want, or what our biases or interests or norms tell us
to do. It is about struggling to pursue the best ends with the right means. We
are responsible for altering our wants, biases, and interests to make them better.
Since good ends and means cannot simply be looked up, the pursuit of moral improvement is intellectually difficult. We know that we can be wrong about right
and wrong, for all the people who have sincerely believed in slavery, patriarchy,
and violence have been badly misguided—​and we share the limitations of those
fellow human beings. But although we can be wrong, we must try to be right. The
good citizen does not shy away from the question “what should we do?” because
the answers are contested.
Finally, the word “what” in this question matters, because the good citizen
must be concerned about the options: their costs, risks, and probable outcomes.
Empirical information is essential in this analysis. When time is scarce, additional empirical investigation can be too costly or time-​consuming, but the good
citizen is not afraid to face the implications of the available evidence.
By putting the emphasis on what we should do, I am not suggesting that everyone bears primary responsibility for addressing every issue. You may be the
victim of a social injustice that someone else has created or has the best opportunity to remedy. In such cases, it is most important for them to decide what they
are obliged to do to improve your situation. Not every problem is your problem.
Nevertheless, “What should we do?” remains an important question for virtually all of us. Even if the main moral responsibility lies with someone else, the
only thing we can control is what we do. We may decide that we should demand
justice from another person or group, but making a demand is also a form of
action that we choose to take. In fact, making demands on “target authorities”
is the characteristic activity of social movements;3 and social movements are
composed of people who ask, “What should we do?” It’s just that their goal is to
compel other people to take more responsibility.
Furthermore, acting is not merely a price we must pay in order to improve
the world. It can also be a benefit that we reap, since exercising agency can be
3
Tilly 2004, 7.
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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question
3
an aspect of a good life. Although we should encourage—​and sometimes even
compel—​other people to ask what they should do (the focus of ­chapter 6), it is also
worth asking that question on our own behalf, regardless of our circumstances.
One important demand that social movements make on target authorities—​
usually, national governments—​is to change who counts as a citizen in the legal
sense. Two leaders and thinkers whom I will consider at length in this book are
famous for making such demands. Mohandas K. Gandhi wanted the people of
India to leave the British Empire and become citizens of a free India. Martin
Luther King Jr. wanted African Americans to become full citizens of the United
States; he endorsed a “revolution to ‘get in.’ ”4 Their demands remind us—​if a
reminder were necessary—​that the question of who holds which kinds of membership in which political entities is a serious matter. The modern state has a
profound influence on most aspects of society. In particular, its laws and policies
regarding associations may determine which other groups, apart from the state
itself, we may join or leave. And it offers a kind of membership—​legal citizenship—​that is often not under our control. Whereas we may decide to form a voluntary association with like-​minded peers to address a common concern, a state
may tell us that we are in or out, whether we like it or not.5
Therefore, the question of legal citizenship in states has generated a substantial and valuable literature. These are some of the empirical questions it addresses: Who has which forms of legal citizenship in which states? (Note that de
facto citizenship may differ from rights on paper.) And why, in various contexts,
is legal citizenship defined in particular ways and protected for some while being
denied to others? For example, why were the founding documents of the United
States so reticent about the definition of citizenship?6 The ethical questions include: Who ought to have which rights in each polity? Who is responsible for
remedying any unjust citizenship laws and policies?7
These issues are germane to this book and arise periodically in my analysis.
Nevertheless, my focus is different, for two reasons. First, I adopt and defend a
“polycentric” view of politics, in which the state is not a monolith that exercises
4
M. L. King 1966/​1991, 58. Also discussed in Mantena 2018, 91.
Cf. E. Cohen 2009, 21: “Democratic theory that suggests that citizens make citizenship through
their actions [a fair description of this book] exhibits a particularly influential and yet problematic
normative presumption. This line of inquiry is premised on the notion that it is citizens themselves
who determine the content of their membership through specific forms of voluntary political behavior. But engaging in acts of citizenship does not automatically impart citizenship, let alone recognition of that citizenship by peers or political institutions.” On p. 29, she adds, “some political authority
must identify which acts will be privileged as acts of citizenship, and whose performance of these acts
will be regarded as citizenly.”
6 Smith 1999 (118) explains that reticence as a result of unresolved disagreements between “centralists and decentralists, large and small states, and opponents and advocates of slavery.”
7 An example of an influential principle is Robert A. Dahl’s: “Every adult subject to a government
and its laws must be presumed to be qualified as, and has an unqualified right to be, a member of the
demos.” Dahl 1989, 127.
5
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4
What Should We Do?
ultimate sovereignty. Rather, it is a name for a whole array of offices and bureaus,
officials, rules, norms, and laws that may be in mutual tension and that inevitably
shade into other institutions that are not strictly governmental. Many non-​state
groups and institutions exercise power over governmental bodies. The state is
in the midst of associations of all kinds, not the fundamental basis of all other
associations.
Second, even when we decide that a government’s policies about who should
have which rights are the most pressing issues, the main question for us remains: what should we do about it? Although it is worth analyzing citizenship
rights in a given state and arguing that they should be defined or enforced differently, we cannot stop with such analysis. If the status quo is unjust, we should try
to change who has legal citizenship. To do that will probably require joining or
forming groups other than the state that can advocate change, whether they are
lobbies, social movements, or guerrilla armies. So my focus is on membership in
a wide range of groups, in a world in which membership is not always voluntary,
and in which people are often included or excluded against their will.8
To take this stance is to be “republican” in one ancient sense of that word.
Etymologically, a republic is the “public thing” (or “public good”). In this book,
I assume that a very wide range of goods belong to their associated publics: the
safety of a street belongs to the neighborhood; a country’s laws belong to its citizenry; and the global climate belongs to us all. These publics have both the right
and the responsibility to exercise ownership of their respective goods—​with the
question of who collectively owns which goods constantly arising. Collective
goods are compatible with (and often essential for) private goods. For instance,
the safety of a street is a public good even if all the buildings have private owners.
To own a public good is to ask what we should do about it. It means resisting the
passive question, “What should be done?” Classical republics were born when
the public wrested responsibility from a monarch, a clique, a clergy, or a foreign
power, thereby adopting an active voice.9
To do a good job of collectively governing any good requires appropriate virtues and institutions. Some of these virtues are discursive: good speaking, reasoning, and listening. But discursive virtues will not suffice; people must also
work, sacrifice, and sometimes fight to defend their common goods. It is natural
to use the word “civic” for the skills, habits, virtues, and institutional forms that
enable us to govern common goods well; thus we speak of “civic discourse,” “civic
8
In the terms of Tully 2008 (8), this is a “civic,” not a “civil/​national,” notion of citizenship.
Cf. Constant 1819: “the liberty of the ancients . . . consists of exercising collectively, but directly,
many parts of absolute sovereignty, [and the right] to deliberate, in a public space, about war and
peace, to ratify treaties of alliance with foreigners, to vote laws, pronounce decisions, examine the
accounts, actions, and management of officials, to compel them to appear before the whole people, to
accuse them, to condemn or acquit them.”
9
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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question
5
engagement,” “civic associations,” “civic forums,” and “civic courage.” This book
is a contribution to civic republican theory, although I dissent from some uses of
that phrase.
It can also be seen as a contribution to democratic theory. “Democracy” is
defined in many ways, but I find it most useful as the name of a system in which
voting plays an important role and in which everyone who is a full member gets
an equitable share of the vote. To make voting legitimate and valuable may require additional features, from freedom of speech and rule of law to some degree
of social equality. These features buttress the central architectural element of a
democracy, the vote, whose purpose is to equalize power.10 It seems likely that
democracy, so defined, is the best system for governing the public goods that are
the laws of most (perhaps all) sovereign states. Therefore, states should generally
be civic republican democracies. It is a more complex question whether other
important entities—​such as religious denominations, professions, academic disciplines, computer networks, extended family and kinship groups, markets, and
the earth as a whole—​should be democracies. It is possible for people to own and
govern these things without ever voting. Still, all should be civic and republican,
because in each case, a group must define and govern itself and its goods wisely.
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From Ethics to Politics
This book’s question, “What should we do?,” has a plural verb because politics
exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associations to nation-​states. The plural question raises a new set of issues that are not
directly addressed in individual ethics.
To start, problems of complicity arise once you belong to a group. Consider
a case like the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II,
which probably caused 35,000 civilian deaths on one night and did nothing to
advance the Allied victory over Nazism. The firestorm sucked oxygen out of the
air and caused civilians in shelters to die of asphyxiation. It was started by bombs
from one thousand airplanes. Eight thousand crewmen flew in those planes,
and “many thousands further were involved in planning and support.” Exactly
the same number of deaths would have occurred if 999 bombers had flown instead of one thousand. Thus, as Christopher Kutz observes, each crewman or
10 Robert Dahl defines democracy as “voting equality at the decisive stage” (Dahl 1989, 109–​11).
I find this narrow definition useful for analytic purpose; it allows us to investigate what is needed to
make democracy work well and what outcomes democracies accomplish. If we load other features
into the definition, the resulting system (e.g., voting plus deliberation, or voting plus social equality)
may be more attractive, but it’s harder to analyze whether voting equality is necessary or sufficient.
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What Should We Do?
ground-​support person could rightly say, “I made no difference, and I had no
control over the outcome.”11
Indeed, because these people did not separately cause the firestorm, no one
should accuse them of homicide. But they do have a deep and permanent moral
connection to the Dresden firestorm, unlike someone who was home in Iowa at
the time. This moral connection requires actions and attitudes on their part: for
instance, regret, memory, confession, self-​scrutiny, and perhaps active support
for peace with postwar Germany. We should consider as morally defective anyone who says, “I was part of a group that killed 35,000 civilians for no military purpose, but I had no effect on the numbers killed, so I don’t care what
happened.”
Kutz argues for two principles: (1) “I am accountable for what others do when
I intentionally participate in the wrong they do or the harm they cause”; and
(2) “I am accountable for the harm or wrong we do together, independently of
the actual difference I make.” Kutz explores difficulties that arise when it’s not
clear whether a person is an intentional participant in a group. If you buy a stock,
you are complicit in what the company does even if your investment made no
difference, but what if you buy a tube of toothpaste from a company or walk
through its building?
Complicity means involvement in the harmful or unethical activities of a
group. The mirror image is one’s positive obligation to be loyal to groups under
appropriate circumstances. A group can accomplish more than an individual
can—​whether for good or evil—​as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate
their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-​than-​ideal behavior in order
to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the amount and type of
sacrifice is usually unequal.12 Long before her, W. E. B. Du Bois had written this
three-​word sentence: “Organization is sacrifice.” He elaborated:
You cannot have absolutely your own way—​you cannot be a free lance; you
cannot be strongly and fiercely individual if you belong to an organization. For
this reason some folk hunt and work alone. It is their nature. But the world’s
greatest work must be done by team work. This demands organization, and that
is the sacrifice of some individual will and wish to the good of all.13
11
12
13
See Kutz 2000, 115–​21.
D. Allen 2004, c­ hapter 3 (“Sacrifice, a Democratic Fact”), 25–​36.
Du Bois 1920, 8.
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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question
7
For someone as fiercely principled and intellectually independent as Du Bois,
this realization that “Organization is sacrifice” must have come hard; but he saw
a truth. To be able to ask the question, “What should we do?” implies that all have
given—​and some may have given much more than others—​to create the “we”
that acts together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too unequal to sustain (Du Bois later quit the NAACP over a matter of principle), but
some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.
In groups, we decide what we should do together—​not necessarily democratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each
of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a
group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own.
A group offers multiple perspectives, which ought to challenge individual views
of what is right to do. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s
decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellectual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decisions. However,
this is the wrong choice if the group is misguided. You retain the option of exit if
you don’t believe voice will work and loyalty is misplaced.14
Three prevalent ways of addressing the individual’s ethical question—​“What
should I do?”—​are: (1) to universalize, asking what you would want anyone to
do who was similarly situated; (2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most
good for the most people, given your resources and options; or (3) to exhibit
and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness.15 Although
philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers,
in everyday life, they typically generate different reasons for the same moral conclusions.16 Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical questions can also be applied in groups, but with important modulations.
First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual
covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to
do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must everyone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties
for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from ethical ideals, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-​ideal behavior
in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if
the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from
the logic of hypotheticals.
Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can maximize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we
14
Hirschman 1970.
See, e.g., Baron, Philip & Slote 1997.
16 The famous trolley problem (Thomson 1985) offers a fictional scenario that poses a conflict between maximizing and universalizing.
15
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What Should We Do?
must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group
that tried to do the most possible good for the whole world would dissolve, because the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they
would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated
action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price
to pay.
Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—​virtues understood, in an
Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions.
In other words, virtues are habits that are durable but can be deliberately shaped.
Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magnanimity, etc. To cite an example developed by Donald Beggs, the individual members of a knitting club may not be concerned enough about people with HIV/​
AIDS that they would take action on their own. But the group (possibly under
external influence) can develop a strong tradition of knitting for AIDS patients.
Then the group has durable dispositions or virtues, such as empathy and inclusiveness.17 Groups also have “epistemic” virtues or vices that make them good or
bad at understanding the world, for example, an ethnocentric group is bad at understanding outsiders.18 Developing and maintaining virtues requires different
strategies when a group (instead of an individual) is the thing that has character
traits.
We will revisit these issues of loyalty and complicity in ­chapter 7, equipped
with a more robust theoretical structure for thinking about collective action.
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The “I” and the “We”
This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That
scheme must be complicated in three ways.
First, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a language is already part of a linguistic community. People who ask, “What should
we do as a city?” were probably influenced by the history, norms, and prevailing
values of that city, which had existed before they did. Even if they react critically
to the dominant opinions of the city, the city still influenced them by causing
their reaction. These are examples of the dependence of individuals on groups
that we never chose to join.
Second, groups are not merely accumulations of individuals. Consider these
statements: “A group just is the people who make it up.” “If a group can be said
to have intentions at all, its intentions must somehow be the intentions of its
17
18
Beggs 2003, 468.
Anderson 2012.
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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question
9
members.” Brian Epstein criticizes an assumption that is implicit in these statements: namely, that social phenomena can be fully explained by talking about
people.19 After all, is Starbucks composed of the people who work for it? Clearly
not, because the coffee beans and water, the physical buildings, the company’s
stock value, the customers and vendors, its iconic logo, the rival coffee shops in
the same markets, and many other factors make it the company that we know, just
as much as its employees do. Indeed, its personnel could all turn over through an
orderly process, and it would still be Starbucks.20
Likewise, when the Supreme Court decided to end de jure racial segregation
in schools, was its intention a function of the preferences of the nine individual
justices? No, because in order for them to intend to overturn the ban, they had to
be legitimate Supreme Court justices within a legal system that presented them
with this decision at a given moment. I can form an opinion of Brown v Board of
Education, but I cannot rule on that case, or seriously intend to rule on it, because
I was not a Supreme Court justice in 1954. Nine men were justices at the moment
when the Brown case came before the court because of a whole series of decisions by other people: presidents who nominated them, senators who confirmed
them, eighteenth-​century founders who wrote those rules, state legislators who
chose those founders, and so on back into history.
In general, Epstein writes, “facts about a group are not determined just by facts
about its members.”21 And it’s not just other human beings who matter; non-​
human phenomena can be implicated in complicated ways. For instance, the
Supreme Court is in session on certain days, and on all other days, a “vote” by a
justice would not really be a vote. What makes us say that a certain day has arrived is the movement of the earth around the sun. So the motion of a heavenly
body is implicated in the existence and the intentions of the Supreme Court. The
sun isn’t a cause of the Supreme Court’s decisions, but it is a ground of it. Human
beings can intentionally ground facts about groups in circumstances beyond the
control of their members, or indeed in facts that are under no human being’s
control (such as the motion of the earth). It can be wise to limit the power of
group members in just these ways. Epstein writes, “Our ability to anchor social
facts to have nearly arbitrary grounds . . . makes the social world so flexible and
powerful.”22
Third, when two or more groups interact with each other, both individual
human beings and larger institutions may interrelate. For instance, when the foreign ministers of the world’s most powerful countries meet in a room, we could
simplify the situation and say that these “states” are negotiating. But the meeting
19
20
21
22
Epstein 2015.
Epstein 2015, 47–​49.
Epstein 2015, 272.
Epstein 2015, 168.
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What Should We Do?
actually involves a limited number of people who stand in complex relationships
with many other people, from the other diplomats in the room, to their own respective heads of state back home, to the ordinary citizens whose support (tacit
or active) is essential even in dictatorships. One of many factors that may determine the outcome of the meeting is whether the foreign minister of, say, France,
identifies more with her own interests, her ministry, her party, her nation, the
club of foreign ministers, the European Union, and/​or the world. If we zero in
on her ministry, we find that it is both an accumulation of people with whom
she relates and—​just as I noted earlier of Starbucks—​a configuration of durable
assets, traditions, and rules, all influenced by people outside its headquarters on
the Quai d’Orsay.
In short, it is impossible to distinguish sharply between the individual and the
group, the “I” and the “we.” Which pronoun is most appropriate is often a choice
that requires judgment. The focus of this book is on the “we,” with an understanding
that the “I” always remains as well.
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Three Categories of Problems for Groups
At all scales, citizens confront myriad concrete issues: poverty, tyranny, crime, racial
injustice, environmental degradation, and many more. These issues are too various
and contextual to be addressed by any single theory. However, beneath such specific
challenges lie three general categories of problems. Political theory that is useful to
citizens must address these three categories.
First, we often struggle to coordinate our separate interests and choices to accomplish valuable ends. Here I refer to problems of collective action. When these
problems defeat us, we fail to achieve goals that everyone would agree are worthy.
For example, even the many nations that agree that carbon emissions threaten the
earth’s environment have so far failed to enact agreements that would restrict their
respective use of carbon sufficiently. Most lament this failure; it nevertheless persists
as a collective-​action problem.
Second, we often disagree about what outcomes we should value or what
means are ethical and appropriate. Some people hold extremely bad opinions of
those questions. Their values pose a threat, and the fact that they hold them reminds us that we, too, could be wrong. We may try to identify the right values by
discussing contested issues with other people, but such discussions can go badly
for a set of reasons that I will call problems of discourse. In 2015, the US Senate,
frequently called the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” defeated an amendment that would have expressed the body’s opinion that “climate change is real;
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The Citizen’s Fundamental Question
11
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and human activity significantly contributes to climate change.”23 Considering
the overwhelming evidence in favor of those clauses, this would seem to be a
failure of discourse.
The philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas writes that any group of
people who communicate about what they should do (my gloss of his phrase
“communicative action”) must “seek to avoid two risks: the risk of not coming
to understanding, that is, of disagreement or misunderstanding, and the risk of
a plan of action miscarrying, that is, of failure.”24 Those risks name the two categories of problem mentioned so far, and they often interrelate. For example,
perhaps the US Senate failed to reach an understanding about the facts of climate change (a discourse failure) because reaching an agreement about the truth
would have pressured the body to enact regulations, which many senators opposed for reasons of collective action—​because they preferred other people in
other nations to pay the price for environmental protection.
In any case, there is a third category as well. People may not see themselves as
participants in a group that should decide anything together in the first place.
They may not recognize a “we,” but rather an “us” versus a “them,” separated in
fundamental ways, such as by differences in identity. The line between us and
them can run through a group in which some dominate others. Or people may
be treated as members of a group yet deny their identity as part of it. Gandhi’s
movement essentially wanted to leave the British Empire; King’s movement demanded full inclusion in the democracy of the United States. Both leaders faced
problems of identity-​based exclusion that often contribute to the difficulty of addressing shared problems.
23
24
Senate Amendment 58 to Senate Amendment 2, 114th Congress (2015–​2016), via Congress.gov.
Habermas 1987, vol. 2, 127.
Levine, Peter. What Should We Do? : A Theory of Civic Life, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/snulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6970187.
Created from snulibrary-ebooks on 2022-09-29 07:22:16.