1 Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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. 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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 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. 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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. 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 6 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. 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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 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. 8 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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. 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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. 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. 10 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. Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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; 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. The Citizen’s Fundamental Question 11 Copyright © 2022. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 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.