Society is a wonderful thing. As Hobbes pointed out, without it life would be nasty, brutish and short. However, despite — and sometimes because of — our cultural and political institutions, some lives are not much better than the state of nature. This is the starting point for the social activist, defender of the underdog and champion of the voiceless.
Brown students are dedicated to social change. We Occupy. We take back the night. If we could have, we would have loved freely and marched by the million.
Activism often involves interfering with the lives of others. This interference takes at least two forms. We might try to change laws, or we might make demands regarding behavior. Affirmative action is the former. The Occupy movement is largely the latter.
About the second type of interference — Slutwalkers are similar to Occupiers in that they are activists who do not have an explicit plan for changing the law. But Occupiers are demanding that the 1 percent earn and spend their money differently. Slutwalkers are essentially educating. This movement is less about changing actions and more about changing minds.
Occupiers would have it that the rich be prohibited from engaging in the practices they condemn. It is for practical reasons that Occupiers do not always call for legislation. Slutwalkers think people should not "slutshame" and blame victims. I have never heard it argued that people should be prohibited from doing these things. Slutshamers are jerks, but we do not try to legislate against jerks.
Perhaps you do not want to call the Occupiers' demands "interference." My point is that Occupiers are more similar to legislative activists than Slutwalkers. I want to call this similarity "interference," and it is my column. Maybe you think there is no such similarity, but I am not interested in having a semantic debate.
What warrants interference? Clearly, we cannot interfere with every behavior for any reason. You cannot interfere with my film choice just because you think Michael Bay films lack artistic worth. We need a more robust normative notion to justify interference.
I see only two live options. We can interfere either when others' actions are immoral or when they are unjust.
We cannot demand that people act morally. This is not a product of the fact that people disagree about what is moral. Even in a world where we all agree on the moral facts, an essential part of being human is being free to make the wrong decision. Instead, we should suggest people act morally. This is what the Slutwalkers are doing. They make a convincing case that slutshaming is immoral and leave it up to observers to change their actions.
When we interfere, it can only be because injustices are being committed. We are concerned with instating just laws. Occupiers focus on the perceived injustices of our current economic system. What bearing does this have on activism? If I am right, interference is only warranted as a response to injustice. Before you get out there and interfere, you need to ascertain whether an injustice or a mere immorality is occurring. If you are not interfering, maybe you ought to be.
We need not debate the nature of justice. As I have argued in the past ("Morality and occupation," Oct. 30), in order to be effective, activists must accept that "such-and-such is unjust" is an objective fact on par with a scientific claim. We need to know what specific acts are just and unjust.
So, what are the principles of justice? In the past ("The right to public masturbation," Nov. 30), I have suggested that just acts are those which respect rights. Activists must determine what our rights are or base justice on something else.
Environmentalists interfere with destruction of the environment. The Lockean proviso that property acquisition leave "enough and as good left in common" would adequately warrant interference. But Lockean thought leaves little room for redistributive justice. Environmentalists must either give up on redistribution or find some other way to justify environmentalism.
Occupiers and other redistributionaries demand we correct socioeconomic inequality. They must develop a theory that holds that this inequality is not only wrong but unjust and somehow squares with individual liberty.
Easier said than done. Though morality requires us to give up some liberty — you have a moral obligation to save a drowning person, even though it would ruin your nice leather loafers — it is not clear that justice does.
We may find that saving the environment and correcting socioeconomic inequality are merely moral and not also just. If this is the case, we have no place self-righteously interfering with the lives of others. We can educate and lead by example like the Slutwalkers, but we would be in no position to make demands.
David Hefer '12 suggests justice starts at "Agents have intrinsic value" and morality at "Don't be a jerk."
