Samuel Dishaw (UNC, Chapel Hill), "Solidarity and the Work of Moral Understanding"

Philosophical Quarterly, 2024

By Samuel Dishaw

Imagine the following scenario. There’s a strike on campus, and a picket line around the building in which a professor’s lecture is about to begin. Our professor arrives in front of the picket line, unsure about what to do. They’re reluctant to cross the picket line, but they’re also reluctant to let down their students, some of whom are in the building now. As the professor is weighing their options, one of their graduate advisees comes out of the picket line and asks them not to cross it, saying, in particular, that cancelling class is the right thing for the professor to do.

Cases of this kind have been the subject of much philosophical debate in recent years. Should the professor simply take their advisee’s word for it that the right thing to do is to refrain from crossing the picket line? ‘Pessimists’ about moral testimony say ‘no.’ On their view, there is something inherently defective about believing some moral claim without understanding, yourself, the reasons why that claim is true. ‘Optimists’ about moral testimony say ‘yes.’ On their view, holding moral beliefs on the basis of moral testimony is not just acceptable but often valuable. It’s part of how we forge valuable relationships with others.    

This philosophical debate, I think, reflects a deeper problem. The deeper problem is that situations such as the one the professor faces seem to confront us with competing ethical ideals. On the one hand, interpersonal ideals, such as friendship or solidarity, call for us to trust others and to take them at their word—including, in some cases, their word about moral matters. But on the other hand, individual ideals, such as virtue or autonomy, seem to demand that we understand for ourselves what morality requires of us and why. Like the professor, we want to stand in solidarity with others, but we also want to do what’s right by our own lights. We face a conflict, it seems, between the individual we aspire to be, and the relations that bind us to others. 

One of my main motivations in writing this paper was to show that the conflict between these two ideals is illusory. Properly construed, the individual and interpersonal ideals do not pull us in opposite directions. This is because the interpersonal ideals also call for us to try to understand morality for ourselves. This aspect of the value of moral understanding—its importance in our relations to other moral agents—has been widely overlooked. Appreciating it allows us to resolve the apparent conflict between individual and interpersonal ethical ideals. That’s the view writ large.

The paper provides a kind of proof of concept of that general idea, focusing on relations of solidarity. I argue that we have reasons of solidarity to try to understand the nature of the injustices which we purport to stand against. There is thus no fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, the interpersonal ideal of solidarity with others, and, on the other, the individual ideal of understanding morality for ourselves. On the contrary, solidarity itself is one of the grounds of our reasons to seek moral understanding.  

As an account of what solidarity requires of us, the view I defend faces some stiff resistance. Both within philosophy and in public discourse more broadly, solidarity is often presented as being an essentially deferential relationship. When we stand in solidarity with others, we make ourselves available to act at their behest. To some, this suggests that we should also adopt an attitude of deference towards the testimony of those with whom we stand in solidarity. On this view, we need not, and perhaps even should not, try to understand the nature of the injustices we stand against. We should, instead, simply defer to the views of those with whom we stand in solidarity.   

Because this deferential picture has been so influential in shaping our conception of solidarity, and because it so obviously conflicts with the view I defend, one of my tasks in the paper is to explain where I think the deferential picture goes wrong.

The first move I make is to distinguish between two kinds of solidarity. One kind of solidarity is reciprocal, as when members of a union stand in solidarity with each other. I call this internal solidarity, since, paradigmatically at least, it holds between individuals that are part of the same group. The other kind of solidarity is unilateral, as when natural born citizens of a country stand in solidarity with recently arrived immigrants. I call this external solidarity, since those who stand in such a one-way solidarity relation are usually not themselves members of the relevant group.

Drawing this distinction already helps in one way. This is because the deferential picture is simply not very plausible as a view of internal solidarity. Rather, when you and I stand in internal solidarity with each other, what we have reason to value is having a shared understanding of the injustice that we together resist. Such a shared moral understanding is valuable both for its own sake, and for the form of collective power that it makes possible. 

The more charitable interpretation of the deferential picture is as a view about external solidarity. We should defer to those with whom we stand in solidarity when we stand in solidarity from the outside looking in. This version of the view, at least, has a clear rationale: that those who suffer at the hands of an injustice are more knowledgeable about it than those who do not. Those with whom we stand in external solidarity have, after all, experienced these injustices first-hand. Their views on the matter may thus be treated as more authoritative than our own.

In the paper, I grant this claim to my opponents. What I argue is that, even if those who suffer at the hands of an injustice are more knowledgeable about it, nevertheless we who stand in solidarity with them should not simply defer to their testimony. Rather, we ought to try to understand for ourselves the nature of that injustice.

I give two arguments, both of which highlight some problematic implications of the deferential picture.

The first problem arises when those who would stand in solidarity with others receive conflicting testimony about injustice or oppression. For instance, civil law in France forbids state employees and professional athletes from wearing the hijab. This law is deeply divisive. Those who support the law claim that the hijab is a sexist tool of oppression. Those who oppose it claim that it is rather the law itself which oppresses Muslim women. Those on the outside looking in can thus expect to receive conflicting moral testimony, including, crucially, from members of the very same identity group.

The problem is that, in such cases, the deferential picture of solidarity requires those who would stand in solidarity with others to remain neutral, by requiring them to suspend judgment about whether the law is unjust. In other words, in many cases of pervasive moral conflict, the deferential picture requires those who would stand in solidarity with others to disengage from these conflicts entirely. Yet such cases are precisely those in which solidarity is most sorely needed. The disengagement problem is a serious one.     

The second problem arises even when we don’t receive conflicting moral testimony. This is that we contribute to an unfair division of labor when we rely solely on the testimony of those with whom we stand in solidarity. Why should it be up to those with whom we stand in solidarity to manage our moral beliefs for us? In refraining from thinking for ourselves, we place unnecessary burdens on those very individuals with whom we purport to stand in solidarity.

The upshot of these two arguments is that even those who stand in relations of external solidarity owe it to others to try to understand, for themselves, the nature of the injustices that they claim to stand against.

This vindicates the more general idea that the paper sets out to illustrate. Far from competing with our interpersonal commitments, the ideal of moral understanding is in fact essential to our relations with others. We do not need to choose between the demands of solidarity and the requirement to understand morality for ourselves. Seeking such an understanding is itself a part of what solidarity requires of us.