Two Situations, One Problem
All of us were were glued to the television last Wednesday, watching hordes of rioters storm the US Capitol building in the attempt to delay, stop, or perhaps even influence the certification process of the vote tabulations for the Electoral College. I was out running as this was going on, so I was listening to it live through my AirPods. As I ran, I was having a difficult time mentally processing what was going on. Could the US Capitol literally be under siege?
My initial emotion was shock, and this quickly gave way to dread - a feeling that a new lowering of the bar in American politics would most certainly lead to worse abuses and events later on. It didn’t take long before dread transformed into anger. After all, it’s not like it’s inevitable that this had to happen. An insurrection at the US Capitol is avoidable, and didn’t have to happen. All I could think, as I ran further down the trail, was that the Capitol insurrectionists were morally to blame and they must be punished - quickly.
As I tried to work though this anger, I also wondered - would this break the fever in the GOP in terms of its monolithic support of Trump? Given how the second impeachment went down, it was obvious that this was not going to happen. Very quickly, a number of new narratives emerged - one of them being a clear refusal to condemn the US Capitol insurrection because the left did not avow violence from BLM rioters. As a result of these responses, I wonder what relationship the insurrection had to the BLM summer riots. Comparing the two, I began to ask how much anger and blame should I direct at the insurrectionists.
My thoughts below are provisional, as I’m still (as are all of you) thinking though this.
Accountability and Blame for the Actors
Next semester, in two different courses, I'll be teaching works by Mencius (300 BCE) and Erin Kelly (her Limits of Blame, 2018). Both independently make a point that is strongly relevant to the questions I’ve posed. Both ask (in their own very different ways) how far can we extend moral blame to individuals who are engaged in wrongdoing (as a group, generally considered). Anger is typically associated with judgments of moral blame, since it appears odd to be angry where moral blame is misplaced. When we look at the Capitol insurrection, my suspicion is that Mencius and Kelly would say there’s "not much" moral blame that can be assigned to the insurrectionists (in general). I tend to agree.
To see why, It helps to distinguish between the notions of "criminal culpability" and "moral blame". Criminal culpability is a straightforward matter regarding the nature of a person's acts. To know if a person is criminally culpable, you simply ask whether their acts are lawful. Seen this way, the insurrectionists are surely culpable. They broke the law, and in my view they should be held accountable. Looking back, this is how I felt about the lawbreaking that happened in Portland and other cities over the summer. Property damage is illegal as an action, and so those who engage in it are criminally culpable.
We tend to have powerful intuitions (perhaps psychological urges) that lead us to believe that if a person is criminally culpable, then they must also be morally blameworthy. This is different issue - here you are blaming the person, or the actor, which is far more than judging an action. In assigning moral blame you are claiming that the person "could have done otherwise". So it's not the act that we're pointing to but rather the nature of the choice itself. If a person chooses to do what they could reasonably not do, and that act is wrong, then they are blameworthy, and it’s obvious why we also become angry with them. After all, the “choice” itself becomes wicked. Mencius and Kelly - rightly, I think - separate culpability from blame. A person can be culpable, but not blameworthy (or the rightful target of anger).
When Mencius talks about this distinction between culpability and moral blame he often puts it in the context of what we should expect, given certain conditions already in play surrounding the actor. When talking to Kings about those (in their realms) who engage in criminal conduct, he notes:
The people, lacking a constant means of livelihood, will lack constant minds, and when they lack constant minds there is no dissoluteness, depravity, deviance, or excess to which they will not succumb. If, once they have sunk into crime, one responds by subjecting them to punishment – this is to entrap the people. How can such a thing as entrapping the people be done under the rule of a benevolent person? (Mengzi, 1A7)
I take Mencius’ point to be this - if you (or the King in his situation) put people into conditions of depraved hardship, you (the King) cannot hold them morally blameworthy if they perform criminal acts for which you can punish them. The reasons is that when you place them in those situations, you (the King) “set up a trap” (criminal wrongdoing) into which such persons will quite reasonably succumb. Essentially, Mencius is suggesting that under such “trap” like conditions - Kelly calls them “hardships” — how far we can extend the claim that the actor reasonably "could have done otherwise" is put into serious question. To use an example - how angry can we be with a person who steals bread out of hunger?
In a post I put up a long while back, I argued that many of the looters at summer protests were also “in a trap” because they were living under general social conditions that created “collective hardship”. In social conditions that are filled with deeply oppressive structures, interpersonal racism, and psychological trauma, certain behavior that would normally (for a person not under those hardships) seem unreasonable might be quite understandable - or even expected. In short, the "ability to do otherwise" in hardship situations is severely compromised, and such ability is dependent on context. As I argued in that post, this made looting and property damage over the summer "criminally wrong but understandable".
My friends on the right elide this distinction - if you are criminally culpable, you must be morally blameworthy. This view, I think, is due to a rather simplistic and naive view of how deliberative choices are made, and I strongly disagreed. Although we should hold such persons criminally culpable for their behavior, our attention should be focused on why such criminal actions appeared reasonable to those persons. In other words, I wanted to shed light on the “Mencian trap” or “hardship” condition that was operating in the background. Who set that trap up? How can we dismantle it? My friends on the right were focused on blame, and not interested in these questions.
I see the Capitol situation very similarly. Whereas I myself (as the person I am, in the situation and context I which I exist and live as a deliberating and choosing agent) see storming the Capitol as completely unreasonable, I have to ask - how would I see things from the perspective of the insurrectionist? Think about it. Many, if not most of them, live in epistemic bubbles. They engage only with those who agree with them. They accept information only from biased sources. They have tuned into a right-wing media complex, some for decades, that all day long paints the opposition as evil, and as a result of this evil say the opposition is capable of literally anything. And politicians from local congresspeople to senators to the actual President of the United States are telling them that the election has been stolen, and that democracy is about to fold.
This situation is, in my view, the kind of “trap” that Mencius, or “hardship” that Kelly, want us to look out for. What would you think, if you were such a person? Quite literally, these people have been radicalized, and I have to be honest enough to admit that if I too had been radicalized it might seem to me that the most reasonable thing to do might be to storm the Capitol and "stop the steal". After all, as a good citizen I cannot allow democracy to fold. The current President is actually there, in front of me, asking and even pleading for my help in making sure this doesn’t happen. In fact, to *not* storm the Capitol may appear irrational. Like the rioters and looters of summer, they may well be criminally culpable (they should be arrested and charged), but it's not clear to me that they are morally blameworthy.
The more I see the situation in this way, the less I see moral blame. And as a result, I become less angry at the insurrectionists. I want them to be arrested, because they did indeed break the law, but instead of engaging in moral blame I want to look to see how the trap or hardship situation most of them fell into was created. This to me is the core question we need to focus on. Just as Mencius points the finger at the King for creating those conditions (he tells the King that robbery in the Kingdom is due to his own misrule) it seems to me that an insurrection occurred because the system has failed.
So I’d like to know - who did (and does) know that the misinformation and subsequent radicalization of this population was entirely based in nonsense and manipulation of the general population? I suspect that there are many, many, people in this camp - some in the right-wing media complex, and many in the political sphere. They knew that this was all nonsense, but they used it to manipulate (for self-interested reasons) a base of voters who had already been primed for it by decades of radicalization. So, generally speaking, if we want to engage in moral blame, my intuitions tell me that this is where we should focus our attentions.
Thinking of criminal culpability, we need to consider that criminality is unequally applied in the two situations. Over the summer, police and the justice system presupposed the criminality of BLM protesters and goaded them--in the moment--into violent action that they could then violently suppress, punish, and spin through the propaganda machine. Often, this goading took the form of proactive violence: tear gas, kettling, shield-and-baton tactics, etc. And both immediately and eventually after the fact, the detainment and legal processing of protesters were abusive and deplorable.
By contrast, criminality was all but completely ignored in the moment during the insurrection. We know this is because law enforcement and justice dept populations are riddled with white supremacists, including many off-duty people who joined in the insurrection. Law enforcement turned out in fewer numbers with relaxed tactics and less militarized gear (to say nothing of the law enforcement and military personnel who were actively withheld for the benefit of the insurrection).
The key difference between the two groups is the threat they pose to the prevailing order (the "King," in your examples). BLM protesters are united in visions of anti-racism and anti-capitalism. The prevailing order thrives on systemic (not, as you say, interpersonal) racism and the competitive, exploitative conditions required by a capitalist economy. By contrast, the insurrectionists' vision is to preserve and further entrench the racial-capitalist structure. The King doesn't acknowledge them as truly criminal in the first place!
I agree at least that in both situations, the moral failing begins with the King. But it's important to acknowledge that one of the groups ultimately benefits the King's paradigm, even if it became an temporarily unmanageable threat in the moment.
I am enjoying your posts/blog. I am impressed with all the hard work and dedication you have put into this new blog my friend, quite impressive. The running posts are also very interesting, you make them interesting, even to a non runner, explaining new training techniques and personal goals, etc....putting in tons of hard work both writing the running posts, as well as doing the actual running...ha. Looking forward to seeing you run the NYC marathon as per your goal.