Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, whose work primarily focuses on ancient philosophy and ethics. She was the 2020 co-recipient of the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. She has received praise and critique for her work as a public philosopher, writing viral essays for the New York Times and hosting the popular Night Owls series at the University of Chicago. In this interview from March 2023, Callard spoke to the HPR about the place of the public philosopher, the value of anger, and the moral corruption of the oppressed.
The Harvard Political Review: What are you reading right now?
Agnes Callard: What am I reading? I’m reading a book called “Mating” by Norman Rush. It’s a novel about a relationship. It was like a woman anthropologist in Botswana and her romantic pursuits of a particular man, but I’m just at the beginning of the novel, so I haven’t so much gotten to the part where she’s pursuing the man yet. That’s coming.
HPR: You’re perhaps best known as a public philosopher, both in the traditional sense of writing essays for Harper’s, the New York Times, and Point magazine, but also in that your life itself is rather public since the New Yorker article. What was behind both of those choices, both to be the philosopher as an essayist, and also the philosopher as a public figure?
AC: I think they probably go together. It’s worth pointing out that the “New Yorker” article was written by someone other than me. The focus was chosen by someone other than me, and so the decision to present that aspect of my life is someone else’s decision. And if I had written a profile myself, it’s not what I would have written. That’s not to say that I was unhappy with it; it’s just to say it’s not my own work.
The way that I would put it is I have no objection to that aspect of my life being made public. Obviously, I didn’t because I answered the relevant set of questions, but the choice to make it public wasn’t my choice. I do think many people would have an objection that they would want to keep certain things private, and I don’t so much have that inclination. So the question is more like: why don’t I have the inclination to keep certain things private?
Regarding why am I writing in a public vein, I did not start off as a public philosopher. I started off as a regular old academic philosopher, writing articles in philosophy journals. And then I think the big change was I became the Director of Undergraduate Studies for philosophy, which is an administrative job that nobody wants in particular. It means you run the undergrad program, and you don’t get paid for it. You don’t get anything. It’s just a bunch of administrative work. But I actually really like it. It gave me the opportunity to get to think more broadly than my own courses. How do I advertise and engage the rest of the university in philosophy? That was my first step as a public philosopher. I started to think in those terms: What does philosophy mean to people who aren’t going to necessarily be philosophy majors?
I came up with Night Owls at that time. I want to provide some programming so that people, even if they don’t take a philosophy course, even if they don’t become a philosophy major, can have some access to philosophy. There was something I was trying to provide, and there were a lot of people who wanted it. You sometimes learn there’s a market for something and you’re like, “Oh, okay, here’s the thing I’m good at and people want it.” And it was the same with writing essays where I’m like, “Oh, here’s the kind of essay that I’ve been good at writing but they’re hard to place in academia.” Turns out like lots of people want to read that kind of thing. I think there’s just a lot of hunger outside of academic philosophy for philosophy, maybe in some ways more than others in it. And it’s very engaging to be part of that.
HPR: What is your view of what the public philosopher should be or should do in the 21st century, both in a political sense and in a broader sense?
AC: My hope is that next week I’ll learn about some new public philosopher who’s doing things in some totally new way that I hadn’t imagined. I think people should be inventive and surprising. I don’t know that I have something like a general schema for how a public philosopher is supposed to be. It’s a lot like how teachers should be, right, so how should a teacher be in a classroom? Whatever ways are going to engage the students, communicate the information of the class, or wake up their minds to engaging with the intellectual material of the class. People who are good at that tend to find their own way of doing it. My best teachers are all people who couldn’t be copied. They had their own style. And so I think that’s the same thing is going to be true public philosophers.
HPR: You have an essay “The Philosophy of Anger” in which you argue, to grossly oversimplify, that anger is both entirely correct and morally corrupting. There’s a passage in which you argue that “long term oppression of a group of people amounts to long term moral damage to that group that […] oppressing people is also bad for your soul [… but] so does being wronged, even if to a lesser degree.” That was published in April 2020. Has your philosophy of anger changed significantly in the past three years?
AC: I have felt more and more of a need to give an account of apology and forgiveness; there’s nothing in there in that essay about how we would move towards apology or forgiveness, so I’ve started to work on that. That’s not a changing of my view, but it’s sort of a feeling like there’s a lacuna that needs to be filled.
I started writing a paper on that topic maybe 12 years before. There was a long gestation to develop my view up to that point, so we shouldn’t expect lots of changes even over a three year period. I don’t think I’ve much changed my mind about the central thesis there. I’ve more just come to see that there’s other stuff I need to account for.
HPR: On that specific portion about the moral corruption of the oppressed: in the intervening period between April 2020 and March 2023, we have seen numerous reinventions or re-explosions of civil rights movements for various oppressed groups. What are the political or activistic implications of knowing or contending that the act of being oppressed is corrupting? What should we take from that as political actors or possible activists?
AC: I think the thing to understand is that being treated unjustly puts you in a position where you are inclined to make moral exceptions for yourself. You’re inclined to see things that you do as good whereas under other circumstances you would see those as bad. This phrase, “moral exception,” I’m taking from the journalist Liz Breunig. An example that she gave is when her older daughter does something like snatches something away from the younger daughter, and then the younger one pulls the other one’s hair. She’s kind of like, “okay, you pulled her hair, but I see why because she took something away from you.” That’s moral exceptionalism, right? Normally it wouldn’t be okay to pull her hair but she did a bad thing first.
When you sort of systematically are like, “Well, look, they did a bad thing first.” That’s like inculcating moral exceptionalism in yourself. A little bit of it is probably not that damaging, but when it becomes kind of a really big part of who you are to engage in this moral exceptionalism, that’s, I think, very bad for you. So the question as an activist would be: “how can I be an activist keeping to a minimum my practices of moral exceptionalism?” And which is to say, “How can I advocate for good things without engaging in behaviors that I would view as unjust were it not for the fact that somebody else did a bad thing first?” I don’t think it’s impossible, but I think there is a challenge there.
HPR: Is this the challenge you’re currently seeing in Chicago? Do you see around you this kind of moral exceptionalism taken too far, or is it a hypothetical concern?
AC: Overall now, the place where I really see it a lot is on social media. It’s not really activism. It’s sort of faux or pseudo activism, but there is this sense of the possibility of unmitigated cruelty in response to somebody who you think deserves it. And I do think that social media has a really outsized role to play in what people are understanding to be politics and to be the public sphere. So I would say that that’s the place where I most see the applicability of this thought, though it may well be applicable elsewhere, I suppose here, I suspect that it’s going to be pretty applicable anytime where you see yourself as very politically engaged or very worked up.
The people that I’m working with are people who are actually leading organizations that are working towards very specific forms of change. They’re not inclined to be very resentful or very punitive, because they’re like, “How can I actually get these changes made for my community that I’m working for and that like,” but I think that when you’re just on social media, getting angry about things that you have no hope of changing. Then I think there is this thought that the only road open to you is this kind of punitive road of cruelty towards the people who you think deserve it.
