Daniel A. Morris – författare

What virtues are necessary for democracy to succeed? This book turns to John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr, two of America’s most influential theorists of democracy, to answer this question. Dewey and Niebuhr both implied—although for very different reasons—that humility and mutuality are important virtues for the success of people rule. Not only do these virtues allow people to participate well in their own governance, they also equip us to meet challenges to democracy generated by free-market economic policy and practices. Ironically, though, Dewey and Niebuhr quarreled with each other for twenty years and missed the opportunity to achieve political consensus. In their discourse with each other they failed to become “one out of many,” a task that is distilled in the democratic rallying cry “e pluribus unum.” This failure itself reflects a deficiency in democratic virtue. Thus, exploring the Dewey/Niebuhr debate with attention to their discursive failures reveals the importance of a third virtue: democratic tolerance. If democracy is to succeed, we must cultivate a deeper hospitality toward difference than Dewey and Niebuhr were able to extend to each other.

This study argues that Black calls for force in the struggle against white supremacy have echoed concepts and principles in the Western just war tradition.After establishing that just war theory has ignored Black calls for force and that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade relied on just war ethics for its justification, this book turns to African American resistance rhetoric in three crucial periods of U.S. history. In the antebellum period, the Civil Rights movement, and the era of mass incarceration, African American thinkers have drawn on ideas and forms of logic that run parallel to just war ethics. This makes Black rhetoric of forceful resistance morally normal, rather than radical or extremist. Figures in the Black just war tradition such as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman, Huey Newton, Bree Newsome, and others should be included in the discipline of just war ethics, and white American Christians should recognize that their endorsements of force are consistent with widely accepted moral positions.