The Social Effects of Unfreedom: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vice of Sloth

Martin Luther King Jr. characterized freedom as a kind of self-determination—the ability to deliberate, decide, and take responsibility for one’s own actions. Poverty and segregation remove one’s ability to be fully free by attacking one’s sense of self-regard. One common expression of this unfreedom is sloth, specifically, apathy toward one’s unjust and unfree circumstances. This paper reconstructs King’s reflections on the vice of sloth and proposed solutions. It proceeds in three parts: first, it reconstructs King’s account of the psychological roots of sloth. Second, the paper examines one of King’s most common political constructions of the apathetic agent—white moderate liberals—and his positive proposal about removing apathy through democratic participation and direct action. The paper concludes by connecting King’s arguments about nonviolent resistance and the dual formation of self and society to contemporary debates about the usefulness of virtue and vices for an ethics of social change.