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, in different though interrelated ways, remove one’s ability to be fully free. Both attack one’s sense of self-regard, and therefore the social and psychological basis of freedom. In an ideally just society, both segregation and poverty should be abolished.
Yet under non-ideal conditions, the effects of both systems of injustice remain persistent in social and political life, infecting both the moral basis of social change and material conditions. King frequently characterized this common expression of unfreedom as sloth or apathy, specifically, apathy toward one’s unjust and unfree circumstances. This paper reconstructs King’s view of the vice of sloth, and King’s proposed solutions. The paper proceeds in three parts: first, drawing on King’s writings, especially his lesser known sermons from 1963 to 1968, I reconstruct King’s use of Biblical themes and motifs to analyze the psychological roots of apathy and unfreedom. Second, I examine one of King’s most used political constructions of the apathetic agent—white moderate liberals—and King’s arguments for a solution to the problem of apathy through a combination of democratic participation and direct action. I end 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.
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.