This panel explores ideas of freedom and responsibility within the African American intellectual tradition, drawing on figures from the 19th and 20th centuries. In responding to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s assertion that “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible,” we aim to highlight how African American thinkers have historically navigated the paradoxes of constrained agency and moral accountability under conditions of injustice. By foregrounding voices such as Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, Mamie Till-Mobley, and Martin Luther King Jr., this panel explores how religious and moral traditions have provided resources for reimagining ethical ideals, and highlights the relevance of the African American intellectual tradition in illuminating the moral stakes of freedom in both past and present contexts.
In his 1843 "Address to the Slaves of the United States," Henry Highland Garnet declares, “The Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters!” This metaphor captures the tragic circumstances of enslaved individuals caught between oppression and the desire for freedom. This paper explores Garnet’s call for freedom as a moral reorientation. Garnet presents freedom as individual responsibility and collective action that requires moral reform in addition to physical liberation. By analyzing Garnet’s critique of slavery, this paper considers how his prophetic vision offers an ethical framework for reclaiming freedom in the face of oppression. It ultimately asks: How can moral reorientation shape our understanding of freedom in the context of persistent and pervasive injustice?
In exploring the relationship between freedom and responsibility, this paper first briefly diagnoses the outsized attention given to blameworthiness and guilt in the philosophical and Christian ethical literature on moral responsibility. Then, this paper locates the sympathetic response (as a kind of practical wisdom) as a capacity central to the concept of responsibility. The sympathetic response, or acknowledgement of another’s suffering, is an achievement fundamental to being responsive to and responsible for others. Drawing from Stanley Cavell’s distinction between “knowing” and “acknowledging,” this paper dramatizes the claim (that acknowledgment of human suffering is essential to knowledge of it) through insights from the lives and legacies of Mamie Till-Mobley and Frederick Douglass.
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.