Solidarity, Avery Kolers contends, is “political action on others' terms” (p. 5, emphasis in the original), that is, “deference on questions of prudential judgment and conscience” (p. 4, emphasis in the original). Deference is owed to oppressed groups who issue calls of solidarity to “joiners.” Solidarity contrasts to a “politics of conscience,” in which one only acts in ways that one considers morally right. The politics of conscience limits our moral imagination (p. 8) and prevents us from acting in solidarity with the oppressed, whose practices or chosen means of fighting we might find reprehensible. Acting in solidarity with the oppressed requires us to submerge our own judgment under theirs; it is deferential action (p. 50). This is a bold claim and an important contribution to our understanding of political action. Kolers is masterful in combining analytic rigor with political passion to build an impressive argument for an original view.
To build this argument, Kolers sets himself three challenges: “the conceptual,” “the agency,” and “the justificatory” problems (p. 7). The conceptual problem—on which I focus my comments—is to define solidarity. This view of solidarity raises the agency problem: “how to understand individuality and autonomy in agents who are in solidarity” (p. 7). As a morally neutral concept, solidarity raises the justificatory problem: “When and why is solidarity valuable and permissible? Is it ever morally required?” (p. 28, emphasis in the original).
Kolers’s answer to the last problem centers on his notion of “Kantian equity.” While justice is a distributive value (it requires that each person receive his or her fair share), equity, in contrast, requires being treated as an equal (pp. 107, 129–30, 135), in particular by social arrangements: “Equity is a structural notion” (p. 106). Thus conceived, Kolers’s view of equity is akin to the notion of justice in Elizabeth S. Anderson’s “What Is the Point of Equality?” (Ethics, 109(2), 1999). As solidarity with victims of inequity partly constitutes equitable treatment of that group, it is intrinsically valuable, given that equity is an ultimate value (p. 119).
Chapters 2 and 3 set out the author’s definition of solidarity. Specifically, he distinguishes his preferred view from loyalty and “teleological” accounts of solidarity.
In contrast to teleological accounts of solidarity, according to which solidary action is action that pursues, together with others, shared political goals (in particular, the goal of bringing about justice), Kolers argues that “working to promote justice [...] is neither necessary nor sufficient for solidarity” (p. 32, emphasis in the original). It is not sufficient because different groups may work to promote justice without being in solidarity. The white clergymen in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” agree with the goals of King’s movement but disagree with the movement’s means of direct action. Even if they work for the same cause as King’s movement, Kolers argues, they are not in solidarity with it, which shows that action that shares a goal is not sufficient for solidarity. Such action is also not necessary for solidarity. Even if the white clergymen are right that civil disobedience is the less effective means to promote justice, solidarity requires them to support what the movement actually decides, not to do what best promotes that shared goal.
This shows that action in solidarity is not action that improves the condition of the oppressed, but action that supports the work of the oppressed (p. 33). Solidarity with group G is “an actual-procedural notion grounded in the authority of G” (or its individual members) to determine its (or their) own interests (p. 33). Solidary action is required because it constitutes equal treatment, not because it brings about justice. The implication is that sometimes we have to act in ways we consider counterproductive to or even contrary to (distributive) justice in order to enact another, perhaps more fundamental aspect of justice, the equal treatment of those whose equal status is denied by social structures. In my view, this is the most original, potentially controversial, and important contribution of A Moral Theory of Solidarity.
Unlike loyalty, which grounds one’s action on one’s particular relationship with a group, to act in solidarity is to act for a reason. This is an independent reason of the subject (that “purports to bind anyone similarly situated, not just this agent” [p. 50]) that picks group G as the object of the subject’s solidarity. As this reason is morally neutral, so is solidarity. One can be solidary with the oppressed, or one can be solidary with those in power, and one’s group of solidarity can change as the group that is picked by one’s reason changes.
Take Kolers’s example of “a Novice Nietzschean who believes that one should side with whoever projects unaccountable power. For this reason he becomes a Nazi in 1937, and then an American in 1945. During his stint with the Nazis he engages in a number of political actions chosen not because he thought they were right or for a paycheck, but because they are directed by the unaccountably powerful.” He “engages in political action on others’ terms,” and therefore, on Kolers’s definition of solidarity, “he is in solidarity, first with the Nazis and then with the US” (p. 50). This example illustrates why solidarity is morally neutral—the “ethics of solidarity depends on the content of reason r,” and r is a “reason that could be anything” (p. 50). That is also why, for the author, switching sides is compatible with solidarity (when the group picked by r shifts).
While I see that the Novice Nietzschean engages in deferential political action, I find it hard to think of it as solidary action. It seems a category mistake to say that one acts in solidary with the powerful. The powerless call for our solidary action, not the powerful. The powerful attract our actions in virtue of their power, so through other mechanisms, other routes than solidarity.
If true, this only suggests that we should restrict the reasons for solidarity (exclude reasons such as “support the powerful”), not that we should renounce the idea that solidarity involves deferential action, is compatible with switching sides, or that it is morally neutral in the sense of not being required by (or even being contrary to) justice.
Kolers’s definition of solidarity raises more serious worries, however. First, it introduces individual judgment through a back door. If the reason for one’s solidary action lies, like in the example of the Novice Nietzschean, in one’s own beliefs, not in the call of the oppressed or the objective fact of oppression, is not then the subject quite nondeferential at a prior step in his or her solidary action? Given that the reasons for picking the group that one will act in solidarity with are based on one’s beliefs, it seems that one can act in solidarity while preserving quite a lot of control over one’s actions. “Supporting the oppressed” does not determine which of the many groups that work on behalf of the oppressed will be picked, and so one can choose those groups whose actions one can independently endorse. There is nothing unsolidaristic about the white clergymen’s picking a group other than Martin Luther King’s, a group that also works for equal treatment for black Americans but whose actions are less likely to conflict with what they deem just.
Secondly, I worry about the central role that the predicament of the outsider is given in this account of solidarity. While one may accept that solidarity requires deference of outsiders, it is unclear why insiders are under the same requirement, as Kolers seems to suggest (pp. 6, 33, 62). Even if we grant that solidarity requires the white clergymen to defer to the decisions made inside Martin Luther King’s movement, this does not show that a black woman who is part of the movement should do the same. It does not show that she does not act in solidarity when she challenges the leaders of the movement to confront the issues that affect black women. It also does not show that black women who criticize the women’s movement for failing to address black women’s issues do not act in solidarity with other women. One could argue that it is precisely because they are part of the movement that they take responsibility for making the movement responsive to their situation. This nondeferential action is itself a sort of joint action, an action in solidarity.
This takes me to a third concern, which is that Kolers’s account of solidarity is unduly restricted to action understood in opposition to debate, public deliberation, argument, and democratic judgment. It seems to me that solidarity is better understood as referring not only to specific actions we take together but also to the joint work of sustaining, over time, habits and practices that enable us to take those actions.
Finally, the example of the black woman in King’s movement also highlights the degree to which Kolers’s account assumes that the oppressed group speaks with one voice, thus making disagreement and difference inside the group irrelevant to the problem of solidarity. In an oppressed group, there are always different voices raising different issues and having different interests. Treating the group’s interests as unified marginalizes the group’s most vulnerable, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) has argued against Tommie Shelby’s conception of black solidarity in In the Shadow of Du Bois. Ignoring disagreement among victims of inequity also assumes that they will necessarily reach the same decisions and make the same judgments, thus treating them as lacking the capacity of judgment. Yet it is precisely this capacity for judgment, the capacity of forming different opinions in controversial matters, that is central to the privileged “joiner” as pictured by the book. In spite of raising these concerns, A Moral Theory of Solidarity is an impressively well-researched and thorough argument for an original account of political action in solidarity.
