This is a book about our uniquely political vices: the kind of persistent dispositions of character and conduct that imperil both the functioning of democratic-political institutions and the trust that a diverse citizenry has in the ability of those institutions to secure a just political order of equal moral standing, reciprocal freedom, and human dignity. Political vices like hubris, willful blindness, and recalcitrance embody a repudiation of the reciprocal conditions of politics, and as a consequence of this, they represent a standing challenge to the principles and values of liberal democ ... More

This is a book about our uniquely political vices: the kind of persistent dispositions of character and conduct that imperil both the functioning of democratic-political institutions and the trust that a diverse citizenry has in the ability of those institutions to secure a just political order of equal moral standing, reciprocal freedom, and human dignity. Political vices like hubris, willful blindness, and recalcitrance embody a repudiation of the reciprocal conditions of politics, and as a consequence of this, they represent a standing challenge to the principles and values of liberal democracy. This book shows how our political vices not only carry out discrete forms of injustice but also facilitate the habituation in and indifference toward systemic forms of social and political injustice. They do so through excesses and deficiencies in human sensory and communicative capacities relating to voice (hubris), vision (moral blindness), and listening (recalcitrance). Drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources, including ancient Greek tragedy, social psychology, moral epistemology, and democratic theory, this book gives new consideration to a list of “deadly vices” that contemporary political societies can neither ignore as a matter of personal “sin” nor publicly disregard as a matter of mere bad choice, and it provides an alternative democratic account that outlines how citizens can best contend with our most troubling political vices without undermining core commitments to liberalism or pluralism.