This is the first installment of “The Philosophy Concentrator” — a series where Avery Kaak ’29 responds to the Brown community’s ethical dilemmas. Please submit your queries here.
“Is it morally correct for international students to not protest, given both the risk of deportation and the immense privilege we have in being able to study in the US?” – Anonymous Inquirer
The fundamental issue at stake here is not simply whether people have an obligation to protest, but whether that obligation is conditioned by circumstance. This question has become especially fraught in light of recent federal actions that have rendered political participation riskier for certain groups than for others. Still, the claim that it is “an immense privilege” to be able to study in the United States offers a useful point of entry to your conundrum.
To assess whether there is a moral obligation, I think it would be beneficial to begin with understanding how protest is situated within the unique context of the United States. The First Amendment guarantees the right to free assembly of all peoples, citizens or not. For many Americans, the right to protest is embedded within the very framework of the country’s existence. Colonial acts of protest like the Boston Tea Party of 1773 are often taken up as part of a uniquely American mythos. Other significant examples of protest in U.S. history include the 1963 March on Washington, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2018 March for Our Lives protests. Time and time again, Americans have taken to public political demonstrations to make their voices heard.
Given this history, engaging in protest — and more broadly civic life — can be understood as a part of fully inhabiting the American political experience, whether you’re a citizen or not. I would argue that in order to get the most out of your experience studying here as an international student, you should engage in some form of protest, or find your niche to civilly engage with the American political system.
Of course, this historical context does not necessarily establish a moral obligation. For that, we must shift into the realm of ethics. Ethics concerns itself with questions of what one ought to do. Within an Aristotelian framework, moral obligations are the actions which contribute to human flourishing. Rosalind Hursthouse, a contemporary virtue ethicist, builds on this idea by arguing that virtuous action both benefits the virtuous actor and helps them be a better human. Aristotle himself describes ethics as a branch of political science, suggesting that the cultivation of virtue is inextricable from life in a political community.
If the aim of moral action is the creation of a better political society, then protest — as a means of collective moral expression — becomes paramount to flourishing as a human being. And so there is a genuine obligation to engage politically, given that political disengagement undermines both individual virtue and flourishing.
But does this obligation to protest persist in spite of the risks posed by being an international student? This is obviously a more tricky issue to unpack. International students are in a particularly precarious position right now in the United States. Rümeysa Öztürk — an international Ph.D. student at Tufts University — was detained after co-authoring an opinion piece that demanded Tufts divest from companies with ties to Israel. Recently unsealed government documents demonstrate that Marco Rubio and the Trump administration have been unlawfully targeting international students for deportation in response to their expressed political views. These realities cannot be ignored in our calculations.
So where do we draw the line? What forms of protest are international students recused from being obligated to engage in? Virtue ethics provides us with a useful tool: prudence. Typically this is posited as utilizing lived experience in order to make decisions that are the most virtuous. In our consideration, prudence suggests that international students should engage in political engagement that does not pose an imminent threat to their legal status, and of course their safety.
The protest that occurred on Brown’s campus this past Friday offers one such example of prudent political engagement. Protestors neither approached U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, and there were no reports of interactions with federal agents. Additionally, police cars were present to make sure that protestors were acting safely when crossing streets. By contrast, during the 2023 University Hall sit-in, 41 students were arrested. The consequences for international students at such a protest in today’s political environment would be disproportionately severe. In such cases, the moral obligation to protest is reasonably alleviated given the substantially unequal burden.
Civic engagement must not be confined to protest alone. Campaigning in the upcoming midterm elections or joining non-public facing roles at a school paper are all forms of political action that preserve the civic values at the heart of democratic life, but also carry low legal risk. These avenues still allow individuals to exercise the capacities that distinguish human political life, that honor the “immense privilege” of studying in the United States.
Avery Kaak ’29 can be reached at avery_kaak@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
Avery Kaak is a columnist for the Brown Daily Herald. He is from Orlando, Florida and is planning on concentrating in philosophy. In his free time he enjoys reading and running.
