However, if philosophy is to serve as an antidote to the resigned acceptance of injustice, a philosophical education must embrace the constructive imagination. We fail if all we teach students is to be critical. We need to enable our students to conceive of a different and better way for things to be. One of the most powerful defenders of social justice in the twentieth century, Martin Luther King Jr, held up hope in the form of a dream. He imagined a possibility that was different than the reality he experienced and held it up as a beacon. Philosophy at its best enables students to find their beacon.

Philosophy, far from being an intellectual diversion for the elite, can be central to the empowerment of those who are so often disempowered outside of the classroom. It is, therefore, one of the ironies of our current times that an increase in inequality has been accompanied by a systematic attack on the humanities.

To illustrate how this can be done let me use an example from my political philosophy class. On the first day of class, I engage students in an exercise, designed by John Immerwahr at Villanova University, which emulates the state of nature. I divide students into groups and ask them to imagine that each group is a family subsisting by fishing from a lake. If a group catches two fish, most of their family will survive, although some among the weak, elderly, or very young in the family could die. If the group catches three fish, all of their family will survive. If they catch any more fish, the excess will rot. However, two fish have to be left in the lake in order for the fish population to be replenished the following year. If the groups over-fish, famine ensues and all of the families will die. There are only enough ‘fish’ (paper fish) in the ‘lake’ (a bag I pass around) to allow for most families to take just two fish, if there are to be two fish left in the lake in the end. During the first round of this exercise, students inevitably take so many fish that there are none left in the lake. Students then discuss what has happened and what they ought to do differently in the next round. Some students have strong intuitions that everybody should take an equal amount, while others insist that all that matters is that in the end there are enough fish left to repopulate the lake. Not only is this exercise pedagogically engaging, but it leads students to develop proposals and to evaluate them critically. When successful, students use what they learned in this exercise to begin developing a sense of what they think would be a fair way of distributing resources and to critique the political and social institutions under which they live.

Why, these students might ask, is the knowledge that philosophy aims at any deeper than that of more practical fields such as medicine, science, or the law?

Picture yourself as a young mother with two children. You enrol in university to obtain a bachelor’s degree, hoping to give yourself a better chance at a job that pays a living wage. Maybe you receive government loans to pay for tuition, and rely on your family’s help, but you still don’t have enough to pay for living expenses and childcare. So, you continue working at a job that pays slightly above minimum wage while taking a full load of courses. Every day you wake up early to get the children ready for school and commute an hour or more to university. After class, you pick up your children from school. If you’re lucky, you can drop them off with a relative while you go to work. By the time you return home in the evening, you are tired, but still have many pages to read and assignments to complete. This is your gruelling daily routine.

An Antidote to Injustice