AG Heinzelmann, 11.07.2025 The unthinkable sword? Democracy, morality, and violence across borders?

Recording

This book project explores the idea of “the unthinkable,” as a means of enhancing our normative grasp of various pathologies in contemporary democratic politics. The book focuses on the relationship between democracy and violence, as this relationship unfolds across international borders. I try to illuminate this relationship through a unified normative account of the phenomenological, predictive, and prescriptive aspects of the unthinkable. I articulate a communal conception of the unthinkable, according to which unthinkable attitudes and actions entail the self-removal of the agents who adopt them from relevant communities. At the phenomenological level, I argue that this link between the unthinkable and self-removal from community powerfully captures the lived experience of unthinkable developments in democratic communities across the western world. At the predictive level, I try to show that the same link grounds a novel interpretation of democratic peace theory, re-orienting the theory towards the future. 

Finally, the link between the unthinkable and self-removal from community has wide-ranging prescriptive implications. It explains why, by undertaking unthinkable actions or adopting unthinkable attitudes, democratic polities remove themselves from the international community of democratic nations, and thus forfeit important moral claims to solidarity assistance from fellow democracies. This forfeiture, in turn, bears on the morality of cross-border efforts to contain violent threats to democracy - whether these originate with authoritarian invaders, with domestic military officers, or with civilian politicians who clearly regard the resort to unconstitutional violence as a thinkable means of securing power. 

Shmuel Nili is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His research deals with foundational and applied questions in political philosophy, spanning meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2016. He has published four books with Oxford University Press on applied topics such as rethinking fundamental assumptions in political philosophy in the face of pervasive political violence. His journal articles appear in top venues including Ethics, The American Political Science Review, and The American Journal of Political Science.