The political value of letting hopes die

ABSTRACT

Much recent philosophical discussion has explored the political value of holding onto certain hopes for shared ends. This paper considers whether there is correlative political value of letting go of certain hopes or at least of refraining from publicly affirming particular hopes for our collective future. For instance, recently a coalition of scientists and governance scholars have called on governments, international agencies, and other actors to agree to a moratorium on a controversial climate-change mitigation strategy known as solar geoengineering. They argue that there is no place for hope for a successful global solar geoengineering strategy in a just and inclusive climate policy portfolio. This paper asks: (i) what sort of demand are these coalitions making? (ii) Is giving up hopes the sort of thing that is warranted for people to do on the basis of these calls? And (iii) is this the sort of thing that can be legitimately demanded of others? Ultimately, I defend both the political value of our own letting go of certain hopes as well as the legitimacy of making such demands on others (at least in certain cases). This is because what I take people to be doing when they make such demands of others is not necessarily to get others to create new desires or to be more or less optimistic about a certain course of action; rather they are making such demands to outline the terms of continued political engagement as they work towards a shared future.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• public reason
• climate policy
• disability
• solidarity
• research ethics

Introduction

Much recent philosophical discussion has explored the political value of holding onto certain hopes for shared ends. Is there a correlative political value in letting certain hopes die?

Consider a recent controversial campaign against solar geoengineering: a coalition formed with the aim to get others to sign a non-use agreement to stop such technology from developing, arguing that hope for a successful global solar geoengineering strategy has no place in a just and inclusive climate policy portfolio. Or consider recent FDA hearings where representatives from Little People of America called on the FDA to require pharmaceutical companies to stop focusing their research endpoints on growth velocity alone. Advocates objected to a research program that pinned its hopes solely on the prospect of growth, some arguing that such a hope was antithetical to their values.

I take both of these cases to involve political coalitions calling on others to let certain hopes publicly die. This paper asks: (i) What sort of demand are these coalitions making? (ii) Is giving up hopes the sort of thing that is warranted for people to do on the basis of these calls? And (iii) is this the sort of thing that can be legitimately demanded of others? In asking these questions, I am interested in the political significance of both letting hopes die as well as of calling on others do so.

Ultimately, I will defend both the political value of our own letting go of certain hopes as well as the legitimacy of making such demands on others (at least in certain cases). There exist certain circumstances where letting go of certain hopes is of political importance in-itself; that is, it is ‘valuable independently of whatever else might happen’ as a result of letting them go (Blöser et al., 2020; Stockdale, 2021, p. 48). There also exist certain circumstances where calling on others to let hopes die is politically justifiable and a reasonable demand one can make of others. This is because what I take people to be doing when they make such demands of others is not necessarily to get others to create new desires or to be more or less optimistic about a certain course of action; rather they are making such demands to outline the terms of continued political engagement as they work towards a shared future.

Before getting started, I should note that in focusing on the political significance of lettings hopes die and of calling on others to do so as well, little will be said about the normativity of our affective responses beyond that. For instance, this paper is an exploration about the political value of letting hopes die rather than the political value of losing hope. I am interested in the active disavowal – the giving up of – certain hopes even when we think the heretofore hoped for prospect may yet transpire. I will not consider the political value of experiencing and acknowledging bitterness, a kind of residual anger involving the loss of hope in response to unremittent injustice (Stockdale, 2017, 2021). Relatedly, I examine the political value of letting specific hopes die, not the political value of letting hope die altogether.¹ This is not an intervention in the growing discussion about the aptness of despair, or its role for political agency in an era of climate emergency, racial terrorism, social domination, and relentless global exploitation. My defense of the political value of letting hopes die is silent on the value of our other affective responses in the absence of these specific hopes – whether we should despair, become bitter, or whether our hope should seek out a new target. That is a subject for another time.

This is not something we see as part of our chosen future

The argument I present narrowly resides within the debate about the political value of hope. I will defend the following claim:

C1: Insofar as holding onto hopes is politically valuable, so is letting them go under certain circumstances. Moreover, one feature of the political significance of holding onto these hopes is built on the possibility that we are willing to let them go if the conditions warrant us to do so.

This willingness is part of what makes our hoping reasonable. Now this may seem fairly banal to claim, not worthy of deep philosophical scrutiny. The more controversial idea then concerns the type of conditions under which we can reasonably be called upon to let certain hopes die. I argue that the conditions that warrant letting go of certain hopes are not merely those where we come to learn that the target of our hope is unachievable or where hoping for such a target distracts us from working toward political progress. Rather the conditions that warrant letting go of certain hopes can also reside in the hopes of others and in the demands they make on us on the basis of these hopes.

Consider the following case. In the summer of 2021, researchers from Harvard University were scheduled to conduct their first outdoor experiment of a technology that could lay the foundation for future solar geoengineering efforts to slow the effects of global warming. Solar geoengineering (or ‘Solar Radiation Modification’ [SRM]) is proposed as a strategy of climate adaptation rather than mitigation: it does not aim to address the underlying cause of global warming by removing accumulated carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, rather it aims to stave off some of the most damaging climate hazards by partially masking the heat emanating from the sun.

The test, part of the ‘SCoPEx’ project, was set to take place over the skies of Northern Sweden. In terms of environmental impact, the test itself posed minimal risk: it did not involve the release of any particles into the air, those experiments would come later. All that the researchers were scheduled to do was launch a technical balloon 12 miles into the stratosphere to pilot the experimental set up. However, the controversial prospect of the technology itself caused so much public resistance from local environmentalist and indigenous groups that the test was suspended by Swedish authorities. With guidance from an independent advisory group for the project, SCoPEx researchers decided to put testing on hold ‘pending further societal engagement’ with local stakeholders and the Swedish public (Osaka, 2021).

A few months later, one of the groups opposing the pilot test – the Saami Council, an organization of Indigenous peoples residing in Sápmi, a region encompassing large swathes of northern Scandinavia and Russia – wrote a letter calling on Harvard to shut down SCoPEx for good. The letter enumerated a wide range of justifications for ceasing the project, including that the technology brings with it unknown risks, potentially leading to irreversible harm, that it may be weaponized or lead to ‘unmanageable geopolitical tensions’, and that there are unresolved power imbalances regarding the research (Henrikson et al., 2021; Saami Council, 2021). These are all significant concerns, to which I will return. For now I want to point out what I take to be one further consideration that the Saami Council bring up in the opening of the letter. They state:

[T]his technology is not something we see as a part of our chosen future. (Saami Council, 2021)

One can read the above statement as just an opening remark announcing councilmembers’ opposition rather than offering any further justification for the researchers to halt their study. But what if this statement itself offered a distinct justification for the researchers to reconsider the hopes they had for the prospect of solar geoengineering? If people like the councilmembers, who these scientists take themselves to be working alongside with – to be accountable to – say, ‘this is not part of our chosen future,’ perhaps this changes what the researchers themselves should choose to hold out hope for. This is the possibility that I wish to explore in the rest of the paper.

Political matters are not merely personal aspirations; they require the involvement of others in order to be realized. One of the political uses of hopes is that they can be publicly affirmed and facilitate the involvement of others. By hoping we engage in ‘mental imaging’ of what it would be like if the desired state of the world were to materialize (Bovens, 1999, p. 675). With these images, we can invite others to share a joint vision worthy of pursuit. Our hopes made public offer a precise image of what the future prospect can be, such an image can galvanize others and coordinate collective action. But a more precise image can also prompt us to hold our hopes up to scrutiny. We can be moved to reconsider whether to endorse our specific hopes if the future our hopes envision turn out to not be shareable with those with whom we take ourselves to be working in partnership.

These ideas grow out of my understanding of how John Rawls conceptualized political reasonableness and the hoping that it required (Howard, 2022). One of the lessons from Rawls regarding our hopes is that not only is it unreasonable to hope for the impossible, it is also unreasonable to hope for some ends that are both possible and perhaps even feasible, but nonetheless inappropriate because they close us off from heeding the demands of justice on us made by others. Our hopes are reasonable when they provide for us a vision of a future social world that facilitates our willingness to make the necessary demands of justice on others and to heed such demands that others make on us. We can learn, in our continued interaction with others, that our hopes are not serving this role. In such a case, it may be time to give them up.

I will argue that this particular lesson is not tethered to the specifics of Rawls’s framework. What matters is understanding the way our relationship to others gives rise to what we should hope. Even if not unreasonable, if we find ourselves in the grips of hopes that are not shared, choosing to disavow such hopes can be an act of solidarity in-itself (Bommarito, 2016). That is, letting go of certain hopes can express a continued commitment towards others with whom we take ourselves to be working collectively to either further shared moral vision (Sholz, 2008) or, in the absence of such a vision, to combat some shared obstacle to our freedom (McKean, 2020). So in the case of the SCoPEx scientists, the Saami letter can be a call to re-evaluate their hopes, not because such hopes are unreasonable in the abstract, but rather because without further interrogation, they may exclude the perspectives and experiences of those that they see as part of their coalition.

Notably, in their letter, Saami Councilmembers make no explicit demands on what the Harvard researchers should hope for. They focus their demands on what the Harvard researchers should do – halt developing this technology. Political engagement often takes this form – sharing our hopes (and our refusals to hope) in order to build a case for others to engage in a particular action or to change a particular policy. The further idea of making political demands related to what others should or should not hope for remains somewhat obscure. So in the next section, I will introduce two cases that more clearly illustrate people calling on others to let go of particular hopes. Each of the following cases still demonstrate a call for a policy change, but as I will argue, they are policies instituted for the purpose of expressing public disavowal of particular hopes.

In sections four and five, I will return to the question of how it could be politically valuable for us to let certain hopes die on the basis of the hopes (and refusals to hope) of others. When others, like the Saami Councilmembers, communicate their refusal to hope for a certain end, this gives us an opportunity to reconsider what we should hope for and potentially provides for us new reasons to let certain hopes die. While this can be done without anyone making any demands on our hopes, I want to suggest that there are certain situations where it is appropriate for others to make such demands. I will then close with a defense that outlines at least some of the circumstances in which it could be legitimate to demand that others let certain hopes die.

Calling on others to let certain hopes die

Case 1: killing the hope for global solar geoengineering

Let us return again to the case of solar geoengineering. About a year after the Saami Council letter, a coalition of over 450 climate scientists and activists launched a call for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering (Open Letter, 2023). The aim of this initiative is ‘to forestall further normalization of solar geoengineering as a future climate policy option’ – in other words, they aim to kill emerging hopes for future use of solar geoengineering (Biermann et al., 2022, p. 4).

Unlike other climate activists who have recently called for losing hope about the possibility of reaching our climate goals (Extinction Rebellion, 2019, p. 129; Huber, 2023), this initiative comes from a stance of optimism regarding our collective capacity to respond to climate change. The main target of the non-use agreement is the most common solar geoengineering proposal: stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which involves continually spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere to dim the sun. The authors of the letter don’t deny that it is realistic to hope for the technology to work, rather they contend that if we really envision what is required of us to get it to work, we should find such a prospect undesirable and our continued hoping for the prospect to be counterproductive to our common ends.

The letter articulates three of the coalition’s main concerns. First, they worry that there is deep and irreducible uncertainty regarding the technology itself (see also Hofbauer, 2023). How the technology will affect global weather patterns as well as regional precipitation levels and agricultural outputs is poorly understood and, as the critics contend, cannot be fully determined empirically ‘short of full-scale deployment’ (Open Letter, 2023; see also Okereke, 2023; Thornell, 2023). Second, they worry of the moral hazard in continuing to pursue this speculative technology insofar as it detracts from our more pressing efforts of decarbonization (see also Markusson et al., 2018). The third and main focus of the initiative, does not concern the speculative nature of the technology itself, but rather the governability of its deployment. The signatories argue that while we don’t know whether SAI will work, we still can anticipate that – given the nature of the technology – for deployment to work as proposed, it ‘cannot be governed in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner’ (See also Biermann et al., 2022; Reynolds, 2021). Let me explain this last concern in more detail since it provides the grounds for the specific demands outlined in the non-use agreement.

The signatories argue that a just, full-scale deployment of SAI calls for a kind of global cooperation and governance never seen before. Democratic procedures will be required to negotiate the levels and manner of deployment as well as how to compensate local regions who end up bearing a disproportionate burden of the implementation choices made collectively. Furthermore, in contrast to long-lasting CO₂ emissions, the effect of SAI is short lived (around two years), requiring continual and consistent deployment. Once the process gets started, there are serious risks to stopping. A sudden interruption may lead to ‘termination shock:’ a catastrophic spike in global temperatures as they rapidly rebound toward the level they would have reached without the intervention (Jones et al., 2013; McKinnon, 2019; Okereke, 2023). Thus the signatories worry that SAI is only sustainable if unprecedented global governance structures are in place to continue the intervention indefinitely. It has been suggested that ‘just a few powerful countries’ would be able to counteract the risk of termination shock by maintaining backup deployment mechanisms to support system-resilience (Parker & Irvine, 2018). Unfortunately, this concentration of power in a few well-resourced countries would contravene inclusive and equitable strategies for governance. Sustainability of implementation of the technology is thus understood by the signatories to pose further barriers to an already improbable democratic decision-making process which would be needed to govern SAI implementation equitably.

These arguments about the governability of solar geoengineering are not new. They are outgrowths of an ongoing conversation from within the scientific and activist communities regarding not only the legitimacy of future deployment of SAIs but also the legitimacy of researching methods of deployment. What is distinctive of the initiative, however, is the way it aims not only to convince others that solar geoengineering is not worthy of hope, but also to operationalize the killing of hope for solar geoengineering for others. The signatories aim is explicitly to disincentivize research into the development of SAI technology, not only in the countries that would sign the agreement, but elsewhere as well (Biermann et al., 2022, p. 6; Buck, 2022).

It should be noted that few are currently advocating for the future use of solar engineering. Those who defend continued research into solar geoengineering have clarified this point in their own open letter: “While we fully support research into SRM approaches, this does not mean we support the use of SRM (Climate Intervention Research Letter [CIRL], 2023). For advocates of continued research, the lack of evidence is a reason to ramp up such research now in order to be able to make ‘an ethical and effective decision’ about solar geoengineering deployment in the future (CIRL, 2023). They do not want to give up hope on the technology prematurely. The non-use coalition, on the other hand, see ramped up research into the technology as normalizing the possibility of using the technology in the future. It keeps hope for this future technology alive. For this reason, the Non-Use Agreement aims to commit governments who sign it to not only refrain from future deployment of such technologies but also from currently conducting research to develop such technologies in the first place.

The Non-Use Agreement enumerates five core prohibitions that governmental and NGO signatories would be committed to: [1] prohibiting national funding agencies from supporting the development of technologies; [2] banning outdoor experiments; [3] refusing to grant patent rights or [4] to deploy technologies for solar geoengineering if developed by third parties; and [5] objecting to future international institutionalization of planetary solar geoengineering as a policy option.

The demand for a moratorium on even researching SAI has been met with criticism and frustration, even by those with deep ethical concerns regarding solar geoengineering and its governance structures. Olúfémi Táíwò and Shuchi Talati argue that ‘a ban at this stage of low information and low involvement of Global South’ … ‘is premature and undemocratic’ and conclude that ‘anticolonial politics should demand answers’ to the social, ethical, and political questions of solar engineering, rather than ‘foreclose the possibility of’ these questions being asked (2022, 14). While the list of core commitments still allows for continued research into global perceptions of SAIs – especially surveying views from the most vulnerable that are often not represented in these policy debates – the last three commitments prevent the implementation of SAIs on the basis of any novel findings that come out of this social research.

David Keith, a researcher on SCoPEx, questioned the utility of a moratorium on research, ‘we can’t bind the hands of the future and force them to never use these technologies. So if we make a collective decision now not to do serious research, that doesn’t prevent people employing these technologies in the future it just means they will employ them with less knowledge’ (See also Keith et al., 2017; Thornell, 2023). Similarly, others have worried that even if governmental actors and NGOs sign the non-use agreement, this will not stop the research from taking place, it would just make it more likely that those funding the research – such as private funders or militaries – will be less accountable to public opinion and less transparent about their findings (Buck, 2022).

These are serious criticisms of the non-use agreement and the coalition making such demands on others. It is one thing to register one’s own refusals to hope for the future use of such technology and to criticize a particular ongoing research program (as the Saami Council Letter does). It is another thing to try to get the international community to take proactive steps to kill everyone’s hope for the future of such technologies. Is it legitimate for this coalition to call on others (particularly, governmental and international organizations) to kill the hope for the future use of SAI? This question is made more salient given the very real possibility that having governments sign onto the non-use agreement may not stop SAI technology from developing in the end. We will return in section five to explore the legitimacy of this particular call. For now, I hope that these details provide a clear illustration of how people go about making demands on others to let a specific hope die.

Case 2: letting hopes die for a biomedical “cure” for short stature

Consider a second case. A drug named ‘vosoritide,’ developed to increase the growth of children with achondroplasia, was recently approved by the FDA and the European Commission. The approval was based on a year-long randomized control trial which found larger on-average increase in growth (1.57 cm per year) for those in the intervention arm (Savarirayan et al., 2021).

The development of the drug has been controversial within the dwarfism community. Some viewed the drug as a threat to the community’s continued existence, while others advocated for its approval (Stoll, 2021). In response to the drug’s approval in the US, the Little People of America (LPA) – a support organization for people of short stature – tried to tread a middle path, issuing the following statement: ‘[w]e strongly believe that a focus on growth velocity is a search for a pharmaceutical solution for a societal problem. We want to reframe priorities in research to the most meaningful ones for our members, such as reducing spinal stenosis, sleep apnea, and the need for corrective surgeries, as well as supporting other improvements in quality of life’ (Stoll, 2021). None of these aims were studied in the research prior to approval as noted in the limitations section of the published study (Savarirayan et al., 2021).

The limitations of the study were a critical point of contention in the US federal hearings that were part of the approval process. There, Michelle Kraus, the advocacy director of LPA, called on the FDA to push BioMarin, the pharmaceutical company developing the drug, to extend its study and expand its research endpoints to study the effects of medication beyond growth velocity. She asked in the hearing, ‘Is it just height we are gaining, or are we solving the important issues that limit our quality of life?’ (Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration, 2018). She argued that while they support biomedical research related to the comorbidities that come with achondroplasia, growth in stature alone was not a high research priority. She urged the FDA to extend the clinical trials before approval to determine whether the drug had any meaningful impact on the health conditions that matter.

Another member of LPA, Olga Marohnic, a mother of a 15-year-old with achondroplasia articulated a more skeptical perspective on the drug’s potential: ‘We have a supportive and diverse community of people with short stature who make up a segment of the population that these pharmaceuticals are targeting and trying to eradicate’ (HHSFDA, 2018). Outside the hearings, others shared this concern, in response to an earlier phase of the drugs development, Leah Smith, a spokeswoman for LPA at the time stated, ‘[p]eople like me are endangered and now they want to make me extinct’ (Saner, 2020). Not only was the drug being developed of low priority, hope for growth in stature – its only studied effect – was understood by some as an existential threat to their community.

The process in which the drug was approved expresses the FDA’s own position regarding which medical prospects we collectively have reason to hope for and should prioritize. Vosoritide was given a Priority Review designation by the FDA, which allows the agency to speed up the approval process for drugs that promise ‘significant improvements’ in treating ‘serious conditions’ as compared to standard applications (Stoll, 2021). The approval process also fell under the newly instituted Accelerated Approval Program which requires less robust evidence to approve the drug if it ‘treats serious conditions’ or ‘fills an unmet medical need’ based on promising surrogate endpoints (Stoll, 2021). Under this accelerated approval process, the FDA can require further research post-approval to stay in the market and it did – but again the studies required were only to determine ultimate height growth in adult populations and not any other impacts on people’s health. Thus the approval process itself expressed the agency’s hope for a drug to be developed which would successfully make little people taller.

The FDA’s decision regarding the approval process itself brings with it material consequences for the dwarfism community. Without the FDA requiring other endpoints to be studied post-approval, Biomarin has less incentive to conduct such research, making it less likely that parents will be able to make evidence-based decisions regarding the drug’s health outcomes. Over eighty percent of children with achondroplasia are born to parents of average stature (Solomon, 2020). With the availability of vosoritide, parents of young children, most of whom have not themselves experienced life with dwarfism, are put in the difficult position of choosing whether to have their child take the drug without knowledge about whether it will actually produce any health benefits or quality of life benefits beyond marginal growth.

However, advocates are also pointing to non-consequential wrongs that come with the FDA continuing to harbor such hopes. In her testimony, Marohnic continued: ‘My son is not sick; he doesn’t need medicine. My son is not broken; he doesn’t need fixing. My son, what he needs is inclusion and acceptance … In my opinion, these pharmaceutical companies are taking advantage of the fear that many parents are faced with, with having to raise a child with dwarfism’ (HHSFDA, 2018). When interviewed, Joseph Stramondo, a philosopher and disability rights activist, held a similar position. He clarified that his criticism does not express any judgment against parents who may choose to have their children take the drug; rather it lies in the original intent for vosoritide’s development and the public justification for the drug’s approval – namely, the aim to ‘normalize dwarves’ bodies’ (Saner, 2020). On approval, the message that the FDA sent is that growth velocity data alone is the information parents need to make an informed medical decision.

I take this to be another clear case where some members of the dwarfism community were calling on the FDA to publicly disavow the hope for a prospect of a drug that will make little people taller. Were the FDA to refuse to approve the vosoritide on the basis of growth velocity alone, it would be holding the position that such a prospect is not on its own the sort of thing we have reason to hope for.

Again, the challenges regarding the hope do not reside in the notion that such hopes are unrealistic. Development of this sort of drug has been described as inevitable (Garde, 2019). Nor is the challenge merely related to the view that such hopes are distractions from other more pressing concerns. For many, the pressing concerns require a societal rather than biomedical response; no FDA approved drug can fully address these concerns. Rather, the challenge lies in the fact that if we really imagine in detail what a world would be like if height were a matter of (parental) choice, this is a world that is not desirable for all members of the dwarfism community. And it is not desirable, at least for some, because it is not a world where they can imagine themselves and their loved one’s inhabiting. Marohinic’s, Smith’s, and Stramondo’s arguments lay the foundation for understanding the FDA as harboring and promoting what I have called, ‘exclusionary hopes’ (Howard, 2018, 2019). These are hopes that cannot be shared, not merely because their prospect is found to be undesirable, but rather because such hopes envision a future where these others (or people like them) are absent. Not only is such hoping insulting, it undermines the legitimate and deeply held practical commitments of activists within the dwarfism community: to do what one can to combat the normalization of non-standard bodies.

Like in the case of solar geoengineering, the political value of calling on others to let certain hopes die is up for debate. Not everyone who is critical of vosoritide, considered the strategy of formally demanding that the FDA to let go of its expressed hopes to be effective or worthwhile. Stramondo, for instance, doubts that such calls will do much good: ‘Do we try to influence the direction of new medical research so that it addresses “quality of life” issues?… I fear that move may be naive. These biotech companies are going to conduct research in whatever way maximizes profits’ (PhilosopherCrip, 2021). As with the case of the SAI non-use agreement initiative, the following question thus remains open: Even if we refuse to see a certain prospect as a part of our chosen future, what is the point of demanding that others – other people and other organizations – let those hopes die? Especially, if we do not expect that getting others to let go of hope will end up stopping those futures from coming about. While there may be reason to disavow certain hopes, is there reason to demand that others disavow those hopes as well?

In the next section, I will argue that there can be non-instrumental value in letting hopes die. That is, it is sometimes politically significant to disavow our hopes for certain prospects even if those disavowals may not be expected to change the trajectory of future events.

Letting hopes die regardless of consequences

Let us return to the claim made at the outset of the paper:

C1: Insofar as holding onto hopes is politically valuable, so is letting them go under certain circumstances. Moreover, the political significance of holding onto these hopes is built on the possibility that we are willing to let them go if the conditions warrant us to do so.

What could make holding onto certain hopes valuable politically and why is this value built on our willingness to let hopes go under the right circumstances?

The political value of keeping certain hopes alive and letting others die may grow out of a more general practical value of hoping. Hope can be a source of grit (Rioux, 2022). Even if it is not necessary for action, holding out hope for success can strengthen one’s resolve to continue pursuing a goal when others may be tempted to give up (Calhoun, 2018). Hoping involves ‘unswamped focus’; allowing one to attend to the prospect’s possibility without being distracted or deterred by some countervailing considerations regarding its riskiness, impermissibility, unlikelihood, etc (Chignell, 2023, p. 55). These are just some of the ways in which keeping hopes alive can be instrumentally valuable for achieving our individual and political ends (see also Bovens, 1999; Goldman, 2012; Martin, 2014).

Inversely, holding onto certain hopes can also hinder our practical agency. As Philip Pettit has argued, ‘hope … does not come cheap’ (2004, 157). When we hope for some prospect, we are ‘investing the prospect with a characteristic, galvanizing, and orientating role:’ sustaining such hopes often requires mental and attentional resources, which could be put to better use elsewhere (Pettit, 2004, p. 152). Hoping can orient us to the wrong sorts of ends and can guide our attention away from the challenges we are most likely to face (Martin, 2014; Sleat, 2013).

The practical then translates into the political in the following way: insofar as the hoped-for ends are politically worthwhile and hoping for them actually helps us achieve these ends, hoping for them is also of instrumental political value. People often think of grit or resolve as a virtue of an individual, but is it a political virtue? Perhaps it is admirable that someone is resolute, but it is only politically good for them to be so if their resolve propels them to effectively pursue politically worthwhile causes.

If holding out hope for a prospect is only instrumentally politically valuable, then C1 still holds but rather vacuously. In order to determine whether holding onto the hope is politically valuable in a given case, we just look at whether the hoped-for prospect is politically worthwhile and whether hoping for it can motivate us to continue pursuing it. Conversely, letting go of certain hopes is valuable if doing so can actually motivate us to more productively pursue our ends. If, however, letting go of those hopes does nothing to change the trajectory of what ends up happening, then there’s nothing particularly significant about disavowing them.

I take this instrumental understanding of the political value of hopes to underlie some of the criticisms of calls to let certain hopes die. From an entirely instrumental view, such calls on others to let certain hopes die may make people feel better, but they don’t actually make a better future more likely and they may actually sow discord within groups that should be working together.

While I do not deny that holding onto certain hopes and letting go of others is of instrumental value, this is not the whole story. When it comes to certain hopes, it is the hoping in-itself that is politically significant regardless of whether or not it brings about good consequences. Similarly, as I will argue, when it comes to letting hopes die, it is the disavowal in-itself that can be politically significant.

Claudia Blöser and Titus Stahl have advanced a non-instrumental account of the practical value of hope. They offer the example of a political activist who ‘hopes for the end of global inequality in full knowledge of its unlikeliness’ (2017, p. 356). This activist may recognize that hoping for political change is unlikely to achieve any recognizable benefits, either for herself (these hopes could lead her to feel emotionally gutted) or for the world (given the political forces she and her comrades are up against). And yet, Blöser and Stahl argue that she still may be justified in holding out hope: ‘[s]he does not hope because this is a means to an end but because such hope constitutes her as the kind of person that she is’ (2017, p. 355). Maintaining certain hopes can be necessary for our practical identities (2017, p. 356).

Were the political activist to let certain hopes go, she would in turn resign herself to no longer being the kind of person who sees the possibility of ‘witnessing the realization of her political vision’ as a reason to continue engaging in political action (Blöser et al., 2020, p. 357). This changes who she can take herself to be. While the political action may continue to be worthy of her time for other reasons (it may, for instance, provide for her a sense of comradery), the hopeful activities of anticipating the radical changes she desires and spending mental energy fantasizing about future just worlds would no longer be the sort of thing she can take herself to do as a central part of her identity. Insofar as we care about our own practical identities – and Blöser and Stahl follow Korsgaard in articulating that we have responsibilities to constitute a unified identity over time – we have reason to not give up on certain hopes, even if the costs for holding onto them outweigh their benefits (2017, p. 359).

This does not mean that, on their account, hopes for any such thing are justifiable as long as they contribute to a person’s practical identity and coherent sense of self. Our hopes are subject to normative evaluation and can change as we better understand what our practical identity entails. If a person’s hopes contribute to a morally vicious practical identity – Blöser and Stahl give the example of a mafioso hoping to make more money through blackmail schemes (2017, p. 358) – then it is not ultimately the sort of hope that they should maintain even if it does foundationally contribute to their own self-conception.

We may thus come to question the moral value of our particular practical identity and gain reasons to give up certain hopes. We may also come to understand certain hopes for morally desirable prospects to no longer be constitutive of our practical identities and turn our hopeful attention elsewhere (Blöser et al., 2020, p. 364). For example, while the parents of a failing child actor may still see the prospect of their child having a successful acting career in adulthood as desirable, they may no longer take hoping for such an end to be constitutive of their identity as loving parents. In such a case, they may not have any further reason to maintain their hopes for their child’s future acting success in the face of countervailing evidence.

In Hope Under Oppression, Stockdale builds on this account and distills it into a standard of evaluation for the moral aptness of hope:

Standard for moral evaluation of hope

Hope is morally inappropriate when the hope reveals that the agent is not properly oriented toward the good. (Stockdale, 2021, p. 90)

We can, Stockdale argues, criticize a racist’s hope for racial domination due to its immoral end. Additionally, we can criticize a person’s selfish hope that their ex’s marriage ends disastrously – not because there is anything immoral about the prospect of a failed marriage, but rather because such a hope is still revelatory of a vice in the person’s character. On Stockdale’s account, while people may not have the capacity to instantaneously change their hopes, when a hope reveals a vicious orientation toward the world, they can take themselves – as can others – to ‘have sufficient reason to work to overcome or revise [these] morally inappropriate hopes’ (2021, p. 90).

One thing to note about both Blöser’s and Stahl’s original account and how it is operationalized by Stockdale is that the normative evaluation of our hopes – the reasons we can take ourselves to either sustain or give up on certain hopes – concern the moral value of our practical identities. We have reason to hold onto hopes that contribute to our morally valuable practical identities even if those hopes are not a means to further any morally good end. The hopes are themselves warranted in virtue of revealing something morally good about our sense of self, our values, and the considerations we take to be reason-giving. When the hopes reveal something morally vicious about our practical identity, we have reason to let those hopes go.

These accounts thus develop a compelling argument for how hoping can in-itself be ethically significant regardless of whether or not it brings about good consequences. But, as I will argue, they do not quite cover all the political considerations people may encounter regarding their hopes as presented in the cases above.

While one of Blöser and Stahl’s primary examples is that of a political activist, the reasons they explore for why she should sustain or give up on certain hopes are not depicted as the result of political demands or expectations made on her by others; rather the reasons relate to her own self-understanding about the sorts of hopes a political activist should entertain. She may ask, ‘If I give up on hope, what sort of person would I be? Can I even see myself as a political activist anymore?’ Undoubtably this is descriptive of one possible line of questioning that an activist may pursue in evaluating her hopes. It may also turn out that answering this line of questioning requires us to be open to the demands made on us by other people. But it is noteworthy that one could substitute other practical identities here – mom, friend, scientist – and the structure of the reasoning remains the same, relying on the value of these particular practical identities to the person inhabiting them, these identities’ moral worth, and the centrality of certain hopes to maintain these identities.

This sort of normative evaluation doesn’t say much about the sorts of political demands we can make of others regarding what they ought or ought not hope. One can imagine a concerned friend advising the parents of the child actor to give up on their hopes for their child’s future acting success: ‘Holding onto these hopes doesn’t make you loving parents. Your child will resent you.’ This advice does not express a demand made on the parents by another to disavow their specific hope; it is not, for example, a demand made by the child to give it up already. Rather this is a call for them to recognize that taking these hopes to be central to their practical identity as loving parents misinterprets what such a practical identity actually entails. It is a call for them to see the reasons that they had all along as loving parents rather than introducing further considerations that can act as new reasons to change their hopes (or their practical identities for that matter). The source of normativity for these hopes resides in people’s own self-conception and practical identities and what they hold dear, rather than in the demands that are made on them by others.

I highlight this feature of the account not to deny that important ethical dimensions to why we should maintain or to disavow certain hopes are often grounded in how we view ourselves. It is just that I do not take concerns regarding the maintenance of one’s morally valuable practical identity to fully cover all the political reasons we may have to disavow our hopes.

First, political evaluation of hope need not depend on the moral goodness or badness of a person’s practical identity. As we saw with the case of vosoritide, urging the FDA to disavow the hope for a drug that makes little people taller need not impugn moral judgments on any parents who hope for the drug’s success or who plan to have their child take the drug were it approved. Critics of vosoritide recognize how difficult these decisions can be for parents given the stigma and unaccommodating world in which they raise their children. The criticism rather targets the drug companies and government agencies who continue to express their hopes in research endpoints that undermine parental decision-making by bringing to market a drug with inadequate information related to its risks and benefits. Political evaluation of one’s hope is not necessarily a moral evaluation of that hope.

Second, even when it comes to people’s own motivations and deliberations, our self-regarding reasons to maintaining our morally valuable practical identity do not capture in full how people may come to understand the political significance of their hopes. Let us return once more to the political activist. The question, ‘what sort of political activist would I be if I gave up this hope?’ is clearly coherent to ask oneself. But when it comes to political activism, we often understand our responsibilities and the political appropriateness of our hopes as being sparked by and growing out of our relationships to other people.

Relatedly, our political responsibilities towards others may give rise to hoping in ways that disrupt our settled practical identities. As Sahar Fard has recently proposed, collective hopes can arise in social movements even when there is ‘no single narrative’ or ‘unified goal’ (Fard, 2023, p. 6). Fard suggests that ‘although there might be nothing that we all hope for, one thing we can all do to resist despair is to stay and hope together’ (2023, p. 7). Fard advocates that we reframe the normativity of hope to be primarily concerned with ‘the how’ to hope with others, not ‘the what’ specifically to hope for. On Fard’s definition, at minimum, ‘one stands in a relation of hope with others when one allows the contingencies of their connection to influence the object or target of one’s hope’ (2023, p. 7). The specifics of what we end up hoping for is often a contingent product of whom we are committed to work together with. This contingency does not undermine the authenticity of the hopes we sustain; rather it is what it means to be open to the invitation to hope with others.

In this way, political action may require us to cultivate a messy form of agency that does not neatly form a coherent practical identity. Our practical identities and their commensurate hopes have been shaped by social institutions we’ve grown up in – insofar as we see these institutions as oppressive and in need of change, we should be open to the possibility that our own self-conceptions and ways of attending to the world have been malignantly influenced by them. Justice may require of us to ‘cultivate a certain alienation from our habitual perceptions under unjust institutions and a greater openness to the claims of others’ with whom we work in solidarity (McKean, 2020, p. 165). What is sometimes called for then is not sustaining the hopes that can support a sense of a unified self, but rather being open to revision and disunity within our self.

The political significance of hoping and letting hopes die

Given the discussion above, I suggest the following political evaluation of hope:

V1: standard of political evaluation of hope

Hope is politically inappropriate when the hope reveals that the agent is not properly orientedtowards others.

Unlike the standard of moral evaluation, this standard does not rely on any particular conception of the good, but rather on what hopes we can justifiably sustain given our relationship to other people. But what does proper orientation towards others look like? To which others must our hopes be accountable? And finally, how does this all relate to how we can justifiably make demands on one another’s hoping?

Our conception of proper political orientation to others is going to depend on our broader conception of justice and political agency. For example, Rawls offers the idea of ‘reasonablenesss’ as proper political orientation, which requires us to ‘enter as equals the public world of others and stand ready to propose, or to accept…fair terms of cooperation with them. These terms … specify the reasons we are to share and publicly recognize before one another as grounding our social relations’ (1993, p. 53). Three things to highlight about Rawls’s view and how it bears on hope. First, proper orientation requires us to see each other as having equal standing to propose and honor the fair terms of cooperation; our hopes should facilitate us doing so. Second, proper orientation includes the expectation of reciprocity – reasonability entails a willingness to be guided by mutually acceptable terms, ‘as long as others can be relied on to do the same’ (Rawls, 1993, p. 54). So the justifiability of our hopes is determined by their mutual acceptability with only those others who are reasonable as well. The third feature is the public nature of this orientation. Rawls writes: ‘Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common’ (1993, p. 100). Thus one’s hopes may be unreasonable even if kept private insofar as one would not be able to publicly affirm and support those hopes while continuing one’s political engagement with others as equals (Howard, 2019).

This suggests the following Rawlsian specification of the SPEH:

V2: Rawlsian specification of SPEH

Hope is politically unreasonable when the public affirmation of the hope would foreclose continued political engagement with reasonable others.

On this Rawlsian conception of proper orientation, others can legitimately demand we disavow our unreasonable hopes. Though the hoped-for ends may seem morally innocuous and completely understandable, we cannot continue to publicly affirm our hopes anymore. We can no longer hold onto these hopes, or to take them to be central lines of reasoning for our political action, and at the same time treat reasonable others as equals in light of what we know about their political ends. I take eugenic hopes, given their exclusionary aspirations, to be unreasonable in this way (Howard, 2018). Some of the criticisms of FDA’s approval point in this direction as well, drawing links between the public justification for vosoritide’s uses and the possibility of social eradication. In making the demand for the FDA to refuse to approve the drug on its studied endpoints, activists may be contesting the reasonability of the FDA’s position.

However, whether or not a hope is reasonable is not the only determining factor for whether others have legitimate standing to demand that one disavow it. While V2 is a distinctly Rawlsian formulation for SPEH, others can be developed as well. To sketch out another formulation, I want to suggest some of the threads in V2 that are generalizable beyond a Rawlsian framework. In particular, I take the ability to publicly affirm one’s hopes to be at the heart of a distinctively political reason for keeping certain hopes alive and letting others die regardless of whether or not those hopes are reasonable in the Rawlsian sense.

‘Ability’ to publicly affirm is an important qualifier here. It does not mean that only the hopes we already share with others are the justifiable ones. As Jakob Huber has recently argued, our shared hopes are ‘not necessarily something citizens already bring to the table, but something they jointly create through political discourse’ (2024, p. 99). He notes that ‘[i]t is very likely that citizens will come out of democratic deliberation with hopes that differ from the ones they entered it with: they may come to see a particular possible future as something they should or should not hope for’ (Huber, 2024, p. 100). On his account, we should enter into these collective negotiations with an understanding of our own hopeful visions ‘as fallible and provisional, i.e. subjected to continued interrogation and deliberation’ (Huber, 2024, p. 99).

We must be open to the possibility that in the course of political deliberation and shared action, we may come to realize that the hopes we harbor envision a world that others do not choose as their future and for good reason. Sometimes, we may learn that our hopes are exclusionary: we are holding out hope for a world that others worry has no place for them or for the people they love. At other times, we may be justified in holding steadfast to certain hopes that we learn are unshared as long as they do not close us off from continuing engaging with each other as equals. We may also choose to revise our hopes in light of what visions we can share with others. The provisional nature of our hopes requires us to check our visions with others. There is no abstract test here. Continued engagement thus makes it legitimate for us to contest each others’ hopes, even when such hopes are not exclusionary.

So here is an alternate formulation of SPEH that is inspired by but does not rely on the complete apparatus of the Rawlsian framework. In particular, it gets rid of reasonability as the standard for what hopes are justifiably held or disavowed:

V3: second revision to SPEH

Hope is politically inappropriate when the public affirmation of the hope would foreclose continued political engagement with others we regard as partners in our political efforts.

V3 offers another specification of what proper orientation in V1 would look like. On this formulation, our hopes can be reasonable in the Rawlsian sense and still politically inappropriate if they foreclose continued political engagement. Moreover, the people for whom we are accountable in our hoping – those who have standing to make demands on us about our hoping – are not determined by their reasonability. Rather it is those with whom we are committed to working alongside in our political efforts. To explain, let us return to Fard’s description of hoping with others. Just as there is contingency related to the hopes we end up taking up, there is also some contingency on what hopes we should let die. Hoping with others requires us to be open to the possibility that what we see as our chosen future cannot continue to be affirmed in light of what we know about what others see as futures that are open to them. And when we recognize that there is a hope we harbor that cannot be shared, this gives us a new reason to let go of some particularities of our chosen future to accommodate the visions of others. If we cannot bring ourselves to do this – that is, if the stakes for what we are hoping are too high and we are being asked to give up too much – then what may need to be re-evaluated is whether we indeed are committed to working with these others as partners in our political efforts.

Given the details of the cases, even if one disagrees with the different coalitions’ positions, using V3 we can evaluate their demands to let hopes die as legitimate engagements in our complicated ‘shared practice of negotiating our hopes for a just future’ (Huber, 2024, p. 98). In democratic deliberation, there is room both for people to share their hopes and commitments as well as to contest the hopes of others. As I have argued, the FDA case is a much clearer illustration of critics legitimately claiming that others harbor exclusionary hopes. But it would be wrong to think that we can only demand of others to disavow the hopes that are so clearly unreasonable. Part of what we are doing in making such demands is testing the boundaries of what is and is not reasonable to hope for.

Just as there is an epistemic function to publicly avowing hopes, so is there an epistemic function in publicly disavowing them. Hoping provides clarity and specificity. Part of what the critics of SAI and the critics of the FDA’s approval are doing in their demands for public disavowal is providing for others a more determinate picture of what we should collectively anticipate were the hoped-for end to transpire. The activists are urging those in their collective partnerships (other members of the dwarfism community/others combatting climate change) to imagine in detail what a world would be like if height were a matter of (parental) choice or if SAI technology was developed. Such worlds are not part of their chosen future, and I take it in detailing their vision, it is their wager that these are worlds that others may find unpalatable as well.

There is also a communicative function to publicly avowing and disavowing certain hopes. When the FDA allows for growth velocity to be a hoped-for endpoint or when NASEM issues a report calling for a more comprehensive US strategy for solar geoengineering, these organizations express our communal priorities more broadly (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2021). Publicly killing certain hopes (as in the case of a non-use agreement), publicly letting certain hopes die (as in the case of FDA approval on the basis of height velocity), can express shifts in our communal priorities.

I have tried to outline an argument defending the distinctly political significance of letting hopes die. As others have articulated before me, we have political reason to nurture our capacity to hope with others, and these reasons are not always coextensive with the political desirability of the specific prospects we are hoping for. Moreover, our capacity to hope with others, is built on the possibility that we are willing to let certain hopes go at least under some conditions. So what are those specific conditions where we should let certain hopes go? I fear that there are no set answers to this question, or at least I don’t have them here. Instead, my aim in presenting the two cases in such great detail was to make legible the idea that sometimes what people are legitimately demanding of us is to let certain hopes die rather than to sustain hopes that we already share.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted Jakob Huber and two anonymous referees for their constructive feedback on this paper as well as the members of “The Political Philosophy of Hope” conference, which took place on 21 and 22 July, 2022 at Freie Universität Berlin. The discussion there changed the trajectory of this article. Thanks also to Benjamin McKean, Martin Fitzgerald, Abe Graber, Anna Meuer, Naomi Scheinerman, and Shameka Thomas for for their thorough suggestions and comments.

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Dana Howard

Dana Howard is an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University Division of Bioethics, which is housed in the Department of Biomedical Anatomy and Education in the College of Medicine with a joint appointment in the Philosophy Department. Her work often focuses on the role that our anticipatory attitudes like hope and retrospective attitudes like regret should play in our decision-making both in political and medical contexts.

Notes

1. Here I am using Andrew Chignell’s helpful distinction between specific hope and basal hope (Chignell, 2023). Specific hopes refer to the episodic attitudes we hold toward some determinate future states (i.e. the hope that the Earth will not warm more than 2 degrees Celsius) whereas basal hopes refer to a ‘broad existential stance: an anticipatory openness to or embrace of an indeterminate range of possible futures’ (Chignell, 2023, p. 46).