Date:
Location:
Speaker: Nancy Rosenblum, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government, Harvard University
Neighbors make us miserable, disturb our sleep, provide company and care, rescue us in emergencies, betray us to political authorities. Our quality of life around home is vulnerable to neighbors' ordinary vices and, sometimes, exceptional hostility and cruelty. No wonder we tell stories about our neighbors with feeling. The scope of our interactions is unpredictable, and the temper of our encounters is colored by the human spectrum of personal and moral disposition. No wonder we navigate our give and take uneasily. Although moral and political theorists have pondered the principles and obligations that govern family and friendship, workplace, civil society, and political life, neighbors fall outside these institutions and outside philosophers' concerns. "Good neighbor" falls between the poles of public and private morality. Nancy Rosenblum identifies the "democracy of everyday life" as the distinctive regulative ideal shaping relations among neighbors. Its democratic elements – "Reciprocity," "Speaking Out," and "Live and Let Live" – are less well theorized than citizenship, but better practiced. "Good Neighbor Nation" presents a democratic theory in which the quotidian "democracy of everyday life" is the deep structure of public life, and democracy's saving remnant.