The political value of letting hopes die

Abstract

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.