The European: The main body of your work is in moral and political philosophy. How do you define justice?
Cohen: Let me answer the question in two ways. First, I conceive of moral and political philosophy as somewhat distinct enterprises. Moral philosophy is the reflection on how individuals should lead their lives, and political philosophy examines how we should conduct our common affairs. These are different enterprises, particularly in a pluralistic society where people have very different philosophies of life. I consider myself principally a political philosopher. Second, a just society can abstractly be conceived as a society in which each person has what he or she is entitled to. The big question that is addressed by different traditions in political philosophy is what exactly that means. Personally, I believe in the equality of people. Justice demands that we create the conditions that assure people the treatment-as-equals that is rightfully theirs.

The European: What does that require of us?
Cohen: Justice requires a democratic society in which people have equal standing and make collective decisions. It requires equal opportunities in life: fate must not be fixed by our birth. And it also requires that everyone can enjoy a fair share of available resources to enable all of us to pursue our lives.

The European: When you talk about “people”, whom do you mean? The citizens of a nation-state, the members of a community, or all humans? To whom do we owe equal consideration?
Cohen: Justice is not an exclusive property of the nation-state. But the substance and meaning of global justice is different from justice on a national level. We can in all cases say that people should be treated as equals. But what does mean? Well, that depends on the relations we have to them. My relationship with other Americans is different from my relationship with people in Kenya. I mention Kenya because this is a place I am doing some work now.

The European: What is the right way to mediate between different conceptions of justice? Is that the role of philosophy, or should we rely on legal norms to spell out the framework of a just society?
Cohen: Reasoning about justice is part of ordinary life. I believe that human beings have intuitive convictions about what is owed to them and what they owe to other people. Different people can have different convictions, and it is part of the ordinary texture of political life to argue about these differences. Politics is not simply the struggle for power in pursuit of interests; it also the quest to advance one’s own convictions about justice. Political philosophy builds on that feature of ordinary life and politics. It is not too dissimilar from regular barroom conversations, although maybe more reflective. It is founded on the hope that we can reduce the areas of disagreement through our common use of reason.

The European: Philosophy cannot be separated from practice?
Cohen: That is correct. Political philosophy is conducted from the standpoint of an agent, not from the standpoint of an outside observer or a neutral judge. It builds on the concern, already present in ordinary political discourse, to engage in social and political cooperation in a more reflective way.

The European: Virtually all democracies struggle with stagnating or declining levels of electoral participation. Do you share the worry that our agency is in jeopardy, that we are unable or unwilling to engage in these substantive discussions about society and politics?
Cohen: The concern about agency is a thread that runs through protest movements around the world. Look at the Spanish Indignados: At the heart of their thrust is the demand for a more participatory politics: The idea is that people should engage in politics in their own name, not just as representatives of political parties or interest groups. Within the Occupy movement, this concern about agency is strongly present as well, and also linked to a specific concern about socioeconomic issues—about the incredible and disgusting growth of inequality in the United States over the past forty years.

The European: If you are primarily concerned about giving people what is rightfully theirs, inequality must not necessarily be worrisome. You could argue that different people simply deserve different things. If I put in more effort, or if I am better at something, treating me equally to others would not be right.
Cohen: There are four things that worry me about inequality. First, some inequality is simply unfair. In the United States, some people have been gaining the lion’s share of the benefits that flow from our cooperative activities, while others have been largely excluded. That is not a necessary development but the consequence of concrete political decisions. If we had decided, for example, to structure our tax code differently, inequality would likely be less severe. It is a kind of breach of the social contract. Second, it is very hard to preserve a commitment to equality of opportunity in light of current levels of inequality: Some people have much greater opportunities than others. Third, it undermines the ability of everyone to have the equal chances for political influence that are part of a well-functioning democracy. Fourth, there is something very important about the thought that “we are in this together.

” Yet the realities of life for well-off members of society now are so fundamentally different from the realities of life for others; they people who are very well-off do not have to worry about eviction or foreclosure or health care or education. These great disparities make it hard to maintain a sense of a common fate, of “there but for the grace of God go I,” a being in this together.

The European: We tend to talk about pluralism in terms of tolerance: The idea that we can peacefully live alongside each other. I wonder whether that is sufficiently demanding to allow for a sense of togetherness to take hold.
Cohen: There is an idea in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that I find very attractive. Lincoln argues that the US was conceived in an idea and dedicated to a proposition. The idea was liberty, the proposition was that we are all created equal. This country was not forged on the battlefield or in the forests but in abstract, philosophical principles. The question that Lincoln asked was whether something as abstract as an idea and a proposition are sufficient to keep a country together: could it “long endure.” So, when I say that a sense of togetherness is important, I mean that the project of building and improving society so that it lives up to these broad principles of liberty and equality falls to each of us. And that does demand more than toleration, as important as toleration is. Even if we disagree fundamentally on religion or morality, we can stand together on a common ground of political principles. Whether that is a sufficient basis for long-term social cohesion, I don’t know. Lincoln’s question is still unanswered.

The European: It seems easy to be fatalistic about these questions. Yet standards of living have improved almost every decade of every century. Human-induced violence has declined throughout history. Societies have become more stable.
Cohen: Martin Luther King used to borrow a phrase from the Unitarian abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I am sympathetic to that view. In the United States, much remains to be done in terms of racial justice, gender issues, or combating other forms of social exclusion and subordination. It is a rocky road ahead, but much has already been done. To that extent I agree with the thrust of your question. But that does not mean that we can take future progress for granted. There is a second point that King often made, a word of caution about what he called “the myth of time.” The myth of time is associated with the optimistic expectation that things will automatically get better, that, as King put it, progress will “roll in on the wheels of inevitability.”

The European: Are you not an optimist?
Cohen: There is a difference between optimism and hope, as Gramsci has pointed out. He said: “Be a pessimist of the head and an optimist of the heart.” So I am hopeful: an optimist of the heart, not of the head. What I mean is this: that if we make determined efforts to improve things, then it is not unreasonable to expect improvement. When I look at the historical record that you cited, I don’t see a reason to be optimistic and relax. Instead, I see it as the foundation for reasonable hope. Our efforts at improvement are not doomed to failure. We are not banging our head against the wall; a world of human beings cooperating in society is not recalcitrant to improvement.

The European: Barack Obama also used the quote about the moral arc of the universe during his campaign. What has happened to that surge of hope?
Cohen: There was too much hope placed in the election of Obama. If you compare him with Roosevelt, the circumstances are fundamentally different. In the 1930s, unions were very strong, the Left was very strong. Roosevelt could credibly say to his political enemies on the right: “You don’t know what’s coming. Better deal with me.” The truth is that until the Occupy movement emerged, organized pressure from the Left was virtually non-existent.

The European: Can you give me a concrete example?
Cohen: Here is a speculation: The Congressional Budget Committee has failed. The reason is that Democrats, for the first time, did not collapse like a cheap tent. Occupy is holding the Democrats’ feet to the fire. Inequality is suddenly part of the political discourse again, and that has changed the bargaining strategy. The Democrats knew that, this time, they could not simply cave.

The European: Is it fair to say that political creativity was largely a feature of conservatives in recent years, and that the Left had either folded or fled in retreat?
Cohen: Yes. Conservatives have been very innovative, even before the election of Obama. Political energy of the Left had become increasingly institutionalized since the 1960s. The strategy was piecemeal progress and compromise, hampered by the collapse of the labor movement. The cost of that is that you begin to enter an abusive relationship with the Democratic Party: you have no place else to go, so you are taken for granted.

The European: Has the Left sold out?
Cohen: That is too harsh.

Despite the dissatisfaction with Obama, the Left will vote for him again. And there is a good reason for that: Whom do you want to appoint the next Supreme Court judge? Obama or Romney? Decisions like the Citizens United case or the upcoming health care ruling illustrate how incredibly consequential these choices can be. Do we really want to tolerate the risk for society? That is a strategic calculation, not a sellout. But it has tied the hands of the Left.

The European: Let’s shift focus a little bit. You have edited the Boston Review for twenty years – a magazine that features poetry, fiction, non-fiction, scholarly writings and investigative reporting. What do you find fascinating about that mix-and-match approach?
Cohen: In Boston Review, we aim to embody, to model, the kind of public discussion—the exercise of public reason—that is essential to a well-functioning democracy. Citizens in a democracy have different interests and convictions, but we should all acknowledge the importance of good arguments and rules of evidence: that is what the political forums in Boston Review are about. However, politics is not just about reason, just as life is not only about reason. There is a world of imagination that is humanly important and also necessary for political innovation. We need a flourishing literary imagination both for itself and if we want to think creatively about politics. That only works if literature is not all seen as supporting a particular political attitude. The world of imagination needs to be autonomous.

The European: When you want to create a forum for discussion, you presumably want to have political impact. Why use the Boston Review? Why not take a widely read tabloid paper and make it more political?
Cohen: John Rawls was enormously influential as a political philosopher. Yet he never made direct contributions to journals, unlike Habermas, who is very actively participating in political discourses. So how can we explain Rawls’ considerable influence? Because there are intermediaries between high intellectual discourse and public discussion. That is what we try to be: an intermediary. We need to free ideas from the confines of their disciplinary cloisters. If they develop traction, much can happen. It’s a classic example of the division of labor: We do our work, which addresses a more limited audience than a tabloid paper, and hope that someone else picks up on it. We’re bridging a gap – at least that’s the project.

The European: I want to stick with the idea of political innovation. What is the importance of out-of-the-box thinking for concrete political problems?
Cohen: I am based in San Francisco, I teach at Stanford, near Silicon Valley. I am surrounded by a lot of techno-utopianism and techno-enthusiasm. Not all of that is unwarranted, but it creates an unfortunate attitude: The big praise for innovation is that something is cool or a neat idea. OK: fine. What I am interested in are cool ideas that are also effective and make a real difference to people’s lives. So I got involved in the Liberation Technologies Program and I am teaching at the Institute of Design here at Stanford. The focus in my teaching is on whether we can use mobile technology to address human needs and human development—our projects are in informal settlements in Nairobi. We try to discipline the techno-enthusiasts. There are many great ideas around – but which of those are good ideas? Which ideas help us to effectively work on the things that matter?

The European: And those are questions that presumably do not lend themselves to philosophical inquiry?
Cohen: We want to make sure that our technological solutions really engage with people’s lives, so we are using a human design-centered approach. We want to take ideas that have potential and fully realize them. This brings me back to our earlier conversation: I am very hopeful about this project. The high penetration of mobile phones—and the promise of widespread availability of smartphones—create great opportunities. But they will not turn into something good by themselves. Technological progress can be used for the greater good, but it can also be used to for disastrous purposes. So I am hopeful, but not optimistic. We need to engage the world with reflection and determination.

The European: Do you think that there is a danger in relying too much on technological potential – not because technology is ill equipped, but because we are outsourcing our determination and responsibility for change?
Cohen: There is a history of technological determinism that is potentially dangerous. I am very sympathetic to the work of Evgeny Morozov, who has been a very vocal critic of utopian strands of contemporary technological thought. It is very easy to sit down and think that mobile phones or Twitter have empowered political opposition movements and disempowered authoritarian governments. That is complete bullshit. But why do we believe it? Because we are fascinated by technology; it captures our imagination. Well, we have to be a bit more critical than that. It does not mean that we should become Luddites, but it does give us a responsibility to mix some skepticism in with our determination and hopefulness in our engagement with the world.