Sahar Heydari Fard: Peace and Hope in Dark Times
[00:00:00] David Staley: you are co-editing a book called Peace and Hope in Dark Times, and I'd like to hear more about this collection.
[00:00:08] Sahar Fard: I'm excited about this collection especially because the home of this collection is a group of philosophers Who started their work in 1960s and seventies. And they were very inspired by the civil rights movements and peace activism and nonviolent protests. And they have generated a big body of work that brings in insights from these movements and combines it with the philosophical literature that existed. And, Involve also the work of intellectuals of the time, like King Gandhi Baldwin and many, many others who are trying to make sense of what is going on or what should happen 
[00:00:56] David Staley: joining me today in the ASCTech Studio is Sahar Heydari Fard, professor of philosophy at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of the social and behavioral sciences, social and political philosophy and ethics. Much of her research is concerned with examining the possibility of sustainable change in complex and dynamic social systems and the moral implications of such a possibility. Welcome to voices, Dr. Fard. 
[00:01:28] Sahar Fard: Thank you so much for having me here. 
[00:01:29] David Staley: Well, and I very much want to dive into your research, but I wanted to begin with something that I saw on your website that really caught my attention. And I think you described this as a way maybe of, describing what your research philosophy is or what your research approach is.
[00:01:43] But you write, contemporary societies are increasingly more complex and dynamic. So many of our ethical or philosophical conceptions that do not take this complexity into account have misleading effects. What's that mean? 
[00:01:57] Sahar Fard: Well the idea is that at some point maybe we could have thought about like all possible scenarios that we could have dealt with in a smaller community of people who has a somewhat stable lifestyle and come up with rules or decisions that can guide our action while we are trying to figure out who has dessert for what kind of like scenario or what kind of claim is a justified claim, but that time has passed. A long time ago that existed. And we got kind of our sense of morality based on that condition. And now we're living in a situation that things change rapidly. People have very different ideas, very different needs, very different attitudes towards what is right or wrong.
[00:02:50] And the complexity, or like the fluidity of our lives also requires us to be able to be more flexible than we used to. And all these things together can create like an environment in which maybe thinking about ethics is more necessary than ever because you cannot just rely on habits and not think about them.
[00:03:12] But at the same time, thinking with the tools that we invented when things were much easier are not helping as much. So I think more than any time we need to think about ethics consciously and try to figure out what are the differences that this new lifestyle has brought to our lives and how we can incorporate it in a way that we can respect other people's needs and desires and claims of, dessert or claims of moral claims in general.
[00:03:43] But at the same time not be bogged down with those older conceptions of what is right and wrong. 
[00:03:50] David Staley: You suggest that maybe our tools of ethics are out of date. What are some of these tools? When we talk about tools of ethics, what are we talking about? 
[00:04:00] Sahar Fard: Well, like, think about the way that we conceptualize something like the golden rule. Right? 
[00:04:06] David Staley: Okay. 
[00:04:06] Sahar Fard: Don't do something that you don't Want it to be done to you, right? 
[00:04:10] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 
[00:04:11] Sahar Fard: At some point maybe that was like a good way to go about figuring out at least roughly what are the right or wrong things to do. But then we are living in situations in which things are way more complicated than they used to be.
[00:04:25] People are occupying very different social positions and things that might have been fine if someone do to me, I won't mind because I have some other sort of like protections or social support or some way of shielding myself from the wrongs that comes from that kind of action might not be applicable to someone else who occupies very different social position.
[00:04:48] Let me give an example. 
[00:04:50] David Staley: Please 
[00:04:50] Sahar Fard: I'm thinking about when I was back home. I'm Iranian and o ccupied, like a very specific maybe social bubble with certain kind of privileges that came maybe with class, with education, with some other forms of social capital.
[00:05:07] And I might have felt the pressure of gender dynamics much less because I had that kind of protection. But then I was taken out of that context and I was put in completely different context in which none of those like credentials that I had was recognized by people around me when I moved to the United States as a grad student.
[00:05:28] Now that was when I started feeling that, whoa, this like gender dynamics really is affecting how I'm conducting myself, how I interact with others and how much it hurts when people like, use that kind of maybe gendered rules of interacting with each other. And they apply it to me. It felt different because I was occupying a different environment in different context, a different social position, the structures of social interactions. So if someone would ask me when I was home whether this kind of behavior is wrong or right, the wrongness or my recognition of whether it's wrong or right was very different from my recognition here when I didn't have other kind of social protections. So the rule of if you don't want something to be done to you, don't do it to others, would not help me to figure out that well, when I was back home, there were people who didn't have the social protections that I had. So things that I thought they're just fine and they're just very lighthearted I don't know, like plays or like jokes that would not hurt anyone seriously.
[00:06:41] They can hurt others who are in a different social position. So if we were in a homogenous environment that everyone occupies the same kind of social position, everyone has the same kind of protection or same kind of resources, this kind of difference wouldn't matter. I could just think that something that hurts me I should not do to others. But when there's a big variation between how people are living their lives and the resources they have, so on and so forth, the effect of the same, the very same action, or the very same joke, or the very same comment would be very, very different. Mm-hmm. and that rule is not helping me to figure out whether it's a bad thing or not.
[00:07:24] So I need to come up with other tools that help me figure how I should interact with others who are occupying different positions in, let's say social networks. And the effects of my actions would hurt them in a way that I cannot figure out just by introspection or relying on my own experiences.
[00:07:48] David Staley: Let's dive into your research. So in 2022, you published "Strategic Injustice, dynamic network formation, and social movements," and perhaps you might begin with a definition of what we mean by strategic injustice. 
[00:08:04] Sahar Fard: Yeah, definitely. So strategic Injustice project was a response to a bigger body of work that relies on game theoretic tools to talk about how norms of fairness, norms of justice can emerge out of people's need for cooperation.
[00:08:22] David Staley: And when you say game theory, what to, what are we referring here? 
[00:08:25] Sahar Fard: Lovely question. So game theory is a theory that tries to formalize how people make decisions not in isolation. So if I'm trying to make a decision about what to have for lunch, and I'm the only person who is making this decision, my decision might be very different from the time that you and I are trying to figure out where we should go for lunch, right?
[00:08:50] We might both want to go somewhere that we can go together and satisfy what we need for lunch. And it might be worth it for me to sacrifice some of my needs. Let's say I'm gluten free, but I really want to have lunch with you and that available options that we can both go have some limited gluten-free options or something like that, it might be worth it for me to sacrifice the need to like find a gluten-free restaurant and just to make sure that I can have lunch with you, right? So this interaction between you and I or this like need for cooperate or coordinate our actions so we can get to something that we can both do and we benefit from having a meal together can change my incentives and my decisions. If I don't pay attention to this interaction and I theorize without these interactions in mind, I might come up with solutions about what people should or shouldn't do or what I should or shouldn't do. But when I take into account that I'm making almost always decisions that are affecting others or others have some way of, I don't know, influencing my decisions well, the theory is gonna be different, and game theory is a way to formalize this kind of interaction, formalize this need for cooperation and help us to get to a better understanding of how we can make decisions together and how we can do it right. 
[00:10:21] David Staley: Hmm. And so strategic injustice in this context refers to? 
[00:10:26] Sahar Fard: So strategic injustice, as I was saying earlier, is a response to a bigger body of work that uses game theory to talk about how that need for cooperation can help us to come up with norms of fairness. So if you and I are going for lunch every day, in a month or week or whatever, after a couple of times if I am sacrificing too much and the like sacrifice that I'm making outweighs the benefit of having a meal with you? Well, I might drop out, right? So you might start thinking that well, like how we can accommodate your need for a gluten-free option so we can maintain our cooperation over time, right? So if even if you had some other incentives to dismiss my need for gluten-free options, now because of our repeated interaction, now you have incentives to say that, look, look, no, no, no. You, should get what you need. So this body of literature is trying to use these kind of dynamics to explain how norms of fairness, norms of cooperation, norms of justice specifically can emerge out of people's random interaction with each other while they're trying to satisfy their coordination game or like needs to coordinate with each other. And it has some implications, for instance, like you can just let people be and they gonna figure things out on their own. So my response to this body of literature, or my biggest contribution to this body of literature is that while true that people can figure things out, but it's not always guaranteed that they will. And when you look at the structures of interactions, meaning that who is interacting with who, how often, what is the social positions that people occupy? For instance, if I am your boss, or I have a lot more power than you do, well, the likelihood of our interaction leading to something that satisfies our needs over time, even over repeated interaction, gonna be very low because I have a lot more bargaining leverage over you, and that can change our dynamic. So without paying attention to these structural or what I call structural elements, you might not get the right answer or you might not be able to explain what actually happens in the society, if you're thinking about modeling, how a whole population comes up with norms of justice.
[00:13:00] But more importantly, I think it's that we manipulate these structures. These structures are not things that we are born in or these structures are not ready made, and we go and occupy them. We build them. Sometimes these structures are very institutional. We decided who should be at what position and what is the process to get there.
[00:13:22] But some other times they're very informal and very flexible, but they're equally important in figuring out who can get what in what condition. And the bargaining leverage that comes up with that can sometimes outweigh the bargaining leverage that people who are in those formal position can have.
[00:13:41] And I think social movements are very good examples of that, that like people who don't have necessarily a lot of bargaining leverage because of their social position, they can form collectives or they can generate like a bigger weight in let's say structures of interaction or structures of interdependence that will help them gain some bargaining leverage and correct the bias that comes out of other structural elements.
[00:14:09] So I would say the biggest contribution of that paper is to say that strategic justice projects dismiss these structural elements that I conceptualize in game theoretic terms as a network of interaction. And doing that or dismissing this network element is an impediment for finding how injustice occurs.
[00:14:34] It's also an impediment for figuring out how we can correct these injustices. So, yay, networks and structures. 
[00:14:43] David Staley: How can we correct injustice? 
[00:14:46] Sahar Fard: Well, it's...
[00:14:47] David Staley: That's a startling finding. 
[00:14:48] Sahar Fard: I know. So I don't think that we can guarantee just stay that we can do these steps and we can get to this just date at the end of the day.
[00:14:59] But I do know that we can make progress. Why do I know that? Because we've made it before. And when you look back at every instance of social moral progress that we look back and we think that, look, you know what, after this era as a society we became a better one. Morally speaking even, we became a better one when we abolished slavery or when we recognized women's right to vote or many, many other kind of progress that happened throughout history and helped us be more proud of who we are or we think that like the ones before were not recognizing the importance of things that we are appreciating today. And every time you look at this kind of process, you see that there's a social movement there. Just think, scan in your mind every single time that you feel like there's a big jump in how we perceive morality and the moral progress we make. If you think that can be a thing, there is a social movement that has supported it, and I think that is a very important starting point because it shows that sometimes like many of these social movements tried to go for some institutional change, some legal change, some policy change.
[00:16:18] The Me Too movement is a good example of that. In 1970s, we went for this like legal interventions that makes things like sexual harassment illegal, but it was not implemented or appreciated the same way as it is today, and if it wasn't because of the Me Too movement, I don't think that it would.
[00:16:40] And many scholars who work on the Me Too movement, even scholars who we are directly involved in changing those policies, admit that that kind of policy change or legal intervention was very necessary. But at the same time, it wasn't sufficient. What has changed is that now people who make claims are taken more seriously than they used to.
[00:17:03] And there are like a lot of studies that show before and after the Me Too movement, the percentage of those kits that people would like report or collect after they've been assaulted, sexually what percentage, percentage of them are actually examined. , what percentage of them are sitting in a hospital shelf for decades and not being used.
[00:17:26] And you can see a stark difference before and after the movement. And I think that is so because you are bringing in a lot of people who, their support for the person who is going and claiming sometime has at some point is very clear. So as a woman, if you are making a claim, you have a lot more confidence that people are gonna support what you're saying. People not gonna use this against you. You have a lot more confidence that if someone treats you wrong other people not gonna shove their action under the rug and ask you to be quiet one way or another. Whether or not that's all we need, that's another conversation, but at least we can say that like the progress or going from a point that you recognize that there's an injustice to a point that things are at least slightly better requires bringing in a lot of people who at the same time are thinking about a problem or they are changing the way that they trust each other or they give each other the benefit of the doubt or they support the cause that one group is advocating for in order to get to a better place.
[00:18:41] David Staley: You mentioned that you are from Iran. 
[00:18:43] Sahar Fard: Mm-hmm. 
[00:18:43] David Staley: Originally. 
[00:18:44] Sahar Fard: Mm-hmm. 
[00:18:45] David Staley: As we're recording this, I wonder, are we witnessing a social movement in Iran today? 
[00:18:52] Sahar Fard: Absolutely. But I'm expecting more questions to come. What made you ask that question whether we are categorizing what's happening in Iran as a social movement?
[00:19:04] I think what define what I'm gonna say next.
[00:19:08] David Staley: Given what you've just said about social movements and especially the role that they play in bringing about change, bringing about progress. Is that what you're witnessing? Is that what maybe what you're hoping 
[00:19:19] Sahar Fard: Yeah. 
[00:19:20] David Staley: In Iran? 
[00:19:21] Sahar Fard: Yeah. So like significant part of my work is about the ethics of participating in social movements.
[00:19:28] And the reason I'm interested in that is that social movements are a very good example of very complex and dynamic behavior in a society because they involve many low impact actors all at once. 
[00:19:42] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 
[00:19:43] Sahar Fard: And trying to achieve some goals but these goals might not match with each other. So there might be a collapse or a clash between what people want.
[00:19:54] Movements involve many people who have very different ideas about like, what is this movement is about? What's their goal, what progress even means to them. But nevertheless, you see that some of them make huge jumps in terms of our understanding of the world or like, they do things that be considered as progress, but at the same time, there are many other structural elements that you need to pay attention to in order to make the right moves.
[00:20:21] And I'm saying that like going back to the ethics part is that like, well, you are participating in a movement and in virtue of your participation, you are affording this movement certain kind of actions or interventions, but it's truly outta your hand what gonna happen next, because there's so many other people who are involved in it too, right?
[00:20:42] So you're kind of like ethically gambling that it can go many different ways. And I think things can be even more complicated when you don't look at movements in a vacuum, right? If you look at a movement in maybe United States in which at the time of stability in which like there is no interference from outside.
[00:21:03] And there are not very many people who they're like I don't know interests are involved. They have skin in the game that are interfering with the process of the movement. The evaluation of the movement would be very different from a context in which you are dealing with a movement in an unstable region, that has a lot of like friction on the border and there are a lot of complications in terms of who is supporting what cause. And I think it is even more salient in that kind of situation when you're thinking about the ethics of participation to think about how many ways things can go wrong or what are the things that are at stake here?
[00:21:50] We had this conversation a couple of weeks ago about movements in even the context of the United States, that like when you're participating you are letting this movement grow. You are letting this movement engage a lot of people to think and rethink together. What is missing? In the way that we are doing things at the moment.
[00:22:10] But at the same time, sometimes the cost can be too high and, movements are sometimes very good at figuring out how to avoid that very high cost. Some other times they're not. And I'm, I'm gonna leave it in the conversation about Iran there that like, I am not sure I. What gonna be the consequence of this movement, whether it gonna be an instance of progress or it gonna be an instance of regress and unstability.
[00:22:42] And I hope that it's the first one, but I am not sure whether that's the case. And I think that's something that we should think about and worry about together. 
[00:22:51] David Staley: And I should note, you and I were both on a panel that's true on US elections just before, just before the last elections. I note that you are co-editing a book called Peace and Hope in Dark Times, and I'd like to hear more about this collection.
[00:23:07] Sahar Fard: Well, I'm excited about this collection especially because the home of this collection is a group of philosophers Who started their work in 1960s and seventies. And they were very inspired by the civil rights movements and peace activism and nonviolent protests. And they have generated a big body of work that brings in insights from these movements and combines it with the philosophical literature that existed.
[00:23:38] And, Involve also the work of. Intellectuals of the time, like King Gandhi Baldwin and many, many others who are trying to make sense of what is going on or what should happen or how we should update our philosophical understanding of the world and see the world through a different lens. And it has had a long tradition and like philosophy of like engaging with these kind of movements that are happening on the ground and get insights from them.
[00:24:08] But also bring insights from our philosophy to see how these two can aid each other. So the volume is a response to the pandemic that happened and the like last maybe 10 years of Various forms of turmoil, like politically political changes presidential elections and what that brought to the political sphere in terms of tension or new forms of polarization.
[00:24:37] And brings in insights from these. Scholars who've been in the field for a long time, but also are specifically interested on different aspects of what is happening and thinking about how the conception of hope that existed or emerged or not emerged, but maybe it has like a new wave of attention in 1960s and seventies or in the context of the civil rights movement, can aid us or help us understand the world today, or what are the things that.
[00:25:09] The specifics of the world today can help us understand what those pictures were missing about hope. I have like a small piece there in that collection that talks about who we should hope with instead of what should we. Be hopeful about because I'm obsessed with structures and networks and interactions and thinking about how we can solve some of our problems sometimes by thinking about who we are, dreaming about a better future with and who we are excluding from our collective thinking, 
[00:25:49] David Staley: why did you decide to become a philosopher?
[00:25:52] As opposed to, I don't know, a historian or a physicist or something. Why are, why are you a philosopher? 
[00:25:57] Sahar Fard: Well lovely question. I started as a physicist. Oh, okay. I did my undergrad in physics, but I think, I took one class. In philosophy of science at the very end of my undergraduate coursework.
[00:26:13] And that was when I realized, huh, what I really loved about physics was the philosophy part. But physicists are giving me the philosophy part, but they make me work too much to get to the philosophy. And if I do philosophy, it's more like eating the dessert all the time. I'm not needing to eat the vegetables.
[00:26:33] But I was also very fascinated with the discussions about explaining various phenomena, physical phenomena, especially complex phenomena or what I call complex and dynamic, or people call complex and dynamic, systems in which you see, a lot of. Low impact actors you can say like a lot of particles live in are interacting with each other.
[00:26:59] And the causal effect that each of them have is very, very minimal to the point that even if you take every one of them, like replace every one of them, you're not gonna see any different in what is going to happen at the end. But nevertheless, they can, endogenously. Generate some order in the way that they are behaving.
[00:27:23] You can see very similar things in social systems too. Mm-hmm. That social movements, some people might think is like an or unorganized collection of people who cannot even tell what are the different ideas that are involved in the very same collective, especially if it's very big or it's as a mass, mass scale.
[00:27:48] But still they can. Generate like some forms of organization along the way. They can come up with certain goals, they can brand themself in certain ways, and magically, somehow they can make progress as we discussed earlier. So I, I would say that my fascination with the complexity and complex system remain constant throughout.
[00:28:12] Uh, I just moved. From a discipline that would only allow me to do calculations or like think about how these complex system behave in physical world and gradually find my way to the social world that I was maybe more excited about or way more excited about. 
[00:28:32] David Staley: What's your next project? Tell us about your next project.
[00:28:35] Sahar Fard: Well, the project that I am working on and will be the core of my future work too is about diversity, the idea of diversity in complex and dynamic systems. So if you agree that society is a complex and dynamic system it is, it shouldn't be surprising that we gonna have. Diversity in perspectives and diversity in deeply held moral and political beliefs and commitments as we can see in the world that like people's, a lot of like ideological clashes exist because for from the very same interactions we talked about earlier, they come up with rules about how they should define fairness or how they should adjudicate.
[00:29:25] Their conflicting interests. And that can be path dependent, can, that can be context dependent. That can be a response to historical environmental or even material, conditions that they have. And then when these groups get mixed together, they might not be able to come up with the, with a quick, way of converging to the same kind of norms or values that helps them cooperate or coordinate their actions.
[00:29:56] And some people think that that is, A limitation for the way, we do things because we want people to consent to some like impartial agreements and use that impartial agreement as the standard for what is right and wrong. And if you agree that people come from very different perspectives, you should also anticipate the possibility of them not being able to come up with.
[00:30:23] An impartial agreement. And the question is like, okay, so what should we do now? Should we suppress one attitude? Should we enforce that? Like, well, someone comes up with something that looks like partial impartial agreement and then. Be quiet everyone else and take them out of the political or like social sphere.
[00:30:42] But some people are saying that like, look convergence happens if you let people figure things out. And one way to think about that is to bring diversity at the center of our conversation. So if we value diversity, if we take into account that the more diverse is our perspectives, the better are our chances to come up with something that works for everyone.
[00:31:07] Because it's a very complex world. There's so many variables that there's no single perspective that can do the whole work for us. So the more people we have who are looking at the problem from different ways, and the more they're talking to each other and cooperating with each other the better we'll be Our chance of coming up with some consensus or some.
[00:31:30] Base to make sure that cooperation happens. And my work is basically inserting the network and structure conversation there too, to see what are the limitations of that, uh, when should we worry about that? This advocacy for diversity might lead to further polarization because it also happens how we can walk back, what social movements can do for us to walk.
[00:31:56] Back from that they polarized environment 
[00:32:01] David Staley: Sahar Heydari, thank you. 
[00:32:03] Sahar Fard: Of course. Thank you 
[00:32:04] Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio.
[00:32:13] More podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.