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While individual cases of suicide can frequently generate widespread feelings of loss and grief, a collective sense of political responsibility for the enduring and differential conditions of suicidality remains missing today. The aim of this article is to develop the broad outlines of a political approach to suicide as a matter of social justice. In contrast to the dominant psychological and psychiatric approaches to the study and prevention of suicide, this article advances the thesis that suicide is a solitary “answer” to a set of collective and institutional questions about the conditions of a dignified human existence that we (i.e., most political societies) have not confronted in a meaningful or sustained way. I argue that a political account of suicide should ultimately point in the direction of a new right to life movement, the aim of which is to secure the conditions of human dignity for all persons.

Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown a heightened interest in the role that various virtues might play in promoting the good/free society. Yet within this recent "return" to the virtues, one quality that has been almost entirely left out of the discussion is humility. In this essay, I critically address this lacuna and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility. After considering a range of moral and political objections to the concept of humility, I provide an account that seeks to address some of these long-standing difficulties while arguing that the idea of humility, recuperated as an ethos of civic attentiveness, may be one of the most important virtues for late-modern societies marked by ethical and cultural pluralism.

The behavioral sciences are playing an increasingly important role in the design and implementation of public policy worldwide. While there have been several important critiques of the latest policy revolution linking the behavioral sciences and the state in the pursuit of human behavioral change, few scholars have investigated the potential costs of “nudging” for democratic citizenship and the deliberative capacities upon which democratic self-governance relies. A central purpose here is to consider the possible civic consequences of nudging within the pursuit of otherwise desirable social outcomes (like improved public health, energy conservation, or higher rates of financial saving). Through a critical investigation of the governing philosophy of the “nudging state” and drawing on the policy feedback literature, I argue that the recent behavioral turn in public policy risks overlooking or bypassing the personal capacities and institutional conditions necessary for the meaningful exercise of democratic citizenship. Evidence from the empirical assessment of deliberative democracy shows how liberal societies can fruitfully address bounded rationality while facilitating civic virtues like public practical reason without violating liberty or constraining pluralism.

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