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Gaslighting brings its victims to doubt the sources of their evidence. This article holds that political gaslighting, by leading citizens to hold beliefs disconnected from the available evidence, poses a distinctive threat to democratic politics. But holding “audacious beliefs”—beliefs that are ahead of the evidence—can serve as a core ingredient for democratic movements. This creates a dilemma for citizens, who must choose between two kinds of evidential policies. How can they protect themselves from gaslighting without rendering themselves insusceptible to the mobilizing efforts central to democratic politics? Citizens, then, face a standing challenge: to remain open to the bully pulpit while vigilant against the gaslighter's epistemic bullying.

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Do partisans view members of the other party as having lower moral status? While research shows that partisans view the out-group quite poorly, we show that affective polarization extends to expressing a willingness to sacrifice an out-partisan’s life. We report the first study to consider partisanship in the classic “trolley problem” in which respondents are asked whether they would sacrifice an individual’s life in order to save the life of five individuals. We explore this issue with a nationally representative survey experiment in the United States, inquiring about politicized variants of the trolley problem case. First, we vary the political affiliations of both the group of five (to be saved by turning the trolley) and the single individual (to be sacrificed by turning the trolley). We find that individuals are less willing to sacrifice a co-partisan for the sake of a group of out-partisans. These findings go beyond earlier work by suggesting that partisans not only hold negative attitudes and judgments toward political out-groups but also they will at least signal approval of differing moral treatment. We take stock of how these results bear on normative questions in democratic theory.

When a symbol is a marker of a primary bearer of value and, secondarily, a bearer of value itself, then it has symbolic value. Philosophers have long been suspicious of symbolic values, often regarding them as illusory or irrelevant. I suggest that arguments against symbolic values either overgeneralize or else require premises that can only be supported if the normative significance of some symbolic considerations is presupposed. Humans need symbols to represent identity facts to themselves and others. Symbolic values thereby contribute to individuals’ control over their own agency.

Substitution and satisfaction theories of the atonement connect suffering or punishment to the possibility of forgiveness. I argue that even the most sophisticated versions of these theories cannot explain why the atonement was necessary. Instead, I suggest that the meaning of the atonement is in establishing the authority of God. God's authority, on this view, is analogous to the authority of a parent or friend. Christ's experience changed God to make him more like his children, and thereby to share a relationship of authority with them. On this proposal, the atonement is an act of divine humility.

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