Philosophers being punished for acting on their convictions is not new. It goes back at least to Socrates, who was executed in Athens for what he understood as a moral duty to question and examine, and to Hypatia, who was killed in Alexandria amid political and religious conflict. These cases are often treated as historical anomalies, but they point to a recurring tension: philosophy, when lived rather than merely discussed, can come into direct conflict with power.

What changed for me was the Parr Center for Ethics incident. After that, I became disillusioned with philosophy as it is often practiced institutionally. My focus shifted from studying ethics to studying power and security—less out of theoretical interest and more out of a perceived need for self-protection. I came to see a gap between ethical discourse and ethical action: in many contexts, ethics seemed to function as a professional activity oriented toward publication, status, or abstraction, rather than as a guide to conduct under real conditions of risk.

What I observed—rightly or wrongly—was that acting on one’s ethical commitments in the world is often treated as naïve or even irrational, especially when it conflicts with institutional authority or material incentives. In that sense, the problem is not simply whether someone like Jonathan Caravello is right or wrong in a particular instance, but whether philosophy as a practice equips people to bear the consequences of acting on their reasoning.

I am now returning to philosophy with a different set of questions:
• How are philosophy, power, and security structurally related?
• What conditions are required for ethical reasoning to have practical force, rather than remaining purely discursive?
• How can the gap between learning ethics and enacting it be narrowed?

One way to frame the issue is this: ethical reasoning presupposes a space in which arguments, rather than coercion, determine outcomes. But that space is not self-sustaining—it depends on social, legal, and material conditions that protect participants from retaliation. Without such conditions, those who act on principle are exposed to asymmetric risk, while those who rely on power face fewer constraints.

If that diagnosis is even partly correct, then the question is not only how individuals should act, but what kinds of institutions and norms are needed to make ethical action viable. What would it take to create conditions in which people are compelled to reason together, rather than able to default to force? And what forms of protection—legal, professional, or collective—would be necessary for philosophers, and others, to act on their convictions without facing disproportionate personal risk?

Until those questions are addressed, the distance between ethical theory and ethical practice is likely to remain—and cases like this will continue to feel less like exceptions and more like reminders of an unresolved structural problem.