Engaging with a Forked Up Society: “The Good Place” vs “Civil Disobedience”

By Ben Colon-Emeric, TD '22. Ben is majoring in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.

There’s a lot of talk around the Yale campus about being “complicit.” The idea is that if you put money into a system that is participating in immoral actions, you are engaging in immoral actions. The protests about Yale divesting its endowment from various investment groups, for example, often use this language of being “complicit.” The problem this raises in a deeply interconnected society is where to draw the line: are we complicit in immorality simply by participating in society?