Deep Trust, Political Hope, and the Future of Democracy – Professor Michele Moody-Adams, Astor Visiting Lecturer 2025

Many citizens of once stable democracies have become tolerant of oligarchy and autocracy because they feel betrayed by conventional political elites and disempowered by established political institutions. If we want to produce better leaders and create institutions truly conducive to the flourishing of democracies and their citizens, we must rebuild what I call deep trust in the human capacity for self-governance. Democratic deep trust demands, first, what Lawrence Becker calls noncognitive security regarding the motives of others. But it also requires , second, that most citizens have cognitive self-trust in their capacities to contribute constructively to political debate and decision. Rebuilding deep democratic trust is critical to strengthening hope for the survival of democracy and enabling pursuit of John Dewey’s ideal of democracy as a “freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.”

Michele Moody-Adams is Straus Professor of Politcal Philosophy and Legal Theory at  Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. Before Columbia, Moody-Adams taught at Cornell University, where she was also Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life. She has also taught at Wellesley College, the University of Rochester, and Indiana University, where she served as Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences.

She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and the virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is the author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope (2022), and a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (1997) She is also a co-author on the multi-author work Against Happiness (2023). She is currently working on two book projects: Renewing Democracy and Reclaiming the Idea of the Human. 

Moody-Adams holds a B.A. from Wellesley College, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and she earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University under the supervision of John Rawls. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. 

We strongly encourage in-person attendance. In-person participants will be able to take part in the discussion and Q&A following the lecture and are warmly invited to stay for lunch in the Common Room at the Manor Road Building afterwards.

If you are unable to attend in person, the lecture will also be live-streamed via Zoom. Join the lecture via Zoom. Please note that online attendees will be able to watch but will not be able to ask questions.

This lecture is held in collaboration with the Law in Societies Cluster.