Juan Carlos Mora is a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at George Washington University, pursuing an M.A. in Philosophy and Social Policy. He obtained a B.A. in Philosophy, and his scholarship focuses on philosophy of law, political philosophy, critical theory, constitutional law, administrative law, and epistemology. He has worked in the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and a top-5 lobbying firm in Washington, D.C.
What excites you about philosophy?
Theodor Adorno once famously noted in Minima Moralia that wrong life cannot be lived rightly. At the intersection of philosophy, law, and policy, what excites me is not only discovering the “right life” but also understanding how to “live less wrongly.” Philosophy has challenged me more fundamentally than I could have ever imagined. I remember once leaving a course meeting and feeling that my hues of perception had changed. I no longer saw a closed world in which some aspects of daily life, as a matter of “practicality,” just were as they were. Mixed with gloom and hope, I saw for the first time a world full of unrealized potential. To me, philosophy is a means of identifying the difference between the world and its potential; law and policy are the means by which the difference is made less stark. Or, in other words, the means by which life is lived less wrongly.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
I am a first-generation student who grew up speaking only Spanish, so my younger self would have called you a liar if you told me I would one day publish something I wrote. But somehow, I made it, and that is an accomplishment I cherish most deeply. But it’s not an accomplishment I can credit to myself alone. I was raised by parents who, without any sign of equivocation throughout my entire life, always placed education front-and-center. In addition to my parents’ inexperience with accessing education, their commitment to my education was also made unlikely by virtue of their incentive to get me working as early as they could. We were a family of five that quickly grew to 8 and then 9, and so every dime counted. But they didn’t. They didn’t just teach me the value of education; they paid the costs. All of this is to say that the paper I published is a direct tribute to my parents’ uncompromising love. Published in the George Washington University Undergraduate Review, under the mentorship of Associate Provost and Professor Jeffrey Brand, I wrote The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Problem: A Blockchain-based Proposal for Distributed Judicial Selection. The paper offers the conceptual principles underlying blockchain technology as a heuristic tool for explaining the legitimacy problems of the American judicial selection process. This paper also argues for a prescriptive framework grounded in the principles of decentralization and transparency and integrates existing proposals from the judicial selection literature into a unified proposal termed Distributed Judicial Selection.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
After taking a course on the Frankfurt School, where we read everything from Löwenthal and Guterman’s psychoanalytic exposition of fascism to Adorno’s negative dialectics, I wrote a paper on the critical-utopian function of American disco music and disco culture in the 1970s. Drawing on José Esteban Muños’ commanding interpretation of Ernst Bloch, as well as a rich historical record, I argued that disco served as an emancipatory negation of heteronormative standards of time, sexuality, and self-expression for queer people in the 1970s, though particularly for cis gay men. Upon observing that we are today experiencing a burgeoning resurgence of disco—as epitomized by Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s tribute to Donna Summers, titled “Summer Renaissance”—I also argued that 21st-century disco must reorient its emancipatory teleology toward trans and non-binary people, who were left out of earlier political gains and also presently experience disparate political oppression. My deep appreciation for these 20th-century German philosophers derived not only from their saliency in the 21st century, but also for their ability to push my writing into an unexplored expanse.
What are you working on right now?
I am currently working on understanding the philosophical gap between two administrative law decisions by the United States Supreme Court and developing a philosophical course of action to close the gap: Motor Vehicles Mfrs. Ass’n of U.S., Inc. v. State Farm Mutual Auto. Insurance Co., 463 U.S. 29 (1983), and FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc., 556 U.S. 502 (2009). Both cases are required reading for understanding the high court’s jurisprudence with respect to its own standard of review in cases where agencies decide to rescind regulations which had previously undergone notice-and-comment rulemaking. Since agencies are prohibited from engaging in “arbitrary and capricious,” i.e., unreasonable, rulemaking, its rulemaking decisions must have a logical nexus to the facts it considers during its notice-and-comment period. See, e.g., 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A); Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, Inc. v. Volpe, 401 U.S. 402 (1971); Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp v. LTV Corp, 496 U.S. (1990). In the State Farm case, the Supreme Court held that a regulation’s rescission must be analogously reasoned as the initial decision to enact it. However, in the Fox case, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority upheld an agency’s decision to rescind a regulation, despite that the agency did not adequately address the key considerations that led to the regulation’s enactment, i.e., it may have acted arbitrarily and capriciously. Some explanations of this phenomenon rely on Justice Rehnquist’s concurring opinion in the State Farm case, where he argued that change in presidential administration is sufficient to lend credence to an agency’s rescission decision. Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia’s majority seem to commit themselves to a form of doxastic permissivism, where the same body of evidence considered by an agency makes adopting contradictory attitudes equally rational. This permissive gap left by the Supreme Court’s cases is made wider by Justice Scalia’s requirement that an agency, inter alia, need only believe their attitude to be better. In addition to better understanding the epistemological framing of these cases, I am interested in incorporating recent scholarship on agnosticism, i.e., suspension of belief in cases where evidence is equally balanced or insufficient to overturn a prior belief. This research is made urgent by advances in the deregulation of the national government in areas that provide important protections and benefits.
What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy by Jürgen Habermas
Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy by Anthony M. Annett
The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-first Century by Peniel E. Joseph
If you could only use one condiment for the rest of your life, which condiment would you pick and why?
Less a matter of convenience and more of necessity, I would need Tapatio. It’s versatile, balanced, accessible. It’s everything you want in a condiment. It makes even the most disappointing foods slightly less disappointing.
What’s your favorite quote?
Sometimes in the swim against the current and the race for accolades, it’s easy to forget the importance of grace and love. Lauryn Hill’s “Tell Him” provides me the best reminder: “I may have wisdom and knowledge on Earth / But if I speak wrong then what is it worth?”
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
