Sissela Bok

Sissela Bok is a Swedish-born American moral philosopher, professor, and writer who has served as a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University and a senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. As a philosophical writer, she has written on topics in the fields of bioethics, practical ethics, biography, and public affairs. Sissela Bok has also served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize board and on editorial boards for a number of journals, including the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Criminal Justice Ethics, and Common Knowledge.

Gunnar Myrdal, father of Sissela Bok.

Sissela Bok was born Sissela Myrdal on December 2, 1934, in Stockholm, Sweden to parents Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, née Reimer. Her parents were considered intellectual titans in their own right. Both won Nobel Prizes for their social reform work. From her parents, it is believed Sissela Bok inherited her belief in the power of individuals to improve their own circumstances found in her philosophical work.

Gunnar Myrdal would win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 with Freidrich Hayek for their 1944 study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which set the stage for the post-World War II intellectual and political challenge to racial segregation in the American south. He would also work before and after the Second World War on poverty and development.

Alva Myrdal, mother of Sisseal Bok.

Alva Myrdal had a career as a diplomat with a distinguished record of service in the United Nations and at UNESCO, and she worked as the Swedish Ambassador to India. She would also work as a government minister in charge of nuclear disarmament issues for non-aligned Sweden, where she worked to persuade superpowers to disarm and fought for nuclear-free zones in Europe and worked to convince countries to take the initiative and ban nuclear arms. For this work, she would win the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize along with Alfonso Garcia Robles.

Sissela Bok's early education was in Switzerland and France before she would leave for the United States, where she would receive her B.A. in psychology from George Washington University in 1957 and her M.A. in psychology from the same university in 1958. In 1970, she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University.

She also received a series of honorary degrees. These include an honorary Doctor of Laws from Mount Holyoke College in 1985, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from George Washington University in 1986, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Clark University in 1988, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from University Massachusetts in 1991, and Doctor of Humane Letters from Georgetown University in 1992.

Sissela Bok around 1971.

Once graduating from Harvard University with her Ph.D., Sissela Bok received work as a lecturer at Simmons College in Boston, where she worked from 1971 to 1972 before working as a lecturer at Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division Health Sciences and Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1975 to 1982. From 1982 to 1984, she worked as a lecturer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before working as an associate professor of philosophy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1985 to 1989. She was then promoted to a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University from 1989 to 1992, before moving to work as a distinguished fellow at the Harvard Center Population and Development Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1993 until her retirement in 2022.

She held several other positions throughout her career, including as a member of the ethics advisory board for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1977 to 1980; a board of directors position of the Population Council from 1971 to 1977; a position on the board of directors at the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University; a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1989 to 1997; and a fellow at the Hasting Center, including the director of the center from 1976 to 1984, and from 1994 to 1997. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Association.

Sissela Bok's Lying, perhaps her most influential philosophical work.

Sissela Bok has written extensively for philosophical and ethical journals, and she tends to be best known for her books in the field of applied ethics. She has also written in the fields of bioethics, public affairs, and biography. She is known especially for her political philosophy, where her thinking is committed to the fundamental tenets of democracy and approaches the problems of lying and secrecy in democracy in her writing—problems that have only increased since the publication of these books in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time of their publication, these works were considered important works for the new democracies springing out of the dissolution of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. Since then, the books have regained prominence with these same lingering questions in the democracies of Western European and North American countries.

She co-edited, with John Benke, the Dilemmas of Euthanasia, published in 1975, and co-edited Ethics Teaching in Higher Education with Daniel Callaan in 1980. She also co-authored Of Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide in 1998 with Gerald Dworking and R.G. Frey.

As noted above, Sissela Bok's philosophical thinking tends to focus on applied ethics in various fields and topics, such as public affairs and medical ethics. She also shows a strong interest in preserving democracy and strengthening democratic involvement through those applied ethics while showing a belief in the individual's ability to make meaningful change in their own life. She has been seen as one of the first of her generation to apply philosophy to current concerns and is considered by some to be a pioneer of the field of practical ethics or applied moral philosophy.

Her books relating to applied ethics tend to deal with concrete examples of what people should do and why, or more of a practical approach to philosophy. This approach tends to be in contrast to that taken by other moral philosphers—such as Ludwig Wittgenstein—who have held that the task of philosophy is to leave everything as it is, rather than present ideas advancing judgments with moral content.

Particularly in her books Lying and Secrets, Sissela Bok deals with the ethical and moral dilemmas of lying, deception, and, to a lesser extent, violence. In the opinion of some, Bok's definition of lying falls in line with similar definitions offered by St. Augustine and Kant, both of whom stated in their ways that there is no morally acceptable way to lie, with Kant suggesting that lying is in effect an assault on the individual's morality and St. Augustine seeing lying as always impermissible and only allowing that an individual may at times avoid telling the truth. Both St. Augustine and Kant believed lying to save an innocent life is still immoral, but Bok refutes this through a novel a fortriori argument, in which she argues that one should lie or speak honestly depending on the situation and continues in her work to provide a framework on why a person should lie.

Sissela Bok's exact definition of a lie is the following: a lie is a statement, believed by the liar to be false, made to another person with the intention that the person is deceived by the statement. And she asks, as a follow-on to this definition, of what makes lying or deception wrong. Here, she makes the case for her Principle of Veracity, in which she asserts a strong moral presumption against lying. She asks what it would be like to live in a world where truth-telling was not the common practice and finds that the person could not trust anything they were told or they read, and therefore have to find everything out on their own, first-hand. Further, in a world without trust, education would not be possible, as education involves a necessary level of trust. And this is true for various important things a person may want to do in their life.

However, the Principle of Veracity holds that lying is usually but not always wrong and goes on to say that the presumption against lying can be overcome. To do so, an individual needs to understand when a lie can be morally justified, and she asks the question of how this should be decided. To answer the question, Sissela Bok offers a mechanical procedure for lying, which includes two parts: an introspective part and an active part.

• The introspective part looks at if the prospect of lying is a temptation, requiring the person to begin consulting their own conscience, in which the individual has to ask themselves the right questions, such as: are there truthful alternatives to the lie, what is the context of the lie, what goods and bads will be brought about by the lie, what are the arguments for and against the lie, and what are the considerations that bear on the particular lie. Further, this step requires the individual to consider these questions to resolve how to act, and understand how their resolution can impact others or how other reasonable people will feel about the lie.
• The active part, followed after the individual has asked themselves the right questions, requires the individual to seek an audience and to see how that audience responds to their reflections. This audience can include friends, associates, peers, or persons of various allegiances either in terms of the lie or to the individual. The aim of this part is to see if the lie would be considered acceptable to a reasonable public and is meant to serve as a check on the introspective part and any blind spots or emotional ties to the lie.

Sissela Bok considered either of these parts (introspective or active) as inadequate on their own, and that using only one could lead to a perspective in which lying is beneficial, if not okay, and the individual does not develop justifications for lying to allow themselves to lie more naturally.

Sissela Bok's Secrets.

Through other of her works, Teaching Ethics in Higher Education and Secrets, Sissela Bok ponders important ethical questions. A lot of the work Sissela Bok looked at in her contribution to Teaching Ethics in Higher Education looked at the moral conflicts with "whistleblowing," and that exists within government and especially when a government worker tries to report malfeasance and immorality in government operations. In Bok's finding, effective whistleblowing requires an audience in which a rational appeal to justice can be made and requires the political possibility of a concerted public response (which means an open and democratic society is necessary for whistleblowing to occur at all). However, she sees whistleblowing as a violation of loyalty, except it is a loyalty toward colleagues (or the individual's team) against a loyalty to the public interest, or those who may be otherwise injured.

In Secrets, Bok makes a study of the phenomenon of keeping secrets in society, including the secrets of the police, journalists, scientists, politics, academics, and business communities. Secrecy is seen as a personal choice, and as such, Bok analyzes secrecy and morality, secrecy and openness, secrecy and self-deception, confessions, gossip, and secrecy and accountability. And secrecy, in this case, is defined by Bok as "intentional concealment," which she argues is neutral and therefore no moral judgment can be made on the secret as a concept, and only on the secret's impact either in revelation or withholding.

Her later work, A Strategy for Peace, was based on lectures Sissela Bok gave at Harvard University and looked to propose a framework of moral principles as a strategy for peace. In the book, she rejects contemporary calls for a "new ethics," which she defined as a worldwide religious or psychological or political conversion after which peace is intended to be reached as if by itself. Further, she rejects utopian schemes of international harmony, such as those government or world government schemes and programs intended to develop a miraculous transformation of society.

Sissela Bok's Strategy for Peace looks to establish an objective moral value.

Another corner point of Sissela Bok's thinking tends to be her belief in the basic "laws of humanity," also known as the basic human drives for survival, which gives people reason to confront traditional enemies from the larger perspective that survival requires. Or, put another way, the basic principles that drive humans to survive and confront difficulties rather than, as the traditional tenets of survival require, run from those difficulties. These concepts speak the language of religion and morality and tend to stress character and principled conduct, more commonly found in the Christian pacifist tradition, or in the writing and thinking of Tolstoy, Ghandi, and Martin Luther.

This includes the need for competence, insight, and good planning represented by the political realism of thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger, who argued the value of one's own survival overrides other values. Sissela Bok tries to bring together these two traditions of thought, seeing the language of morality and that of strategy are both indispensable in the face of a crisis.

Her perspective is informed by Kant's moral law to act only according to the maxim whereby an individual can at the same time believe their action should become a moral law. This would mean that individuals, communities, or nations would or should only act in a way that respected all humans in their own right and not treat them as a means to an end. This would provide moral constraints on violence, deceit, and breaches of trust, long before any debate about the problems of equality, liberty, justice, or human rights could be had. She leads this to an argument that—because the survival of the individual or the nation is greater than the problems of equality, liberty, justice, or human rights—nuclear war is made untenable as a political strategy as they cannot assure the survival of any nation.

Out of this, Bok is concerned with her minimal moral principles and walks a line between moral absolutes and moral relativism, as she believes that these certain moral principles exist whether nations or individuals follow them, but morals on top of those may be relative morals. The minimal moral values are simple and include the duty of support and loyalty, injunctions against harm and deceit, and procedural justice. And she believes the minimal moral values are attributes of a universal morality, and they are the minimum necessary for achieving objective criteria to assess all social practices and cultures, which further moves toward greater international harmony and, potentially, peace.

Sissela Bok's Exploring Happiness.

Based on her 2010 book, Exploring Happiness, Bok takes notice of how happiness saw a surge in interest in the beginning of the twenty-first century, exemplified by more writing on happiness and the popular movement of "positive psychology" with a renewed interest in the Ancient Greek philosophical conception of eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing, fulfillment, and well-being. This book looks at understanding the good life, how best to be and to live, and whether a sense of meaning, accomplishment, significance, and worthwhileness can be gained and sustained. The aim of her book tends to be twofold: one, it works to strike new findings of natural and social scientists relevant to the nature and attainment of happiness into conversation with thinkers of the past; and two, to address the connection between the quest for happiness and morality, with morality, if it involves happiness at all, seems to involve a wider happiness than the small circle of happiness an individual enjoys with loved ones.

In 1955, Sissela Myrdal married Derek Bok, a professor of law at Harvard from 1958 and would later serve as president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991. They had a daughter, Hilary Bok, who has also worked as a philosopher with an interest in ethics, bioethics, freedom of will, and Kant.