This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

An additional role the virtues can play involves helping to evaluate (and thereby possibly even guide) conduct. It is here in particular that responsibility or accountability mechanisms often come up short or can at least be said to be naturally limited. Typically, such mechanisms focus on single instances of conduct, divorced from what preceded or inspired them, or then conduct might be such that it can hardly be caught by rules. Some have pleaded strongly for “intelligent accountability,” but the combination of having rules and organs or agents to apply and enforce them as they relate to particular facts makes such an idea well-nigh impossible. In the typical accountability scheme, the act under review usually gets simplified and stylized. This has heuristic benefits in that it simplifies what actually goes on, but these benefits may come at the cost of proper understanding.

Global governance is transacted through the medium of language. This chapter scrutinizes the standing of agents of justice who rely on words: experts, public intellectuals, advocacy groups, and the media, all of which have played major roles in both the Sustainable Development Goals and climate governance. Democracy and expertise exist in tension. There are problem-solving benefits in the integration of lay and expert perspectives that deliberative democratization would enable. The partial perspectives that public intellectuals offer ought to be reconciled in deliberation involving a broad public whose situated knowledges may increase the quality of outcomes. Non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and activists have important roles, but when they implicitly claim to represent categories of people they become democratically problematic – potentially distorting the content of global justice. Advocacy groups (such as Oxfam) have special duties toward the poor they claim to represent, which should embed their representation in deliberative democracy. The role of old and new media alike has been troublesome on matters of global justice, for example in contributing to polarization and organized climate change denial. In the context of the expressive overload that now pervades social media, it is necessary to cultivate deliberative spaces of reflection.