Undergraduate Spotlight: Isaac Lozano

Isaac Lozano is a senior majoring in Political Science and an incoming coterminal master's student in Modern Thought and Literature. He has extensive experience working and interning in magazines and newspapers and has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Nation, Independent, and others. He is interested in Marxist psychoanalysis, Hannah Arendt and the question of evil, the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, relations of domination, Jewish studies, and the history of intellectual thought. He hopes to produce a Marxist psychoanalytic reading of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem for his MA thesis. Outside of school, he enjoys spending time with family, going to the gym, and collecting French vinyls. 

Why did you choose to participate in the Honors Program in Ethics in Society?

My thesis, tentatively titled “Towards A Critique of Social Mobility at Elite Universities,” examines the ethics of social mobility among working-class students at elite universities who go on to work in technology, finance, and consulting. I explore the ethical costs - most notably, the problem of complicity in structural injustice - that accompany working-class students’ career choices and consider under what conditions such students may justify working in particular careers and industries. I conceptualize the unique position of working-class students through the lens of double binds: choice situations in which agents are forced to choose between two ethically fraught options. 

Explain why your topic interests you and share any “aha” moments that you’ve experienced in your research.

I became interested in the ethics of social mobility for two reasons. The first was my observation of the mechanics of career discourse at Stanford and other elite universities. Many students recognize that jobs in technology, finance, and consulting may bring agents into relationships of complicity with structural injustice; this is an ethical problem for all students, yet some students from working-class backgrounds say that the socioeconomic burdens they face position them in a different way to this problem. Because agents within this demographic have competing moral demands, the problem of complicity must account for the complexities of their experiences. I became interested in how to balance such demands and what this means for the ethics of social mobility more generally. The second reason was my personal interest in Marxist psychoanalysis; in particular, I am highly interested in the ways bureaucracy produces particular moral psychologies. Since reading Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, I have formed something of an obsession with the book (though it is not Marxist by any means) and the broad moral questions Arendt posed vis-à-vis the ‘respectable’ middle and upper-middle classes.

How do you define ethics, and how has this approach affected how you examine your thesis topic and your other studies? 

I believe ethics provides me with theoretical grounding for the values I already subscribe to: justice, equality, fairness, honesty, among others. I’m not sure if my thesis will convince anyone to change their life decisions - since its primary aim is to make a normative judgment - but I hope it adds precision and depth to the beliefs and commitments I adhere to. I also hope it may spark further questions about ethics, careerism, and moral responsibility in the world. It was Marx who said that the philosophers, having thus far interpreted the world, must assume the task of changing it; yet Arendt reminds us that to reflect on what we are doing, one must first “stop and think.”