50 years ago today, Noam Chomsky's famous essay in protest of the Vietnam War, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," was published inThe New York Review of Books. The essay makes the case that intellectuals ought to use their privileged positions and access to information to speak truth to power and to help the public distinguish truth from lie. Truth telling is no easy task for Chomsky, as one has to understand the intellectual's "role in the creation and analysis of ideology," and "[i]f it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective." But it is worth keeping in mind that the intellectual for Chomsky is not an expert to whom all opinion should be deferred; after all, Chomsky understood this undeserved trust in "experts" to be one of the primary reasons the Vietnam War had been able to survive on lies for as long as it did. Rather, the intellectual is "expose the lies of government, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions."

Coincidentally,a lengthy interview与当代有影响力的哲学家玛莎·努斯鲍姆(Martha Nussbaum)的合作也刚刚出版，她在书中也讨论了公共知识分子的责任，以及她是如何受到约翰·罗尔斯(John Rawls)的鼓励而公开工作的。努斯鲍姆回忆道:“有一天午餐时，(罗尔斯)敦促我把一部分精力用于为更广泛的公众写作和演讲:他说，如果你能做到这一点，你就有道德义务去做。”但纳斯鲍姆实际上认为，一个人如果不适合从事公共工作，就没有必要把自己的知识输出投入到公共工作中去。毕竟，一个人可以通过许多方式为公众利益做出贡献，而这些方式可能并不总是显而易见的。在她的例子中，物理哲学家不会像政治哲学家那样有直接的实际应用，但他们的工作仍然很重要。用努斯鲍姆的话说，“我确实认为每个人都应该以某种方式为人类的未来做出一些贡献，但有很多方法可以做到这一点:政治参与、捐款、教学、抚养孩子。你不需要通过写作来做到这一点。"

These two opinions aren't entirely at odds, but it is worth asking: in times like these, in which truth and lies seem just as indistinguishable as they were when Chomsky first wrote his piece, do all our intellectuals have a responsibility, a duty to devote their efforts toward directly speaking truth to power and mobilizing for social justice? Or are some exempt from this duty to wholeheartedly pursue their interests that may or may not lead to direct public benefit?