This is a guest post by Nick Boden(University of Bristol)
Teachers and academics face questions relating to freedom each day. How will students engage with the material? How should students be in the learning environment? Are students free to choose tasks or are their choices constrained by the practitioners preferred methods? These questions place instructors at the centre of an ongoing debate about freedom. Is freedom simply the absence of constraints? Or is there more going on?
At first glance, Isaiah Berlin’s (1958) idea of positive and negative freedom offers a useful framework. Positive freedom can be thought of as “the freedom to”. Rules or regulations are put into place to increase the options available to you. Negative freedom is explained as “freedom from” constraints. Barriers are removed and options are available to you. For example, advocates of negative freedom would explain being left alone to make decisions and choices increases freedom. Whereas advocates of positive freedom would welcome things like welfare funding, taking away the “freedom from” taxes, to “provide freedom to” buy basic goods whilst unemployed. A form of collective freedom.
It has always been clear that ChatGPT’s general availability means trouble for higher education. We knew that letting students use it for writing essays would make it difficult if not impossible to assess their effort and progress, and invite cheating. Worse, that it was going to deprive them of learning the laborious art and skill of writing, which is good in itself as well as a necessary instruments to thinking clearly. University years (and perhaps the last few years of high school, although, I worry, only for very few) is the chance to learn one’s writing and thinking. When there is quick costless access to the final product, there is little incentive for students to engage in the process of creating that product themselves; and going through that process is, generally, a lot more valuable than the product itself. Last March, philosopher Troy Jollimore published a lovely essay on this theme. So, we knew that non-regulated developments in artificial intelligence are inimical to this main aim of higher education.
Even more concerning news are now starting to find us: Not only is the use of ChatGPT bad for students because the temptation to rely on it is too hard to withstand, but respectable studies such as a recent one authored by scholars at MIT show that AI has significant negative effects on users’ cognitive abilities. The study indicates that the vast majority of people using Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in order to write, forget the AI-generated content within minutes. Neural connections for the group relying on natural intelligence-only were almost twice as strong as those in the group using LLMs. And regular users who were asked to write without the help of LLMs did worse than those who never used ChatGPT at all. The authors of the study are talking about a “cognitive debt”: the more one relies on AI, the more they lose thinking abilities. All these findings are true of most users; a silver line, perhaps, is that users with very strong cognitive capacities displayed higher neural connection when using LLMs.
In short, LLMs are here to stay, at least until proper regulation – which is not yet on the horizon – kicks in; if this study is right, they can give valuable support to the more accomplished scholars (perhaps at various stages of their career) while harming everybody else. Part of the university’s job is to develop the latter group’s cognitive abilities; encouraging students to use LLMs appears, in light of these considerations, a kind of malpractice. And assigning at home essays is, in practice, encouragement.
We humans are wired to hope. The very act of planning is fueled by hope that tomorrow will come, that the object of our hope is achievable, and that we will have the resolve to take concrete actions towards it.
Such a personal emotion might seem to have little place in the law. After all, hope is not something a court can simply grant. And yet, recent developments in European human rights law have begun to suggest that the law might have a role in fostering, or even protecting, the fragile social conditions that make hope possible. Specifically, European human rights law has begun to develop the idea that there may be a legal right to hope in the context of prison sentences, and particularly life sentences.[1] This refers to the notion that sentences must carry ‘a prospect of release and possibility of review’.[2] It raises a host of interesting questions – many of which were investigated at a recent LSE Law working paper series which we participated in.
Our view, shared by many contributors to that series, is that there should be a larger place for hope in the law. Hope is a crucial part of a human life. It is best understood as the emotional and cognitive counterpart to planning: it galvanizes our resolve and motivates us to act as if the hoped-for outcome were possible—even in the face of setbacks.[3] When you truly hope to finish that work project, learn to make sourdough, or develop a better relationship with a loved one, you take steps to make that happen – with an invested heart – despite the challenges that those tasks might give rise to.
No Explicit Right to Hope
Yet, the relationship between hope and the law is not a simple one because we cannot have an explicit right to hope. Rights are entitlements to treatment or resources. Yet, hope is neither a treatment nor a resource that anyone could supply; it is a subjective sense of positivity that a person feels. We can provide a person with adequate conditions in which to experience hope, but completing the puzzle requires that person to take up what is available to them. This introduces a key legal tension: while rights can secure external goods, hope is partly internal and volitional.
Nonetheless, hope is well-connected to other things that people can provide. Hope is a highly social enterprise. In hard times, our hopes are bolstered by our friends, family, and even memories of love and care. We also draw strength from the wider social world: in music, art, sport, and the sense of being seen and valued in community. Furthermore, the very things we hope for tend to be highly social.[4] Our hopes often revolve around connection—to love and be loved, to be accepted, valued, and needed.[5] In prison, hope might mean seeing family again, hugging our kids, being forgiven, starting over, or finding someone who accepts us despite our criminal record. Staying connected to those who believe in us is often key to change.
These thoughts speak in favour of a broader idea: that to secure hope, we ought not to focus on hope per se, but the conditions that allow hope to thrive in the first place.
What makes hope possible
Although we cannot have a right to hope, we can have rights to the things that make hope possible. Our capacity to hope rests on our sense of social recognition, inclusion, and acceptance. Hope and other forms of positivity such as joy, gratitude, and compassion, are cultivated in childhood as parts of a healthy emotional profile that we cannot develop without adequate nurturing from caregivers.[6] Moreover, we cannot sustain a healthy emotional profile over the course of our lives without adequate access to social inclusion.[7] To be able to hope, we have to feel that there is something worth hoping for – and so we have to feel that we are worthy of love and loving, and of basic forms of social attention and acceptance from others.
As a growing field of literature in philosophy is beginning to show,[8] these are things to which we can and should have a right. We should have rights to opportunities to form social bonds, to form lasting connections over time, to participate in the life of the community, and to avoid being exposed to the many risks that arise from isolation, ostracism, and marginalisation.[9] The banner statistic is that isolation and loneliness are worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.[10] A 2023 US National Advisory on Social Connection summarised recent findings that unwanted isolation and loneliness not only correlate with physical health morbidities, but also correlate with more overtly social and emotional ills such as anxiety, despondence, depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation and behaviour.[11]
So, although there may be no right to hope, there is a place for hope in the law: the law can foster and protect the conditions under which hope can survive and – ideally – thrive in community with others. Given the significance of the relationship between hope and sociality, the state must attend to the social pre-conditions for hope.
How to nurture hope
In the context of punishment, that means several practical things. Policies must focus on long-term, preventative measures. This begins in childhood, with stable environments, nurturing relationships, education, and social integration. For those in prison—especially serving life sentences—maintaining social connections is crucial, both with loved ones and within the prison community, requiring adequate visitation, social opportunities, and protection from harm. Mental health support is also essential to help individuals retain a sense of self-worth, which underpins their ability to hope. Finally, upon release, individuals must be met with strong social and material support to counter isolation and marginalisation, and to foster a renewed sense of belonging that can sustain hope and reduce recidivism.
Hope cannot be granted like a legal verdict. But it can be nurtured – through careful public policy, social connection, and the quiet recognition that no one is beyond the reach of redemption.
[1] See Sarah Trotter ‘Hope’s Relations: A Theory of the “Right to Hope” in European Human Rights Law’ (2022) 22 Human Rights Law Review.
[2] Vinter and Others v UK Applications Nos 66069/09 et al., Merits and Just Satisfaction (2013), para 12.
[3] See Victoria McGeer & Philip Pettit, ‘The self-regulating mind’ (2002), Language & Communication, 22(3), 281-299; Philip Pettit, P., ‘Hope and its place in mind’ (2004), The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 592(1), 152-165.
[4] Our claim here is not that the object of hope is always social in nature.
[5] Kimberley Brownlee, Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford University Press 2020); Ariel Gordy, Helen Han Wei Luo, Margo Sidline & Kimberley Brownlee, ‘The missing measure of loneliness: A case for including neededness in loneliness scales’ (2021) International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(1).
[6] S. Matthew Liao, The Right to be Loved (Oxford University Press 2015).
[7] Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why our brains are wired to connect (Oxford University Press 2013), ch. 1.; Vivek Murthy, Office of the US Surgeon General, ‘Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The US Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community’ (2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.
[8] See e.g. Kimberley Brownlee (ed.), David Jenkins (ed.) & Adam Neal (ed.), Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[10] Julianne Holt-Lunstad, ‘The Potential Public Health Relevance of Social Isolation and Loneliness: Prevalence, Epidemiology, and Risk Factors’ (2017), Public Policy and Aging Report 27, no. 4: 127–130.
[11] Murthy, ‘Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation’.
Over the last few weeks, I have been marking exams for the economic ethics course I taught this year. The experience has not been particularly joyful. Admittedly, marking rarely is, but it gets worse when one develops a feeling of uselessness and failure, as I experienced on this occasion.
The source of this feeling was the realization of the grip of inegalitarian ideologies on my students. Since most of them were studying business, I should maybe have expected it, but I naïvely hoped that their ethics course might have led them to somewhat question their inegalitarian beliefs. And perhaps it has. It would take a combination of anonymous ex-ante and ex-post opinion surveys to measure it.
Whether it would be ethical to conduct such a survey is an interesting question (your opinions are welcome), but not the one I wanted to discuss in this post. The one I am concerned with is whether it would be acceptable, from an ethics of teaching perspective, to engage more straightforwardly in ideology-critique in my course, in the future.
In this post, Viviana Ponce de León Solís discusses her article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on how nudging interventions can have uneven effects on low-income individuals, potentially worsening inequalities.
Nudges can be powerful tools for influencing behavior, but their impact on vulnerable populations—especially low-socioeconomic status groups (SES)—remains a topic of debate. Research reveals three possible outcomes: these groups may respond more strongly, less strongly, or similarly to nudges compared to the general population. While the type of nudge—cognitive, affective, or behavioral—matters, the real key to success lies in the intervention’s design and its ability to address the unique barriers faced by the target audience. Without careful consideration, “one-size-fits-all” nudges risk deepening inequalities or stigmatizing vulnerable communities.
Some people center their life on work. They identify with their job and derive most of their life’s meaning from it. The writer Derek Thompson coined the term ‘workism’ to describe this phenomenon. Other people center their life on family (think of a stay-at-home parent who finds raising children deeply meaningful), a hobby, or something else entirely. Finally, some people don’t center their life on any single thing. Instead, they try to live a well-rounded life, drawing meaning and identity from a plurality of sources.
Are each of these lifestyles reasonable ways to live a life, or are some of them mistakes that lead to less fulfilling lives? In recent years, workism has come under fire and been dismissed as an especially poor life choice. In my article ‘What is wrong with workism?’ I challenge that view and defend workism as a viable way to live a good life. In case you are wondering, I am not a workist myself—I find meaning from a plurality of sources. Still, from a philosophical perspective, I don’t see what’s wrong with some people choosing to center their lives on work.
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Sara van Goozen and Toby Buckle. Toby Buckle runs the popular Political Philosophy Podcast. He has a BA in PPE from Oxford University and an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of York. He spent many years working with political and advocacy groups in the United States, such as Human Rights Campaign, Environment America, Working Families Party and Amnesty International. He started his podcast around seven years ago, and has interviewed academics including Elizabeth Anderson, Orlando Patterson, Phillip Pettit, and Cecile Fabre, as well as politicians (such as Senator Sherrod Brown, or Civil Rights Commission Chair, Mary Francis Berry), commentators (such as Ian Dunt) and public figures (such as Derek Guy AKA Menswear Guy). He is the editor of What is Freedom? Conversations with Historians, Philosophers, and Activists (Oxford University Press, 2021). He writes regularly for Liberal Currents. In this interview, we discuss running a podcast, the enduring relevance of historical philosophers, and what young academics can do to build a public profile.
According to the UK government, any child who misses more than 10% of school is “persistently absent” from school. Alarming news headlines inform us that this “persistent absence” is now at record rates of 20%. As a parent and a social philosopher interested in the topics of illness and disability, I find the guidance more worrying than these numbers.
Schools in the UK usually provide 190 days of instruction a year. Missing 10% or 19 days means missing just under 4 weeks of school. We have to remember, however, that these 190 days are not distributed randomly over the year. During the summer, when the number of contagious illnesses is lowest, there is a long break from school. The guidance does not differentiate according to age either. Schooling is compulsory between the ages of 5 and 18, which means children usually start school at age 4. While a 14 year old might be able to go to school with even a relatively bad cold, a 4 year old (or 7 year old) will not be able to do so. Small children delight in close proximity to each other – hence they are likely to pick up both head lice and viral illnesses more quickly from each other too than adults would. They are also likely to do things which result in injuries like broken bones. As a result they are likely to be ill more often. Family size also matters. According to a study conducted in 2009, families with one child had a respiratory viral infection in the household about a third of the time, but this rocketed to more than half the time for families with two or more children. By contrast, families with only adults had viral infections in the household only 7% of the time. Children are simply ill a lot. It is easy for them to miss two weeks of school between September and February, when schools start internal procedures to tackle “pesistent absence” half-way through the school year.
Carbon taxes represent a key part of humanity’s current strategy to avoid global warming above 2 degrees Celsius. They work by making carbon-intensive activities more expensive, thus encouraging individuals to reduce these activities. Given the existential threat climate change poses to our societies, one would hope that such a key policy tool was both effective and enjoyed broad public support. Neither of these things are true today. Why is that and what needs to change?
The carbon tax is a so-called steering tax. Its goal is to change people’s behaviour, not to raise revenue for the government. The current version of the carbon tax in place in most countries does not change people’s behaviour as effectively as it could and should. To see why, consider two frequently ignored facts.
First, rich people emit considerably more than the average person. Studies on socioenvironmental inequality estimate that the top 10% of emitters are responsible for about 50% of individual carbon emissions. Think of private jets, which emit up to 4.5 tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per hour, that is three times as much as the average human on the planet can emit per year if we want to meet our climate targets. Second, someone who falls in this category will usually not even bat an eye at a carbon price of, say, 100 Euros per tCO2e, let alone change their consumption habits. For context, the price of carbon in the European Union Emissions Trading System has oscillated around 80 Euros per tCO2e over the last three years.
Justice Everywhere is pleased to share the following call for papers:
The Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) at UCL and the Teaching Political Theory Network (TPTN) at the University of York are co-organising a one-day workshop focussed on ethical and epistemological issues in the teaching of politics.
Time: Friday, 6 June 2025
Location: University College, London
The teaching of politics is taken to include the teaching of all relevant sub-disciplines (e.g., political science, international relations, political theory) as well as activities that inform and support it (e.g., related pastoral and administrative activities).
The aim of the workshop is to provide a platform for educators and researchers to critically explore contemporary philosophical issues, scholarly debates, and innovative pedagogical approaches related to the central theme.
We welcome presentations, case studies, papers, and panel proposals that might address, but are not restricted to, the ethical and/or epistemological dimensions of:
Please send your expression of interest and a short abstract of no more than 100 words to polsci.cpp@ucl.ac.uk by the end of Wednesday 9th April2025.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
About us
This blog explores issues of justice, morality, and ethics in all areas of public, political, social, economic, and personal life. It is run by a cooperative of political theorists and philosophers and in collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
