a blog about philosophy in public affairs

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Feminism and the top end of the payscale

Class is a deep dividing line in feminism for two, mutually compatible, reasons: One is about the strategic use of limited time and energy in the feminist movement. The interests of poor and working-class women often diverge from the interests of the more privileged, hence the need to set priorities. This is what my previous post was about.

But the more important reason – captured these days by the agenda of the Feminism for the 99% movement – is that the problems of women who make it to the top are parasitic on a structure of the labour market and schedule of rewards that should not exist in the first place. This second complaint against lean-in feminism (sometimes and, I think, mistakenly, identified as “liberal feminism”) is not merely about misplaced priorities, but about identifying feminism with the gender cosmetisation of deeply unjust existing arrangements. The worry with the upper class feminism is, as Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser put it, that “[i]ts real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top.”

Structural change, individual change, and four-story walkups

In this post, Alex Madva discusses his recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the importance of an empirically-grounded approach to analysis and remediation of social injustice.


Should we “focus on structuring the social context, rather than changing the beliefs or values of individuals?”

No: Debates about the priority of social-structural versus individual change are confused, or so I never tire of arguing (see, e.g., these papers, and other contributions to this issue). The important questions are which kinds of individual and structural changes to pursue, and how best to think about individuals and structures in tandem. Which changes in individuals are most conducive to bringing about large and durable structural reforms? And vice versa? In “Integration, Community, and the Medical Model of Social Injustice,” I call for epistemic humility in these conversations. Before confidently asserting what’s required, we need to spend more time heeding, and producing, rigorous evidence.

Attaching strings now is key to shaping post-Covid-19 future

Let’s make the post-pandemic world socially and environmentally more sustainable – a better place.

This sentiment is common these days among both politicians and academics. At the same time, many crisis management decisions by governments, central banks, and other public institutions make an appeal to the idea that “there is no alternative” (TINA) when it comes to the policies we use in the immediate term to prop up the economic and financial system.

The disconnect between the laudable long-term intentions for change and what are perceived as short-term constraints is not just disconcerting, it is also potentially harmful. It ignores important lessons from recent crises, notably the 2008 financial crisis: short-term crisis management decisions can have significant, sometimes unintended, side-effects that undermine fundamental social policy goals.

Explaining Injustice: A Symposium on Bias in Context

In this post, Erin Beeghly and Jules Holroyd introduce a recent symposium they edited in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the role of biases in oppression and injustice.


For over a century, activists and theorists have decried the role of prejudice and stereotyping in creating—and sustaining—group oppression. In an 1892 editorial, Ida B. Wells argued that white lynch mobs and their defenders seemed to believe that all black folks were “criminal, ignorant, and bestial.” In liberation movements of the mid-to-late 20th century, feminists and anti-colonial theorists likewise critiqued stereotyping and prejudice as part of their push for social equality and political self-determination. “My true wish,” writes Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, “is to get my brother, black or white, to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension.” “Shaking off the dust” requires, in part, freeing one’s heart and mind from biases.

But how easy is it to do this, and how significant are these personal, psychological transformations to ending injustices? In the 1990s and early 2000s, psychologists increasingly began to argue that social biases had gone “underground” in our psychologies, and were therefore both widespread and particularly difficult to root out. They referred to these biases as “implicit.” Implicit bias was posited as an important cause of discrimination and exclusion, capable of explaining why social inequality could persist in the absence of ill will and explicit prejudice. Yet many objections exist to explaining injustice via prejudicial attitudes and implicit bias in particular. Some worry that attention to the role of psychological factors obscures the real causes of injustice, which are structural in nature. Others argue that implicit bias theorists downplay the existence of explicit racism, sexism, and homophobia in the 21st century. Yet others contend that the scientific quality of the research is questionable and not sufficiently predictive of real-world behaviour.

In 2016 and 2017, we—along with Alex Madva—hosted a series of four workshops to scrutinize these critiques, and explore how one might understand the role of psychology in group oppression. This post provides a brief snapshot into the conference series, as well as the symposium that emerged out of it. We outline some of the symposium’s main themes and connect these with the three articles featured in it, as we do in our introduction to the symposium.

Distributing the Deliberative Forum

There is an argument, appearing in both the higher and lower tiers of public debate, that goes something like this:

You can raise as many arguments as you want about solving Problem A (say, adoption rights for gay couples), but what you’re missing is that we should be dealing instead with the more prominent Problem B (say, how the budget is being balanced). It is there that we need to place our focus.

A first-semester philosophy student will easily recognize the red herring fallacy here. The proponent of the argument is not addressing the points presumably raised about how Problem A should be solved, but sidesteps into a different subject altogether. Some further claims might be made by the proponent that Problem A is being used as a smoke screen for Problem B, and that to deal with Problem A itself indicates a certain susceptibility of those involved to being distracted by ‘the powers that be’.

In an important sense, the philosopher’s annoyance is well warranted. The particularities of Problem B hardly bear any relevance to Problem A. But in at least some cases, I want to suggest that the ‘red herring’ could stand for a legitimate concern about how we are distributing our deliberative forum. The claim raised might not be an attempt to solve Problem A, but that another problem, Problem B, requires attention and is being overlooked without justification.

Left Unity: An Interview with Marius Ostrowski

Fay Niker recently talked with Marius Ostrowski about his new book Left Unity: Manifesto for a Progressive Alliance

I want to make the case for why the left urgently needs to snap out of its current mindset, stay abreast of the deep changes taking place in society, and find new ways to counteract its fragmentation.

Philosophers’ Rundown on the Coronavirus Crisis

The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised several ethical and political questions. In this special edition, Aveek Bhattacharya and Fay Niker have collected brief thoughts from Justice Everywhere authors on 9 pressing questions.

Topics include: the feasibility of social justice, UBI, imagining a just society, economic precarity, education, climate change, internet access, deciding under uncertainty, and what counts as (un)acceptable risk.   

Supply Chains, Disaster-Mitigation, and State Manufacturing

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed serious vulnerabilities in healthcare supply chains in many countries, including the UK. Shortages in protective equipment are leading to staffing problems in many hospitals. If these problems aren’t soon resolved they could jeopardise the operations of the entire health system. The same threat looms over the care sector. And even if the NHS remains well-enough staffed to sustain its operations, ventilator shortages may mean that critically ill patients don’t have access to essential life-saving treatments at the peak of the pandemic. And stocks of the chemical supplies needed in order to produce test kits, and vaccines – if and when one is viable – are running short as well.

Countries should try to take proactive measures to pre-emptively mitigate the harm done by future pandemics by disaster-proofing their healthcare supply chains. The probability of another pandemic in the foreseeable future that’s as bad as or worse than COVID-19 may be small. But the probability-weighted downsides of this possible outcome are great enough that they warrant action in strengthening supply chains. This is just one action that’s warranted among others. The question I want to home in on here is how we can disaster-proof supply chains without it being so expensive as to (a) carry prohibitive op-portunity costs, or (b) become politically untenable once the galvanised mood around COVID-19 subsides.

Emergency Ethics for a World Broken by Coronavirus

The title might seem melodramatic even though we are all on the edge right now. Humanity has survived many epidemics, two world wars, natural and technical disasters such as tsunamis or reactors exploding. The costs have been high though, and ethics has often shied away from providing answers for these tough times. In this post, I will argue that philosophers must be prepared to undertake a form of non-ideal emergency ethics to be able to help with the pressing moral questions, for instance in the medical sector.

How will the coronavirus affect us – as individuals and as a society?

Schools are closed. Flights cancelled. Highways and trains deserted. People are asked to minimise social contact. At first, the coronavirus appeared to be not much different from a normal flu. But then it spread in almost no time across 100 states around the world. Initially, the measures taken by the Italian government seemed extreme, perhaps exaggerated – now several countries are following the Italian example, including Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. The most urgent ethical issue raised by the coronavirus will be the allocation of limited resources, including hospital space. There are also concerns of global justice, given the huge differences between states with regard to their ability to deal with the virus. Despite the fatal effects of this pandemic, we also hear voices that view it as a chance and express the hope that it might bring about some positive changes in society. How will covid-19 affect us – as individuals and as a society? Will it make us more egoistic (“My family first!”) or will it bring us closer together, making us realise how much we depend on each other? Can we expect anything positive from this crisis, and what could that be?

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