People are increasingly concerned with what we owe to other animals as a matter of justice. Philosophical writing on these issues typically takes two forms. First, there is conceptual work: thinking about how existing ideas such as liberty, citizenship, democracy, and legitimacy, might apply or be extended to include other animals. Second, there is normative work: thinking about how we should treat other animals. Both projects require that we know other animals; know something of their capacities, their experiences, their relationships, and the material conditions of their lives. Thinking about justice for animals, then, necessarily involves learning more about who they actually are.
In this post, Vincent Chiao, discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on how to understand the “mass” part of “mass incarceration.”
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. On a per capita basis, the United States incarcerates at a higher rate than any other democracy, with the possible exception of El Salvador. Yet at the same time, a disturbingly large share of crime is never reported much less punished. This raises the simple question: how do we know when a penal system incarcerates too many people? Even as “mass incarceration” has become a staple of both academic research and political discourse over the last decade, and even as renewed attention has been paid to glaring racial disparities, the question of scale – how much is too much – has remained surprisingly elusive.
It is true that people tend to be incarcerated for longer in the United States than in other parts of the world, but that alone does not show that the United States incarcerates “too many” people. In part, this is because punishments of varying degrees of severity might all be in some sense “proportionate,” and in part because the large number of unpunished crimes creates significant headroom in incarceration rates. The United States could incarcerate many more people, and potentially incarcerate them for longer, without violating basic rights against punishing the innocent or disproportionate punishment of the guilty.
Otherwise put: incarceration rates tend to be driven more by policy than by crime. What makes this into a philosophical problem is principled disagreement about what we are trying to do when we punish people for committing crimes. Crime prevention? Reparation? Symbolic vindication? Rehabilitation? Something else? We tend to be more confident that criminals should be punished than we are as to why they should be punished. But that makes it difficult to say if what we are getting is too much, too little, or just about right.
What about crime prevention?
Crime prevention is the most common, and most popular, answer to “why do we punish criminals?” But it is easy to see why one might hesitate. “Is incarceration an efficient way of preventing crime?” quickly leads to comparing the interests of the innocent in not being victimized against the interests of the guilty in not being imprisoned. Not only is that a hard question to answer objectively, but it also involves intrusive value judgments that liberals have reason to eschew. Telling people that their safety isn’t “worth the cost” can easily sound condescending, particularly when the costs mostly fall on those who choose to break the law.
Three conceptions of excess
This presents a difficult, though not insurmountable, challenge. For starters, we could define excess incarceration in strictly Paretian terms: can we release people from jails and prisons without increasing crime? Since this approach makes some people better off without making anyone worse off, it does not require trading off different people’s interests.
Alternatively, we could consider whether alternative modes of preventing crime could substitute for incarceration, again holding crime constant. By holding crime constant, we would only be asking whether there are ways of controlling crime that have a less malign impact on people’s lives than prisons. This too does not involve weighing competing interests.
The main limitation of these approaches is that they take existing levels of criminal victimization as sacrosanct. As a result, a quite substantial degree of incarceration could potentially be justified if it prevented trivial increases in crime. That might lead us to seek a more demanding conception of excess. That will, however, require weighing competing interests – those of potential victims in not having their rights violated and those of potential prisoners in not being incarcerated. As noted, this can easily come across as condescending, and worse, as involving intrusive judgments of worth.
That said, it’s worth noting that very few people are absolutists about crime. Most of us regularly make practical trade-offs between convenience and safety, for instance, which routes we will walk, where to lock our bikes, whether to install a security system. These mundane decisions – along with jury awards, tangible costs, and survey data – reveal how people subjectively value safety versus other goods.
Such information would, of course, need to be carefully considered to control for morally salient biases. Nonetheless, the broader point is that a utilitarian conception of excess is not committed to paternalistically evaluating whether people are wrong to fear crime as much as they do. Its theory of value can be constructed from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. Doing so can help mitigate concerns about condescending or intrusive value judgments.
So what?
Mass incarceration is unjust. This is in part because the burdens of incarceration are unfairly distributed, but it is also in part because those burdens are excessive in absolute terms. The moral critique of mass incarceration thus depends on an analytical metric—a theory of what it is to incarcerate too many people. The metric we choose will tell us what it means to truly bring the era of mass incarceration to an end.
Vincent Chiao’s research interests are in public law, with a particular focus on the philosophy of criminal law. He is the author of Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (OUP 2018). Themes in his work include the place of law in formal and informal social orders, punishment and the evolution of cooperation, and the rule of law as a social technology.
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.
Failing to do what we really, really want seems all-too familiar in everyday life. You might want to lead a healthier lifestyle or aspire to a career in a girl band but turn out to be too sluggish to go for a run or practice your singing and dancing skills. If you really are committed to those aims, these are clear instances where you fail to satisfy your ‘true preferences’.
I have argued in previous posts (here and here) that we have good moral reasons to end the practice of keeping pets (for a full defence see here). Pet keeping involves the unjustifiable instrumentalisation of animals, sets back animals’ interests in self-determination, and exposes animals to unnecessary risks of harm. Not to mention the many attendant harms that the practice involves to farmed animals, wild animals and the environment. Given all this, we should seek to transition to a pet-free world.
In this post, I suggest we won’t be able to make progress towards a more just world for animals until we’ve engaged in some honest soul-searching about our desire to keep animals as pets.
On Wednesday 4 December 2024, French Prime Minister Michel Barnier was forced to resign after 3 short months in office – the shortest government in recent French history. On the very same day, in South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol was threatened with impeachment. What unites these two cases are attempts to ascertain power and bypass parliaments, in a context of budgetary disagreements. These cases remind us of the importance and democratic value of parliamentary assemblies, which have frequently been sidelined in favor of executives in recent decades.
On Tuesday, November 5, citizens of the United States will vote for who they want to serve as their president for the next four years. They will also vote for federal congressional representatives as well as a host of other state and local government officials.
U.S. political campaigns—especially presidential campaigns—are exhausting. This is in part because they are much longer and more expensive than the political campaigns in many other nations.
At least part of the reason that so many Americans believe this patent falsehood is because Trump and his allies have told this lie repeatedly. However, it seems that Trump and his allies don’t really believe it because they have been unwilling to make these same claims in court or in other contexts in which they could face legal sanctions for lying.
In the United States, freedom of speech protects one’s right to lie on the campaign trail but not in the courtroom. In the latter context, liars can be convicted of perjury.
This helps explain the truth-revealing power of courts. The best explanation for why Trump and his co-conspirators refuse to make these false claims about the 2020 election in court where they realize that lying can have significant legal consequences is that they know they are lying.
If significant legal consequences for lying are enough to stop Trump and his co-conspirators from lying in court, one might naturally conclude that the best course of action might be to create similarly significant legal consequences for lying as part of political campaigning. This is a reasonable thought, but it’s not that simple—at least not in the United States. This is because such a course of action conflicts with contemporary social and legal understandings of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech.
This lecture was delivered by Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The lecture has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original presentation can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel. Several themes from this lecture have been developed and expanded upon in Professor Snyder’s forthcoming book: On Freedom.
(C) David Benatar. Camondo Stairs, Galata, Istanbul, 2022
Imagine that you are a soldier fighting a militia that is embedded within an urban civilian population. You face situations in which, in the fog of war, you are unsure whether the person you confront is a civilian or a combatant, not least because the combatants you are fighting often dress like civilians. You can either shoot and ask questions later, or you can pause, even momentarily, to take stock, and risk being shot.
Depending on the precise circumstances, pausing may be either a moral requirement or merely supererogatory (that is, a case of going beyond the call of duty). Either way, the soldier who pauses is morally superior to the soldier who shoots without hesitation. However, there will be situations in which a soldier is killed precisely because he acted in the morally better way.
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Davide Pala and Dorothea Gädeke, revolving around Gädeke’s research project “Theorising Freedom From Below”. Dr. Dorothea Gädeke is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University. She joined Utrecht University in 2018. Before that, she taught at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany, and at TU Darmstadt, Germany and spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and at Princeton University, USA. Her research is motivated by the urge to understand and address current social and political challenges. It is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, social philosophy and legal and constitutional theory. She specialises in domination and structural injustices and analyse how they are connected to practices of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. She is particularly interested in transnational relations between the global north and the global south. Currently, she is setting up a new project on agency and resistance against unfreedom.
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.
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