In this post Annick Backelandt argues that xenophobia should be understood as a distinct bias in Large Language Models, rather than being subsumed under racial bias. She shows how LLMs reproduce narratives of “foreignness” that particularly affect migrants and refugees, even without explicit racial references.
In this post, Louis Larue (Aalborg University, Denmark) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the appropriateness of selecting research applications randomly.
Applying for external funding is an integral part of academic life. Universities dedicate huge amounts of resources, and often have entire teams of administrators and advisors, to help researchers obtain external grants and manage the immense load of paperwork required to administrate successful applications. Researchers and teachers, at all stages of their careers, spend considerable time and resources to write, read, revise, and submit applications. If successful, they will then have to write various reports and will be required to master the complex and often obscure language of funding agencies. At a more advanced stage of their careers, they will also dedicate a significant share of their time to reviewing and evaluating applications submitted by others and to sit in various selection committees.
Most of the time, the selection procedure involves (in one or several steps) the evaluation of the scientific quality of the submitted applications, by one or several peer reviewers. When all evaluations have been gathered, a selection committee usually selects successful applicants. The ideal behind this procedure (which I have only sketched, and which varies across countries and institutions) is to select, impartially, the “best” applications, that is, those with the highest level of scientific quality, properly defined.
Let’s call this selection procedure the “Peer Review procedure” (or PR). In recent years, it has attracted much criticism. For many, it is a costly, biased, and conservative procedure that is unable to deliver on its promise to select the best applications. In response to these criticisms, many authors have advocated mixed procedures involving various degrees of peer review and random selection (for instance, here and here). Following usage in the literature, I will call these mixed procedures “Modified Lotteries” (or ML).
The modified lottery is a two-stage procedure. At stage 1, the members of the selection committee select, among all eligible applications, the ones that they judge to be the most qualified applications, that is, those that meet minimal standards of scientific quality. At this stage, only the “worst” applications are rejected. The selection rate is thus allowed to be high, or, in any case, much higher than the current selection rate. At stage 2, a certain percentage of the applications selected at stage 1 is randomly selected. The percentage of applications selected at stage 2 is simply a function of the amount of money at the disposal of the funding agency.
In this post, I shall argue that the modified lottery procedure would strike a better balance between scientific quality, cost-effectiveness, impartiality, and fairness, than the current peer review procedure. (In the article, I also discuss, and reject, pure random selection, but I leave that part of the argument aside here).
Cost-effectiveness and scientific quality
A first intuitive argument for the use of random selection is that it would liberate time and money for researchers to do actual research. For the time dedicated to writing and reviewing applications amounts to time not dedicated to research and teaching. Considering the fact that most applications are rejected, this time is generally wasted.
However, the cost-reducing potential of random selection should not be over-estimated. A recent survey of applicants to the Health Research Council of New Zealand, which is among the first funders to use a Mixed Lottery, report that most of the applicants declared that they did not reduce the time spent writing their applications. Moreover, the time dedicated to reviewing proposals is not necessarily wasted. First, reviewers may be expected to set aside at least the proposals that do not meet minimal standards – an ability that should not be underestimated. Second, even if we assume that they cannot, getting rid of peer reviewers entirely may remove the incentive to write serious research proposals.
Hence, the relationship between the costs and benefits of investing time and money in selecting applications demands further consideration. In the article, I argue that costs are justified if they allow setting aside the applications that do not meet minimal standards of scientific quality; and that they are unjustified otherwise. Hence, dedicating time and money to peer reviewing applications is justified up to the point where peer reviewers can no longer perform their selection job. The empirical literature has for years stressed that peer reviewers are often unable to agree on the ranking of excellent applications, though they are more likely to agree on those applications that do not reach a minimal level of quality. The mixed lottery is thus to be preferred to the current system, because the limited space it gives to peer review allows to reduce its costs in a way that is not detrimental to scientific quality, since stage 1 is there to make sure that some peer reviewing still takes place. Though it may be impossible to find the “optimal” level of peer review, it is likely to be greater than zero and lower than the current level.
Impartiality and biases
A common complaint about peer review is that it is biased. There is evidence that the Peer Review procedure tends to be biased against women and ethnic minorities. Moreover, personal relationships as well as a preference for one’s own area of expertise tend to skew the peer reviewers’ evaluations. For all these reasons, a selection procedure based on peer review is unlikely to be impartial.
It is uncontroversial to say that these biases are bad, even morally wrong. Yet we may have reasons to accommodate some biases for the sake of retaining some place to peer review. In very short, my argument is the following: peer review is necessary to (at least) set aside the worst applications from the rest and to avoid removing the incentive of writing minimally good applications. Yet peer review is also inherently biased in some way. Hence, getting rid of all biases would require getting rid of peer review entirely, which would be detrimental to scientific quality. How do we get out of this dilemma?
My view is that, because peer review is unescapable, we should allow for the possibility that biases will influence the selection procedure. In that context, the modified lottery is preferrable to the current system, because it minimises the influence of biases, by leaving only a limited space to peer reviewers. However, those who would want to condemn biases more severely than I do, will have to contemplate the necessity to get rid of peer reviewers entirely and turn to pure random selection instead. My view is that the latter move would come at a cost for the advancement of science, because it would lower the probability to fund the best research. As I argue below, it may also be unfair.
Fairness
A further frequent complain against the current pee-review procedure is that it is unfair (see for instance here), though “unfair” is often confused with “biased”. However, this complaint may also be raised against proposals to select research proposals randomly (either partially or totally): isn’t that unfair to excellent applicants to consider all applications equally?
In the article, I use Broome’s idea that the fair distribution of a good requires that claims to a good should be satisfied in proportion to their strength. In our case, the good to be fairly distributed is research money. People’s claim to that good will depend on the extent to which their future research will be the most likely to produce the best science. Therefore, one may say that grants are distributed fairly when they are allocated to the proposals that have the strongest claim to research money, that is, to those that are the most likely to produce the best research.
In an ideal world without budget constraints, biases and other limitations, the peer review procedure would be the best and the fairest procedure: it would always select the most deserving applicants. But we do not live in such a world. First, in the real world, budget constraints may prevent funding bodies from giving money to all deserving applicants (i.e. those who have the strongest claim to it). Second, peer reviewers may be unable to reach a consensus on who the most deserving applicants are (a phenomenon that I call “epistemic limitations”). In that world, the modified lottery is the best choice.
As I have argued above, we may expect peer reviewers to be able to track scientific quality up to a certain point. If peer review has some value, the first stage of the modified lottery will allow to set aside the applications that have some minimal level merit (that is, a “minimal claim to research money”) from those who do not. The first stage therefore guarantees, at least to some extent, a certain degree of discrimination based on merit. But beyond that point, random selection is to be preferred, since no actual argument based on reasons may be used where epistemic uncertainty prevents reviewers from collectively distinguishing between applications. At stage 2, random selection ensures, at least, that all applications that have passed stage 1 have an equal chance to get funding, and that it is not biases or arbitrariness that decide among them.
The modified lottery is therefore not a fair procedure: it will not automatically distribute research money to those who have the strongest claim to it. But it is fairer than other procedures. It is fairer than pure random selection because it leaves some place to merit, which random selection fails to do; and it is fairer than the current system because, once the possibilities of peer review have been exhausted, it does not pretend to be able to select the best proposals among proposals whose relative merit is undistinguishable by reviewers (or disputed). Rather, it gives equal weight to all of them.
Some readers may still complain that the modified lottery disrespects excellent applicants, those who really deserve to be selected. In response, I would like to stress that the first stage of the proposal is meant to ensure that the best candidates are among the pool of short-listed applicants, and that they are selected according to shared standards of scientific quality. My view is that we cannot hope for more: it is beyond the capacity of peer reviewers to discover the “truly” best applicants. Moreover, the second stage limits the influence of non-scientific criteria (biases, etc), which might be present at stage 1, so that good candidates with profiles that are more likely to attract biases have a higher chance (compared to the present system) to be selected. So both stages actually contribute to increasing the ability of the procedure to track scientific excellence, rather than something else. Finally, we may have serious doubts that the current procedure is selecting the best applications. Lack of resources and various biases, as well as possible disagreements among evaluators on the quality of different applications, prevent the current system from doing its job well. Therefore, though there is a risk that the modified lottery will sometimes fail to select some of the best applications, this risk is probably not much higher than for the current peer review procedure.
Louis Larue is a researcher at the Aalborg University, Denmark; and a guest professor at the Hoover Chair of Social and Economic Ethics, UCLouvain, Belgium. He has published on the ethics of money and finance, and on several issues in the philosophy of economics. His first book, entitled Alternative Currencies: a Critical Approach, has just been published by Routledge.
Before we return to our schedule of regular posts, I wanted to take the opportunity to share information about this online workshop.
From institutional pressures to competing demands from students, teachers are increasingly having to navigate complex political, pedagogical, and ethical challenges. For anti-speciesist teachers in the context of anthropocentric societies, there are several further layers of difficulty: how should we approach the teaching of core subjects and the general “canon”, when those often replicate speciesist norms and assumptions? Is it necessary to balance “objectivity” and advocacy? Is pedagogical or academic rigour threatened by moves towards animal-friendly pedagogy? How should we engage with students and colleagues who are resistant to non-anthropocentric perspectives? What specific pedagogical strategies or curriculum design choices (e.g., choice of texts, use of various media, interactive activities, assessment design) can anti-speciesist teachers effectively employ to introduce non-anthropocentric materials without alienating students or triggering a defensive backlash?
This online workshop aims to bring together academics working in politics, philosophy, and adjacent fields to consider the challenges and opportunities associated with tackling speciesism and anthropocentrism in higher education. It will be an opportunity to share ideas, research, and experience. We invite contributions from anyone involved in teaching in relevant fields. We’re looking to provide a space to share reflections on experiences as well as formal paper-presentations. Keeping this in mind, we invite submissions of the following types:
Submissions must be suitable for approx. 15-20 minute presentations and Q&A/discussion. Please send anonymised submissions to sara.vangoozen [at] york.ac.uk
The deadline for submissions is 30 March 2026
For any further information, please also contact Sara van Goozen.
When I mentioned anarchism to friends or family, the response was always, “That’s impossible—get rid of government and you get chaos.” So I wanted real answers.
In his book The Anarchist Banker, the Portuguese poet and novelist Fernando Pessoa tells the story of an anarchist who also happens to be a banker. His old comrades are shocked by this apparent contradiction of normative beliefs and actions. But the anarchist justifies his unexpected choice of occupation by pointing out that anarchists can achieve none of their ideals if they don’t have the means to do so. Becoming a banker is, in fact, the best way to contribute to the anarchist cause! Or so, at least, is the banker’s argument.
At first, one may suspect that Pessoa’s anarchist banker is not honest. We could rightly infer from his choice of occupation that he has relinquished the ideals of his youth and that his anarchist talk is just that: mere talk. But another interpretation is possible: what if the anarchist banker is in fact honest? And what if his way of life is, in fact, the best way to contribute to anarchism, because the money he generates through his banking activities allows him to support the anarchist cause more effectively than most other anarchists? Isn’t he simply a sort of effective altruist? For, like effective altruists, he has considered the evidence and applied reason to work out the most effective ways to improve the world (i.e. by becoming a banker), though he may never have heard about act-utilitarianism.
(more…)
In debates about the ethical dimensions of using nonhuman animal labour, people increasingly argue that some forms of labour are compatible with animals’ interests, including their interests in freedom. The reason for this is that animals can choose to cooperate with us and choose to work for us. These choices manifest themselves in the animals’ informed enthusiasm for the activity, and this affirmation is considered especially significant when the animal has meaningful opportunities for dissent but chooses not to take them up. Under such circumstances, some suggest that we can interpret the animal’s wilful engagement as a form of consent. Examples of the kinds of jobs that animals might consent to – compatible with their basic interests, like not being harmed – are some forms of human therapy, conservation work, sporting activities, and non-invasive research.
I disagree. I have argued elsewhere that an animal’s willingness to engage in discrete activities and interactions within a role is not sufficient to show that they consent to the role itself. Here I want to try out a different argument: the fundamental problem with making animals work for us is that it typically involves us usurping their purposive will and harnessing their bodily powers to achieve human-given ends.
(more…)This is a guest post by Joe Slater (University of Glasgow).
It is well known that chatbots powered by LLMs – ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. – sometimes make things up. People have sometimes called these “AI hallucinations”. With my co-authors, I have argued that we should describe chatbots as bullshitting, in the sense described by Harry Frankfurt, i.e., the content is produced with an indifference to the truth. Because of this, developing chatbots that no longer generate novel false utterances (or reduce the proportion of false utterances they output) has been a high priority for big tech companies. We can see this in the public statements made by, e.g., OpenAI, boasting of reduced hallucination rates.
One factor that is sometimes overlooked in this discourse is that generative AI can also be detrimental in that it may stifle development, even when it accurately depicts the information it has been trained on.
Recall the instance of the Google AI overview, which is powered by Google’s Gemini LLM, claiming that “According to UC Berkeley geologists, you should eat at least one small rock per day”. This claim was initially made in the satirical news website, The Onion. While obviously false claims like this are unlikely to deceive, it demonstrates a problem. False claims may be repeated. Some of these could be ones that most people accept, or even that most experts accept. This poses serious problems.
In this short piece, I want to highlight three worries that might escape our notice if we focus only on chatbots making stuff up:
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Matt Perry and Chris Armstrong. Chris is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, winner of the 2023 Lynton Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association and the author of A Blue New Deal (Yale University Press), an accessible and popular book about the politics of the ocean. He primarily works on issues at the intersection of global justice and the environment. He has published 6 books in total (including with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), over 50 journal articles and numerous articles in popular media, including The Guardian and The Conversation. Matt spoke to Chris about his experiences writing for a wider audience, his motivations to do so, and what tips he might have for others hoping to do the same.
Matt Perry: Thanks again for agreeing to chat! First, I’d like to ask you why you decided to pursue a career in Political Theory, and what factors led you to address the topics your work focuses on?
Chris Armstrong: When I was at school, I had no conception whatsoever of what political theory might be, or even that it existed. People in my family didn’t go to university. I didn’t really realize you could think about power, ideologies, culture and society in quite an analytical way until I picked up a sociology textbook secondhand.
I announced to my teachers that I was going to completely change all the A levels that I had been intending to do, away from sciences, and then went off to university to do Politics and Sociology. I then did my master’s in International Relations. Still, I was fairly untutored in political theory until my PhD, and in that sense I’ve found my way slowly into the (sub)discipline from the outside. I did my PhD on gender inequality. I set myself the task of investigating whether Michael Walzer’s theory could help us think about gender inequality, which was an interesting project. I’ve been finding my way since then, and I’ve shifted the direction of my work a few times. I moved into thinking about global justice first and then thinking about more environmental issues.
Right now in my career, I’m really appreciating the fact that a lot of what I read is science, history and law. And I kind of read quite indiscriminately across disciplines. In a sense, what I’m doing there is finding my way back to the beginning, where I just read indiscriminately and was interested in everything.
MP: That’s great. I have a second general question before we get onto your public engagement: what do you perceive to be the role of academia, and more specifically the political theorist?
CA: I’ve never been particularly impressed by claims about the authority of political theory. I mentioned I did my PhD on Michael Walzer. Walzer is not someone I work on now. But one thing I was impressed by was his deflationary account of political theory. He essentially thinks that the political theorist is just one more citizen: a participant in public debate, but nothing more than that. I like that idea. It is a very democratic commitment to reasoning with your fellow citizens, arguing with people, not claiming that you’ve arrived at some kind of deep truth that the population just have to fall in with, but that we should have a continual commitment to engaging with others.
MP: That resonates with me, too. I wanted to ask you: what are your own motivations for public engagement in general, but also for writing your book, A Blue New Deal?
CA: Whilst thinking about global justice in my previous work, I got more and more interested in environmental issues. And I suppose at some stage, it dawned on me that there was this big, missing element in many political theory discussions about climate, environmental protection, territory, and natural resources: the ocean.
It’s probably the biggest carbon sink, definitely the biggest ecosystem, and it contains most of the territory on our planet, but it is often simply missing from political theory discussions. You can find bits of political theory on the ocean, of course. But you mainly have to go back to Grotius and the people who engage with him, or to Carl Schmitt, if that’s to your taste. But in the tradition of analytical political theory and reasoning about territory, territorial claims, and justice, it’s missing. And that’s intellectually interesting, but it’s also deeply problematic, if it is in fact the biggest haven of biodiversity, the biggest carbon sink, and so on. So one track that I was going down was to try to persuade other political theorists to engage with the ocean.
I suppose in the end I realized that talking to fellow political theorists was important, but not the only thing that I wanted to do. The more I learned about the governance of the ocean, the more I realized how massively dysfunctional it is. I felt that I needed to do my bit to stage an intervention to raise the public profile of these issues as much as I could, while also trying to persuade other political theorists to actually engage too. Over time, I’ve engaged more with speaking to ordinary citizens, people outside academia, NGOs, and so on. That’s come to feel more important.
MP: Of course, there’s not just a missing focus on the ocean in political theory as a discipline. It seems to be something that’s more broadly reflected in politics too. So it makes sense that those two pieces came together. It’d be good if you could tell us a bit more about your book — what are the key claims?
CA: So, what I try to do in the book is to persuade people that we are going through a double-edged crisis. We’re familiar with the idea that the ocean is facing an environmental crisis, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, you name it. But we also face a crisis of inequality in the way that we govern and relate to the ocean. The human impacts on the ocean are not being evenly caused by everybody, and the benefits from human interactions with the ocean are not being accrued evenly. This is a world in which some are benefiting from burgeoning ocean industries and others are not.
To some extent, the environmental piece is reasonably well understood and people in the sciences have made that case. My distinctive contribution was to draw those strands together and say that when we think about the environmental crisis, we should also always be thinking about questions of social and global justice. We have these hierarchies of power and influence that we also need to reckon with. Some people benefit from what gets called the “Blue Acceleration”, a creeping industrialization of the ocean. I argue we can’t really have good solutions to environmental problems that don’t also tackle these gulfs in power and advantage. The book draws those two things together and argues that we need to think a bit more ambitiously about the way that we are governing the ocean.
MP: One of the things I find impressive about the book is the way it draws together different topics: there’s history, ocean science, policy, and ideal theory. But the framing is around this practical proposal of the Blue New Deal. Did you have this idea already when you started writing? How did you come up with this framing given how encompassing the topic is?
CA: The Blue New Deal framing actually came in fairly late. In the beginning there was just a sense that there were three components to the project: (i) what’s wrong with contemporary ocean governance? (ii) How did we get here? And (iii) how can we do better?
I was going to call the book Ocean Justice: Political Theory for a Blue Planet. My editor at Yale quite sensibly pointed out that no one would know what that meant (like me as a kid, the general public don’t know what political theory is). So, she actually came up with the idea of naming it A Blue New Deal. I, as a theorist, flipped one way and the other and then thought, actually, she knows what she’s doing. Editors know much more than authors do about marketing.
But the Blue New Deal framing is ameliorative, not the end-result I endorse. Chapter 9 is titled ‘A Blue New Deal’, and Chapter 10 ‘Beyond the Blue New Deal’. Chapter 9 is asking how far we could get given existing institutions, and the argument is that we can get pretty far. We might do much better in bringing together a focus on socioeconomic injustice and environmental protection, even relying on existing institutions. But that isn’t entirely satisfying because I think existing institutions are deeply flawed. So, in chapter 10 I ask much grander questions about the way we think about and govern the ocean.
MP: I’m interested in what the uptake was like after releasing the book. What further public engagement did the book invite and how have people received the ideas you defend?
CA: It’s all been great and kept me very busy in a way I was unused to. Unlike typical academic books where you wait a couple of years for reviews and citations, the response was immediate, largely thanks to my publisher’s publicity operation. There were reviews in newspapers, and I was invited onto podcasts. I was continually and positively surprised to find out that my book had in fact reached a wider audience and that people wanted to engage with it. There were two different kinds of audience. The first were policymakers and people with power. For instance, I got invited to go and talk to the board of this entity called Crown Estate Scotland, who govern and maintain the Scottish coastline.
But I also engaged with less formal audiences, such as Ocean Rebellion, a spinoff from Extinction Rebellion. They’re a vanguard of people, many of them artists, who are trying to raise the public media profile of ocean issues. Initially, they were pretty much exclusively focused on the environmental protection angle and not really on social and global justice. I’ve tried to encourage them to bring those things together.
In general, I’m much more engaged in speaking to NGOs and ordinary citizens, and getting them thinking about whether blue growth and the blue acceleration are the priorities we ought to have. Going back to the Walzerian idea of the theorist as another citizen arguing with his or her fellow citizens, I feel much more comfortable speaking to civil society actors and campaigning groups. I prefer trying to raise the profile of ocean issues, rather than trying to get the ear of princes, to use the political theory cliché.
MP: That’s interesting. One thing it would be great to know is what the whole process of publishing for a wider audience has been like? What are some of the key challenges you faced?
CA: One self-imposed challenge was flip-flopping about what kind of book I wanted to write: public-facing, academic, or somewhere in the middle? I’m happy with where it ended up, but I wasn’t especially clear about that at the beginning. If I wanted to turn that into advice I would say: be really clear from the beginning about the exact audience you want to engage with.
If you’re going to take things seriously, you really need to read mass market books, or books that are in that hybrid academic/commercial space. I ended up in quite a good place, probably in part because I had a really good editor, but it’s obvious in hindsight that if you want to write a book that communicates to a wide audience, you ought to be reading lots of books that already do that, because there is a specific approach and method of addressing the reader. For instance, by working in lots of examples, using historical tidbits, and relying on real world cases — these are things that define the genre. It’s a bit different from the work that we academics are used to producing.
MP: That makes me wonder: has writing for a broader audience influenced your writing style more generally?
CA: That’s a really good question. I found the process of writing for a general audience really liberating. When writing for academics, you’re always thinking about qualifications, and considering the two or three interlocutors who are metaphorically sitting on your shoulders, or worrying about giving deference to various literatures. When you’re not writing for an academic audience, you don’t have that anymore. I found that very freeing. Instead, you’re trying to lay out a case as simply as possible — to cut things to the bone and get to the basics.
If there’s a wider lesson that I’ve learned from doing that, it would be to take some of that freshness and accessibility back into my academic work. I’ve always in my academic work taken accessibility quite seriously. But maybe I take it even more seriously now. You can communicate fairly complex ideas to a wider audience without sacrificing too much. Going forward, I might leave behind some of the formality, and so many gestures towards literatures. There’s a sense in which lots of academic work is quite literature-driven, whereas I suppose the work I’ve done more recently is issue-driven or ideas-driven, first and foremost.
MP: That’s really interesting. How did securing the book contract differ from typical academic publishing?
CA: The way things worked at Yale was quite different to my previous experiences in academic publishing. There was much more editorial input and a clear sense from the beginning that this was a project that the editor really liked. The book did go to academic reviewers, but this seemed to be a more advisory role compared with in mainstream academic publishing. To secure a contract, you need to find out what the editor is interested in, what they published previously, and what gaps there might be in the roster that they are hoping to fill. There’s no guarantee of success. But essentially, you have to tell a story about not just why this is intellectually interesting, but why it has broad appeal now. Timing, I think, is much more important.
MP: That’s helpful. I’ve got two more questions for you. First, I wondered how your public facing work has been received within the discipline of political theory.
CA: I’m not entirely sure. One kind of attitude is that there is primary work at the level of ideals and normative arguments, and secondary, “applied” work that shows the implications of those ideas for particular issues. There can appear to be a hierarchy between these. The thought might be that the work I was doing in A Blue New Deal might not be quite so cutting edge conceptually, that it is essentially a translation of normative ideals for a wider audience. I do think that is absolutely what I’m doing — I’m not claiming to be doing cutting-edge conceptual work and I’m unashamed about that. But I also think that “applied” work is really important and that we should be doing more of it.
Another attitude concerns the mission I had to try and persuade other political theorists to take up the issue of the ocean — which I don’t feel has been massively successful. One explanation for why is the view that “Chris has got this” so others don’t need to address it, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen. Again, with my subsequent book about the biodiversity crisis, I’m explicitly trying to open up issues to other academics, providing a map of the territory and introducing major debates in the hope others will join me and make their own contributions. I don’t want to do it alone.
MP: Yes, applying normative theory beyond academia and opening up discussions to others are both really key. My last question is: what’s on the horizon next for you? Will you continue with more public-facing work?
CA: I am excited to continue this trajectory and write another book about the ocean that is exclusively for a public audience rather than being a hybrid — but more on that soon!
In this interactive “choose-your-own-adventure” post, Kian Mintz-Woo (University College Cork) explores the different roles that philosophers might play in supporting the development of public policies. This is based on his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
Congratulations! You have been invited to participate in a government policy-recommendation committee in [insert your research area of expertise]. You look around and see some academics (a political scientist, an economist and a [insert relevant] natural scientist), but also some political bureaucrats and some representatives of civil society. You have been jointly tasked on evaluating and recommending a policy option.
‘This is our justice theorist,’ they say in introduction. Or maybe ‘Please welcome our ethicist!’ You’re a little intimidated. You’ve never done something like this before, but you want to contribute in a way that is useful for the group—but also reflects the appropriate role for a philosopher.
When it comes time for you to contribute, do you:
‘I’m a normative theorist who has considered this area extensively,’ you begin. ‘The principles and theories of [insert your normative position] are clearly stronger than the alternatives. Indeed, we can tell that those principles are useful as they show that [your preferred policy option] is highly justifiable.’
Some members of the committee, having never heard the policy options discussed in this kind of theoretical way, find that your position sounds quite plausible. Discussion continues, with the following rebuttal occasionally offered to alternative views: ‘But justice demands [your preferred policy option], according to our justice theorist!’
You find yourself squirming slightly, since you realize that [your normative opponent at a more famous university] could also have been invited instead, and, as they have a different normative position, they would have argued for [your dispreferred policy option]. But you content yourself with the thought that, luckily, you are here instead of them. Jump to [§5].
‘We have to remember that we are here to consider and recommend public policies,’ you begin. ‘So it behooves us to consider what the public thinks. Luckily, I have a more than passing familiarity with [news opinions, polling data, historical documents, other potential sources of societal value] and I think the deep values of society are [liberal, conservative, egalitarian, xenophobic, utopian, etc.]. That is very helpful because it shows that [society’s preferred policy option] is highly justifiable.’
The committee is intrigued and begins to debate about whether these are society’s real values. One member points out that it would be somewhat more convincing if a social scientist could inform the committee, muttering something under their breath about ‘empirics’ and ‘armchair philosophers’. Another member asks whether society’s values are reflected by what society does or what society says. Yet another asks whether we should really be thinking about what society did or said.
You find yourself squirming slightly, since the questions the committee keeps asking you sound like ones that maybe a social psychologist or a sociologist or a historian would have an easier time answering. Jump to [§5].
‘What do philosophers do?’ you begin. ‘Many of you are wondering that, but you might not really know. Well, part of what we do is we try to make arguments or draw valid inferences based on various normative positions. For instance, in this particular policy context, some influential principles and theories are [you introduce some relevant positions]. While there is significant theoretical disagreement, [some policy option] can be justified from very many normative positions and [some other policy option] can be justified from quite a lot of positions. Here is how those justifications work…’
The committee pays close attention, with some members nodding sagely when certain positions are mentioned and a couple interested murmurs as you draw some subtle inferences. Afterwards, the committee discusses which principles they are drawn to and question some of the arguments you present.
You find yourself squirming slightly, since you wonder if your summary of the arguments is idiosyncratic or whether you were fair to the various interlocutors’ positions. But you comfort yourself by thinking that you gave it your best shot and that at least you didn’t give a wild misrepresentation of the debate. Continue to [§5].
After much discussion, multiple meetings, and several reports, the committee ultimately decides to recommend [your preferred policy option]. You are surprised but pleased, although you remain unconvinced about whether your particular recommendation made any difference. You finish your committee work with a mix of inspiration and skepticism about the role of policy committees.
But you also can’t help realizing that you can’t wait to go back and try it over again, maybe a little differently.
[The (very slightly) less interactive version of this blogpost can be found at: Mintz-Woo, Kian. Forthcoming. “Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy, as Applied to Carbon Budgets.” Journal of Applied Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70047 .]
A version of this blog post was cross-posted at New Work in Philosophy website.
This is a guest post by Hollie Meehan (University of Lancaster).
We have been warned by the CEO of AI company Anthropic that up to 50% of entry-level jobs could be taken by AI in the coming years. While reporters have pointed out that this could be exaggeration to drive profits, it raises the question of where AI should fit into society. Answering this is a complicated matter that I believe could benefit from considering virtue ethics. I’ll focus on the entry-level job market to demonstrate how these considerations can play an important role in monitoring our use of AI and mitigating the potential fallout.
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