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Justice Everywhere a blog about philosophy in public affairs

Academia / Democracy / Education / Pedagogy / Reflections on Ukraine / Teaching Philosophy / War

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Utopia, Dystopia, and Democracy: Teaching Philosophy in Wartime Ukraine

A photograph of a large multistorey building destroyed by shelling.
Karazin Business School, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland.

This is a guest post by Orysya Bila (Ukrainian Catholic University) and Joshua Duclos (St Paul’s School), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Why teach philosophy in wartime Ukraine? It’s a fair question. It’s a necessary question. Given the variety and gravity of Ukraine’s urgent needs, few will think to themselves: “But what about philosophy? Is Ukraine getting enough philosophy?” As two scholars committed to teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine – one American, one Ukrainian – we believe an explanation is in order. 

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Climate / Economics / Environment / General / Health

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Redefining limited liability

Different phases of economic development call for different institutional arrangements. When an institution outlives the economic circumstances for which it was designed, it can lead to unintended negative consequences. The limited liability of corporations, at least under certain conditions, represents an example for such an institution.

Limited liability is one of the key features that distinguishes a partnership from a business corporation. When a partnership goes bankrupt, it is not just the capital of the partnership that is liable but also the private wealth of each of the partners. When a corporation goes bankrupt, by contrast, the reach of the creditors is limited to the capital that shareholders have invested in the corporation. They are off the hook as far as their private wealth is concerned.

It is easy to see why this arrangement leads to a significant increase in the capital that corporations are able to raise compared to partnerships. Which investor would turn down a setup with significant potential upside in terms of capital gain but limited downside? The justification for limited liability from a social perspective is equally obvious. Separating individual property from corporate property in this way hugely enhances financing capacity and thus output across the economy.

Limited liability under climate change

Limited liability worked well under conditions where any growth was good growth. However, independently of whether that was ever true, it is certainly not true in the 21st century. Some economic growth generates negative externalities in the form of social and environmental costs. Corporations only pay for the private costs of their production, whereas the social and environmental costs are borne by society as a whole.

The classic example in this category are greenhouse gas emissions. Corporations in the fossil fuel sector only pay for the private costs of getting the stuff out of the ground. Beyond the insufficient forms of carbon pricing in place today, corporations do not pay for the human and environmental costs measured in human deaths, respiratory disease from pollution, extreme weather events such as heat domes or atmospheric rivers, food shortages due to droughts, and loss in biodiversity. The results are overproduction and overconsumption of carbon-intensive products at inefficiently low prices.

Investor liability as a complement to carbon pricing

The conventional wisdom in the discipline of economics tells us that the most efficient way to reduce fossil fuel production and use to efficient levels is a form of carbon pricing, for example by charging a carbon tax. It is true that carbon taxes could be effective if they were both high enough and progressive. However, they clearly fall short on both counts today.

The above considerations point to a complementary regulatory lever. Under conditions of climate change, the justification for limited liability breaks down. Letting shareholders off the hook is not a good idea when doing so amplifies irresponsible corporate behaviour in the form of overproduction. Instead, in order to convince corporations to meet the challenge of producing sustainably, we have an interest to ensure that both the corporations and their investors have some skin in the game.

Note that this does necessarily imply that investors would have to be liable with all of their wealth, but a limited liability rather than zero liability would encourage corporations to price in negative externalities right away rather than wait for adequate levels of carbon pricing. One might also envisage a progressive form of liability where wealthier investors have more skin in the game than their less well-off counterparts. Indeed, if they did not, their incentives to invest responsibly would be reduced.

Extending the corporate time horizon

Corporations, their managers, and their shareholders are often criticized for maximising profit in the short-term. The current forms of carbon pricing have not succeeded in changing that. Redefining limited liability in the way sketched above promises to have an immediate impact in this regard. After all, under this arrangement, and in contrast to carbon pricing, it is not primarily up to the government to ensure that negative externalities are priced in, but it is up to the corporation and its investors. If the corporation and its shareholders get the numbers wrong, they will have to pay for it.

Some people will no doubt object that liability of this sort would represent a form of red tape restricting private business activity. They have things the wrong way round. Limited liability for shareholders is an enormous privilege bestowed on the corporate sector and its investors. As shown above, this privilege is no longer warranted, at least not for sectors with significant negative externalities. Today, corporations in the fossil fuel sector are able to privatise gains while they socialise losses. This is untenable. Reforming liability arrangements for these kinds of corporations offers one promising path of reform.

Academia / International / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

A photograph of a destroyed and rusted military vehicle on St. Michael's Square, Kyiv. Behind the dark vehicle, you can see a colourful church tower with a golden dome.
St. Michael’s Square, Kyiv, June 2022. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland

This is a guest post by Dr Nataliia Viatkina (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine/American University Kyiv), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

A recent issue of Aeon featured an article entitled, “The Missing Conversation”, with the subtitle, “To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue.” The article amounts to a conversation between the famous scientists and historians of science, Professors Lorraine Daston and Peter Harrison. What is their conversation about?

As it turns out, one reason for their discussion is the question: Would a boycott of Russian scientists be an effective protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine? This is not the only question—there are several others, and all of them lead to the article’s main topic: scientists and historians have stopped communicating with each other. Both Professors believe that now is the time to resume the dialogue. 

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Animals / General / International / Social justice

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More Than a Name: Decolonising Wildlife

Anna’s Hummingbird hovering © Matt Perry

Vancouver’s official city bird is the small but charming Anna’s Hummingbird. This bird’s namesake was a 19th Century Italian Duchess – Anna Masséna. These hummingbirds are not found in Europe, so the chances are Anna never even saw one in flight. And yet, the whole species unknowingly trills through the sky carrying her banner.

The colonial practice of giving birds eponyms (names after a particular person) was frequently used to uphold a person’s legacy, curry favour, or directly honour them. In North America alone, there are over 150 bird species with eponyms.[1] They include the Stellar’s Jay, the Scott’s Oriole and the Townsend’s Warbler. And this practice is not reserved just for our feathered friends. Many mammals, reptiles and fish are named eponymously, too. The mammals include the Abert’s Squirrel, the Heaviside’s Dolphin, and the Schmidt’s Monkey.[2]

This post provides a short case in support of renaming animals currently named eponymously. It defends two ideas that should inform the renaming process. First, renaming prevents the improper glorification of racist or colonial figures and so it is morally required to create a social environment necessary for human equality. Second, renaming as a process productively reorients us to each animals’ importance – independent of human history.

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General / International / Moral values / Reflections on Ukraine

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To Cancel or Not to Cancel? – Questioning the Russian Idea

A photograph of St Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv at night time.
St. Sophia’s Catherdral, Kyiv, November 2023. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland

This is a guest post by Professor George Pattison (University of Glasgow), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Nine months after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in which he argued that although Western leaders always claim to be the champions of freedom, Western liberalism was now engaged in the complete suppression of anything that contradicted its view of what was socially and culturally desirable. As he told his audience, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky prophetically foretold all this back in the 19th century”. Specifically, Putin cites Shigalev, one of the nihilistic conspirators in The Possessed (or Demons). Shigalev is a gloomy theorist who realizes that his plans for unlimited freedom will result in unlimited despotism. “This,” says Putin, “is what our Western opponents have come to”. Specifically, he applies Shigalev’s remark to the so-called “cancel culture” of the West, comparing it to Nazi book-burning and contrasting it with the fact that, even during the Cold War, American and Soviet leaders maintained a respect for each other’s cultural achievements (indeed, I remember posters outside one of our local venues advertising the Red Army choir and dancers). Probably referring to the cancellation of a course on Dostoevsky at Milan-Bicocca University days after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin told his listeners that even Dostoevsky is now cancelled in the West—ignoring the fact that the course was swiftly reinstated following a public outcry.

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International / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Putin’s Use and Abuse of History as a Political Weapon

The Invitation of the Varangians: Rurik and his brothers arrive in Staraya Ladoga. Painting by the Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a guest post by Professor Cynthia R Nielsen (University of Dallas), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

To draw upon different strands of history for the purpose of creating, strengthening, or re-imagining a national narrative is not in itself problematic and, in fact, is common to most, if not all, states. Yet when one’s historically informed (or de-formed) narrative is transformed into a History that cannot be contested or challenged and is used to colonize, exploit, and justify waging aggressive and unjust wars on other sovereign states—or as Vladimir Putin did with Chechnya, autonomous territories within one’s own borders—one’s Historical narrative becomes a propagandistic weapon.

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Academia / General / International / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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The Difficulty of Doing Non-Western Political Theory

I am currently designing an undergraduate course on ‘contemporary non-western political theory’, a task fraught with difficulties. Ever since I moved to Europe for my postgraduate studies, I have felt a certain discomfort with the ethnocentrism in analytical political theory departments here, that is at once apparent and not-so-apparent. Apparent, because 99% of the authors I read in a ‘global’ justice course or the scholars I meet at ‘international’ conferences turn out to be people who grew up and trained in the ‘west’. Not-so-apparent because the content of the research taught and produced by these scholars is often genuinely universal. Questions such as ‘what justifies democracy’ or ‘is equality inherently valuable’ or ‘what grounds human rights’ can and often do have answers that transcend cultural particularities. That is, in fact, what attracted me to analytical political theory in the first place – it’s concern with some basic, normative issues that presumably affect all human societies. 

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Duties / International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Against the Odds: Defending Defensive Wars

A photograph of an apartment building damaged by bomb impacts. In the foreground, a child's climbing frame is visible.
Saltivka, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland

This is a guest post by Professor Gerald Lang (University of Leeds), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Peace is better than war. It takes two to fight. These are truisms: they’re true, but so obvious that they’re not usually worth stating. But they swiftly generate conundrums in the ethics of war in general, and the Ukraine conflict in particular. We can learn something, in my view, from thinking about these conundrums. But we may need to tackle the understandable concern that it’s unhelpfulto explore them at a time when energy and attention levels are flagging in the international community, even though Ukraine remains under attack from Russia and arguably requires all the support, moral and otherwise, that it can get. In some circumstances, indulging in more theoretical speculations—the kind of speculative and hypothetical thinking that forms the daily diet of philosophers of war—may come across as being objectionably detached, or perhaps as just another way of being a useful idiot. These worries deserve careful consideration, not hasty dismissal. If there’s to be a place for serious philosophizing about war, it needs to be reconciled with the more engaged concerns of those who care deeply about the Ukraine war but lack specifically philosophical concerns about it.

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Democracy / Governance / Liberty / Public Philosophy

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Free Speech for Political Campaign Lies?

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.


Another reason why many have found the last three presidential campaigns exhausting is the sheer volume and brazenness of the lies told by Donald Trump and many other Republicans who have come to mimic his campaign style. Trump’s lies have reinforced partisan epistemology while simultaneously creating epistemic chaos that he seeks to use to his advantage.


He has successfully used lies to undermine public trust in U.S. elections. This is starkly exhibited by the fact that nearly 30% of Americans—including roughly two thirds of Republicans—say they believe that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was stolen.


The reason that so many Americans believe this patent falsehood is because Trump and his allies have repeatedly told this lie. However, it seems that Trump and his allies don’t really believe it, given that they have been unwilling to make these same claims in court or in other contexts in which they could face legal sanctions for lying.


This is an example of 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 contexts where they realize that lying comes with 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.

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International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War

A photograph of male and female Ukrainian soldiers standing in a line.
Ceremony on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Photo: President of Ukraine, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain

This is a guest post by Professor Jeff McMahan (Oxford University), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

There are three wars currently in progress in Ukraine: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian war against Ukraine, and the Ukrainian war against Russia. It is necessary for the purpose of evaluation to make these distinctions, for the first of these wars is, like the Second World War (understood as a war between allied and axis powers), neither just nor unjust. Only a war fought by one or more belligerents against an opponent can be just or unjust. Many or most of what we refer to as wars consist of a just war on one side and an unjust war on the other – or, to be more precise, a war with predominantly just aims on one side and a war with predominantly unjust aims on the other.

There is no credible understanding of a just war according to which the Russian war against Ukraine is a just war. It is a wholly unprovoked war of aggression intended by those who initiated it – primarily Putin – to conquer Ukraine, annex its territory, and assimilate its population. The motives of the war’s planners are doubtless many and various but some stand out as obvious and dominant. One is to expand the Russian empire until it is at least coextensive with its earlier boundaries under the tsars and the post-revolutionary Soviet dictators. Another motivation echoes the American concern about “falling dominoes” as a reason for invading Vietnam. Many of the states that were ruled by Soviet puppet regimes during the Cold War have, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, been adopting more and more elements of Western culture, in particular liberalism and democracy. Ukraine was a falling domino that threatened to become a fully independent, economically flourishing democracy in a large border territory that Russia had repeatedly ravaged in the past – a state that would be an example, highly visible to Russians, of an appealing alternative to Putin’s tyrannical kleptocracy.

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