Brazil is at the second round of the election for President. My country is divided again by Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro supporters, who is the son of Jair Bolsonaro.
In the first round, Deputes, Senators and Governors are chosen. In a surprise that shocked many, the extreme right wing, came out on top. Of the 81 seats in the Senate, Balsonaro’s Parido Liberal (PL), got 21, while Lula’s Work Party (PT) only 6. PL has 121 elected candidates for Federal Deputy, which is the highest number achieved by a unique party since our democratic constitution was founded in 1988. PL also did best of any party in elections for State Governors in Brazil, with 5 so far, only in the first round.
Bolsonaro’s PL are, as many newspapers have confirmed, the biggest party at the moment, an electoral phenomenon. Behind this political phenomenon is a highly conservative agenda. It differs from conservatism of the Global North, which is obsessed with immigration, but in Bolsonaro’s case it is an attack on Brazilians: the poor; the Black population; indigenous people, women, the LGBTQIA+ community. It is an agenda against, social inclusion, to sum up in a simple phrase, Promising to transform Brazil by ending of the corruption and criminality, the majority of the Brazilian population have chosen the most corrupt, elitist, and criminal politicians in our history.
Just for a quick example, of many, Flavio Bolsonaro is himself involved in many schemes of money laundering, membership of a criminal organisation and violence.
Why are Brazilians are going for such a candidate, who is not only intrinsically bad for everyone except for his family, but also instrumentally bad in terms of longer-term effects? Not only will he cut many social benefits, intensify violence, and reduce opportunities, he threatens to destroy our democracy.
Specialists, no doubt, will each have a favourite a list of reasons to understand this phenomenon, but one stands out as becoming ever more powerful: the role of the big tech in influencing our electoral process.
Meta is for instance for a time blocked videos and posts from the left wing candidates, and put up other barriers for their online presence. As is well-known the algorithms are biased: the left wing gets less attention, reduced viewing, and their posts are more restricted in their circulation.
On the other side, not only is the social media system boosting Flavio Bolsonaro, as it did his father in previous elections, but Bolonaro has armies of robots or fake accounts systematically posting and reposting his material.
Lula’s supporters take to streets, colourfully and noisily mobilising behind him. But these demonstrations of support barely penetrate social media, unlike coverage in favour of his opponent. The social media bias, of course, a huge impact in his campaign, which is deliberately hobbled by Bolsanoro’s supporters. Many young politicians are fighting back, trying to revitalise Lula’s chances for the second round, such as Janones and Ana Elisa for the Workes Party, but the fact that Lula’s starting point was so unequal raises serious and urgent questions about the emerging underlying structure for elections, not just in Brazil but around the world.
And if there are different rules for different parties, and no clarity or enforcement of the rules of what is allowed in this new space (robots; fake news), are our elections fair? Who, in the end, is choosing our candidates? This is a crisis of democracy, and like any crisis it needs urgent action. But what can be done, and who has power to do it. If the President can’t make elections fair, who can?
The next round of the election is coming fast: 25th of October. Lula supporters must hope that, for the sake of Brazil, he has a chance to get his message across despite the obstacles deliberately put in his way. But whatever the outcome later this month we need to debate a set of serious structural questions about the terms of democratic engagement, which directly and indirectly have such a profound effect on the lives of us all.
Philosophers are well aware of the tension between protecting ecosystems as a whole and defending the rights of individual sentient animals. Social movements and the general public are aware of it too, especially when a case of culling animals classified as ‘invasive species‘ gets coverage in mainstream media. Both ethical positions seem to have grown apart for some time, but could the increasing legal recognition of nature as a rights holder actually improve the legal treatment of individual animals?
The answer, as it turns out, is far messier than a simple yes or no. I argue that existing legal cases where rights of nature are recognised tend to perpetuate the tension between ecosystem-level protection and the rights of individual animals. But this need not be so.
The Estrellita case: setting the scene
Over the past two decades, legal systems around the world have begun to recognise nature in general, or specific ecosystems, as a rights holder. In so doing, they are pushing law beyond anthropocentrism and Western legal thought, at least on paper (see the UN Harmony with Nature Initiative for an overview of rights of nature cases globally).
However, the results are not what animal rights advocates would expect, and they can give rise to perplexing questions: Can a court recognise the rights to life and physical integrity of individual sentient animals and, at the same time, a human right to eat meat? Well, apparently, it can, and both were recognised under the umbrella of the rights of nature.
In 2022, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador ruled on a case originating from a habeas corpus action (a legal mechanism against unlawful detentions traditionally reserved for human individuals) filed in 2019 to defend a woolly monkey named Estrellita. Known as the Estrellita case, the Court saw an opportunity to clarify the content and scope of the rights of nature enshrined in the 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution (Art. 10 and 71 to 74), determining whether this framework also included individual animals as rights holders or, at least, individual wild animals.
Woolly Monkey / Photo by Evgenia Kononova fromWikimedia
Where the tension lies
The Court tried to have it both ways, embracing holistic and individualistic approaches —that is, ecosystem-centred versus individual-centred. The Court stated that nature acquires the status of subject of rights from a system-based approach, encompassing all the biotic and abiotic elements that shape this ‘complex subject’. Yet the Court also held that sentient animals are rights holders and must be considered individually, not merely as components of ecosystems. It recognised the rights to life and physical integrity for all sentient animals and certain specific rights of wild animals, such as the right not to be hunted, fished, captured, trafficked, etc., and the right to free animal behaviour.
These are significant legal claims that, taken seriously, would change current human practices drastically. Yet the Court also introduced interpretive principles that pull in the opposite direction. According to the ecological interpretation principle, animal rights must be understood through the lens of biological interactions that maintain ecosystem balance. Under this logic, the Court stated that environmental authorities may eliminate ‘invasive species’, doing little to smooth out the alleged incompatibility between protecting the environment and respecting animal rights.
This principle also allows the Court to acknowledge that human food practices and domestication are part of these legitimate ‘biological interactions’ and, therefore, must be respected. However, this hardly describes today’s intensive livestock farming, embedded in capitalist dynamics of exploitation. The kind of domestication characteristic of this system does not seem to be a desirable biological interaction fundamental to ecosystem balance.
There is no human right to eat tofu, but neither to eat animals
The most striking piece of reasoning, though, is that the Court also recognises a human right to eat animals based on two reasons: a) humans are natural omnivores; and b) food is a biological condition of human beings and a legally protected human right. This reasoning is questionable.
First, the Court flirts with the naturalistic fallacy: the fact that humans are omnivores only means that we can feed on a wide variety of organisms, but it says nothing about what we ought to eat. And it says nothing about killing animals for food (especially if there are also strong moral reasons against doing it).
What we do have is a human right to food, which brings me to the second point. If we follow a needs-based approach to the philosophical foundation of rights (as the Court seems to do), the human right to food is grounded in the basic need for food and nutrition. But eating animals is just one existing means, among many others, to satisfy that basic need. It is important to distinguish between the basic need itself and the diverse means to satisfy it. Only the former grounds the existence of a right. Therefore, there is no such thing as a human right to eat animals any more than there is a right to eat tofu.
Better friends than foes, right?
The Estrellita case is just an example among many others. However, the lesson is not that the rights of nature and animal rights are inherently incompatible. Both serve the project of expanding legal consideration beyond the human.
But the case reveals that simply folding animal rights into the rights of nature does not resolve the deep disagreements between holistic and individualistic ethical positions. It may, instead, reproduce those disagreements inside the law, quietly overriding the possibility of improving the legal treatment of animals individually considered. If we want to take both frameworks seriously, we also need to confront hard legal-philosophical questions. If rights are legal artifacts that serve to protect individuals so they can live together in society, is our current understanding of legal rights well suited for such a complex subject, i.e., ‘nature’? Legal rights, as artifacts, can change and adapt, but they are also embedded in a long history that has shaped its concept, content, and scope. Beyond the recognition of rights itself, interpretation and legal reasoning play a prominent role. The coherence of our legal systems depends on getting these and other questions right.
Pablo Serra-Palaois a PhD Candidate and Predoctoral Fellow in legal philosophy at Comillas Pontifical University (Madrid, Spain), and has written on topics including ecological justice, green criminology, and animal rights theory.
Language shapes how we see the world. Politicians speak of ‘enhanced interrogation’ rather than ‘torture’, we speak of ‘wars’ on cancer and racism, proposals for social care reform are labelled ‘dementia tax’ to undermine them. These word choices trigger particular perspectives; they shape what we notice and pay attention to, the judgements we draw, and whether we respond positively or negatively. These are examples of framing effects: the way information is presented shapes how we respond to it.
In a recent paper, I explore how the framing effects of words and phrases – ‘lexical frames’ – can function to maintain oppressive social practices. I propose that these lexical frames can regulate our behaviour in ways that come to preserve oppression and can even undermine our attempts to talk about injustice.
Linguistic Anchors
To understand how lexical frames can come to preserve social practices, consider the case of ‘desire lines’ (also called ‘cow paths’), tracks that become worn into grass by footfall over time. These lines emerge from individual habits as people take shortcuts away from official, paved paths and wear away visible routes. As these pathways become visible, more people begin to follow the route, which in turn makes the path more established. In this example, the physical environment is anchoring our shared habits. The worn-away path emerges from a habit – following the shortcut – and then maintains that same habit, creating a stabilizing feedback loop. Language can operate in the same way.
Words can become associated with particular perspectives through use, which creates habits of attention and emotional responses. Akin to the feedback loops that create desire lines, which anchor people’s movement through space, these lexical frames linguistically anchor collective attitudes and social habits.
Anchoring Oppression
These desire lines can anchor all sorts of collective habits – including oppressive norms. Philosophers Shen-yi Liao and Bryce Huebner analyse the example of ‘Shirley cards’, which were, historically, images of white women against a coloured background used to calibrate the development of film photographs. The use of white women reflected the attitude that white skin was ‘normal’ and resulted in the failure of analogue film stocks to properly capture dark-skinned subjects. Here we see how an oppressive attitude, that whiteness is the default, has embedded itself into technology in way that preserves inequality. These Shirley cards anchored oppression. They are not only a product of racist norms but operate to maintain them.
Language can operate in much the same way. In the Shirley Card example, the film stock had become imbued with racist assumptions. Words can become imbued with values and norms when it is consistently associated with them over time.
Naming Injustice
Just as analogue film can be miscalibrated, lexical frames can distort the world. In some cases, these distortions can anchor oppressive practices. One upshot is that resisting injustice requires finding the right language. We can’t call out injustice we can’t name. But we also can’t tackle injustice if we’re using a lexical frame that anchors the same oppression we’re trying to resist.
Linguist George Lakoff suggests this happens in political debates about tax policy. Those in favour of reduced taxes term their plans “tax relief”; in doing so, tax is framed as an affliction and, therefore, any reductions are a welcome respite. Next their opponents in favour of progressive taxation want to reject these plans. But, Lakoff points out, if they do this by proclaiming their opposition to “tax relief” then they’ve already lost the language game. The lexical framing of tax as an affliction is already embedded into the proposals, even if the proposals favour increased taxation. Likewise, speaking about the fatal effects of reducing “welfare” might backfire, because the word itself cues a racist and classist perspective on which welfare are lazy and undeserving of help.
Emotional Labour
Sometimes, we need to talk about cases of injustice that have been erased. In such cases, we might need new language. However, if our existing language is imbued with ideology, we risk projecting old distortions baked into these new labels.
I suggest in the paper that this has occurred in the case of “emotional labour”. The term was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild to describe the demands of regulating emotions at work – such as the artificial friendliness of airline stewards or the performative hostility of debt collectors. Over time, however, the term has become a catchall for feminised domestic labour, especially the invisible mental aspects such as remembering dates and managing tasks [Hartley].
On one hand, naming this category of activity makes sense: the invisibility of this work contributes to preserving the gender inequity in who performs it. However, the term “emotional labour” itself is counterproductive because (unlike terms such as ‘mental load’) the frame itself is imbued with sexist values. The term “emotional” is deeply entwined with sexist prejudice. Calling household management ‘emotional labour’ reflects and reproduces the sexist perspective that erases this labour in the first place.
This is like trying to address the whiteness of fashion magazines by photographing a more racially diverse range of subjects while still using film calibrated for white skin. The new targets become reconciled with the old ideological distortions. If we’re going to tackle injustice, we need language that illuminates, not distorts.
Emilia Wilson is a lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her current research explores the relationship between representational resources (like language, stereotypes, theories, etc) and social practice.
In this post, Mihaela Popa-Wyatt discusses her article “Online Hate: Is Hate an Infectious Disease? Is Social Media a Promoter?”, published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. She argues that hate does not go viral but takes hold through repeated reinforcement — exactly what platforms are built to deliver—and draws out what follows for how we think about platform responsibility.
We often say that hate “goes viral.” The metaphor treats hateful belief like measles: one exposure and you may carry it. This picture is wrong. Hate does not spread like a virus. It rather spreads like joining a protest: people commit only once enough others they trust have committed first. Network scientists call this complex contagion.
The distinction matters for policy. Social media platforms are engineered to deliver precisely the dense, repeated reinforcement that complex contagion requires. They are not neutral carriers of hate. They are promoters of it. If that is right, the central question is not which posts to delete. It is who designs the environment and what they are permitted to optimise for.
The simple contagion model fails
The standard story runs like this. A hostile post infects a viewer. The viewer passes it on. Once enough people carry it, hate breaks out across the network.
But almost nobody becomes a committed racist from a single tweet. Hateful attitudes accumulate. They are absorbed from many sources over time and they take root in people who already feel uncertain, aggrieved, or hungry for belonging.
So the one-shot model cannot explain what we observe. Some people consume vast amounts of hostile content and remain unmoved. Others are transformed by far less. The difference is not how much they see. It is the structure of what they see: hostile content arriving repeatedly, from multiple sources, framed as what people like them believe. People are radicalised in groups by voices they trust.
The virus metaphor has one further shortcoming, and it’s the one that matters most. A virus passes through a passive host: the host does nothing. But people do something. They weigh what they hear, decide whom to trust, and choose what to pass on. This determines what intervention(s) are likely to succeed. If hate really were a pathogen, quarantine would be the answer: isolate carriers, remove contaminated material, wait. Because hate is instead something people adopt, under conditions that make adoption feel reasonable, the answer lies in those conditions: who builds them and what they are built to maximise.
Thresholds are the key
Complex contagion offers a better model. Its defining feature is a threshold: a person adopts only after receiving reinforcing signals from several different sources. Anything costly, risky, or norm-violating spreads this way, because risk is what makes social proof necessary. Adopting an unproven technology is one example; joining a protest is another. One friend marching is not enough; five friends marching changes the calculus. What does the work is not the number of exposures, but the number of sources.
Hateful attitudes behave the same way. People adopt them when their social environment signals that the attitudes are normal, shared, and safe to express. A single hostile post converts no one. A feed where hostility appears repeatedly, from many accounts, framed as common sense, slowly shifts a person’s sense of what “people like me” think.
Once a threshold is crossed, the recipient becomes a source. The person who was converted starts producing hateful content, supplying one of the reinforcing signals that will move somebody else across their own threshold.
This explains three things the virus model cannot. Hate clusters in tight communities rather than diffusing evenly across a network. Deradicalisation is hard, because removing a single contact leaves the surrounding web of reinforcing ties intact. And people who leave hateful communities often relapse, because the threshold structure that recruited them is still standing.
If hate spreads by complex contagion, then the environments that spread it best will be those that maximise reinforcement density. Consider what followed the Southport stabbings on 29 July 2024. Because the suspect was a minor, reporting restrictions made official identification legally impossible for three days, leaving an information vacuum. A fabricated name for the attacker, originating in a single unsourced post on X, was taken up by accounts presenting themselves as news outlets; a small site wrote it into an article, which an account with 2.8 million followers then cited as reporting. Within a day the name had accumulated over 30,000 mentions across more than 18,000 accounts.
What matters here is not the volume but the distribution. A user met the claim from many apparently distinct testifiers, some posing as journalistic authority. This is precisely the structure that a threshold model predicts will produce adoption. But the independence was illusory. All of it traced back to one unverified source, so the convergence carried no confirmatory weight. Platforms then supplied the same illusion at scale. The name trended on X and appeared as a suggested search on TikTok, and kept doing so for nine hours after police confirmed it was false. Recommender systems are indifferent to truth- value. What they optimise for is the very thing complex contagion feeds on: the appearance of many sources saying the same thing.
The mechanism generalises. Recommendation algorithms cluster similar users together, inflating the apparent prevalence of in-group views. Engagement-based ranking surfaces emotionally charged content, much of it hostile. High-follower accounts lend authority to hateful framings. And anonymity lowers the cost of expressing extreme views, so their visible frequency rises. This means that the threshold falls for everyone watching.
None of these features was designed to spread hate. Each nonetheless supplies precisely what complex contagion requires: hostile content encountered repeatedly, from sources that appear numerous, independent, and either similar to oneself or authoritative.
Social media is therefore not like air carrying a virus. It is an active promoter whose structural features systematically lower the threshold at which hate takes hold.
The harm is a design harm.
What follows for policy
Standard policy aims at the wrong target. Removing individual posts treats symptoms, while the ecology that produced them remains intact. Banning the loudest accounts helps only modestly because complex contagion does not depend on any single superspreader. What matters is the density of reinforcement in a user’s feed, and that survives the removal of any one node.
The right interventions are structural. Each targets a condition the mechanism requires.
· Break up homogeneous clusters. Complex contagion needs dense, clustered networks. Simple contagion travels well along long weak ties; complex contagion dies without local reinforcement. Clustering is the variable with the most theoretical leverage, and recommender systems currently maximise it.
· Reduce amplification of borderline-hostile content. Most reinforcement is supplied by material that breaks no rule. It sits below every removal threshold and is never moderated. What crosses a person’s threshold is volume, not severity.
· Change what ranking optimises for. Demoting engagement-bait treats the output of the metric. Engagement ranking selects for affective content because affect holds attention, so hostile material wins on the platform’s own terms. The metric is the thing to fix.
· Add friction to sharing inflammatory material. Reinforcement accumulates faster than verification. At Southport the police correction arrived after 30,000 mentions. Friction removes nothing. It changes the order in which claim and correction reach a user, and order is what determines whether correction works at all.
· Give counter-speech a reinforcement structure. Counter-speech faces the same threshold problem as hateful speech. One dissenting voice changes nothing; several arriving together might. No platform is built to deliver that. This is the only intervention that adds speech rather than restricting it.
None of these is sufficient alone, and each raises hard questions about platform power and free expression. But they aim at the mechanism rather than its output.
Who builds the room
Let’s return to the virus metaphor. If hate were a virus, quarantine would be the answer: isolate carriers, remove contaminated material, wait. That is roughly what content moderation attempts, and it is why content moderation underperforms. Hate is not caught; it is adopted by people who are reasoning, under conditions that make adoption look reasonable to them. Those conditions do not arise on their own. Someone builds them, maintains them, profits from them, and could build them otherwise.
This is why the familiar question of what speech is protected, and prohibited, cannot be the first one. It takes the environment as given and asks only what may circulate inside it. But the environment is not given. It is a product, with designers and a business model, and its design decides whether an unverified claim dies on arrival or reaches eighteen thousand thresholds by the following afternoon.
The line between protected and prohibited speech will still need drawing. But justice in public discourse is also a matter of who builds the conditions under which we speak, and what they are permitted to optimise for.
Mihaela Popa-Wyatt is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Her research spans philosophy of language, social philosophy, and public policy, and is organised around two related questions: how speech causes social harms, and how such harms can be reduced without undermining freedom of expression.
The principle of community is certainly not new, yet it names something rarely discussed about our social relations. The natural objection follows: it would be wonderful if the baker baked and the teacher taught out of a commitment to fulfilling others’ needs. But isn’t it self-indulgent to think a society could run on trust in each other’s attitudes of service?
A snapshot from the student demonstrations in New Delhi(more…)
Justice Everywhere is back for a new season. We continue in our aim to provide a public forum for the exchange of ideas about philosophy and public affairs.
We have lots of exciting content coming your way! This includes:
Weekly posts from our a wonderful team of house authors, offering analysis of a vast array of moral, ethical, and political issues on Mondays.
The continuation of our collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy, introducing readers to cutting-edge research being published on justice-related topics in applied and engaged philosophy.
If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to contribute a guest post on a topical subject in political philosophy (broadly construed), or would like to pitch a series or collaboration – such as publishing a series based on a workshop or special issue – please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
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While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, werecall some of the highlights from our 2025-26 season.
At Justice Everywhere, as the name suggests, we write blogs that focus in one way or another on justice. That can take many forms – but, we definitely do not ignore some of the core questions of contemporary political theory. Here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to personal relations, society more broadly, and, ultimately, (social) justice:
As part of our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, Matt Perry talked to Chris Armstrong about extending discussions about global justice to include our oceans, as well as how to write (and publish!) engaging philosophy for a general audience.
Under what conditions can affirmative action be consistent with merit-based selection practices? In this post, part of our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Shalom Chalson (National University of Singapore) and James Bernard Willoughby (Australian National University) discuss their article on using affirmative action as a tie-breaker.
How should we think about caste and caste-based discrimination? And to what extent is should it be treated the same as race or gender? Drawing on his paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Ajinkya Deshmukh suggests that thinking about caste can help us better understand social identities like gender and race that impact our lives.
What is an emotional affair, and why should philosophers think about emotional affairs? Building on their paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Justin Clardy discusses the ethics of emotional affairs and to what extent they should be considered wrongful.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2026-27 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing soon with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors, in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series. If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, werecall some of the highlights from our 2025-26 season.
At Justice Everywhere, we are always keen to feature posts reflecting on academia, pegagogy and the odd job of being a philosopher – and all that entails. What role should philosophers have in society? How can we adapt our teaching to the changing demands of students and the “world of work”? Here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to philosophy, politics and academia:
It has been almost three years since ChatGPT was released in the public arena amid great hopes, worries, and, perhaps more than anything, hype. In one of the first posts of the year, Alexandru Volacu asks, can our current academic model go on in the age of AI?
While we’re scrambling to adapt our assessments to the Age of GenAI, Anca Gheaus suggests that we also need to worry about the impact GenAI has on students’ ability to read complex text. How can we adapt our teaching to “AI reading”? Should we?
It is part of the life of an academic to be confronted with failure: a job application going nowhere, a promising paper ruthlessly stomped by Reviewer 2. In this post, which draws on a paper published by the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Mario I. Juarez-Garcia investigates the unexplored value of giving up.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2026-27 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing soon with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors, in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series. If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, werecall some of the highlights from our 2025-26 season.
With record breaking heatwaves, climate change has been at the forefront of many political debates this year. However, the climate and the impact that climate change has on communities accross the world is but one of the issues relating to the natural environment our writers have dug into. Here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to human communities, animal communities, and the environment:
Campaigns for animal rights often rely upon shocking images of their suffering to gain attention and drive change. Whilst this often succeeds, it can also be counter-productive and drive people away. In this fascinating post, Steve Cooke discusses his paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy and asks – what would it mean to use wonder to achieve animal rights?
Can we make animals work for us? Some people argue that employing (some) animals can be compatible with their interests. However, Angie Pepper argues that this is mistaken.
How should we conceive of the status of nonhuman animals? Pablo Magaña and Devon Cass argue that there are resources within the literature on relational equality that mean we can extend it to include animals.
In human relationships, we often operate with the ‘benefit of the doubt’. When a friend cancels a plan or a family member behaves differently to normal, we might assume there is something going on that has little to do with us. In this thought-provoking post, Matthew Perry considers whether we should approach the question of animal minds with a similar “benefit of the doubt” attitude.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2026-27 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing soon with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors, in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series. If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, werecall some of the highlights from our 2025-26 season.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of interest on this blog this year relating to the issue of AI. However, it’s not just AI that as occupied our writers this year – here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to politics, technology, and ethics:
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. In her first guest post for Justice Everywhere, Hollie Meehan asks whether “virtuous AI” could actually save entry level jobs.
The proliferation of Generative AI is just one of the threats facing democracy. Our regular contributor Alexandru Volacu draws on Ancient Greece to argue for the creation of a new type of democratic job to incentivice democracy.
What is the harm in having an AI companion? Apps that allow users to develop relationships with customizable AI chat bots are increasingly popular. As part of our ongoing partnership with the Journal of Applied Philosophy, we featured a post by Muriel Leuenberger which analyzed the effect of using AI companions.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2026-27 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing soon with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors, in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series. If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
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.
