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Justice Everywhere a blog about philosophy in public affairs

General

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Lessons from the Brazilian elections II

by Katarina Pitasse Fragoso and Nathália Sanglard

Pic by Mariana Pitasse

On the last Sunday in October, Lula won the presidential election in Brazil in a historical but also dramatic second ballot. It was historical for several reasons: it was the first time a candidate who came second in the first ballot overturned the deficit to win; it was the first time a Brazilian President was elected for his fourth mandate; and it was the first time that the left wing organised an online army to fight biased and unfair algorithms.

Lula’s election was not made by his own campaign, which pushed him no further than his most loyal supporters and almost torpedoed his chances. The disorganisation was astonishing. For instance, Lula’s much loved stickers were unavailable in many parts of Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro. We were at a vitally important election, but where was the energy? Brazil is famous for its big public shows but they went missing before the first ballot. There was an absence of noise, colour, people on the streets and, perhaps what’s worse, ideas. Left-wing activists did not seem capable of attracting voters beyond their usual audience and their own bubbles. Even the students seemed to be taking their studies more seriously than the streets. Where was the “festa” for  democracy?

The results of the first round were clear. Lula lost, and around the country extreme right-wing deputies, senates and governors were elected. Deep disappointment and upset spread and those who cared were on the brink of despair. But a couple of hours after the first-round results, we got a message, a clarion call: join the Army for Lula. At first, we could not figure out what to do, but at a stage of desperation, what did we have to lose? Army for Lula is a WhatsApp channel led by André Janones, a Deputy elected from the REDE, a left-wing party. He has energy, and understands his way around social media, and how the engagement brought about by mass action can change the biased algorithms. For most social media users, this was new and exciting. He said his goal was to make social media more democratic and less captured by the extreme right-wing. We wanted that too, but we needed a guide, and Janones took on that role magnificently giving us daily missions. For example, by encouraging Google searches regarding corruption cases involving Flávio Bolsonaro, or by posting a photo of left-wingers wearing the Brazilian national team jersey, to reclaim a symbol that the Brazilian far-right had tried to co-opt. We had no clue how powerful our engagement would be back then. We also saw beautiful social movements emerge just one day after the first election. In our alma matter university, Federal Fluminense University, in Niterói, students went to the street to say “no” to the extreme right-wing, seemingly energized by the protests of French students. And then, countless spontaneous and simultaneous movements sprung up. Activism bred activism and we all became even more engaged; we ended up bringing  family and friends to the streets. Joyous demonstrations exploded throughout Brazil, from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to small cities in the countryside.

We were worked harder and harder for Lula, digitally and in person. But dramatically, Flavio Bolsonaro’s party applied to the Electoral Tribunal to ban the Army for Lula, and it was temporarily suspended. Momentum seemed lost and even with all our action, opinion polls showed Flavio Bolsonaro ahead;  the result of a profusion of fake news, backed with money and support from big tech and business. Lula’s supporters  viewed every new opinion poll with stress and agony. What will become of us? We were doing everything, but the voting pattern was barely shifting.

But the suspension of the Army of Lula was lifted and Janones had a brilliant idea: we should try to talk with and convince at least one person outside our socio-political bubble. We sent messages to people we hadn’t spoken to for years; even to people outside Brazil. Sometimes replies were cold or we found ourselves blocked, but we were overwhelmed with the proportion of positive answers. So we kept trying. Together with this, alternative media outlets, such as Intercept, Revista Piaui, Calma Urgente were undertaking real investigation to keep fake news out, and bring information to the population.

It worked. We saw a wave of elderly, sick, and disabled people, together with the indigenous and quilombolas, going to vote. People who had been exempted in the first round and didn’t vote, but turned out in huge numbers in the second. It was very emotional. The result, as we now know, is that we had about 2.9 million more voters in the second round, the lowest abstention rate in 20 years.

Even with this wave of hope, on election day, public transport had been dramatically cut in some big cities and so many people could not get to the polling stations before normal closing time.  In Salvador, for instance, 944 busses were kept back the garage, and in São Paulo only 60% of the buses were operating.

After a nervous wait, and the fact that both candidates asked for an extension, the Supreme Court decided to delay closure for two hours until 19h. But in practice this did not help everyone, as by the time of the decision many places were closed already for the public and were not permitted to reopen.

As the results started rolling in Lula pulled ahead, winning in many international cities, including Frankfurt. The initial lead faded and Flavio Bolsonaro was reported ahead, but as the later returns were tallied up Lula returned to the front, with a lead that grew and grew until the end. A dramatic turn as if scripted by our best movie directors. The emotions exploded in our hearts. We were witnessing a historical drama.

Just like his father, who refused to accept his defeat in the last elections, Flavio Bolsonaro questioned the results of the election. But only 35.000 votes were registered in the extension period, and Lula won by 4.4 million votes. Bolsonaro still hasn’t conceded, but it hardly matters anymore, as Lula’s election was accepted by Brazil’s institutions and world leaders around the globe.

We are proud to be spreading joy and happiness to everywhere! Alegria, alegria, in Caetano Veloso’s words. Congratulations flooded in, from near and far. Lula became the leader of hope, the leader against extreme right-wing politicians and parties, around the world. 

The lessons of our election are many: we are not the backyard of Trump, we care about our democracy, we care about our people. Brazil is a huge and complex country, but our capacity for collective mobilization on various fronts has shown us the path to defeating the far-right and strengthening Brazilian democracy.

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Children / Duties / Education / General / Social justice

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Making families: Whose interests count?

Serene scene of a couple enjoying the Bruchsal city view from a hilltop bench.
Photo by Cedé Joey via pexels.com

This is a guest post by Daniela Cutas (Lund University). She discusses her new book, co-edited with Anna Smajdor and Kristien Hens, entitled The Ethics of Human Reproduction and the Family: Individual and Collective Interests. It is now available, with open access, from Bloomsbury.

What are the effects of maternal norms on mothers’ decisions to donate their womb to their daughters? What does milk kinship tell us about the nature of motherhood? What should happen when women’s procreative interests come into conflict with those of the state (and can the state be said to have procreative interests)? All these questions, and many more, are discussed in a newly published collective volume that addresses the interplay between individual and collective interests in family-making.

The contributors analyse reproductive interventions facilitated by medical advances, especially those that transcend the limits of consent or bodily integrity. These include, for example, the collection at the parents’ request of reproductive tissue from children facing conditions or medical interventions that are a threat to their reproductive potential. Another example is that of uterus transplantation from mother to daughter. And yet another example is the collection of reproductive material from comatose or deceased people in order to use it to create children. How are such interventions justified?

They tend to be justified by appealing to the interests of the person on whom the intervention is performed. The removal of reproductive material from children has a therapeutic purpose, of allowing the child to become a parent later in life. It is in the interest of women to be able to carry a pregnancy and become mothers. A man who has lost his life before becoming a father is assumed to have an interest in his wife having his child, or his parents having grandchildren, even after his death.

These explanations sometimes obscure the expectations and interests of those who request or carry out the interventions. Parents could also request fertility preservation interventions on their children in order to preserve their own potential to become grandparents. Researchers who create extraordinary opportunities could also stand to gain prestige from such achievements. The wife or parents of a man who can no longer choose to become a father might also be acting in their own interests.

It is inevitable that the interests of family members, patients and doctors, research participants and researchers do not always coincide. The problem arises when the interests of some of the participants in a decision or intervention threaten, compromise or completely replace those of the very individuals who are the subjects of the decision or intervention. Moreover, certain conceptual entities such as the family are sometimes treated as having their own moral status and interests that may conflict with those of family members. When they do, the family’s interests are sometimes given priority over those of its members. The volume examines such situations.

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Duties / General / Moral values

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What Gossip Gets Wrong

In this post, Ali Raza Jatoi discusses his recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on why gossip wrongs us not by breaching privacy or spreading lies, but by shutting us out of the conversation deciding who we are.

Gossip, Charles Haigh-Wood (19th century), oil on canvas. (c) Public Domain.

Think of the last time you told someone about a mutual acquaintance who wasn’t in the room. Maybe you were worried about them and wanted advice on how to help. Or maybe you were speculating about why they got that promotion, that breakup, that demotion. One of these felt fine, even caring. The other felt a bit like backstabbing, even if every word of it was true. Why?

Gossip is not a fringe activity. Researchers estimate that roughly two-thirds of human conversation is evaluative talk about people who aren’t present to hear it. We are not going to stop doing this and probably shouldn’t try. But gossip clearly can go wrong, and the puzzle is explaining what, exactly, goes wrong when it does. In a recent paper, I argue that the standard answers – privacy, harm, dishonesty – all fail, and that the real wrong is exclusion.

Start with privacy. It cannot be the whole story, because gossip about entirely public facts still feels wrong. A colleague speculating about why you didn’t get promoted, using only things everyone already knows, still stings. Harm cannot be the whole story either because gossip that never reaches its target and changes nothing can still feel like a betrayal, purely because it happened. And deception is clearly not the issue, since gossip built entirely on true, verified information is often the most cutting kind of all.

Here is the alternative I defend. Gossip is evaluative talk about an identifiable, absent person, shared with some people but deliberately not with the person it’s about. That person has no chance to correct a mischaracterisation, add context, or push back. Their reputation gets shaped by a conversation they are locked out of. I call this a loss of participatory standing: a legitimate claim to a voice in discourse about oneself, grounded in one’s stake in the outcome, one’s agency over how one is understood, and one’s membership in the community doing the discussing.

This is what the other theories miss. The very same criticism, said to someone’s face and said behind their back, is not morally equivalent, even when the words are identical, because only one version includes them in the conversation that is deciding how they’ll be seen.

Exclusion, though, comes in degrees, and so does the wrong. Praise someone behind their back and they have little reason to demand inclusion since there’s nothing there to contest. Positive gossip is still gossip, but only weakly troubling. Compare: “She’s too humble to say it, but she probably only got the job because they needed a woman on the panel.” Still framed as a compliment, but it smuggles in a claim she would have every reason to challenge. What matters is not whether the tone is warm or hostile. It’s whether there’s anything in the remark the person would want a say in. A stranger’s exclusion also matters less than a close friend’s, since the stakes of the relationship differ. And exclusion is sometimes flatly justified as warning others that someone is dangerous doesn’t require giving them a hearing first.

None of this settles when gossip actually crosses the line, so I propose three further constraints. The first is about standing. Does the target have a real stake in this conversation, through their interests, their say over their own story, or their membership in the community discussing them? If not, exclusion barely registers as a wrong at all. If a friend group is speculating about why Mara stopped drinking, that’s her reputation and her story, and these are her people. She’d want a say. But if a stranger on the train guesses why some guy looked annoyed on the phone, there’s no relationship, no story that follows him, nothing real on the line

The second is about purpose, in particular, is the talk serving a genuine need, like warning someone or working through a hard decision, or is it entertainment at someone’s expense? The third is about justice. Does this gossip, even in a single harmless-seeming instance, prop up an unjust pattern? Speculation that trades on a stereotype about women, or about any marginalised group, carries a structural weight that outstrips the individual conversation, however casually it’s meant.

Put together, these constraints explain why gossip is neither always fine nor always wrong. A worried conversation about a stressed colleague, aimed at figuring out how to support them, passes all three tests easily. Speculative chatter about how a colleague “must have” earned a promotion, dressed up as concern, does not.

I don’t think we can or should try to eliminate gossip. It is too tightly woven into how humans build trust, share information, and hold each other accountable. But we can ask better questions of it. Instead of “is this private?” or “could this cause harm?”, ask: does this person have a stake in what’s being said about them? Would they want a voice here? And if they’ve been excluded, was there a good reason for it? These questions won’t settle every case, but they get at what actually troubles us about gossip in a way that the usual worries about privacy, harm, and honesty never quite manage.

Ali Raza Jatoi is an independent researcher working across philosophy, number theory and computational methods.

General

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Lessons from the Brazilian elections

Picture by acf.view
Picture by acf.view (https://instagram.com/acf.view?mdxt=aHg3NDg5MHJ5cWhq)

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 voting 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 temporarily 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 the 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.

Animals / Climate / Environment / Governance / Rights

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Missing the Animal for the Forest? The Limits of the ‘Rights of Nature’ Approach

This is a guest post by Pablo Serra Palao.

A photograph showing a large body of water surrounded by forested hills.
San Marcos Lagoon, Ecuador / Photo by Marcelo Trujillo from Pixabay

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.

A woolly monkey climbing a tree.
Woolly Monkey / Photo by Evgenia Kononova from Wikimedia

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-Palao is 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.

This post is based on the author’s open-access article ‘Naturaleza, animales, derechos: encuentros y desencuentros en la Corte Constitucional del Ecuador’

Gender / General / Social justice

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How Language Preserves Oppression

In this post, Emilia Wilson (Cardiff University) discusses her article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy Ameliorating Linguistic Anchors of Oppression on how specific words and phrases may anchor oppressive social practices. 

Renée Kools, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Moral values / Technology

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Is Online Hate Contagious? Why the Virus Metaphor Isn’t Quite Right

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. 

© Creative Commons. At: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Network_Analysis_Visualization.png

Social media is a promoter, not a medium 

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.

General

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Student Protests and the Fleeting Community in New Delhi

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
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General

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Welcome to the 2026/27 season!

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.
  • More from our special series: Beyond the Ivory Tower where we interview those who work at/across the boundary between theory and practice, and Teaching 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.

So please follow us, read and share posts on social media (we’re on Facebook, and on Bluesky), and feel free to comment on posts using the comment box at the bottom of each post.

Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Social justice

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From the Vault: Relations, Society, and (Social) Justice

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall 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.
  • In a fascinating reflection on the 1920s story, “The Anarchist Banker”, by Fernando Pessoa, Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and Louis Larue try to make sense of the idea that someone can pursue an immoral career while supporting political projects such as anarchism.
  • 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.