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Justice Everywhere a blog about philosophy in public affairs

General

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Why Might Vulnerability Make Crisis Politics Morally Distinctive?

This post is co-authored by Matthew Adams and Fay Niker, and is based on their recent, open-access journal article “Taking Advantage of Crises“.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the humanitarian crisis it created, Milton Friedman wrote an influential op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating for a school voucher system in New Orleans. “This is a tragedy,” he wrote. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.” His advocacy succeeded: within 18 months, the city’s School Board went from running 123 public schools to just 4, with most replaced by privately run charter schools.

This wasn’t an isolated case of opportunism unique to free market advocates. Winston Churchill famously advised to “never let a good crisis go to waste.” More recently, figures like Arundhati Roy have suggested that crises like Covid-19 provide opportunities for progressive transformation. And the Green New Deal explicitly frames the climate crisis as an opportunity to advance broader economic reforms, including policies like living wages that extend well beyond emissions reduction.

If political actors across the ideological spectrum try to take advantage of crises, what makes such opportunism problematic? The intuitive answer focuses on ends: it’s bad when Friedmanites privatize public goods, good when progressives create quality jobs. But this simple view misses important moral nuance. Even taking advantage of crises to realize good ends can be problematic in how those ends are pursued—through cognitive distortion, emotional manipulation, or circumventing democratic procedures. More fundamentally, it doesn’t address whether strategies that take advantage of crises should be evaluated differently from essentially the same strategies used during normal times.

Recognizing the patterns

Taking advantage of a crisis can occur in various forms. We can distinguish several strategies, three of which are particularly important:

Fear Factor involves framing issues to deliberately amplify people’s crisis-related fears. The “weapons of mass destruction” framing that justified UK involvement in the Iraq War following 9/11 is a paradigm case—playing on terrorism-related fears to build support for actions people might not otherwise endorse.

Smuggling presents something as crisis-responsive while covertly advancing an independent agenda. The Friedman example illustrates what we call over-extending: instituting a measure that is at least partially responsive to the crisis, but that primarily advances an independent ideological agenda. Replacing New Orleans’ public schools with charter schools did address rebuilding the education system, but its primary effect was advancing privatization. Another form is omnibussing—appending unrelated policies onto crisis responses, as critics argue occurs when the Green New Deal includes living wage provisions alongside emissions reduction measures.

Surfing the Wave seizes a crisis-induced “radical mood” via standard democratic means. Labour’s shock 1945 election victory, running on a manifesto drawing heavily on the Beveridge Report commissioned to address wartime social and economic crises, exemplifies this strategy.

These strategies aren’t mutually exclusive in practice. The USA PATRIOT Act introduced shortly after 9/11 simultaneously smuggled liberty-restricting provisions into anti-terrorism measures, seized the radical mood, and amplified fear—using multiple strategies in concert.

The vulnerability argument

Here’s the key theoretical point: crises don’t merely create political opportunities—they create and compound vulnerabilities in ways that make certain strategies morally worse than they would be during normal times, independent of their consequences.

Crises increase vulnerabilities in several ways. Most directly, they threaten people’s corporeal wellbeing. Hurricane Katrina exposed New Orleans residents to death, infectious disease, loss of medical care, and homelessness. Covid-19 threatened lives globally. Even financial crises that don’t directly threaten health still expose people to fear, uncertainty, and dependence.

These vulnerabilities aren’t distributed evenly. Crises compound existing inequalities. During Katrina, those most vulnerable were in the city’s lowest-lying, poorest neighborhoods with predominantly Black and single-mother populations. Wealthy people facing Covid-19 could pay for better healthcare and shelter in relative luxury. Members of comparatively disadvantaged groups thus become more vulnerable not just to crisis effects but to social exploitation by those in even more powerful positions because of the crisis.

More subtly, crises create dispositional vulnerabilities through the mere possibility of exploitation. A crisis opens up new possible ways actors could take advantage of it for bad ends. These possibilities—independent of whether they’re actualized—expose people to additional vulnerability. New Orleans residents were vulnerable not just to what actually happened but to the myriad possible ways the crisis could have been exploited.

This matters because it’s worse to cognitively deceive, emotionally manipulate, or procedurally circumvent people who face such heightened vulnerabilities. Other things being equal, using Friedman’s over-extending strategy on a population reeling from a humanitarian disaster is worse than using essentially the same deceptive strategy during normal times. The badness isn’t just about consequences—it’s about the moral weight we should give to manipulating people in vulnerable states.

Why this matters

This “Weight Variantism”—the view that crisis strategies should be weighted more heavily than the same strategies during normal times—has practical implications beyond theoretical interest.

It means we should evaluate crisis-era policies with particular scrutiny for procedural violations and manipulation, even when we support their aims. A progressive policy smuggled into crisis legislation may advance justice, but the smuggling itself remains problematic in a way that matters for evaluation. The distinction between ends and means can’t be collapsed.

It also suggests that the severity of crises matters for evaluation. The worse the crisis, the greater the vulnerability, the more problematic the exploitation. Covid-19’s global scope, duration, threat to lives, and unexpectedness made it a particularly severe crisis. Strategies that take advantage of such severe crises are worse—across the cognitive, affective, and procedural dimensions—than the same strategies in response to less severe crises.

We live in an age permeated by overlapping crises—climate, public health, economic, political. Understanding when and why taking advantage of them crosses ethical lines, beyond simple disagreement about ends, helps us evaluate both past responses and future ones with greater moral precision. The question isn’t whether we should ever take advantage of crises, but how the additional vulnerabilities crises create should shape our evaluation of the various ways actors might do so.

General

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Incentivizing Democracy

Two global crises are troubling policy-makers, academics, and large swaths of the general public. The first one is political, currently unfolding, and could be best labelled as a crisis of democracy. As the latest V-DEM Report on Democracy shows, the gains of the so-called “third wave of democracy” have been almost completely wiped out, with democracy worldwide going back to 1978 levels. Only 7% of the world population are now considered to live in a liberal democracy. Moreover, global dissatisfaction with democracy among ordinary citizens has reached unprecedented levels in the last few years. The other crisis is economic, currently looming, and is traceable to the impact that loosely regulated AI development is likely to have for the job market. While it is too early to offer more than potential scenarios for this evolution, even in the near to medium-term future, there is a fairly widespread sentiment that the consequences of AI for employment, at least in some sectors, will be rather pernicious. For example, most business executives believe that AI is likely to displace a large number of existing jobs, while about two thirds of both EU and US citizens believe that AI will lead to more jobs dissappearing than being created. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has strikingly predicted as recently as January 2026 that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years. In this piece I briefly outline an institutional proposal, which is not novel but instead has excellent historical pedigree, that could contribute to attenuate these crises if coupled with other kinds of substantive democratic reforms.

Athenian Tetradrachm

Source: https://www.navic.org.au/numismatic-items/the-athenian-tetradrachm/

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Democracy / Duties / General

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Partisanship and the ethics of citizenship

An important body of literature has documented, and sometimes lamented, the decline of partisanship over the last few decades. Party membership and partisan identification seem to have decreased significantly, while skepticism towards partisan politics has increased among populations of consolidated democracies. However, as I argue in a recent article, while some aspects of this evolution are worrisome, it is unclear that we should regret the age of massive partisan loyalty. While parties may be essential to a well-functioning democracy for a diversity of reasons, partisanship, understood as the sustained commitment by citizens to a particular political party, is more ambivalent. In other words, parties may be more valuable than partisanship.

Strawberry Thief printed textile designed by William Morris (1883).
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Children / Economics / Gender / General / MediaPhilosophy / Public Philosophy / Technology

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‘Polluter Pays’: A Tax on Big Tech to Reduce Online Harms

Mihaela Popa-Wyatt and Ajinkya Deshmukh from The University of Manchester.

Image credit

That platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook operated by Big Tech companies cause harms to their users is now a well-established fact. The US Surgeon General has repeatedly warned that adolescent mental health and body image are adversely affected by social media. Large-scale studies from Canada and the UK show that this is not specific to the US. The thornier issue is: how do we mitigate these harms? A popular policy solution has been banning social media for young people. Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia have done this, while France, Finland and several other countries are considering it.

72% of children aged 8–12 are still accessing sites and apps with a minimum age of 13

– Ofcom

The problem is that bypassing age-restrictions is trivially easy for many children. Ofcom research shows that “72% of children aged 8–12 are still accessing sites and apps with a minimum age of 13”. Unless there is a concerted global effort such that even technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) cannot circumvent bans, this bypassing is unlikely to stop. We think a better solution is to tax the companies that build these products based on how their algorithms amplify harmful content. Here is why this is better than bans.

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Duties / General / Health

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Against the intention-based objection to euthanasia

In this post, Harrison Lee (University of Mississippi) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the intention-based objection to euthanasia.

Many opponents of euthanasia argue that it is impermissible simply because it involves intentionally killing a patient. By contrast, they often accept practices like palliative sedation (PS), even when these foreseeably hasten death. The usual explanation appeals to the doctrine of double effect: it is sometimes permissible to cause harm or evil as a foreseen side effect, but never permissible to cause it as an intended means.

I want to challenge this way of thinking. The distinction between intending death and merely foreseeing it does not do the moral work it is often taken to do in arguments against euthanasia. In particular, there are cases in which it is clearly permissible to act because one will thereby cause death—and it is hard to maintain that acting in order to cause death is any worse.

A simple thought about everyday reasoning helps set the stage. Suppose you throw a party because you know your friends will feel obliged to clean up afterwards. You throw the party in order to have fun—but only because your friends will help you clean up afterwards. Still, it would be odd to say that you throw the party in order to cause your friends to help you clean up the resulting mess. That would be irrational, since the mess would not even exist in the first place if you did not throw the party. The fact that your friends will clean up is a reason for your action, but not its aim.

Something similar could happen in medical cases:

Fanatical Director Scenario
Mr. Gray is in severe distress near the end of his life. Dr. Clemens can administer palliative sedation (PS) to relieve his suffering while he is still alive.
 
The hospital director, Dr. Smith, fanatically opposes PS. If PS is administered and the patient is still alive at 5:30 PM, Smith will torture him as punishment. If no PS is administered, Smith does nothing.
 
Dr. Clemens knows:
– If she administers PS at 5:00 PM, it will cause Mr. Gray to die by 5:20 PM.
– If she does not administer PS, Mr. Gray will not be tortured.
 
She administers PS in order to relieve Mr. Gray’s suffering while he is still alive. She is also aware that doing so will cause him to die before 5:30 PM and thus will not subject him to Smith’s abuses.

How should we describe Dr. Clemens’s reasoning?

It would be a mistake to say that she administers PS in order to make Mr. Gray die before 5:30 PM. It would be irrational for her to administer PS to Mr. Gray in order to protect him from abuses (at the hands of Dr. Smith) that he would not be subjected to in the first place if she did not administer it. Indeed, this would be just as irrational as throwing a party in order to cause your friends to clean a mess that would not exist if you did not throw it.

Instead, the right description is this: she administers PS in order to relieve Mr. Gray’s suffering while he is still alive, and she does so because she knows that doing so will not expose him to further harm—since it will bring about his death before Dr. Smith can intervene.

In other words, the fact that Mr. Gray will die is part of her reasoning, but not her goal. It reassures her that administering PS will not backfire and make things worse. The prospect of death functions as a reason in favor of the action, but she does not perform the action in order to cause death.

The crucial point is that Dr. Clemens’s action appears permissible. It would clearly be permissible to administer PS if the fanatical director were not present. And it is hard to see how his mere presence could make it impermissible to do what is best for the patient when, given the timing, he will not in fact be harmed by him.

I think it follows that it can be permissible to intentionally cause death as a means of relieving suffering. If death were always an evil that must not guide our actions, then it would be morally problematic for Dr. Clemens to be guided by the prospect of causing Mr. Gray to die. But this is not the case.

Why is it permissible for Dr. Clemens to be guided by the prospect of killing her patient? I think he answer is very simple. It is that Mr. Gray’s death will benefit him by preventing him from being tortured by Dr. Smith, and thus, from suffering a greater harm.

Opponents of euthanasia might respond by arguing that it is wrong for physicians to intentionally kill even where death benefits the one who dies. For example, they might argue that intentionally causing death always violates the aims of medicine or the dignity of the patient.

But these objections also imply—implausibly—that Dr. Clemens acts impermissibly in Fanatical Director. Dr. Clemens is guided in part by the fact that administering PS will cause Mr. Gray to die. If being guided by the prospect of causing death were always morally corrupting or incompatible with medical practice, then her action should be impermissible too. But it is not.

The deeper lesson is that death is not always an unconditional evil in medical decision-making. Sometimes, given the alternatives, death can benefit the patient by preventing a greater harm. Once we recognize this, the intention-based objection to euthanasia loses much of its force. The mere fact that euthanasia involves intending death is not enough, by itself, to show that it is impermissible.

Harrison Lee is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mississippi and will join UCLA as a Postdoctoral Clinical Ethics Fellow in 2026. His research focuses on bioethics and normative ethics.

Animals / General / Liberty / Rights / Technology

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When Curiosity Wrongs the Cat

Sneaky Cat
Creative Commons Qatar from Qatar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

People are increasingly concerned with what we owe to other animals as a matter of justice. Philosophical writing on these issues typically takes two forms. First, there is conceptual work: thinking about how existing ideas such as liberty, citizenship, democracy, and legitimacy, might apply or be extended to include other animals. Second, there is normative work: thinking about how we should treat other animals. Both projects require that we know other animals; know something of their capacities, their experiences, their relationships, and the material conditions of their lives. Thinking about justice for animals, then, necessarily involves learning more about who they actually are.

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Animals / Democracy / General / Governance / Moral values / Rights / Social justice

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When Animals Enter the Demos: Two Problems for Political Inclusion

In this post, David Paaske and Angela Martin discuss their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on two problems of democratic inclusion of animals.

For a long time, debates in animal ethics focused primarily on how humans ought to treat animals. The central questions concerned cruelty, suffering, and welfare: Which practices are permissible? How much harm is too much? More recently, however, philosophers have argued that this focus is too narrow. Animals are not merely passive recipients of human action. They are deeply and systematically affected by political decisions—about land use, agriculture, energy, urban planning, conservation, and climate policy. If justice is concerned with how power is exercised over those whose lives it shapes, then animals seem to fall squarely within its scope.

This thought has motivated what is often called the ‘political turn’ in animal ethics. Rather than asking only how individuals should treat animals, political theorists ask how institutions should be structured to account for animals’ interests. Influential proposals describe animals as citizens, denizens, or members of sovereign communities, and argue that their interests ought to be represented—directly or indirectly—within democratic decision-making. The underlying intuition is simple and compelling: if animals are sentient beings with morally significant interests, and if political decisions profoundly affect those interests, then excluding animals from politics looks like a form of injustice.

In our recent paper, we take this intuition seriously. But we also argue that once animals are genuinely included as political subjects, two fundamental problems arise—problems that have not received sufficient attention in the literature.

Two problems for political inclusion

The first is what we call the Conflict Problem. Political inclusion does not merely require that interests be recognised; it requires that they be adjudicated. Yet the interests of animals often conflict sharply—not only with human interests, but with one another. Predators survive by killing prey. Conservation policies benefit some species at the expense of others. Infrastructure projects may harm local animals while benefiting far larger populations elsewhere.

Consider the case of wind turbines. Large-scale wind energy projects are widely defended on environmental grounds. They reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to mitigating climate change, which in turn benefits humans and animals alike. At the same time, turbines cause significant and foreseeable harm to present animals through habitat destruction, collisions, and noise. If animals are politically included, whose interests should prevail—the many animals harmed now, or the many more who may benefit later? And how should conflicts between animals themselves be resolved?

These are not exceptional cases. Once animals are included in the demos, such conflicts become pervasive. Yet familiar democratic tools—compromise, aggregation, cost–benefit analysis—sit uneasily with stakes involving survival, bodily integrity, and irreversible harm. The Conflict Problem highlights a structural tension between political inclusion and the tragic nature of many interspecies conflicts.

The second challenge is the Numbers Problem. Nonhuman animals vastly outnumber humans. Even conservative estimates suggest that wild animals alone number in the trillions. If political inclusion tracked affectedness, population size, or proportional representation, animals would dominate political decision-making. Human political influence would be radically reduced, and many ordinary human projects—housing developments, transport infrastructure, even public health measures—could be routinely overridden on animal-protective grounds.

Many people find this implication implausible or unacceptable. Yet rejecting it is not straightforward. If animals count morally, why should they not count politically in proportion to their numbers or the extent to which they are affected? The Numbers Problem forces proponents of political inclusion to explain why animals should be included—but not too much.

Why proposed solutions fall short

A range of responses has been proposed to defuse these problems. Some restrict political inclusion to certain categories of animals—such as domesticated animals—while treating wild animals as members of separate sovereign communities. While these strategies may soften the Conflict and Numbers Problems, we argue that they do not resolve them without significant cost. Weighting interests by cognitive capacity risks reintroducing hierarchies that sit uneasily with commitments to equal moral consideration. Restricting inclusion excludes many animals whose interests are undeniably shaped by political decisions. Institutional workarounds can dilute animals’ political power to the point where inclusion becomes largely symbolic.

Alternatively, one might accept the radical implications of political inclusion: that justice really does demand sweeping changes to human institutions, priorities, and resource allocation. This response is coherent—but it requires acknowledging just how disruptive animal-inclusive democracy would be. The political turn, on this reading, is not a modest extension of existing democratic ideals. It is a demand for profound political transformation.

Taking inclusion seriously

Our aim is not to reject the political turn in animal ethics. On the contrary, we believe it has brought essential questions into view. But taking animals seriously as political subjects means taking these problems seriously as well. Political inclusion is not a cost-free moral upgrade. It forces us to confront conflicts that cannot be neatly resolved and numbers that cannot be easily managed.

Justice has a habit of unsettling our institutions. If animals are to be included in the demos, we must decide how much disruption we are willing to accept—and which democratic principles we are prepared to revise in response. The answers to these questions remain open. What is no longer plausible, we suggest, is to assume that political inclusion can be achieved without confronting its most demanding implications.

David Paaske is a PhD student at the Arctic University of Norway. Angela Martin is a lecturer at the University of Fribourg.

AI / Democracy / Technology

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The First Week I Fell for Political Deepfakes Twice (That I Know Of)

For the past decade or so, social epistemologists, among others, have been warning and theorizing about the impending risks of political deepfake images and videos. Thus, I expected the day would come when I would fall for such things.

But I suppose I always vaguely envisioned that I would first be fooled by, or at least unsure about, something of great importance. Perhaps voice cloning technology would be used to release a fake speech from a world leader. Or maybe deepfake video technology would be used to falsely depict a candidate for high political office in a career-ending compromising situation.

I was, in some sense, prepared for such a day. What I wasn’t prepared for was the utter banality of the first political deepfakes that I would discover I had fallen for. Nor was I prepared for the happenstance way in which I (belatedly) managed to figure out they were deepfakes. As someone who works in social epistemology and the philosophy of free speech, I think it is worth reflecting on how deepfakes are actually being deployed and what the upshots might be for the dissemination of knowledge and the future of public discourse.

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Animals / General / Moral values / Social justice

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Why Our Attitudes to Animal Minds Matter for Justice

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. Although we might be uncertain, we operate on a presumption that works in their benefit.

By analogy, our fundamental attitude to the subjective lifeworlds of other animals ought to begin with a presumption that works in their benefit, too: that there is a somebody there to be socially engaged with. Like the benefit of the doubt, such a presumption of subjectivity ought to exist even in the face of uncertainty concerning the extent and kind of subjectivity animals possess.

Yet, rather than being a social grace, assuming that animals are somebodies is necessary for justice in social relations with them to even get started. We must see animals as somebodies to see them as belonging to our social worlds. Indeed, this presumption goes radically beyond an acknowledgement (already common to animal ethics) that animals have morally important interests. To see why, we need to start by looking at our traditional attitude to animal minds.

Geese and goslings staring directly into the camera.
© Matt Perry

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Academia / Climate / General

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Sustainability and Inclusion come with a Price Attached, but it is a Price worth Paying

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This is a guest post by Miroslav Imbrišević (Allen Hall/London & The Open University)

Doing the right thing isn’t easy; if it were, the world would be a heavenly place. We usually have to overcome our self-interest or our inclination to take the path of least resistance. It requires thinking of others and/or the common good. Surprisingly, the American Philosophical Association (APA) fails in this respect.

In 2021 the group Philosophers for Sustainability launched a campaign, asking the APA, to switch from three in-person conferences per year to two in-person meetings and one virtual meeting. The aim was to reduce the environmental harm of flying to the meetings (more than 1000 people typically attend each conference). In 2022 the three APA divisions ‘agreed to conduct a three-year experiment with a rotating schedule of two in-person divisional meetings and one virtual divisional meeting per year’.

Robert Pasnau, president of the Central Division of the APA, explained: ‘The motivations for going online are in part environmental (…), and in part to provide better access for people who find it difficult or impossible to attend meetings in person.’

But to the astonishment of everyone, the APA pulled the ‘kill switch’. After holding only one virtual conference (the 2025 Central meeting) the APA decided to pull the plug on the experiment, although the second scheduled online meeting in April 2026 will still go ahead. I understand that one of the programme chairs for the 2025 meeting had to withdraw for health reasons, and this had a negative effect on the organisation and planning of the conference. So, the first virtual meeting wouldn’t have been representative for a regular, successful online conference.

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