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 ofdemocracy. 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.
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).(more…)
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 repeatedlywarned 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this post, Ajinkya Deshmukh from The University of Manchester discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on why thinking about caste can help us better understand social identities like gender and race that impact our lives.
Features of our identity that we have little to no control over can influence how we think, what we do, and who we become. The lottery of birth – what the famous investor Warren Buffet called the ovarian lottery – heavily determines things like nationality, gender, and race. Your passport influences how easily you can pursue international opportunities. Your gender can govern where and when you can be out in parts of the world. Your race can affect if you get that job. No wonder then that philosophers have thought about social categories like gender and race. Caste – which is also determined at birth and also impacts life trajectory – has not gotten similar attention.
“So what?” you might ask. Surely it is a niche phenomenon not affecting most of the world. But the numbers are staggering. Caste-based discrimination affects hundreds of millions of people globally, and manifests as segregation in schools, housing, and public life; reduced access to political and civil rights; and inadequate representation in educational curricula and the media. Caste is found in Asia, Europe and the Americas, and among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians. Anti-discrimination policies at Universities, in cities, and even countries are being revised in light of caste.
What is caste anyway? It is a centuries-old hierarchical grouping of individuals in society wherein caste membership comes with corresponding expected behavioural, social, or cultural practices. Failure to adhere to these expectations can result in varying degrees of social sanctions, including (in serious cases) “honour” killings and mob lynching. Castes are divided into so-called “upper” and “lower” stratas. Many practitioners follow the outlawed practice of “untouchability”, physically and socially distancing themselves from so-called “lower” caste members. The most persistent feature of the caste system is endogamy, where members of a caste will only marry within their caste or their caste strata. In India, for instance, most people have friends from within their caste/strata and most will go on to marry within their caste.
Three things stand out as strange about caste, especially to those who did not grow up in societies where it operates.
1. It is inherited from one’s parents but there are no genes that determine any visible features by which one could tell somebody’s caste. Indeed, there are not even invisible traits expressed by one’s genes that correspond to one’s caste identity.
2. Despite being the foundation of a lot of discrimination, it is invisible. You cannot tell somebody’s caste just by looking at them. Go on, try it. You don’t need to know the names of castes. Just look at the picture at the head of this post and see if you can hierarchically group the individuals based on anything other than a hunch. You have to ask or infer one’s caste from other information. And yet, people cannot easily ‘pass’ as belonging to a caste other than their own because caste bona fides are often verified communally and institutionally.
3. For an invisible, non-genetic property, it is nevertheless ‘sticky’ like gender and race. Just as one cannot easily change one’s gender or race, caste also sticks to the person. This table from my paper summarises these peculiar features of caste.
#
Features↓ / Social Kinds →
Gender
Race
Caste
1
Basis for discrimination / affirmative action
Yes
Yes
Yes
2
Typically ascribed at birth
Yes
Yes
Yes
3
Hard(er) to change or disavow
Yes
Yes
Yes
4
Genetic basis to ascription
Yes
Yes
No
5
Visibility claim / Marked body
Yes
Yes
No
Table 1: Similarities and dissimilarities between various social kinds.
Yet most theoretical accounts of social kinds focus on gender and race, then generalise from there. This often leads to explanatorily inadequate theories. I argue that using caste as a test case for understanding systems of social identity will benefit both the scholarship on caste and our broader understanding of the social world.
Broadly speaking, I argue that theories of social identity that try to give fixed, unchanging definitions – often called ‘essentialist’ accounts – fail to capture the changing fortunes and social dynamics of these identities. Further, while such accounts might do a good job of capturing a snapshot of present-day conditions, they risk fueling views that see certain social identities as perpetually dominant or subordinate. A good theory, I claim, must not only aid in emancipatory efforts against social-kinds-based discrimination, but also be able to explain how an erstwhile oppressed group can redefine itself on its own terms.
If you want a very quick primer on caste, I encourage you to read section 2 of my paper. If you want to learn how caste is like and unlike gender and race, sections 4 and 5 do exactly that. If those sections pique your interest, read the rest of the paper!
Ajinkya Deshmukh is a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy at The University of Manchester. His research interests are social ontology and epistemology, the philosophy of attention, and Buddhist philosophy.
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.
.jpg){kind=link}