A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Yearly Archive: 2019

Beyond the Ivory Tower / General

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Happy Holidays!

Justice Everywhere is taking a short winter nap at the moment.

We wish you happy holidays and a fresh and bright New Year!

 

But we will already be back next week – And how!

Next week, we will introduce our Beyond the Ivory Tower series. In this series of posts, we will speak with political philosophers who have achieved positions of political impact, to better understand the relationships between political philosophy and real-world politics. Kicking it off will be an interview with Baroness Onora O’Neill. So stay tuned!

Academia / General

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Conference Announcement: Ethics in a Global Environment

The Centre for the Study of Global Ethics is pleased to announce its Sixth Annual Conference on 28 and 29 May 2020.


Call for Papers

We welcome abstract submissions addressing the central theme Ethics in a Global Environment, as well as a wide range of topics within global ethics.

Submission deadline is 1 February 2020.

 

Please visit

https://globalethics 2020.weebly.com

for more information.

Animals / Democracy / Duties / General / Governance

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UK General Election 2019: Spare a Thought for the Badgers

Every election has winners and losers, and this one is no different. These are, however, particularly turbulent times, and while the message of “getting Brexit done” appears to have chimed with many voters, the Conservative victory last Thursday does not bode well for the UK’s most vulnerable. After a decade of Conservative austerity measures, the use of food banks continues to rise, child poverty has soared, and changes to the welfare system have left disabled adults four times worse-off financially than non-disabled adults. More of the same is likely to most hurt those for whom life is getting tougher by the day.

It is clear that things are precarious for many of the UK’s citizens but it is important to keep in mind that humans are not the only ones affected by our governments’ decisions. Though it is tempting to think that we already have enough to worry about without extending concern to the nonhuman animals who live with us, we owe it to those creatures to speak up on their behalf. With no voice of their own, other animals are entirely dependent on us to keep their interests on the political agenda and to hold our leaders to account for the harms visited upon them. With that in mind, I’d like you to spare a thought for British badgers who, like many humans, have been made to suffer terribly by recent political decisions and government policies.

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Distribution / Duties / Economics / International / Rights

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What do we owe the victims of exploitation?

In this post, Erik Malmqvist and András Szigeti discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the remedial duties arising from exploitation.

We tend to think that exploiting people is morally wrong. And yet, this kind of wrong is uncomfortably close to home for many of us. Likely, the clothes you wear today or the computer you use to read this piece were produced by workers who received meagre pay for dangerous and exhausting work. Since exploitation is so widespread and not something most of us can wash our hands of, we have to ask what is required to set things straight after exploitation has happened. This is the question we have raised in a recent article.

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Children / Gender / Technology

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The Potential Mediating Role of the Artificial Womb

On May 6th, I published a post about the artificial womb and its potential role for promoting gender justice. I keep thinking about this technology, and since there is more and more ethical discussion about it, I want to address it again, this time from the point of view of mediation theory and in an attempt to anticipate the potential mediating role of this technology. According to mediation theory, technology mediates how humans perceive and act in the world. The Dutch philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek has extended this post-phenomenological approach, which has been developed by Don Ihde, to the realm of ethics. Verbeek sees technology as being intrinsically involved in moral decision-making. Technology mediates our moral perceptions and actions. Moral agency is not something exclusively human, but a “hybrid affair”. Moral actions and decisions “take place in complex and intricate connections between humans and things”. Verbeek illustrates technology’s mediating role by means of the example of obstetric ultrasound. I shall apply the idea of the technological mediation of morality to the artificial womb and discuss some ways in which that technology could play a mediating role in morality. (more…)

General

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Is it wrong to enjoy violent horror films?

In this post, Ian Stoner discusses his recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy offering a defence of gory fictions.

I have a soft spot for the slasher films of the 1980s–A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Child’s Play, etc. were nostalgic favorites at movie nights in my college years. At the time, I cheerfully ignored the conservative position, still common in the 1990s, that watching these movies was morally wrong.

Many years later, I watched a few instances of the genre known as the New French Extremity. These films–such as Martyrs, Irréversible, and Haute Tension–left me feeling miserable. I caught myself thinking, “people who have fun watching these brutal movies must be sickos, sadists.” Which is to say that I caught myself thinking the same thing of fans of the New French Extremity as the conservatives of my youth thought of me.

Was I wrong to dismiss the anti-slasher position? Is there some difference between these sub-genres such that I was right judge them differently? After reflection, I have settled on the view I defend in an article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. (Alternatives: free read-only access or download a pre-print.) I now believe that my suspicion of the New French Extremity was misguided and that depictions of suffering and death could never themselves make a horror film morally wrong to watch.

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Democracy / Economics

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Should central banks create their own cryptocurrency?

Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have attracted widespread media attention. Interestingly, their advent has also triggered reflection among central bankers. Their first reaction was, unsurprisingly, to warn consumers against the dangers of unregulated private money. However, almost ten years after the creation of Bitcoin, central bankers now see the huge potential of these currencies for monetary policy and the control of payments. Is this enthusiasm justified? Should central banks create their own digital currency?

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Academia / Education / General / Public Philosophy

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To Strike or Disrupt?

In this post, guest contributor Liam Shields discusses an important dilemma related to the strike in UK higher education institutions.

Members of the University and College Union, the trade union that represents many lecturers and other university staff in the UK, at 60 universities will be called upon to withdraw their labour from their employers from 25th November to 4th December. However, some are on research leave, or will not be doing any teaching on some or all strike days, so their striking will go unnoticed. The question then is: should they go on strike or not? (more…)

Children / Moral values

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Why Two Parents Rather than One or Five?

In this post, Kalle Grill discusses his recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on how many parents there should be in a family.

Engaged parenting is hard work. That is one reason most of us prefer to have a co-parent. But why stop at one? As I argue in a recent article, I don’t think there is a good and general answer to that question. Some people are committed to an existing two-parent family, or to starting one, but there is no reason why society should endorse that family form as a norm.

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Democracy / Governance / Moral values / Public Philosophy / Technology

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From Fact-Checking to Value-Checking

Fears over ‘fake news’, targeted disinformation, and the rise of post-truth politics have met with a central mainstream solution: ‘fact-checking’. Fact-checking is featuring prominently in coverage of the 2019 UK General Election. ITV News, for instance, will use FullFact.org to analyse the claims made by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn in their forthcoming leadership debate, with the aim of better informing their viewers by exposing misleading statements.

This reflects the wider embrace of fact-checking as a panacea against the rise of anti-expert politics. It has been employed in coverage of US presidential and primary debates, as well as the parliamentary theatre of Brexit. Third party fact-checking organisations have also been championed by social media companies in response to demands by regulators and legislatures that they take responsibility for the content circulated on their platforms. Indeed the use of ‘independent’ fact-checkers to flag content was highlighted by Mark Zuckerberg, during his various appearances before Congress, in defence of Facebook’s practices.

However, the concept of fact-checking frames the problems of post-truth politics in narrowly positivist terms – as reducible to a lack of information (‘facts’), leading to sub-optimally rational decision-making by electorates. It has not been underpinned by a sophisticated account of the epistemic conditions for the exercise of democratic citizenship. Fact-checking occupies an increasingly central place in our political culture, but the justification for it remains largely implicit and untheorized. (more…)