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

Yearly Archive: 2021

Animals / Distribution / Duties / Governance / Rights

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What Do We Owe to Pandemic Puppies?

For many, having an animal companion during the pandemic has been a blessing. Someone to keep you company, someone to play with, someone who brings you joy and gives you a reason to get out of bed. Indeed, in the UK, the Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association (PFMA) reported that 3.2 million households in the UK have acquired an animal companion since the start of the pandemic. This brings the total number of animal companions in the UK up to 34 million, including 12 million cats and 12 million dogs, and equates to 17 million households being responsible for an animal’s welfare. (more…)

Academia / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Teaching Philosophy “Outside the Walls”

A photograph depicting an audience listening to a lecture in a traditional lecture hall

An audience in a lecture hall

How do you get undergraduate students excited about philosophy? How do you show students that studying philosophy isn’t just about reading complex discussions about the nature of reality? Philosophy teachers the world over are increasingly facing external pressures – from Rate my Professor to government funding bodies and everything in between – to make their courses popular, engaging, or “useful”. Many are also aware of other factors that may encourage re-thinking the way in which we teach philosophy and to move away from traditional  styles of teaching, for instance concerns about accessibility or Western-centrism. One of the things this series, Teaching Philosophy in the 21st Century, sets out to do is to canvas different ways of teaching philosophy. We hope that these discussions serve to inspire and provide ideas for those considering adopting different ways of teaching and assessing students.

For this post, we spoke to Dr Sjoerd Griffioen and Dr Merel Semeijn from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). They run a module called Buiten de Muren (Outside the Walls), which is a required module for second year BA Philosophy students. In the module, students identify a societal issue they want to tackle, a relevant ethical theory or concept (broadly construed), and create a creative final product. ‘We really ask them not to write a standard academic paper about it, or do a standard presentation, but to really come up with something else – because it will probably be the only time in their academic career that they can do that’, Griffioen says. ‘Of course we supervise them very intensively. Because it does happen that students start with a brilliant idea but then they run into problems and we have to turn them towards something that might be a bit more pragmatic. But the principle is that we give them a lot of freedom to come up with something other than a standard academic paper. “Outside the Walls” means to think outside the walls of academia – outside the box, if you will.’

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Duties / Gender / Moral values / Work

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How to better care for each other

The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically reminded us of our shared vulnerability and our need of care, and as a result, calls for care have been widespread since the pandemic began. Some of these calls to care, as well as celebrations of essential care workers, have appeared disingenuous when coming from governments and parties with a long history of carelessness. It is precisely this carelessness, which ranges from cuts to public health services to a general lack of concern for the fate of the most vulnerable in society, that has been deemed responsible for many of the difficulties and the failures in facing Covid-19. Many calls to care have been motivated precisely by this critique as well as the idea that care should be central in our societies. How, then, should we conceive of a caring society? In what follows, I address this issue by reflecting on the ambivalence of care and the idea of communities of care.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower

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Theory, Politics and Socialism: An interview with Paul Magnette (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

Before becoming the president of the Belgian Francophone Socialist Party, Paul Magnette was a renowned scholar in the fields of EU studies and political theory. In addition to analysing the political regime of the European Union, the growing power of the European Parliament, and the issue of citizen participation in EU politics, he wrote a book on the thought of Judith Shklar and another on the history of the idea of citizenship. We met in September 2021 at the headquarters of the Socialist Party to discuss the influence of his academic training on his political activity, the challenges of shifting from theory to political practice, and the practical relevance of political theory. A new interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series.

 magnette

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Climate / General

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A justice-inspired reading of the COP26 discursive arena

The 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which has been taking place in Glasgow since October 31st and will end on November 12, has already offered many possibilities for reflecting about the ongoing transnational, multidisciplinary debate on climate change which unfolds through mass media and social platforms. The COP26 is the occasion for delegates of the 197 countries which signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to negotiate ways to contrast climate change in line with the objectives set in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in the subsequent COPs. (more…)

Climate / Distribution / International

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Should land be reclassified as a global commons?

In this post, Megan Blomfield discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on treating land as a common good.

In a world confronting climate change, new questions arise about how land ought to be used and shared globally. Land has already become scarce relative to the demands of the global economy. Climate impacts and policies threaten to significantly exacerbate this problem. Some are suggesting that it is therefore time to classify land as a global commons, akin to other vital and endangered global commons such as the atmosphere. In a recent article, I identify reasons to fear that this move would not in fact promote land justice. (more…)

Distribution / Economics / General / Governance / International

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Is the OECD/G20 international corporate tax reform fair?

On October 8th, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced that 136 countries have adopted its two-pillar proposal to reform the taxation of multinational enterprises (MNEs).

Pillar One applies to MNEs with sales in excess of $20bn and profits over 10%. It shifts the taxing rights of the next 25% of profits above the 10% threshold to market jurisdictions, that is, to the country where the goods and services of the MNE in question are sold. The measure is thought to apply only to about 100 MNEs, many of them in the highly profitable digital services sector. Pillar Two introduces a minimum tax of 15% for all MNEs with revenues of more than $750m. (more…)

Democracy / Education / Public Philosophy

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The United States’ Perils of Presidentialism

Photo of the White House. Credit to René DeAnda.

In his seminal 1990 article “The Perils of Presidentialism,” political scientist Juan Linz pointed out that “the vast majority of the stable democracies in the world today are parliamentary regimes” and that, in contrast, “the only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States.” Based in part on this observation, Linz concluded that parliamentary democracies are more conducive to stable democracies that presidential democracies.

Linz thought the United States was the exception. What, according to Linz, made the United States exceptional? His answer was that it lacked political polarization and instead had a large moderate consensus that avoided catering to extremists. But this is no longer true.

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Economics / Technology

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Why we can’t quit Facebook – and what to do about it

This is a guest post by Nikhil Venkatesh, a PhD candidate in Philosophy at University College London, and a fellow of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research. It draws on his paper ‘Surveillance Capitalism: a Marx-inspired account’.

On Monday 4th October, mistakes in a routine maintenance task led to Facebook’s servers disconnecting from the Internet. For six hours people across the world were unable to use Facebook and other platforms the company owns such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

The outage had serious consequences. Billions of people use these platforms, not just to gossip and share memes but to do their jobs and to reach their families. Orders and sales were missed, and so were births and deaths. At the same time, many found those six hours liberating: a chance to get things done undistracted. But what if the outage had gone on for weeks, months, or forever? Would you have been able to cope?

The previous day, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed herself as the source for a Wall Street Journal series examining how the company’s products ‘harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy’. This is the latest in a continuous stream of Facebook-related scandals: Cambridge Analytica and Brexit, Russian interference and Trump, genocide in Myanmar, the ongoing presence of scams and hate speech, and the spread of conspiracy theories about the pandemic and the vaccine which led the President of the United States, no less, to accuse Facebook of ‘killing people’. Each time a scandal appears, many of us consider quitting Facebook’s platforms. How could you participate in a social network that does these awful things? (more…)

Climate / Democracy / Moral values

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A Conversation with Philip Kitcher about Moral Methodology and Moral Progress

On Monday evening, I talked to Philip Kitcher about his novel account of moral progress, which he developed in his Munich Lectures in Ethics. Those lectures have just been published by Oxford University Press, together with comments from Amia Srinivasan, Susan Neiman and Rahel Jaeggi. In the Munich Lectures, Kitcher takes up the “Deweyan project of making moral progress more systematic and sure-footed”. He seeks to gain a better understanding of what moral progress is by looking at cases from history. He then proposes a methodology for identifying morally problematic situations and coming up with justified solutions to those problems. It is a methodology for moral and ethical practice (not theory!), and it manifests the hope that human beings are able to attain moral progress – even with respect to the highly complex moral problems of our times. In our conversation, we talked about the open-endedness of the moral project, the collective nature of moral insight, the kinds of conversations that Kitcher believes are needed to deal with the moral problems that humanity is facing today, and the role of technology in the moral project. (more…)