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

Yearly Archive: 2021

Academia / Children / Distribution / Gender / General / Health / War

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From the Vault: Collaboration with Journal of Applied Philosophy

While Justice Everywhere takes a break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2020-21 season. This post focuses on our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

In 2019, Justice Everywhere began a collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The journal is a unique forum that publishes philosophical analysis of problems of practical concern, and several of its authors post accessible summaries of their work on Justice Everywhere. These posts draw on diverse theoretical viewpoints and bring them to bear on a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from the environment and immigration to economics, parenting, and punishment.

For a full list of these posts, visit the JAP page on Justice Everywhere. For a flavour of the range, you might read:

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Children / General / Governance / Public Philosophy

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From the Vault: Good Reads on Public Philosophy

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2020-21 season. 

 

Here are three good reads on issues relating to public philosophy that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:

  • In From Armchair to Engaged Philosophy, Nicolás Brando reflects on the the benefits of philosophers directly engaging with their subjects of research throughout the whole research process – applying this to children as the subject of an important strand of recent and current philosophising. Nicolás’s post references Diana Popescu’s interview with Jo Wolff, which discusses the idea of “engaged philosophy”, published as part of our Beyond the Ivory Tower series.
  • Anh Le’s post, which addresses the question: Should Academics also be Activists?
  • Lisa Herzog’s interview with Rowan Cruft, the latest in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, in which they discuss his public philosophy, and in particular his contribution to the Leveson Inquiry into the practices and ethics of the British media.

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General / Governance / Liberty / Public Philosophy / Punishment

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Wrongly Weeded Out: Richardson’s Removal and Unreasonable Rules

In this guest post, John Tillson and Winston C. Thompson discuss the recent case of US track star Sha’Carri Richardson’s suspension from competing at the Olympics.

Sha’Carri Richardson was suspended from the US Olympic team after testing positive for marijuana. This is ultimately because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) decided to ban THC in-competition in all sports. THC (or tetrahydrocannabinol) is the main psychoactive component of cannabis/marijuana. WADA can prohibit athletes’ use of substances in order compete in the Olympics and other major sporting events such as those organized under the auspices of World Athletics. Richardson has apologized for her actions and US President Biden has commented on the case saying, ‘the rules are the rules’. (more…)

Distribution / Health / International

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Vaccine Equity and the Responsibility of Rich Countries

What We Owe to Each Other is the title of Tim Scanlon’s famous work on contractualism. As the title reveals, Scanlon seeks to investigate how to treat others with the due respect and dignity they deserve. This post is not about contractualism or about the TV show. Rather, borrowing Scanlon’s book title, I suggest what rich nations should do to address the global vaccine inequity that is hampering poorer nations’ efforts to combat the pandemic. The account sketched here must stand a good chance of being accepted by the relevant rich states. To this end, the following constraints must be accepted. First, governments are primarily driven by concerns for their own citizens and residents. This means that, as non-ideal as it may sound, global egalitarian ideals would not be realised, at least for now. Second, and relatedly, access to vaccines would always likely to be decided by free market principles. Again, legitimate objections, especially egalitarian ones, can be raised against this but this is a constraint that must be accepted, given the dominance of free market thinking in Western countries. Third, as a result, COVAX’s original goal – ‘to ensure that people in all corners of the world will get access to COVID-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth’ – was always a wishful thinking. (more…)

Children / Health

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Nicotine Vaccines and Childrens’ Rights to an Open Future

That smoking significantly contributes to preventable death and loss in quality of life is obvious, and it is the starting point of many governmental interventions aimed at curbing national smoking rates. Cigarette smoking – and consumption of other nicotine (and tobacco) products – has been and continues to be in the focus of attention of state governments, public policy makers, and public health officials, and remains as one of the main targets of public health interventions.

The most familiar types of tobacco control and anti-smoking interventions include legal age limits, taxation, restrictions on sale and advertisement of nicotine products, educational campaigns, and smoking bans in public and semi-public places. However, the impact of these efforts is far from ideal. Simply put, people start and continue to smoke, thereby contributing to the expected rise in the number of smokers and to the increase of smoking-related fatalities worldwide. (more…)

Duties / Health / Moral values

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Dementia, Truthfulness, and Respecting Agency

In this post, Jeanette Kennett and Steve Matthews discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on respecting agency in dementia care.

Years before entering the nursing home Mr Q had been a janitor at a boarding school. With the progression of dementia, he came to perceive the nursing home – with its distinctly institutional décor – as his old place of work. And so, throughout the day he would act out his janitorial role, with its many tasks of checking windows and doors, and making sure that all was running smoothly. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, writing about the case, noted that ‘the Sisters [who ran the home]…though perceiving his confusion and delusion, respected and even reinforced [his] identity. They assisted him [by] giving him keys to certain closets and encouraging him to lock up at night before he retired.’ Did the sisters do the right thing? Perhaps they should have been more truthful by reminding Mr Q that in fact he was a declining patient with dementia. Sacks thought otherwise. Occupying his role helped Mr Q to make sense of his surroundings. In fulfilling this role, says Sacks, ‘[Mr Q] seemed to be organized and held together in a remarkable way…’

The case of Mr. Q raises a thorny problem for caregivers: should truthfulness give way when people with dementia form false beliefs about their circumstances? This moral dilemma is usually presented as a choice between acting on a principle of respect for persons – which requires truthfulness – versus acting out of a concern for their welfare – which might require going along with a false belief. In our recent article, however, we argue that the debate should be framed in a different way. It seems to us, that in going along with Mr Q, the Sisters were scaffolding and protecting his sense of identity, something that thereby respected his agency. This of course had the added effect of attending to Mr Q’s welfare. We argue that when we support a person’s agency in these ways their welfare needs are simultaneously addressed.

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Gender / Governance / Rights

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Combining public policies and transformative action in fighting against gender violence

In this contribution, Katarina Pitasse Fragoso and Nathália Sanglard reflect on gender violence and public policies. 

 Gender violence is a form of physical, verbal, psychological or symbolic damage, caused directly or indirectly to the person due to her gender identity. It is an injustice, because, according to Elizabeth Anderson, it has been generated by arbitrary systems, such as patriarchal ones, which use gender as a justification to harm others and prevent access to resources, rights, the job market and other services. In this article, we will explore how these types of violence disproportionately affect women and feminized subjects, and we will propose some ways to enhance mainstream public policies, through a combination of actions and participatory devices. (more…)

General

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Out today: Political Philosophy in a Pandemic

We’re very pleased to announce that our book, Political Philosophy in a Pandemic: Routes to a More Just Future, is released today in e-book format. The print versions will follow, on 23rd September. You can order the e-book and/or pre-order a print copy here (or via other booksellers, such as Waterstones, Amazon, etc.). You can also read an extract of the book — which includes the Table of Contents, Foreword by Onora O’Neill, and Introduction — here.

Edited by two of the Justice Everywhere editors (Fay Niker and Aveek Bhattacharya), with several of the chapters written by Justice Everywhere contributors, and having its genesis in a blogpost for this website, this is very much a Justice Everywhere book. We hope you will read and find it stimulating.

Education / Moral values / Technology

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COVID-19 and Technomoral Change

According to the emerging paradigm of technomoral change, technology and morality co-shape each other. It is not only the case that morality influences the development of technologies. The reverse also holds: technologies affect moral norms and values. Tsjalling Swierstra compares the relationship of technology and morality with a special type of marriage: one that does not allow for divorce. Has the still-ongoing pandemic led to instances of technomoral change, or is it likely to lead to them in the future? One of the many effects of the pandemic is the acceleration of processes of digitalisation in many parts of the world. The widespread use of digital technologies in contexts such as work, education, and private life can be said to have socially disruptive effects. It deeply affects how people experience their relations to others, how they connect to their families, friends and colleagues, and the meaning that direct personal encounters have for them. Does the pandemic also have morally disruptive effects? By way of changing social interactions and relationships, it might indirectly affect moral agency and how the competent moral agent is conceived of. As promising as the prospect of replacing many of the traditional business meetings, international conferences, team meetings etc. with online meetings might seem with regard to solving the climate crisis, as worrisome it might be with an eye on the development and exercise of social and moral capacities. (more…)

Democracy / Distribution / Governance / Technology

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Public-private collaboration in the governance of AI

Artificial Intelligence – Adobe Stock

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have seen impressive developments in the last decades. Think about Google’s DeepMind defeating Lee Sedol, the best human player of Go, with their program AlphaGo in 2015. The latest version, AlphaZero, is remarkable because it relied on deep reinforcement learning to learn how to play Go entirely by itself from scratch: with only the rules of the game, through trial and error, and playing millions of games against itself. Machine learning algorithms have a range of other practical applications, from image recognition in medical diagnostics to energy management. (more…)