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

Monthly Archive: October 2022

Migration / Moral values / War

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Russian refugees? An argument for politicisation not moralization

This is a guest post written by Felix Bender (Northumbria University). Felix’s research explores who we should recognise as a refugee and here he considers whether we should consider Russian deserters as refugees through a moralised or politicised lens.

“Perhaps the most pressing task of ethics is to warn against morality”. This statement, issued by German Sociologist Niklas Luhmann, rings nowhere as true as it does now. Moralism dominates the day. Political decisions are made based on the imperative of differentiating between the blameworthy and the blameless, between approval and disapproval of persons. You are either good or bad, and this should dictate the political decisions you face. But is moralizing the right reaction to a political problem, or does it create more problems than it solves? Does it help in reacting to political crises, such as posed by the exodus of Russian men of fighting age, or does it lead us astray from wise political decision making? I will argue for the latter. Wise decision making should not consider moralizing arguments. In the following, I will show, that there are politically prudent reasons for admitting Russian deserters as refugees.

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Duties / Governance / Moral values

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Is Ethics Really Good for Business?

ESG investing – Adobe Stock

Each year when fall comes, I teach finance ethics to bright new postgraduate students in finance. After introducing ethical investing – i.e. the practice of integrating ethical criteria such as environmental, social, and governance performance (ESG) in investment decisions – I ask them a question: “Who believes that ESG investing generates higher financial returns?”

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Democracy / Education

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Defending Science Deniers

In this post, Alex Davies (University of Tartu) discusses his recent paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy where he urges caution when the conclusions of political psychologists tempt us to blame the audience for failures in science communication.

A slew of newspaper articles were published in the 2010s with titles like: “The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs” and “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds — New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason”. They promoted a common idea: if a person doesn’t conform to the scientific majority, it’s because she forms beliefs on scientific questions in order to achieve social goals (to fit in with people of her kind, to make her social life more comfortable) instead of engaging in an earnest hunt for the truth. Rational persuasion doesn’t work with her. To change her mind, science communicators must become more paternalist. They must adopt methods of persuasion that bypass her awareness—the arts of the marketeer, the ad man. Drawing upon ideas from my recent paper, I want to convince you not to take these articles so seriously.

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Children / General / Rights

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Small in the City: The Exclusion of Children from Public Spaces

by Nico Brando and Katarina Pitasse-Fragoso

I know what it’s like to be small in the city…The streets are always busy. It can make your brain feel like there’s too much stuff in it.

Sydney Smith – Small in the City

Don’t look by Cristian Blanxer & Victor Garcia Delgado

More than a billion children grow up in cities. This means growing up in densely populated areas with political, and cultural prosperity, but with radical inequalities. While some have access to parks, playgrounds, and child-friendly streets, others are forced to navigate crowded roads, deal with violence, and difficult (sexist, racist, ageist) environments. Children are among the various groups (think, as well, of individuals with disabilities, the elderly, or animals) who suffer from discrimination in their right to make use of public spaces safely. Especially in large urban areas, public spaces can be highly threatening to children of all ages. Smaller children suffer from lack of accessibility, and high risk of busy roads. Older children and youths, even if able of navigating urban areas alone, can have their free movement limited due to status offences, insecurity and violence.

In this short reflection, we wish to introduce some preliminary thoughts on the issues that affect children living in urban spaces. Why are children excluded from equal use of public spaces? Do children have a right to responsive and inclusive urban design?

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Moral values / Technology

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The diversity of values in virtual reality

In this post, Rami Ali (University of Arizona) discusses his recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the range of values possible in the virtual world.

AI-generated image generated by Rami Ali’s prompt using OpenAI

Early in The Matrix Cypher confronts Neo with a question: “Why, oh why, didn’t I take that blue pill?” The confrontation is meaningful and significant. The red pill gave them their nonvirtual life outside the matrix. But is that life really more valuable than their blue pill-life inside the matrix? We’re invited to take a side and it’s tempting to do so. But neither choice is right. In The Values of the Virtual I argue that virtual items are not less or more valuable, nor of equal or sui generis value when compared to their nonvirtual counterparts. Or more aptly, they are all of these, depending on the virtual instance we have in mind. Taking sides short-changes the diversity of the virtual world and everything populating it, leaving us with less nuance than we need to understand and govern our virtual lives.

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Duties / Moral values

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A Social Ethics of Belief: Two Lessons from W. K. Clifford

Photo Credit of Sinking Boat to Pok Rie

The nineteenth century British philosopher, W. K. Clifford, is one of a small handful of individuals who titled an essay so effectively that it became the name of an entire philosophical literature: the ethics of belief.

It has been (correctly) observed that “Clifford’s essay is chiefly remembered for two things: a story and a principle.”

The story is that of the negligent shipowner who, by wishful thinking, convinces himself that an unsafe ship is seaworthy, and who thereby sends his passengers to their death when the ship sinks.

The principle is that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

As a result, Clifford is often viewed one-dimensionally as an (unreasonable) evidentialist, most interested in defending a stringent epistemic position. I think this is unfortunate.

It is unfortunate because such a view of Clifford overlooks what are probably the most relevant aspects of his essay for a “misinformation age” like ours.

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