What’s the point of teaching moral and political philosophy?
Ancient philosophers around the world would have thought the answer to this question was blindingly obvious: the point is to make students better – better as citizens, rulers, or just as human beings.
Yet today I suspect very few academics would defend this position, and most would find the idea of inculcating virtue among their students to be silly at best, dangerous at worst.
I think the ancients were right on this one. We should educate our students to make them better moral and political agents. And I don’t think this has to be scarily illiberal at all – at least, that’s what I’m going to argue here.
The model of ethical discourse my students seem to be learning in secondary school
The human desire to enhance our cognitive abilities, to push the boundaries of intelligence through education, tools, and technology has a long history. Fifteen years ago, confronted by the possibility that a ‘morally corrupt’ minority could misuse cognitive gains to catastrophic effect, Persson and Savulescu proposed that research into cognitive enhancement should be halted unless accompanied by advancements in moral enhancement.
In response to this, and following on from Harris’ worries about the mass suffering that could result from delaying cognitive enhancement until moral enhancement could catch up, in 2023, Gordon and Ragonese offered what they termed a ‘practical approach’ to cognitive enhancement research in which they advocated for targeted cognitive enhancement —specifically for researchers working on moral enhancement.
Our recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy suggests that while both sets of authors are correct in their concerns about the significant risks related to cognitive enhancement outrunning moral enhancement, their focus on the ‘extremes’ neglects some more practical consequences that a general acceptance of cognitive enhancement may bring — not least of which relate to the academic project itself.
I have argued in previous posts (here and here) that we have good moral reasons to end the practice of keeping pets (for a full defence see here). Pet keeping involves the unjustifiable instrumentalisation of animals, sets back animals’ interests in self-determination, and exposes animals to unnecessary risks of harm. Not to mention the many attendant harms that the practice involves to farmed animals, wild animals and the environment. Given all this, we should seek to transition to a pet-free world.
In this post, I suggest we won’t be able to make progress towards a more just world for animals until we’ve engaged in some honest soul-searching about our desire to keep animals as pets.
The popularity of AI girlfriend apps is growing. Unlike multi-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, companion chatbots are designed to build relationships. They respond to social, emotional or erotic needs of their users. Numerous studies indicate that humans are capable of forming emotional relationships with AI, partly due to our tendency to anthropomorphize it.
The debate on the ethical aspects of human-AI emotional relations is multi-threaded. In my recent article, I focus only on one topic: the problem of self-deception. I want to explore whether there is anything wrong with allowing oneself to feel liked by a chatbot.
When should we say that two people are treated as equals from a distributive point of view? The straightforward response is that they are equal if they hold an identical bundle of resources. But since some resources will be indivisible and others too qualitatively different from one another, it is likely that a perfectly identical division of resources would ordinarily be unfeasible. An alternative is to appeal to what has been called the envy test, which is passed if no agent would prefer someone else’s bundle of resources over their own, regardless of what these bundles actually contain. This solution, advanced by Ronald Dworkin [1] as a central component of his theory of justice (commonly known as resource egalitarianism) has been heavily influential in contemporary political theory. Though intended by Dworkin as a purely theoretical device to be employed in assessing distributive inequality, we can identify at least one historical instance where something akin to the envy test was given a decidedly practical application. In this piece I aim to give a brief outline of this case, hoping to show not only that it is in itself an interesting historical example, but also that we can perhaps draw on it in order to reflect on some of our contemporary political concerns.
For those of us who have or want kids, this is an uncomfortable fact. We know we should pursue climate justice, including by cutting our own carbon impact. Does it follow that someone living an affluent life in a country like the UK or the US should stay childless?
Not necessarily. What’s more, by putting this argument under pressure, we learn some important lessons for moral philosophers. We need to talk more about individual sacrifice in the face of global emergencies. In so doing, we must engage carefully with sociological and psychological scholarship and attend to the insights of demographic groups who have experienced injustice.
President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a “Make America Great Again” campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Goodyear, Arizona. (c) Gage Skidmore
This is a guest post by Mario J Cunningham M.
“Mass deportation now!” was the omnipresent motto of banners at the 2024 Trump rallies – replacing the “Build the wall!” of 2016. The re-election of Donald Trump, who openly ran on a mass deportation platform, represents a hard blow for all those concerned about migration justice. The hardening of anti-immigrant rhetoric is now understood as a mandate in the most prominent Western liberal democracy. How should we make sense of this? Paying attention to how this policy was marketed and the role “migrant crime” played in its success sheds light on an often-overlooked normative challenge migrant advocates need to come to terms with.
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.
