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

Yearly Archive: 2025

Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

 by 

Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Chris Armstrong

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Matt Perry and Chris Armstrong. Chris is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, winner of the 2023 Lynton Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association and the author of A Blue New Deal (Yale University Press), an accessible and popular book about the politics of the ocean. He primarily works on issues at the intersection of global justice and the environment. He has published 6 books in total (including with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), over 50 journal articles and numerous articles in popular media, including The Guardian and The Conversation. Matt spoke to Chris about his experiences writing for a wider audience, his motivations to do so, and what tips he might have for others hoping to do the same.

© Chris Armstrong

Matt Perry: Thanks again for agreeing to chat! First, I’d like to ask you why you decided to pursue a career in Political Theory, and what factors led you to address the topics your work focuses on?

Chris Armstrong: When I was at school, I had no conception whatsoever of what political theory might be, or even that it existed. People in my family didn’t go to university. I didn’t really realize you could think about power, ideologies, culture and society in quite an analytical way until I picked up a sociology textbook secondhand.

I announced to my teachers that I was going to completely change all the A levels that I had been intending to do, away from sciences, and then went off to university to do Politics and Sociology. I then did my master’s in International Relations. Still, I was fairly untutored in political theory until my PhD, and in that sense I’ve found my way slowly into the (sub)discipline from the outside. I did my PhD on gender inequality. I set myself the task of investigating whether Michael Walzer’s theory could help us think about gender inequality, which was an interesting project. I’ve been finding my way since then, and I’ve shifted the direction of my work a few times. I moved into thinking about global justice first and then thinking about more environmental issues.

Right now in my career, I’m really appreciating the fact that a lot of what I read is science, history and law. And I kind of read quite indiscriminately across disciplines. In a sense, what I’m doing there is finding my way back to the beginning, where I just read indiscriminately and was interested in everything.

MP: That’s great. I have a second general question before we get onto your public engagement: what do you perceive to be the role of academia, and more specifically the political theorist?

CA: I’ve never been particularly impressed by claims about the authority of political theory. I mentioned I did my PhD on Michael Walzer. Walzer is not someone I work on now. But one thing I was impressed by was his deflationary account of political theory. He essentially thinks that the political theorist is just one more citizen: a participant in public debate, but nothing more than that. I like that idea. It is a very democratic commitment to reasoning with your fellow citizens, arguing with people, not claiming that you’ve arrived at some kind of deep truth that the population just have to fall in with, but that we should have a continual commitment to engaging with others.

MP: That resonates with me, too. I wanted to ask you: what are your own motivations for public engagement in general, but also for writing your book, A Blue New Deal?

CA: Whilst thinking about global justice in my previous work, I got more and more interested in environmental issues. And I suppose at some stage, it dawned on me that there was this big, missing element in many political theory discussions about climate, environmental protection, territory, and natural resources: the ocean.

It’s probably the biggest carbon sink, definitely the biggest ecosystem, and it contains most of the territory on our planet, but it is often simply missing from political theory discussions. You can find bits of political theory on the ocean, of course. But you mainly have to go back to Grotius and the people who engage with him, or to Carl Schmitt, if that’s to your taste. But in the tradition of analytical political theory and reasoning about territory, territorial claims, and justice, it’s missing. And that’s intellectually interesting, but it’s also deeply problematic, if it is in fact the biggest haven of biodiversity, the biggest carbon sink, and so on. So one track that I was going down was to try to persuade other political theorists to engage with the ocean.

I suppose in the end I realized that talking to fellow political theorists was important, but not the only thing that I wanted to do. The more I learned about the governance of the ocean, the more I realized how massively dysfunctional it is. I felt that I needed to do my bit to stage an intervention to raise the public profile of these issues as much as I could, while also trying to persuade other political theorists to actually engage too. Over time, I’ve engaged more with speaking to ordinary citizens, people outside academia, NGOs, and so on. That’s come to feel more important.

MP: Of course, there’s not just a missing focus on the ocean in political theory as a discipline. It seems to be something that’s more broadly reflected in politics too. So it makes sense that those two pieces came together. It’d be good if you could tell us a bit more about your book — what are the key claims?

CA: So, what I try to do in the book is to persuade people that we are going through a double-edged crisis. We’re familiar with the idea that the ocean is facing an environmental crisis, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, you name it. But we also face a crisis of inequality in the way that we govern and relate to the ocean. The human impacts on the ocean are not being evenly caused by everybody, and the benefits from human interactions with the ocean are not being accrued evenly. This is a world in which some are benefiting from burgeoning ocean industries and others are not.

To some extent, the environmental piece is reasonably well understood and people in the sciences have made that case. My distinctive contribution was to draw those strands together and say that when we think about the environmental crisis, we should also always be thinking about questions of social and global justice. We have these hierarchies of power and influence that we also need to reckon with. Some people benefit from what gets called the “Blue Acceleration”, a creeping industrialization of the ocean. I argue we can’t really have good solutions to environmental problems that don’t also tackle these gulfs in power and advantage. The book draws those two things together and argues that we need to think a bit more ambitiously about the way that we are governing the ocean.

MP: One of the things I find impressive about the book is the way it draws together different topics: there’s history, ocean science, policy, and ideal theory. But the framing is around this practical proposal of the Blue New Deal. Did you have this idea already when you started writing? How did you come up with this framing given how encompassing the topic is?

CA: The Blue New Deal framing actually came in fairly late. In the beginning there was just a sense that there were three components to the project: (i) what’s wrong with contemporary ocean governance? (ii) How did we get here? And (iii) how can we do better?

I was going to call the book Ocean Justice: Political Theory for a Blue Planet. My editor at Yale quite sensibly pointed out that no one would know what that meant (like me as a kid, the general public don’t know what political theory is). So, she actually came up with the idea of naming it A Blue New Deal. I, as a theorist, flipped one way and the other and then thought, actually, she knows what she’s doing. Editors know much more than authors do about marketing.

But the Blue New Deal framing is ameliorative, not the end-result I endorse. Chapter 9 is titled ‘A Blue New Deal’, and Chapter 10 ‘Beyond the Blue New Deal’. Chapter 9 is asking how far we could get given existing institutions, and the argument is that we can get pretty far. We might do much better in bringing together a focus on socioeconomic injustice and environmental protection, even relying on existing institutions. But that isn’t entirely satisfying because I think existing institutions are deeply flawed. So, in chapter 10 I ask much grander questions about the way we think about and govern the ocean.

© Matt Perry

MP: I’m interested in what the uptake was like after releasing the book. What further public engagement did the book invite and how have people received the ideas you defend?

CA:  It’s all been great and kept me very busy in a way I was unused to. Unlike typical academic books where you wait a couple of years for reviews and citations, the response was immediate, largely thanks to my publisher’s publicity operation. There were reviews in newspapers, and I was invited onto podcasts. I was continually and positively surprised to find out that my book had in fact reached a wider audience and that people wanted to engage with it. There were two different kinds of audience. The first were policymakers and people with power. For instance, I got invited to go and talk to the board of this entity called Crown Estate Scotland, who govern and maintain the Scottish coastline.

But I also engaged with less formal audiences, such as Ocean Rebellion, a spinoff from Extinction Rebellion. They’re a vanguard of people, many of them artists, who are trying to raise the public media profile of ocean issues. Initially, they were pretty much exclusively focused on the environmental protection angle and not really on social and global justice. I’ve tried to encourage them to bring those things together.

In general, I’m much more engaged in speaking to NGOs and ordinary citizens, and getting them thinking about whether blue growth and the blue acceleration are the priorities we ought to have. Going back to the Walzerian idea of the theorist as another citizen arguing with his or her fellow citizens, I feel much more comfortable speaking to civil society actors and campaigning groups. I prefer trying to raise the profile of ocean issues, rather than trying to get the ear of princes, to use the political theory cliché.

MP:  That’s interesting. One thing it would be great to know is what the whole process of publishing for a wider audience has been like? What are some of the key challenges you faced?

CA: One self-imposed challenge was flip-flopping about what kind of book I wanted to write: public-facing, academic, or somewhere in the middle? I’m happy with where it ended up, but I wasn’t especially clear about that at the beginning. If I wanted to turn that into advice I would say: be really clear from the beginning about the exact audience you want to engage with.

If you’re going to take things seriously, you really need to read mass market books, or books that are in that hybrid academic/commercial space. I ended up in quite a good place, probably in part because I had a really good editor, but it’s obvious in hindsight that if you want to write a book that communicates to a wide audience, you ought to be reading lots of books that already do that, because there is a specific approach and method of addressing the reader. For instance, by working in lots of examples, using historical tidbits, and relying on real world cases — these are things that define the genre. It’s a bit different from the work that we academics are used to producing.

MP: That makes me wonder: has writing for a broader audience influenced your writing style more generally?

CA: That’s a really good question. I found the process of writing for a general audience really liberating. When writing for academics, you’re always thinking about qualifications, and considering the two or three interlocutors who are metaphorically sitting on your shoulders, or worrying about giving deference to various literatures. When you’re not writing for an academic audience, you don’t have that anymore. I found that very freeing. Instead, you’re trying to lay out a case as simply as possible — to cut things to the bone and get to the basics.

If there’s a wider lesson that I’ve learned from doing that, it would be to take some of that freshness and accessibility back into my academic work. I’ve always in my academic work taken accessibility quite seriously. But maybe I take it even more seriously now. You can communicate fairly complex ideas to a wider audience without sacrificing too much. Going forward, I might leave behind some of the formality, and so many gestures towards literatures. There’s a sense in which lots of academic work is quite literature-driven, whereas I suppose the work I’ve done more recently is issue-driven or ideas-driven, first and foremost.

MP: That’s really interesting. How did securing the book contract differ from typical academic publishing?

CA: The way things worked at Yale was quite different to my previous experiences in academic publishing. There was much more editorial input and a clear sense from the beginning that this was a project that the editor really liked. The book did go to academic reviewers, but this seemed to be a more advisory role compared with in mainstream academic publishing. To secure a contract, you need to find out what the editor is interested in, what they published previously, and what gaps there might be in the roster that they are hoping to fill. There’s no guarantee of success. But essentially, you have to tell a story about not just why this is intellectually interesting, but why it has broad appeal now. Timing, I think, is much more important.

MP: That’s helpful. I’ve got two more questions for you. First, I wondered how your public facing work has been received within the discipline of political theory.

CA: I’m not entirely sure. One kind of attitude is that there is primary work at the level of ideals and normative arguments, and secondary, “applied” work that shows the implications of those ideas for particular issues. There can appear to be a hierarchy between these. The thought might be that the work I was doing in A Blue New Deal might not be quite so cutting edge conceptually, that it is essentially a translation of normative ideals for a wider audience. I do think that is absolutely what I’m doing — I’m not claiming to be doing cutting-edge conceptual work and I’m unashamed about that. But I also think that “applied” work is really important and that we should be doing more of it.

Another attitude concerns the mission I had to try and persuade other political theorists to take up the issue of the ocean — which I don’t feel has been massively successful. One explanation for why is the view that “Chris has got this” so others don’t need to address it, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen. Again, with my subsequent book about the biodiversity crisis, I’m explicitly trying to open up issues to other academics, providing a map of the territory and introducing major debates in the hope others will join me and make their own contributions. I don’t want to do it alone.

MP: Yes, applying normative theory beyond academia and opening up discussions to others are both really key. My last question is: what’s on the horizon next for you? Will you continue with more public-facing work?

CA: I am excited to continue this trajectory and write another book about the ocean that is exclusively for a public audience rather than being a hybrid — but more on that soon!

Climate / Environment / General / Governance / Public Philosophy

 by 

Choose Your Own Philosophical Policy Role

In this interactive “choose-your-own-adventure” post, Kian Mintz-Woo (University College Cork) explores the different roles that philosophers might play in supporting the development of public policies. This is based on his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

[§1]

Congratulations! You have been invited to participate in a government policy-recommendation committee in [insert your research area of expertise]. You look around and see some academics (a political scientist, an economist and a [insert relevant] natural scientist), but also some political bureaucrats and some representatives of civil society. You have been jointly tasked on evaluating and recommending a policy option.

‘This is our justice theorist,’ they say in introduction. Or maybe ‘Please welcome our ethicist!’ You’re a little intimidated. You’ve never done something like this before, but you want to contribute in a way that is useful for the group—but also reflects the appropriate role for a philosopher.

When it comes time for you to contribute, do you:

  • explain, defend, and apply your substantive normative position and how it applies to this policy question (‘the partisan’): Jump to [§2]; or
  • explain what you take to be the relevant societal values and how they bear on this policy question (‘the populist’): Jump to [§3]; or
  • act as a ‘conduit for the discipline’ and explain a variety of positions and the arguments that link them to particular policy options, looking for convergence and divergence between different normative positions (‘the convergent evaluator’): Jump to [§4]?

[§2]

‘I’m a normative theorist who has considered this area extensively,’ you begin. ‘The principles and theories of [insert your normative position] are clearly stronger than the alternatives. Indeed, we can tell that those principles are useful as they show that [your preferred policy option] is highly justifiable.’

Some members of the committee, having never heard the policy options discussed in this kind of theoretical way, find that your position sounds quite plausible. Discussion continues, with the following rebuttal occasionally offered to alternative views: ‘But justice demands [your preferred policy option], according to our justice theorist!’

You find yourself squirming slightly, since you realize that [your normative opponent at a more famous university] could also have been invited instead, and, as they have a different normative position, they would have argued for [your dispreferred policy option]. But you content yourself with the thought that, luckily, you are here instead of them. Jump to [§5].

[§3]

‘We have to remember that we are here to consider and recommend public policies,’ you begin. ‘So it behooves us to consider what the public thinks. Luckily, I have a more than passing familiarity with [news opinions, polling data, historical documents, other potential sources of societal value] and I think the deep values of society are [liberal, conservative, egalitarian, xenophobic, utopian, etc.]. That is very helpful because it shows that [society’s preferred policy option] is highly justifiable.’

The committee is intrigued and begins to debate about whether these are society’s real values. One member points out that it would be somewhat more convincing if a social scientist could inform the committee, muttering something under their breath about ‘empirics’ and ‘armchair philosophers’. Another member asks whether society’s values are reflected by what society does or what society says. Yet another asks whether we should really be thinking about what society did or said.

You find yourself squirming slightly, since the questions the committee keeps asking you sound like ones that maybe a social psychologist or a sociologist or a historian would have an easier time answering. Jump to [§5].

[§4]

‘What do philosophers do?’ you begin. ‘Many of you are wondering that, but you might not really know. Well, part of what we do is we try to make arguments or draw valid inferences based on various normative positions. For instance, in this particular policy context, some influential principles and theories are [you introduce some relevant positions]. While there is significant theoretical disagreement, [some policy option] can be justified from very many normative positions and [some other policy option] can be justified from quite a lot of positions. Here is how those justifications work…’

The committee pays close attention, with some members nodding sagely when certain positions are mentioned and a couple interested murmurs as you draw some subtle inferences. Afterwards, the committee discusses which principles they are drawn to and question some of the arguments you present.

You find yourself squirming slightly, since you wonder if your summary of the arguments is idiosyncratic or whether you were fair to the various interlocutors’ positions. But you comfort yourself by thinking that you gave it your best shot and that at least you didn’t give a wild misrepresentation of the debate. Continue to [§5].

[§5]

After much discussion, multiple meetings, and several reports, the committee ultimately decides to recommend [your preferred policy option]. You are surprised but pleased, although you remain unconvinced about whether your particular recommendation made any difference. You finish your committee work with a mix of inspiration and skepticism about the role of policy committees.

But you also can’t help realizing that you can’t wait to go back and try it over again, maybe a little differently.

[The (very slightly) less interactive version of this blogpost can be found at: Mintz-Woo, Kian. Forthcoming. “Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy, as Applied to Carbon Budgets.” Journal of Applied Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70047 .]

AI / Economics / Social justice / Technology / Work

 by 

Can entry-level jobs be saved by virtuous AI?

Photo credit: RonaldCandonga at Pixabay.com, https://pixabay.com/photos/job-office-team-business-internet-5382501/

This is a guest post by Hollie Meehan (University of Lancaster).

We have been warned by the CEO of AI company Anthropic that up to 50% of entry-level jobs could be taken by AI in the coming years. While reporters have pointed out that this could be exaggeration to drive profits, it raises the question of where AI should fit into society. Answering this is a complicated matter that I believe could benefit from considering virtue ethics. I’ll focus on the entry-level job market to demonstrate how these considerations can play an important role in monitoring our use of AI and mitigating the potential fallout.

(more…)

Animals / Duties / Education / Environment / General / Health / Moral values

 by 

Using wonder to achieve animal rights

In this post, Steve Cooke, (University of Leicester) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the experience of wonder as a route towards justice for nonhuman animals.

Par Arnaud 25 — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27321151

Every year, more than 90 billion land animals are killed for food. Most are raised in factory farms. Campaigns for animal rights often rely upon shocking images of their suffering to gain attention and drive change. Whilst this often succeeds, it can also be counter-productive and drive people away. Being confronted by the harms we cause is uncomfortable. Rather than change behaviour, many people instead try to escape feelings of shame, disgust, horror, and sadness. They do this through rationalisation and carefully avoiding evidence. Hence, there’s a need for other strategies, ones that make use of more pleasant emotions. The feeling of wonder is just such an emotion. Cultivating wonder at nonhuman animals has the potential to change how they are treated.

Wonder is an emotion we feel when confronted by the mysterious and magical and we often feel it when confronted by things we don’t fully understand. When we encounter something wonderous, our attention is grabbed and we begin to search for meaning and understanding. For this reason, wonder has been considered an important emotion many philosophers. One important feature of it is that things we feel wonderment at cannot easily be ignored. Because wondrous things press us to find meaning and significance, wonder can also cause an ethical re-evaluation. Not only that, but wonder is by nature a positive attitude. When we experience wonder towards something, we attend to it closely and regard it as especially valuable. 

These features of wonder make it a useful emotion to for animal activists to encourage. One change is difficult is because animal lives have been made banal. For example, animals are frequently conceived merely as products and described in ways that remove individuality. Modern animal agriculture is directed at sameness, routine, and predictability. It treats animals as replaceable units of production. Mass killing is made routine and thus uninteresting. Finding wonder in the lives of individual animals acts as a counter to these processes of disenchantment.

For as long as it has been possible, the mass slaughter of nonhuman animals has been moved away from the public’s gaze. Studies have shown that the more visible the lives of animals are, the more legal protections they receive. As a result, the meat industry works hard to conceal and sanitise what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. In response, animal activists use what is known as ‘the politics of sight’. This form of activism involves drawing attention to harm in order to stimulate compassion. But, because it makes people feel bad, it needs them to be willing to experience and attend to that discomfort. Many are not. Here, wonder can function to draw attention without provoking discomfort. Wonder can replace compassion or cause people to value animals enough to take on its emotional burden.

Radically changing how animals are treated, such as by ending factory farming, requires paying much more attention to animal suffering. Before they can be granted rights, animals need to be seen as unique and valuable individuals. Rational arguments, no matter how sound, often fail if made without heed to moral psychology. Hence, achieving moral progress requires us to also think about how we experience encounters with other beings. Documentaries like My Octopus Teacher have probably helped campaigns against octopus farming more than any rational argument. Those working towards justice for nonhuman animals should therefore consider how to harness emotions like wonder to support their objectives.

Steve Cooke works on animal rights and the ethics of activism. He is primarily interested theories of justice for animals, moral progress, and duties in non-ideal circumstances.

Children / Climate / Duties / Environment / General

 by 

My child, whose emissions?

In this post, Serena Olsaretti (ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Isa Trifan (University of Essex) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, where they explore the morality of having children in light of climate change.

Created with GenAI

‘Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children!’  So announced the title of an article in The Guardian in 2017, when the idea that procreation is bad for the environment started to once again garner significant public attention. The Guardian article pointed to recent empirical evidence about the carbon impact of different ‘green’ choices a person could make if they wanted to reduce their carbon emissions. The evidence suggested that the carbon ‘savings’ a person could make by choosing to ‘have one fewer child’ in a developed country far exceeded the carbon reductions a person could make by making typical, green choices like giving up one’s car, going on fewer flights, or recycling put together.

Since then, in political theory as in the public sphere, this question has been gaining traction, with newspapers articles in France, Germany, Italy and Spain exploring the same issue. So, is having children in developed societies just as bad, or worse, from the point of view of climate justice as living a lavish, high-consumption lifestyle?

Our answer is: it depends. The kind of ‘moral equivalence’ that many have sought to draw between procreation, on the one hand, and a high-consumption/high-emissions lifestyle (or eco-gluttony), on the other hand, can be interpreted in at least two ways. The first interpretation is that both procreation and eco-gluttony are wrong because both involve overstepping our carbon budget. Assuming that we all have a moral obligation to keep our carbon emissions within a certain limit, or budget, the idea is this. If it is wrong for an eco-glutton to overstep her carbon budget by going on frequent, far-flung holidays every year, then, by logical consistency, it is also wrong for a person to overstep their budget by choosing to bring a child (and therefore a new carbon emitter) into a developed, high-consumption society.

We argue that this ‘strict’ way of drawing the moral equivalence between procreation and eco-gluttony fails because it wrongly assumes that the carbon costs of children should be ‘paid for’ from their parents’ budgets only. But, we argue, insofar as all of society benefits from a certain amount of demographic renewal, the carbon costs that come with bringing new people into the world should be shared between the parents and the rest of society. The carbon costs of some demographic renewal should be treated like we treat the carbon costs of producing other public goods like road infrastructure and national defence: they should be covered by everyone’s carbon budgets. If so, for some parents, at least, it is not true that having children will cause them to overstep their personal carbon budgets.

But there is a second way to interpret the moral equivalence between procreation and eco-gluttony. Procreation and eco-gluttony may be morally on a par, but only in the ‘lax’ sense in which both may be liable to moral criticism from a climate justice standpoint. While eco-gluttony is, indeed, a way of overstepping one’s carbon budget, having children need not be, as we have seen. Nevertheless, those considering procreation in developed societies may have good reason to ‘have one fewer child’ if doing so would contribute to reducing the harms of climate warming.

The basic idea is that if we are well placed to help reduce harm, we ought to do so, at least when this is not unreasonably burdensome for us. If having one fewer child than originally planned is not unreasonably burdensome for some prospective procreators, they may have good reason to refrain from having that child in virtue of the fact that they are uniquely well placed, practically and morally, to stop the entire chain of emissions that their child, and their child’s descendants, would produce. A would-be procreator is uniquely well placed, both practically and morally, to prevent 100% of the emissions of their child and of further descendants because, by contrast to most other individual choices that can reduce global emissions, the choice to refrain from having a child is one that we are (i) morally permitted to make, (ii) uniquely (justifiably) legally entitled to make, and such that (iii) we are able to singlehandedly ensure that a chain of emissions is not produced. If stopping this potentially enormous chain of emissions would help to reduce the harms of global warming, prospective procreators have good reason, perhaps even a moral obligation, to have one fewer child after all.

General

 by 

Can Our Current Academic Model Go On in the Age of AI?

It has been almost three years since ChatGPT was released in the public arena amid great hopes, worries, and, perhaps more than anything, hype. While artificial intelligence tools, including of the Large Language Model variety to which ChatGPT belongs, were already deployed in many areas by then, it was this event that sparked both widespread obsession with AI and the subsequent pouring of trillions of dollars into AI development in just three years. Meanwhile, though still relatively in its infancy, Generative AI has indeed impacted numerous fields, and these include education and research, which together form the core dimensions of academia. Some of the concerns raised by the usage of Generative AI in academia, especially when it comes to student evaluations, have already been taken up on this blog, here, here, here, and here. In fact, out of all the Justice Everywehere posts focusing on AI in the past three years, exactly half looked at this particular problem, which is unsurprising, since on the one hand most of the contributors to this blog are educators, and on the other one that political philosophy is methodologically built around the capacity to engage in original thinking. In this post, which inaugurates the new season of Justice Everywhere, I want to signal a broader issue, which is – to put it bluntly – that key aspects of the way in which academia currently works are likely to be upended by AI in the near future. And, crucially, that as a collective, we seem to be dangerously inert in the face of this scenario.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2020/11/06/an-ai-robot-wrote-my-term-paper/
(more…)

General

 by 

Welcome to the 2025/2026 season!

Justice Everywhere is back for a new season. We continue in our aim to provide a public forum for the exchange of ideas about philosophy and public affairs.

We have lots of exciting content coming your way! This includes:

  • Weekly posts from our a wonderful team of house authors, offering analysis of a vast array of moral, ethical, and political issues on Mondays.
  • The continuation of our collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy, introducing readers to cutting-edge research being published on justice-related topics in applied and engaged philosophy.
  • More from our special series: Beyond the Ivory Tower where we interview those who work at/across the boundary between theory and practice, and Teaching Philosophy.

If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to contribute a guest post on a topical subject in political philosophy (broadly construed), or would like to pitch a series or collaboration – such as publishing a series based on a workshop or special issue – please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

So please follow us, read and share posts on social media (we’re on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky), and feel free to comment on posts using the comment box at the bottom of each post.

General

 by 

From the Vault: Academia, Pedagogy, and the University

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2024-25 season. 

Here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to academia, the modern university, and the academic profession:

Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2025-26 season!

***

Justice Everywhere will return in full swing in September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series (published on Thursdays). If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

General

 by 

From the Vault: Technology and AI

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2024-25 season. 

Here are a few highlights from this year’s writing on a the ethics of generative AI, the philosophy of technology and related issues:

Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2025-26 season!

***

Justice Everywhere will return in full swing in September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series (published on Thursdays). If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

General

 by 

From the Vault: Animals, the Environment, and Nature

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2024-25 season. 

Here are a few highlights from this year’s writing on a wide range of issues relating to nature, animals and environmental politics:

Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2025-26 season!

***

Justice Everywhere will return in full swing in September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series (published on Thursdays). If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.