This post is written by Dr. Seunghyun Song (Assistant professor, Tilburg University). Based on her research on linguistic justice, she provides a tentative answer to the issue of the limits of the linguistic territoriality principle and its aim to protect languages. She uses the Dutch case as a proxy for these discussions.
Image by woodleywonderworks from Flickr (Creative Commons)
(more…)In this post, Tim Fowler (University of Bristol) discusses his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which he explores whether children can be deemed as competent to engage in political activism.
The Fridays for Future or ‘Climate Strikes’ have been a striking feature of political action on climate change. Most associated with Greta Thunberg, these actions reveal the power of children to intervene effectively in political spaces. In doing so, they raise ethical, political, and sociological questions. In my paper I focus on two: first, whether recognizing children’s right to protest should affect the age thresholds for other activities, especially voting; and second, the impact on the child protesters themselves.
(more…)In this post, Bart Engelen (Tilburg University) and Viktor Ivanković (Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, where they explore what it means to have ‘true preferences’ and how this affects our understanding of autonomy and nudging.
Failing to do what we really, really want seems all-too familiar in everyday life. You might want to lead a healthier lifestyle or aspire to a career in a girl band but turn out to be too sluggish to go for a run or practice your singing and dancing skills. If you really are committed to those aims, these are clear instances where you fail to satisfy your ‘true preferences’.
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This is a guest post by Zsolt Kapelner (University of Oslo).
‘Flooding the zone’ is a term often used to describe the strategy Trump and his team have followed in recent weeks. This strategy involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion. Many have criticized this strategy and, in my view, rightly so. But what precisely is wrong with it? In this short piece I want to argue that ‘flooding the zone’ is not simply one of the, perhaps dirtier, tricks in the toolbox of democratic competition; instead, it is an inherently antidemocratic strategy which deliberately aims at exploiting one of our crucial vulnerabilities as a democratic public, i.e., our limited attentional capacity.
(more…)If Gen AI can consistently produce A grade articles across disciplines (for now, it seems they can’t, but they likely might), do we still need students to learn the art of writing well-researched long form texts? More importantly, do we need to test how well each student has mastered this art?
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.
In this post, Heidi Matisonn (University of Cape Town) and Jacek Brzozowski (University of KwaZulu-Natal) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which they explore the justifiability and potential risks of cognitive enhancement in academia.
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.
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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.
(more…)In this post, Emilia Kaczmarek (University of Warsaw) discusses her recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which she explores the ethical implications of self-deception in emotional relationships of humans with AI entities.
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.
(more…)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.
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