Yearly Archive: 2025

Why it can be OK to have kids in the climate emergency

In this post, Elizabeth Cripps (University of Edinburgh) discusses her new article published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, in which she explores whether it is justifiable to have children despite the carbon footprint it creates.

Credit: Andrea Thomson Photography.

In the US, having a child has a carbon price tag of 7 tonnes a year. In France, it’s 1.4 tonnes. Going vegan saves only 0.4 tonnes yearly, living car free 2.4 tonnes, and avoiding a Transatlantic flight 1.6 tonnes.

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.

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Mass Deportation and Migrant Crime

A photograph of a Trump rally during the 2024 US Presidential Election campaign. Trump is visible in the front, and behind him are several rows of fans, some holding signs including "Latinos for Trump" and !Make America Great Again" signs.
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.

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