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Monthly Archive: February 2026

Democracy / Distribution / Duties / Education / General / Governance / Rights / Social justice / Work

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On Using Affirmative Action as a Tiebreaker

In this post, Shalom Chalson (National University of Singapore) and James Bernard Willoughby (Australian National University) discuss their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on using affirmative action to break ties in competence between candidates for a job or university place.

Affirmative Action is consistent with merit-based selection practices. This is what we argue in our paper, “Using Affirmative Action as a Tiebreaker”, forthcoming at the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

This consistency is surprising. The idea that affirmative action is opposed to selecting the most competent candidates is a powerful motive to reject such policies. For example, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that race-conscious affirmative action policies were unconstitutional, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion:

Meritocratic systems, with objective grading scales…have always been a great equalizer—offering a metric for achievement that bigotry could not alter. Racial preferences take away this benefit, eliminating the very metric by which those who have the most to prove can clearly demonstrate their accomplishments—both to themselves and to others.

The thought here is that affirmative action—such as in the form of race-conscious selection practices—removes opportunity for the marginalised to succeed by proving their competence. So affirmative action is, supposedly, inconsistent with meritocracy.

We disagree. There is at least one way that you can implement an affirmative action policy with no expected loss in competence. How? By using affirmative action as a tiebreaker.

First, identify all the people that, for all you can tell, are as competent as each other and more competent than everyone else. What you now face is a tie in competence. Second, apply affirmative action, say by preferring people from historically marginalised groups among the equally competent, to break the tie. Following these steps should not compromise competence.

What about those ‘objective grading scales’? If you are truly selecting for competence, then you might think that the scales are all that matter. But the fact is that our measures of competence don’t always measure actual competence. The same grades do not mean that two students are equally competent. All you can do in a meritocracy is identity the people you expect to be most competent.

Let’s think through an example. Suppose a newly admitted university student’s job is to get good grades in their first year. Now, suppose you know two things about each prospective student: their high school grades and their financial background (whether their family’s income is higher or lower than the average). How would you select the most competent candidate?

In suggesting that grading scales do all the work, Justice Thomas implied an answer: select the students with the best grades and ignore any other information. But this would not pick out the students who are most likely to get the best first year university grades.

According to George Messinis and Peter Sheehan (2015), when comparing students in Australia with roughly the same high school grades, the students from poorer backgrounds get better first year grades than students from richer backgrounds. So, if you preferred a poorer student whose grades were just a little behind the richer student, you would in fact select a student likely to get better first year grades. This is an affirmative action policy that is not only consistent with meritocracy but improves on a policy that focuses only on objective grading scales.

Above, we pretend that all a student must do is get good grades. This makes sense of using high school grades as a metric for competence. In reality, students also must gain the skills necessary for future employment. High school grades are much less likely to matter when assessing future competence.

As we get a more realistic understanding of what we are selecting for, it becomes more doubtful that our selection practices model a perfectly functioning meritocracy. In the actual world, we don’t always select the most competent people. In fact, sometimes the metrics that we use aren’t about competence at all.

In a 2009 article about the United States Space Program, Marie Lathers discusses the requirements for joining the first astronaut program in 1958. Candidates had to both be jet test-pilots and have a bachelor’s degree. However, no woman could be a jet test-pilot at the time. So no women qualified. Of the seven men chosen, two did not have bachelor’s degrees (but were taken to have ‘equivalent experience’). However, the requirement that candidates be jet test-pilots was unrelated to competence in flight. Lathers writes:

Although the first draft of the call for astronauts did not set the requirement of jet test-pilot experience, the final version did, following President Eisenhower’s opinion that those with security clearances who could be called to Washington at any time—that is, military personnel—would be NASA’s most efficient pool.

These metrics ruled women out. Nonetheless, when the same metrics ruled out some good male candidates, the metrics were applied more flexibly. After all, some people can have the required knowledge for a job without having a degree. But some women can be excellent astronauts, despite not being jet test-pilots.

The metrics used to assess competence can be a result of tradition, epistemic mistake, or a direct order from a superior without appropriate justification. Our current selection practices are likely replete with errors. We argue that because of these errors, policies informed by a realistic understanding of our epistemic limitations, and that use affirmative action to break the ties in competence we are likely to encounter, can be implemented without cost in competence. 

To be sure, there are many ways to object to our proposal. One might think that employing affirmative action over a lottery in the event of a tie is simply unfair. One might worry that affirmative action harms those it is designed to help, such as by bolstering stigma. And one might question whether selectors ought to prioritise competence at all. We address objections like these in our paper.

There is a common belief that affirmative action is incompatible with meritocracy. However, we don’t live in a perfect meritocracy. Affirmative action policies can be just as good as current practices for selecting competent candidates, if not better. They can do so while making our society overall more equal, more just, and a better place to live.

Shalom Chalson is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. She works on philosophical issues to do with wrongful discrimination.

James Bernard Willoughby specialises in epistemology, and in particular, on epistemic instrumentalism. However, he is currently working on a range of experimental projects: counterfactuals and retraction; what makes people judge a belief as more or less justified; and assessing legal compliance of AI.

Animals / Rights / Social justice

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Relational equality and the status of animals

a photograph showing three calves, a dog and a monkey resting in the shade in an Indian street
Dogs, calves and a monkey photographed in a city in India. Image by Simon from Pixabay

This is a guest post by Pablo Magaña and Devon Cass

Three challenges

Relational egalitarians believe we should eradicate certain inequalities of rank and status, such those based on gender, race, or caste. Almost without exception, these concerns are focused on humans (typically adult and able-minded). But it is worth noticing that nonhuman animals have also held, across time and space, drastically different statuses. Some have been treated as divinities to be revered, many more as plagues to be eradicated, and even a few as war enemies—as in Australia’s failed campaign against Emus. One might wonder then: can we apply the ideal of relational equality—or, more generally, a relational approach to justice—to our relationships with the other animals? This is a question few have addressed. (Two commendable exceptions are Andreas Bengtson’s “Animals and relational egalitarianism(s)”, and, with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Relational egalitarianism and moral unequals”)

Well, that’s unsurprising, or so one may think. For the extension of relational egalitarianism to animals seems to stumble, at first glance, upon three significant obstacles. First, relational equality requires that we treat one another as equals, a kind of reciprocity to which animals cannot correspond (the absence of social relations problem). Second, even if humans and animals are socially unequal, it’s not clear why this would be objectionable. After all, animals do not seem to possess a sense of self-worth that could be damaged when treated as inferiors (the absence of understanding problem). Third, relational equality seems dependent or grounded on moral equality. But, many argue, humans and animals are not moral equals (the absence of moral equality problem).

In a recent paper in Philosophical Studies, we argue that this pessimism is premature. To answer the above problems, one may call into question their empirical assumptions. Perhaps, one could suggest, maybe some animals do possess a sense of self-worth that can be damaged when treated as inferiors. In our article, we pursue a different strategy: whatever the truth of the empirical assumptions, the three problems rest on a controversial (and, we suggest, mistaken) understanding of the demands of relational equality—or, more generally, relational justice.

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Gender / General / Moral values / Social justice

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The Injustice of Not Feeling Wronged

In this post, Sushruth Ravish (IIT Kanpur) and Ritu Sharma (University of British Columbia) discuss their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on experiential injustice in cases of marital rape.

“El Requiebro” by José Agustín Arrieta (from WikiCommons).

Can one fail to know that they have been wronged?

Often, our knowledge of being wronged arises not from detached reasoning but from the body’s own signals—anger, fear, humiliation, pain. These feelings are not just reactions to harm; they are how we recognise harm. They tell us that a boundary has been crossed and that something ought to be resisted. Now imagine losing that capacity altogether—to endure a wrong yet fail to sense its wrongness; to experience harm as ordinary, expected, or even obligatory. We argue in our recently published paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy that such a loss is a distinct kind of injustice, namely experiential injustice.

When harms are unrecognisable

In 2018, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that the home is the most dangerous place for women. The majority of women who are raped are assaulted by partners, family members, or acquaintances. Yet in many countries, marital rape is still not a criminal offence, or is treated as less severe than other forms of rape. Even where laws have changed, underreporting remains a widespread issue. Many survivors do not identify what they have experienced as rape, describing it instead as “just how marriage works.” Philosophers often interpret this through the concept of hermeneutical injustice. Miranda Fricker defines this as a harm that occurs when people are wronged in their capacity as knowers because they lack the shared interpretive resources needed to understand their experiences. In societies where “marital rape” is an unavailable or marginal concept, victims may endure violations without being able to recognise or articulate them.

Beyond hermeneutical injustice

While this account is important, it stops short of capturing the entire range of epistemic harms. Hermeneutical injustice assumes that victims can at least sense that something is wrong, even if they lack the words to describe it. But what if that sense itself collapses? In our recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, we propose the concept of experiential injustice to capture a deeper kind of epistemic harm. Experiential injustice occurs when trauma, oppression, or internalised domination not only distort interpretation but also erode the very capacity to apprehend one’s experience as morally or epistemically significant. Put simply, hermeneutical injustice presupposes an intact sense of wrongness. Experiential injustice goes one step deeper—with the loss of that sense altogether.

Losing epistemic self-trust

Survivors of marital rape often describe going numb, dissociating, or complying mechanically. They may say they “stopped feeling anything” or came to believe that sex is “a wife’s duty.” From the outside, such reactions look purely psychological—symptoms of trauma or depression. But they are also epistemic. When we lose the capacity to perceive a violation as a violation, we lose access to a fundamental kind of knowledge. Our ordinary mechanisms for recognising and evaluating harm—our emotions, our bodily awareness, our moral perception—no longer function as they should. This marks a collapse of epistemic self-trust: the ability to rely on one’s own affective and perceptual cues as sources of knowledge.

How experiential injustice arises

Our paper identifies three mechanisms through which experiential injustice develops:

1. Trauma-induced disruption.

Repeated coercion can fracture the link between experience and meaning. Over time, the body suppresses sensations that signal danger as a means of survival. This is not merely psychological numbing—it is epistemic damage. The body is one of the primary sites through which we make sense of the world, and when it stops signalling wrongness, understanding falters.

2. Adaptive numbing.

In oppressive environments, emotional detachment often becomes a survival strategy. When resistance brings punishment or social ostracism, submission may seem like the only viable path. Over time, this adaptation hardens into a stable state of indifference, making it difficult to access one’s own sense of violation.

3. Internalised norms.

Patriarchal scripts about wifely duty and marital obligation can make coercion appear not only normal but morally appropriate. When refusal is framed as selfish or disobedient, compliance can feel virtuous. Here, moral evaluation itself has been reprogrammed. These processes often overlap: trauma feeds numbness, numbness eases internalisation, and internalisation prevents recovery.

Why this matters

Recognising experiential injustice alters how we perceive epistemic harm. It reminds us that knowing is not only conceptual in nature. It is also affective and embodied. Conceptual gaps, the focus of hermeneutical injustice, can often be addressed by social or legal reform. But experiential injustice resists such repair. You can introduce a new term like “marital rape,” yet for someone whose evaluative framework has collapsed, the term may carry no meaning. To restore epistemic agency, one must first restore the capacity to feel when something is wrong. This also means that epistemic repair must go beyond conceptual interventions. It must attend to the restoration of self-trust, bodily awareness, and emotional attunement. Survivors need conditions that allow them to feel and to trust those feelings again. Recognising experiential injustice illuminates the profound internal consequences of oppression.

Taking experiential injustice seriously means acknowledging that epistemic repair is not complete when victims can name their experiences. It is complete only when they can once again feel that what happened to them was wrong—and trust that feeling as constituting knowledge. Only then can survivors begin not merely to speak, but to recognise, in the most intimate sense, that what happened to them was wrong.

About the Authors:

Sushruth Ravish currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He earned his PhD from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Naik and Rastogi Prize for Excellence in PhD Thesis. His research lies at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, focusing on the nature of epistemic norms and moral judgments, as well as exploring the limits of transparency and explainability in AI systems. His publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Philosophia, Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy, the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, Indian Philosophical Quarterly, and the South African Journal of Philosophy. 

Ritu Sharma is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She previously completed a PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and has held teaching positions at the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, and at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) in Mumbai. Her research lies at the intersection of Practical Ethics and Social Philosophy, with a current focus on marital rape, unjust sex, hermeneutical injustice, and questions of agency. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, and the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

Academia / AI / General / Pedagogy / Teaching Philosophy / Technology

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Worse than AI writing is AI reading. What can we do?

While we’re all worried that assigning home-written essays stopped making sense because students are outsourcing the task to AI, and we’re all scrambling to invent alternative ways of assessment, this particular blogger is even more concerned about the effects of students relying on brief (or not so brief) AI-generated summaries of the readings that they should do before class. In my short post-LLM teaching experience, worse than AI writing is AI “reading”. And, I want to stress, that’s not merely because students aren’t doing the readings. Rather, it’s because they seem to think that what they get from, say, ChatGPT, is enough for them to understand the view of the author in question, and have justified opinions about it. This surely doesn’t work, at least not for readings in philosophy, which is what I teach. Students may know, in a nutshell, what conclusion the author wants to support and a couple of reasons in favour of it. But because they don’t struggle to extract these from an article, or a book chapter, with their own natural intelligence, they fail to appreciate the complexity of the issue we discuss, the difficulty of defending well a particular position on it, the temptation of thinking about that matter very differently and the extraordinary challenge which, sometimes, is to even formulate the right questions. The result is boredom.

In the classroom, boredom is the kiss of death; eyes would like to roll, hands yearn for the phone but remain still, because my students are mostly polite and because I ban mobile phones in class. Everybody seems to be having a mental cramp. Of course we do: since they have not been through the discovery adventure, but instead skipped to the outcome, students’ comments are flat, their questions – which they should prepare in advance of class and be ready to talk about with their colleagues – are pro forma, and most often vague, so as not to betray the lack of familiarity with the text. Boredom is contagious. People appear unable to imagine how one could think differently about the questions we discuss – something that a well-written paper would have made vivid to them. Even incendiary topics (say, culture wars material) are met with apathy.

For many years, Jo Wolff had a wise and funny series of editorials in the Guardian; one of the earliest was praising academic prose for being boring. It’s for fiction writers to create mystery and suspense; philosophers (for instance) should start with the punch line and then deliver the argument for it. I agree with sparing readers the suspense, but after a series of academic conversations with ChatGPT I discovered that, if pushed to the extreme – the formulation of a thesis and the bare bones argument for it – this kind of writing is the worst. It kills curiosity.

What should we do? Perhaps turn some of our classes into reading-together-in-silence events? Back to monastic education! I talked to colleagues, who told me about several things they’re trying to make students read again (without AI.) An obvious possibility is to ban all use of LLMs by students and explain the reasons: Our job is not primarily to populate their minds with theories, but to help them understand arguments, teach them how to pull them apart, and maybe to occasionally build them. I’m not sure about this solution either. For one thing, a well-prompted LLM is better at reconstructing a slightly unclearly and imprecisely presented argument than the average reader and many students; often, AI often produces much better abstracts of academic work than academics themselves, and well-written abstracts are really useful. Another problem is that policies which can’t be enforced are for that reason deficient, and, I suspect, the very attempt to directly police students on their use of AI would be just as anti-pedagogical as the use of AI itself. (Reader, do you learn from those you resent?)

Alternative suggestions are to change how we teach. Quite a few colleagues have started to read out excerpts in class, then discuss them on the spot. One of them goes as far as asking students to memorise them, in an attempt to revive proven methods of Greek and Roman antiquity. This sounds good, time consuming as it is; better do a little, and do it well, than do a lot for naught, though I’d stop short of requiring memorisation. Others ask students to annotate their readings before class, and check, or use Perusall and similar platforms to read the assignments collectively, in preparation for class. I did Perusall to great success in the Covid era, but when I tried it again recently it was a disaster of cheating and complaints. Some teachers are printing out readers, or organising hard copies of books for the students, in the hope that this dissuades them from uploading digital files to LLMs. One colleague introduced 5-10 minutes flash exams at the beginning of each class, to check that students have read. And another one picks two students in each class, randomly, and asks them to co-chair the discussion about the reading of that day.

In the medium term, perhaps universities should double – or triple – the length of time that students spend together, with an instructor, for each class, and earmark the extra time as “study group”, when students read and write. There’s something dystopian about this model and it would massively increase work loads for instructors, so in practice it should mean more jobs, perhaps with lesser compensation. But is this really worse than giving up on the goal of teaching students how to read and write essays? Everybody would resist, no doubt but by the time the value of degrees, including their market value, will be next to nothing, universities might face a choice between closing down and reforming in ways that we find hard to imagine now.

As for the next academic year, I wonder whether I should assign readings that I won’t cover at all in my lecturing, but which will be of great help to students in the discussion section. Those who come to class having read only the LLM-created abstract will be the poorer for it. But, since I won’t ask them to discuss the papers, we might – most of us – escape the boredom mill.

Any thoughts?