Aaron Wentland (Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London) is organizing a major online benefit event for the Ukrainian academy on 17 and 18 March, entitled: ‘What Good Is Philosophy? – The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis’.
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This is a guest post written by Felix Bender (Northumbria University). Felix’s research explores who we should recognise as a refugee and here he considers whether we should consider Russian deserters as refugees through a moralised or politicised lens.
“Perhaps the most pressing task of ethics is to warn against morality”. This statement, issued by German Sociologist Niklas Luhmann, rings nowhere as true as it does now. Moralism dominates the day. Political decisions are made based on the imperative of differentiating between the blameworthy and the blameless, between approval and disapproval of persons. You are either good or bad, and this should dictate the political decisions you face. But is moralizing the right reaction to a political problem, or does it create more problems than it solves? Does it help in reacting to political crises, such as posed by the exodus of Russian men of fighting age, or does it lead us astray from wise political decision making? I will argue for the latter. Wise decision making should not consider moralizing arguments. In the following, I will show, that there are politically prudent reasons for admitting Russian deserters as refugees.
This guest post is written by Ben Sachs-Cobbe. Ben has recently published a book entitled Contractarianism, Role Obligations, and Political Morality exploring the connection between foundational questions in political philosophy and important issues in public policy, including the political and legal status of sentient animals.
Factory farms inflict suffering on the animals they produce. At a young age animals are torn away from their mothers and mutilated to prevent them hurting themselves and others; they’re then kept in squalid conditions with their movement and access to the outdoors restricted while they grow at a dangerously fast rate; before they’re finally killed by a machine after a mercifully brief life. Estimates of the number of farmed animals produced for food worldwide each year range from 50-70 billion (not including fish), with anything from two-thirds to 90% of those being factory farmed. This is misery on an almost incomprehensible scale.
Justice Everywhere returns this week 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 issues in moral and political philosophy, as well social policy and political economy every Monday.
- Lots more from our special series on Teaching Philosophy and Beyond the Ivory Tower where we discuss pedagogy and working at/across the boundary between theory and practice.
- 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.
So please follow us, read and share posts on social media (we’re on both Facebook and Twitter), and feel free to comment on posts using the comment box at the bottom of each post. 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), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2021-22 season.
Justice Everywhere has several special series that explore philosophical issues relating to an important theme. Here are links to those that ran in 2021-22 with a flavour of the topics their posts address:
In our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, organised by Aveek Bhattacharya, which speaks to researchers about their engagement with “real world” politics:
- An interview on theory, politics, and socialism with Paul Magnette by Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
- An interview on linking philosophy with public and political affairs with Philippe van Parijs by Diana Popescu
In our Teaching Philosophy series, organised by Sara Van Goozen, which interviews scholars on ethics issues involved designing and delivering university courses in philosophy:
- A discussion about jettisoning the philosophical canon with Liam Kofi Bright
- A discussion about deprioritising grading with Marcus Schultz-Bergin
In our series on fatigue, organised by Zsuzsanna Chappell, which explores the political and social consequences of fatigue that have come to the fore in recent years:
- Lisa Herzog’s post on how exhausting citizens poses a danger to democracy
- Zsuzsanna Chappell’s post on the need for policies that ensure everyone in society has the energy for personal flourishing and social and political participation
Stay tuned for even more in these series in our 2022-23 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing on 1st September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series (published on Thursdays). 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), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2021-22 season.
A lot has been written about Covid-19 and Justice Everywhere has contributed to this on several fronts. Here are some links from the last year on philosophical issues raised by the pandemic that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:
- Angie Pepper’s post, What Do We Owe to Pandemic Puppies?, which consider the rise of animal adoption in the pandemic and the ethical concerns about what happens to them next.
- Costanza Porro’s post, What the pandemic can tell us about prison, which explores what prisons looked like during Covid-19 and the opportunity to transform a fraught institution into a caring and more just one.
- Andrew McGee & Drew Carter’s post, Withdrawing and withholding treatment are not always morally equivalent, which differentiates types of medical interventions by looking through the lens of possible treatment dilemmas that arose from Covid-19. (This is part of our ongoing collaboration with Journal of Applied Philosophy.)
- Aveek Bhattacharya & Fay Niker’s post, What the pandemic can teach us about political philosophy, which recounts what they brought together in our Philosophers’ Rundown on the Coronavirus Crisis and the development of these ideas into an edited book, Political Philosophy in a Pandemic: Routes to a More Just Future.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2022-23 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing on 1st September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series (published on Thursdays). 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), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2021-22 season. This post focuses on our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
In 2019, Justice Everywhere began a collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The journal is a unique forum that publishes philosophical analysis of problems of practical concern, and several of its authors post accessible summaries of their work on Justice Everywhere. These posts draw on diverse theoretical viewpoints and bring them to bear on a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from the environment and natural resources to freedom, empathy, and medical ethics.
For a full list of these posts, visit the JOAP page on Justice Everywhere. For a flavour of the range, you might read:
- Megan Blomfield’s post, Should land be reclassified as a global commons?, which explores recent proposals for equitable and sustainable sharing of global commons and whether to apply this approach to land.
- Daphne Brandenburg’s post, Why we should think twice about persons who struggle to emphathize, which discusses the philosophical issues between empathy, communication, and responsibility.
- Paul Raekstad’s post, Why Property-Owning Democracy is Unfree, which considers the unfreedom of capitalism and problems with recent claims that a property-owning democracy might escape it.
- Emma Curran & Stephen John’s post, Why should we protect the vulnerable?, which unpacks the complexity of ethical discourse around the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and of the ethical commitments involved.
Stay tuned for even more from JOAP authors in our 2022-23 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing on 1st September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series (published on Thursdays). 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), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2021-22 season.
Here are some good reads on philosophical issues relating to climate change that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:
- Polaris Koi’s post, Accounting for global and local justice in behavioural climate policy, which explores the tension between localized climate nudges and the global impacts addressing climate change requires.
- Elisa Piras’s post, A justice-inspired reading of the COP26 discursive arena, which sketches how a high-level climate summit might provide a space for the voices of diverse groups of citizens to articulate a common strategy to tackle climate change.
- Temi Ogunye’s post, Is disruptive climate activism morally controversial?, which challenges objections to disruptive activism grounded on worries about law-breaking, inconveniencing others, and counter-productivity.
- Jelena Belic & Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh’s guest post, Rethinking Human Rights in the Context of Climate Change, which draws reflections from their conference on transforming human rights law for it to serve purpose protecting against the harms of climate change.
- Peter Dietsch’s post, Allowing fossil-fuel advertising is harmful and irresponsible, which argues for a ban on advertising fossil-fuel intensive activity, such as gas-powered cars, air travel, and boat cruises, and financial investment in fossil-fuel intensive industries.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2022-23 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing on 1st September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series (published on Thursdays). 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), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
This is a guest post by Kailyn Price and Jacob Zionts. It discusses their thinking on some of the ethical dilemmas faced by organ transplant committees through the lens of The God Committee.
(Note: this post contains spoilers)
It is 2021 and Dr. Jordan Taylor (played by Julia Stiles) sighs relievedly as she sees the genetically modified pig heart that she has just transplanted into the chest of a baboon beat and come back to life. The apparently successful operation serves as the climax to Austin Stark’s The God Committee, a fast-paced medical drama that grapples with the ethics of transplant committees, xenotransplantation (cross-species transplantation), and benefit calculations.
Despite the achievement, the scene is haunted by Dr. Taylor and her transplant committee’s decision a decade earlier to accept a bribe from a suspiciously wealthy man whose adult son desperately needed a heart. Prior to learning of the twenty- something’s condition and prospect of a bribe, the committee had been coalescing around a decision between two other candidates: 1) a middle-aged Black man who struggled with bipolar disorder but is also a loving father of three daughters, and 2) a curmudgeonly 70-year-old white woman who demeans her nurses, has little extant family, and seems ambivalent about receiving the heart. The bribe required the committee to ignore the son’s typically disqualifying drug use and deprioritize the other candidates but, ultimately, funded the research that culminated in the pig-to-baboon heart transplant and enabled the hospital to care for more patients.
The God Committee wants its audience to walk away thinking that the ends justified the means—that the hard-nosed consequentialism of the committee and their willingness to shoo aside the more deontological and virtue-oriented constraints of standard bioethics were necessary to secure the greater good. But we don’t think that’s the right message to take home. In this post, we will explicate and reject both of the committee’s reasons for accepting the bribe: (1) saving the hospital and (2) securing xenotransplantation funding. In the end, we argue that (1) accepting the bribe undermines the committee’s ability to act in the best interest of the hospital’s patients; and (2) the film’s narrow focus on xenotransplantation occludes the upstream causes of heart failure that are imminently targetable with status quo technologies and, critically, have the upshot of positively interacting with the demands of racial, environmental, and animal justice.
This is a guest post by Stanislas Richard. Stan is a research fellow at the Dr. Rachelle Bascara Foundation and is visiting at the Central European University. The post discusses his thoughts on the role of enticements to desert could play in war.
Should we pay soldiers to desert? Should we, for instance, give financial incentives to the Russian soldiers currently invading Ukraine to lay down arms? And what role should such Enticements to Desert (ED) play in peacekeeping and de-escalation policy? This post sketches some answers to these questions.