The reality television series Summer House, recently premiered a spinoff show, In the City, on the popular American television network Bravo. As I found myself doom scrolling suggestions by recommender algorithms on my favorite social media apps (like any “disciplined” academic does), I was struck by the show’s trailer. It featured an emotionally intense conversation between formerly married co-stars Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke, where Cooke accuses Batula of having had an “emotional affair” with West Wilson. What I found interesting wasn’t the representation of an otherwise unremarkable toxic relationship that has become commonplace among dating reality stars per se; but the choice to draw new viewers in by highlighting a lesser known and more conceptually obscure form of infidelity—emotional affairs.
Although cheating accusations are often part of the blueprint for manufacturing a “scandalous” romance, there’s an observed tendency to focus, almost primarily, on sexual infidelity. Though sex is not always present in romantic relationships, many people assume that the presence of sex (and in most cases, sexual exclusivity) differentiate romantic relationships from friendships; and for what it’s worth, sexual affairs are relatively easy to identify. In the City’s trailer, however, seemingly echoed the both importance and legibility of what the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy has called a “growing crisis of infidelity” which suggests many people in romantic relationships tend to accept conditions of some kind of emotional exclusivity as well as sexual exclusivity.
But what are emotional affairs? And are folks wrong for having them?
The challenge these questions pose lies in attempting to differentiate emotional affairs from other emotionally intense connections outside of our romantic relationships such emotionally deep friendships. In other words, it would be odd to classify any emotionally intense connection with folks other than our partners as emotions affairs (even if it is true that many of us might be guilty of having emotional affairs in our friendships more often than we’d care to admit). On the other hand, “falling in love with someone else” seems like too high of a bar for emotional affairs if for no other reason than the fact that the emotional vitality of our relationships might be threatened by emotional connections that stop short of “love”—for example, someone who shares their deepest emotional vulnerabilities with someone that they text throughout the day, confide in, and even fantasize about a possible future together…without being “in love” with them.
In my article “Emotional Affairs,” I suggest that emotional affairs involve three things:
1.) An emotional structure that reflects the primary relationship in relationship-defining ways,
2.) A sustained consideration of a particular kind of relational life with the affair partner, and
3.) They are relevantly opaque to one’s primary relationships—in other words, emotional affairs are not merely marked by emotional intensity, but instead they are marked by what one’s partner(s) cannot meaningfully see, interpret, or respond to.
Therefore, the problem is not intimacy by itself but being shut out of a shared emotional understanding.
Because emotional affairs can be intertwined with guilt, wrong doing, or betrayal, responding defensively to allegations of emotional affairs is not uncommon. However, I think there might be a way to acknowledge the moral salience of these feelings without classifying every emotional affair as wrongful, blameworthy, or censurable. For example, in some cases (e.g., relationships marked by emotional neglect or relationships where severe communication breakdowns are prominent) emotional affairs provide beneficial ways for folks to explore their own needs or even relational possibilities that their primary relationship(s) forecloses or neglects. In other cases, emotional exclusivity doesn’t show up as a defining relational feature such as in some polyamorous or consensually non-monogamous relationships. Accordingly, in my article, I suggest that we should hesitate before applying blanketed evaluations of emotional affairs that fail to consider context, intentions, relational dynamics, and the broader ethical landscape in which emotional intimacy is negotiated.
Conclusion
The public legibility of emotional affair storylines suggests that many folks already recognize the phenomenon, even if we struggle to describe them. Furthermore, perhaps the what emotional affairs reveal to us is that relationship integrity has never only been about sex. Part of what makes emotional affairs unsettling is that they often involve a reorganization of our emotional worlds—they can alter who we turn to for comfort, who occupies our imaginations, and who participates in the ongoing story of our intimate lives. Whether emotional affairs are ultimately wrongful is a question that requires careful ethical deliberation and attention. But before we can determine when emotional affairs are morally problematic, we need a clearer understanding of what they are. My hope is that the conceptual framework offered in “Emotional Affairs” provides a useful starting point for that conversation.
Justin Clardy is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University. Their work focuses on ethical questions that emerge within and around intimate relationships. Justin is also the author of the book, Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous.
In this post, Mario I. Juarez-Garcia (Tulane University) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the unexplored value of giving up.
We all fail. Our papers get rejected, we do not get the job, we declare bankruptcy, we divorce. These are some of the numerous failures that force us to revisit our decisions, abandon our hopes, and find new horizons. And yet, most of the stories around us tell us that we should never surrender, never give up, keep trying. What does not kill us makes us stronger, right? It seems as if failure has no value. When we cannot avoid it, we should move on and hide it. Against common wisdom, my article “Giving Up” (published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy) stresses the importance of failing and giving up.
The Value of Giving Up
Moral philosophers have emphasized the value of perseverance, but not many have addressed the importance of giving up. Perseverance is risky without openness to failing and giving up first. This is easy to understand when we consider two moments of the pursuit of goals: exploration and exploitation. If we only exploit (i.e., we pursue) the first goal we choose, we might either succeed but be ultimately dissatisfied with the result and feel the need to try something else (I call this the risk of success), or we might persevere in goals that we are simply not fit to achieve (the risk of failure), just for the sake of avoiding failure. To avoid these situations, we must explore our goals first, until finding the one that is suitable for us. And the openness to giving up is fundamental for a fruitful exploration.
How do we know which goals are suitable for us? Building on Saras Sarasvathy’s wonderful paper on “Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency”, I argue that the exploration of our goals is parallel to the exploration of our means. When we fail, we learn something about ourselves, our skills, our attitudes, our situation, that would not have been available otherwise. When we are attentive to our effort and to our context, we might learn that we are not suitable for some goals. I joined a band when I was a teenager, but soon realized that I was not a great songwriter, for example. I tried working an office job at some point in my life, but I realized that what I wanted was to do philosophy, so I quit. Exploring goals is exploring ourselves. In this framework, giving up is just knowing that we do not have what it takes to succeed. And that is nothing to be ashamed of. That is an important moment of a process of exploration that might ultimately lead us to understand our talents and skills, as well as to identify the goal that we should strive for.
The Story Behind Giving Up
This is a personal paper. Its story illustrates the argument, even if, at first glance, ironically. I wrote it when I was in graduate school as a side project. We were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and I was sure I was not going to get an academic job. All my colleagues had better CVs, better publications, and better prospects than me. And the pandemic was going to create a bottleneck in the job market. I did not stand a chance. I came to terms with the idea and told myself that I could be happy as a high school teacher. I preemptively gave up on my academic career and decided to use the rest of my time in the program to write about topics that I cared about. So I wrote the first draft of this paper as a side project. When my advisor, David Schmidtz, read it, he told me to take this essay seriously.
I sent the draft to friends in the program. Due to their positive feedback, I submitted it with high hopes, but received rejection after rejection. The paper often passed the editor, but referees wrote that the paper could be better, that it was not quite there yet. After a few rejections, I started to think: should I give up on this paper? Maybe I should listen to my own advice. But, something else happened. I noticed that everyone who read it shared a personal story of failure: they quit their music career, they faced family problems, they questioned whether to pursue a philosophical career, etc. I cherished those stories. I have never had a paper that prompted people to open their hearts. This was an unmistakable signal of the value of this essay. I just needed to find the right way to express it.
The referees were right. In some sense, I gave up on this paper. Probably two or three paragraphs survived from the first version. The argument, the structure, and the writing changed. I significantly nuanced my claims. I went from an unapologetic invitation to give up and an antagonistic stance toward those who promote perseverance to a view that assigns giving up and grit a place in the process of exploring and exploiting goals. The younger version of me was wrong: I did not need to be antagonistic, I needed to be honest. Yet, I did not give up on the main takeaway: giving up is a step toward self-knowledge, if we know how to understand its lessons.
This published version is better than any other thanks to all the ideas that I gave up in the process. Despite the title of this essay, the main topic is not failure, but success in a goal that is chosen after careful reflection resulting from experiencing failures. The kind of success that we can be sure is the right one, not the one that we were told to achieve. When we consider the process of exploration as fundamental for choosing the right goal to exploit, we know that what does not make us stronger may not kill us either.
Mario I. Juarez-Garcia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Political Economy at Tulane University. He is a faculty member at the Murphy Institute of Political Economy and a fellow at the Research Center for Corruption Studies of the University of Geneva. His research focuses mainly on political corruption and the administrative state.
In this post, Harrison Lee (University of Mississippi) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the intention-based objection to euthanasia.
Many opponents of euthanasia argue that it is impermissible simply because it involves intentionally killing a patient. By contrast, they often accept practices like palliative sedation (PS), even when these foreseeably hasten death. The usual explanation appeals to the doctrine of double effect: it is sometimes permissible to cause harm or evil as a foreseen side effect, but never permissible to cause it as an intended means.
I want to challenge this way of thinking. The distinction between intending death and merely foreseeing it does not do the moral work it is often taken to do in arguments against euthanasia. In particular, there are cases in which it is clearly permissible to act because one will thereby cause death—and it is hard to maintain that acting in order to cause death is any worse.
A simple thought about everyday reasoning helps set the stage. Suppose you throw a party because you know your friends will feel obliged to clean up afterwards. You throw the party in order to have fun—but only because your friends will help you clean up afterwards. Still, it would be odd to say that you throw the party in order to cause your friends to help you clean up the resulting mess. That would be irrational, since the mess would not even exist in the first place if you did not throw the party. The fact that your friends will clean up is a reason for your action, but not its aim.
Something similar could happen in medical cases:
Fanatical Director Scenario Mr. Gray is in severe distress near the end of his life. Dr. Clemens can administer palliative sedation (PS) to relieve his suffering while he is still alive.
The hospital director, Dr. Smith, fanatically opposes PS. If PS is administered and the patient is still alive at 5:30 PM, Smith will torture him as punishment. If no PS is administered, Smith does nothing.
Dr. Clemens knows: – If she administers PS at 5:00 PM, it will cause Mr. Gray to die by 5:20 PM. – If she does not administer PS, Mr. Gray will not be tortured.
She administers PS in order to relieve Mr. Gray’s suffering while he is still alive. She is also aware that doing so will cause him to die before 5:30 PM and thus will not subject him to Smith’s abuses.
How should we describe Dr. Clemens’s reasoning?
It would be a mistake to say that she administers PS in order to make Mr. Gray die before 5:30 PM. It would be irrational for her to administer PS to Mr. Gray in order to protect him from abuses (at the hands of Dr. Smith) that he would not be subjected to in the first place if she did not administer it. Indeed, this would be just as irrational as throwing a party in order to cause your friends to clean a mess that would not exist if you did not throw it.
Instead, the right description is this: she administers PS in order to relieve Mr. Gray’s suffering while he is still alive, and she does so because she knows that doing so will not expose him to further harm—since it will bring about his death before Dr. Smith can intervene.
In other words, the fact that Mr. Gray will die is part of her reasoning, but not her goal. It reassures her that administering PS will not backfire and make things worse. The prospect of death functions as a reason in favor of the action, but she does not perform the action in order to cause death.
The crucial point is that Dr. Clemens’s action appears permissible. It would clearly be permissible to administer PS if the fanatical director were not present. And it is hard to see how his mere presence could make it impermissible to do what is best for the patient when, given the timing, he will not in fact be harmed by him.
I think it follows that it can be permissible to intentionally cause death as a means of relieving suffering. If death were always an evil that must not guide our actions, then it would be morally problematic for Dr. Clemens to be guided by the prospect of causing Mr. Gray to die. But this is not the case.
Why is it permissible for Dr. Clemens to be guided by the prospect of killing her patient? I think he answer is very simple. It is that Mr. Gray’s death will benefit him by preventing him from being tortured by Dr. Smith, and thus, from suffering a greater harm.
Opponents of euthanasia might respond by arguing that it is wrong for physicians to intentionally kill even where death benefits the one who dies. For example, they might argue that intentionally causing death always violates the aims of medicine or the dignity of the patient.
But these objections also imply—implausibly—that Dr. Clemens acts impermissibly in Fanatical Director. Dr. Clemens is guided in part by the fact that administering PS will cause Mr. Gray to die. If being guided by the prospect of causing death were always morally corrupting or incompatible with medical practice, then her action should be impermissible too. But it is not.
The deeper lesson is that death is not always an unconditional evil in medical decision-making. Sometimes, given the alternatives, death can benefit the patient by preventing a greater harm. Once we recognize this, the intention-based objection to euthanasia loses much of its force. The mere fact that euthanasia involves intending death is not enough, by itself, to show that it is impermissible.
Harrison Lee is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mississippi and will join UCLA as a Postdoctoral Clinical Ethics Fellow in 2026. His research focuses on bioethics and normative ethics.
For a long time, debates in animal ethics focused primarily on how humans ought to treat animals. The central questions concerned cruelty, suffering, and welfare: Which practices are permissible? How much harm is too much? More recently, however, philosophers have argued that this focus is too narrow. Animals are not merely passive recipients of human action. They are deeply and systematically affected by political decisions—about land use, agriculture, energy, urban planning, conservation, and climate policy. If justice is concerned with how power is exercised over those whose lives it shapes, then animals seem to fall squarely within its scope.
This thought has motivated what is often called the ‘political turn’ in animal ethics. Rather than asking only how individuals should treat animals, political theorists ask how institutions should be structured to account for animals’ interests. Influential proposals describe animals as citizens, denizens, or members of sovereign communities, and argue that their interests ought to be represented—directly or indirectly—within democratic decision-making. The underlying intuition is simple and compelling: if animals are sentient beings with morally significant interests, and if political decisions profoundly affect those interests, then excluding animals from politics looks like a form of injustice.
In our recent paper, we take this intuition seriously. But we also argue that once animals are genuinely included as political subjects, two fundamental problems arise—problems that have not received sufficient attention in the literature.
Two problems for political inclusion
The first is what we call the Conflict Problem. Political inclusion does not merely require that interests be recognised; it requires that they be adjudicated. Yet the interests of animals often conflict sharply—not only with human interests, but with one another. Predators survive by killing prey. Conservation policies benefit some species at the expense of others. Infrastructure projects may harm local animals while benefiting far larger populations elsewhere.
Consider the case of wind turbines. Large-scale wind energy projects are widely defended on environmental grounds. They reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to mitigating climate change, which in turn benefits humans and animals alike. At the same time, turbines cause significant and foreseeable harm to present animals through habitat destruction, collisions, and noise. If animals are politically included, whose interests should prevail—the many animals harmed now, or the many more who may benefit later? And how should conflicts between animals themselves be resolved?
These are not exceptional cases. Once animals are included in the demos, such conflicts become pervasive. Yet familiar democratic tools—compromise, aggregation, cost–benefit analysis—sit uneasily with stakes involving survival, bodily integrity, and irreversible harm. The Conflict Problem highlights a structural tension between political inclusion and the tragic nature of many interspecies conflicts.
The second challenge is the Numbers Problem. Nonhuman animals vastly outnumber humans. Even conservative estimates suggest that wild animals alone number in the trillions. If political inclusion tracked affectedness, population size, or proportional representation, animals would dominate political decision-making. Human political influence would be radically reduced, and many ordinary human projects—housing developments, transport infrastructure, even public health measures—could be routinely overridden on animal-protective grounds.
Many people find this implication implausible or unacceptable. Yet rejecting it is not straightforward. If animals count morally, why should they not count politically in proportion to their numbers or the extent to which they are affected? The Numbers Problem forces proponents of political inclusion to explain why animals should be included—but not too much.
Why proposed solutions fall short
A range of responses has been proposed to defuse these problems. Some restrict political inclusion to certain categories of animals—such as domesticated animals—while treating wild animals as members of separate sovereign communities. While these strategies may soften the Conflict and Numbers Problems, we argue that they do not resolve them without significant cost. Weighting interests by cognitive capacity risks reintroducing hierarchies that sit uneasily with commitments to equal moral consideration. Restricting inclusion excludes many animals whose interests are undeniably shaped by political decisions. Institutional workarounds can dilute animals’ political power to the point where inclusion becomes largely symbolic.
Alternatively, one might accept the radical implications of political inclusion: that justice really does demand sweeping changes to human institutions, priorities, and resource allocation. This response is coherent—but it requires acknowledging just how disruptive animal-inclusive democracy would be. The political turn, on this reading, is not a modest extension of existing democratic ideals. It is a demand for profound political transformation.
Taking inclusion seriously
Our aim is not to reject the political turn in animal ethics. On the contrary, we believe it has brought essential questions into view. But taking animals seriously as political subjects means taking these problems seriously as well. Political inclusion is not a cost-free moral upgrade. It forces us to confront conflicts that cannot be neatly resolved and numbers that cannot be easily managed.
Justice has a habit of unsettling our institutions. If animals are to be included in the demos, we must decide how much disruption we are willing to accept—and which democratic principles we are prepared to revise in response. The answers to these questions remain open. What is no longer plausible, we suggest, is to assume that political inclusion can be achieved without confronting its most demanding implications.
David Paaske is a PhD student at the Arctic University of Norway. Angela Martin is a lecturer at the University of Fribourg.
In this post, Ajinkya Deshmukh from The University of Manchester discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on why thinking about caste can help us better understand social identities like gender and race that impact our lives.
Features of our identity that we have little to no control over can influence how we think, what we do, and who we become. The lottery of birth – what the famous investor Warren Buffet called the ovarian lottery – heavily determines things like nationality, gender, and race. Your passport influences how easily you can pursue international opportunities. Your gender can govern where and when you can be out in parts of the world. Your race can affect if you get that job. No wonder then that philosophers have thought about social categories like gender and race. Caste – which is also determined at birth and also impacts life trajectory – has not gotten similar attention.
“So what?” you might ask. Surely it is a niche phenomenon not affecting most of the world. But the numbers are staggering. Caste-based discrimination affects hundreds of millions of people globally, and manifests as segregation in schools, housing, and public life; reduced access to political and civil rights; and inadequate representation in educational curricula and the media. Caste is found in Asia, Europe and the Americas, and among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians. Anti-discrimination policies at Universities, in cities, and even countries are being revised in light of caste.
What is caste anyway? It is a centuries-old hierarchical grouping of individuals in society wherein caste membership comes with corresponding expected behavioural, social, or cultural practices. Failure to adhere to these expectations can result in varying degrees of social sanctions, including (in serious cases) “honour” killings and mob lynching. Castes are divided into so-called “upper” and “lower” stratas. Many practitioners follow the outlawed practice of “untouchability”, physically and socially distancing themselves from so-called “lower” caste members. The most persistent feature of the caste system is endogamy, where members of a caste will only marry within their caste or their caste strata. In India, for instance, most people have friends from within their caste/strata and most will go on to marry within their caste.
Three things stand out as strange about caste, especially to those who did not grow up in societies where it operates.
1. It is inherited from one’s parents but there are no genes that determine any visible features by which one could tell somebody’s caste. Indeed, there are not even invisible traits expressed by one’s genes that correspond to one’s caste identity.
2. Despite being the foundation of a lot of discrimination, it is invisible. You cannot tell somebody’s caste just by looking at them. Go on, try it. You don’t need to know the names of castes. Just look at the picture at the head of this post and see if you can hierarchically group the individuals based on anything other than a hunch. You have to ask or infer one’s caste from other information. And yet, people cannot easily ‘pass’ as belonging to a caste other than their own because caste bona fides are often verified communally and institutionally.
3. For an invisible, non-genetic property, it is nevertheless ‘sticky’ like gender and race. Just as one cannot easily change one’s gender or race, caste also sticks to the person. This table from my paper summarises these peculiar features of caste.
#
Features↓ / Social Kinds →
Gender
Race
Caste
1
Basis for discrimination / affirmative action
Yes
Yes
Yes
2
Typically ascribed at birth
Yes
Yes
Yes
3
Hard(er) to change or disavow
Yes
Yes
Yes
4
Genetic basis to ascription
Yes
Yes
No
5
Visibility claim / Marked body
Yes
Yes
No
Table 1: Similarities and dissimilarities between various social kinds.
Yet most theoretical accounts of social kinds focus on gender and race, then generalise from there. This often leads to explanatorily inadequate theories. I argue that using caste as a test case for understanding systems of social identity will benefit both the scholarship on caste and our broader understanding of the social world.
Broadly speaking, I argue that theories of social identity that try to give fixed, unchanging definitions – often called ‘essentialist’ accounts – fail to capture the changing fortunes and social dynamics of these identities. Further, while such accounts might do a good job of capturing a snapshot of present-day conditions, they risk fueling views that see certain social identities as perpetually dominant or subordinate. A good theory, I claim, must not only aid in emancipatory efforts against social-kinds-based discrimination, but also be able to explain how an erstwhile oppressed group can redefine itself on its own terms.
If you want a very quick primer on caste, I encourage you to read section 2 of my paper. If you want to learn how caste is like and unlike gender and race, sections 4 and 5 do exactly that. If those sections pique your interest, read the rest of the paper!
Ajinkya Deshmukh is a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy at The University of Manchester. His research interests are social ontology and epistemology, the philosophy of attention, and Buddhist philosophy.
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.
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.
In this post, Louis Larue (Aalborg University, Denmark) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the appropriateness of selecting research applications randomly.
Philosopher in despair after his many applications for funding were rejected by Rembrandt, Musée du Louvre, Paris; Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Applying for external funding is an integral part of academic life. Universities dedicate huge amounts of resources, and often have entire teams of administrators and advisors, to help researchers obtain external grants and manage the immense load of paperwork required to administrate successful applications. Researchers and teachers, at all stages of their careers, spend considerable time and resources to write, read, revise, and submit applications. If successful, they will then have to write various reports and will be required to master the complex and often obscure language of funding agencies. At a more advanced stage of their careers, they will also dedicate a significant share of their time to reviewing and evaluating applications submitted by others and to sit in various selection committees.
Most of the time, the selection procedure involves (in one or several steps) the evaluation of the scientific quality of the submitted applications, by one or several peer reviewers. When all evaluations have been gathered, a selection committee usually selects successful applicants. The ideal behind this procedure (which I have only sketched, and which varies across countries and institutions) is to select, impartially, the “best” applications, that is, those with the highest level of scientific quality, properly defined.
Let’s call this selection procedure the “Peer Review procedure” (or PR). In recent years, it has attracted much criticism. For many, it is a costly, biased, and conservative procedure that is unable to deliver on its promise to select the best applications. In response to these criticisms, many authors have advocated mixed procedures involving various degrees of peer review and random selection (for instance, here and here). Following usage in the literature, I will call these mixed procedures “Modified Lotteries” (or ML).
The modified lottery is a two-stage procedure. At stage 1, the members of the selection committee select, among all eligible applications, the ones that they judge to be the most qualified applications, that is, those that meet minimal standards of scientific quality. At this stage, only the “worst” applications are rejected. The selection rate is thus allowed to be high, or, in any case, much higher than the current selection rate. At stage 2, a certain percentage of the applications selected at stage 1 is randomly selected. The percentage of applications selected at stage 2 is simply a function of the amount of money at the disposal of the funding agency.
In this post, I shall argue that the modified lottery procedure would strike a better balance between scientific quality, cost-effectiveness, impartiality, and fairness, than the current peer review procedure. (In the article, I also discuss, and reject, pure random selection, but I leave that part of the argument aside here).
Cost-effectiveness and scientific quality
A first intuitive argument for the use of random selection is that it would liberate time and money for researchers to do actual research. For the time dedicated to writing and reviewing applications amounts to time not dedicated to research and teaching. Considering the fact that most applications are rejected, this time is generally wasted.
However, the cost-reducing potential of random selection should not be over-estimated. A recent survey of applicants to the Health Research Council of New Zealand, which is among the first funders to use a Mixed Lottery, report that most of the applicants declared that they did not reduce the time spent writing their applications. Moreover, the time dedicated to reviewing proposals is not necessarily wasted. First, reviewers may be expected to set aside at least the proposals that do not meet minimal standards – an ability that should not be underestimated. Second, even if we assume that they cannot, getting rid of peer reviewers entirely may remove the incentive to write serious research proposals.
Hence, the relationship between the costs and benefits of investing time and money in selecting applications demands further consideration. In the article, I argue that costs are justified if they allow setting aside the applications that do not meet minimal standards of scientific quality; and that they are unjustified otherwise. Hence, dedicating time and money to peer reviewing applications is justified up to the point where peer reviewers can no longer perform their selection job. The empirical literature has for years stressed that peer reviewers are often unable to agree on the ranking of excellent applications, though they are more likely to agree on those applications that do not reach a minimal level of quality. The mixed lottery is thus to be preferred to the current system, because the limited space it gives to peer review allows to reduce its costs in a way that is not detrimental to scientific quality, since stage 1 is there to make sure that some peer reviewing still takes place. Though it may be impossible to find the “optimal” level of peer review, it is likely to be greater than zero and lower than the current level.
Impartiality and biases
A common complaint about peer review is that it is biased. There is evidence that the Peer Review procedure tends to be biased against women and ethnic minorities. Moreover, personal relationships as well as a preference for one’s own area of expertise tend to skew the peer reviewers’ evaluations. For all these reasons, a selection procedure based on peer review is unlikely to be impartial.
It is uncontroversial to say that these biases are bad, even morally wrong. Yet we may have reasons to accommodate some biases for the sake of retaining some place to peer review. In very short, my argument is the following: peer review is necessary to (at least) set aside the worst applications from the rest and to avoid removing the incentive of writing minimally good applications. Yet peer review is also inherently biased in some way. Hence, getting rid of all biases would require getting rid of peer review entirely, which would be detrimental to scientific quality. How do we get out of this dilemma?
My view is that, because peer review is unescapable, we should allow for the possibility that biases will influence the selection procedure. In that context, the modified lottery is preferrable to the current system, because it minimises the influence of biases, by leaving only a limited space to peer reviewers. However, those who would want to condemn biases more severely than I do, will have to contemplate the necessity to get rid of peer reviewers entirely and turn to pure random selection instead. My view is that the latter move would come at a cost for the advancement of science, because it would lower the probability to fund the best research. As I argue below, it may also be unfair.
Fairness
A further frequent complain against the current pee-review procedure is that it is unfair (see for instance here), though “unfair” is often confused with “biased”. However, this complaint may also be raised against proposals to select research proposals randomly (either partially or totally): isn’t that unfair to excellent applicants to consider all applications equally?
In the article, I use Broome’s idea that the fair distribution of a good requires that claims to a good should be satisfied in proportion to their strength. In our case, the good to be fairly distributed is research money. People’s claim to that good will depend on the extent to which their future research will be the most likely to produce the best science. Therefore, one may say that grants are distributed fairly when they are allocated to the proposals that have the strongest claim to research money, that is, to those that are the most likely to produce the best research.
In an ideal world without budget constraints, biases and other limitations, the peer review procedure would be the best and the fairest procedure: it would always select the most deserving applicants. But we do not live in such a world. First, in the real world, budget constraints may prevent funding bodies from giving money to all deserving applicants (i.e. those who have the strongest claim to it). Second, peer reviewers may be unable to reach a consensus on who the most deserving applicants are (a phenomenon that I call “epistemic limitations”). In that world, the modified lottery is the best choice.
As I have argued above, we may expect peer reviewers to be able to track scientific quality up to a certain point. If peer review has some value, the first stage of the modified lottery will allow to set aside the applications that have some minimal level merit (that is, a “minimal claim to research money”) from those who do not. The first stage therefore guarantees, at least to some extent, a certain degree of discrimination based on merit. But beyond that point, random selection is to be preferred, since no actual argument based on reasons may be used where epistemic uncertainty prevents reviewers from collectively distinguishing between applications. At stage 2, random selection ensures, at least, that all applications that have passed stage 1 have an equal chance to get funding, and that it is not biases or arbitrariness that decide among them.
The modified lottery is therefore not a fair procedure: it will not automatically distribute research money to those who have the strongest claim to it. But it is fairer than other procedures. It is fairer than pure random selection because it leaves some place to merit, which random selection fails to do; and it is fairer than the current system because, once the possibilities of peer review have been exhausted, it does not pretend to be able to select the best proposals among proposals whose relative merit is undistinguishable by reviewers (or disputed). Rather, it gives equal weight to all of them.
Some readers may still complain that the modified lottery disrespects excellent applicants, those who really deserve to be selected. In response, I would like to stress that the first stage of the proposal is meant to ensure that the best candidates are among the pool of short-listed applicants, and that they are selected according to shared standards of scientific quality. My view is that we cannot hope for more: it is beyond the capacity of peer reviewers to discover the “truly” best applicants. Moreover, the second stage limits the influence of non-scientific criteria (biases, etc), which might be present at stage 1, so that good candidates with profiles that are more likely to attract biases have a higher chance (compared to the present system) to be selected. So both stages actually contribute to increasing the ability of the procedure to track scientific excellence, rather than something else. Finally, we may have serious doubts that the current procedure is selecting the best applications. Lack of resources and various biases, as well as possible disagreements among evaluators on the quality of different applications, prevent the current system from doing its job well. Therefore, though there is a risk that the modified lottery will sometimes fail to select some of the best applications, this risk is probably not much higher than for the current peer review procedure.
Louis Larue is a researcher at the Aalborg University, Denmark; and a guest professor at the Hoover Chair of Social and Economic Ethics, UCLouvain, Belgium. He has published on the ethics of money and finance, and on several issues in the philosophy of economics. His first book, entitled Alternative Currencies: a Critical Approach, has just been published by Routledge.
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 .]
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.
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.
About us
This blog explores issues of justice, morality, and ethics in all areas of public, political, social, economic, and personal life. It is run by a cooperative of political theorists and philosophers and in collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
