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Category: Academia

Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Chris Armstrong

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Matt Perry and Chris Armstrong. Chris is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, winner of the 2023 Lynton Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association and the author of A Blue New Deal (Yale University Press), an accessible and popular book about the politics of the ocean. He primarily works on issues at the intersection of global justice and the environment. He has published 6 books in total (including with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), over 50 journal articles and numerous articles in popular media, including The Guardian and The Conversation. Matt spoke to Chris about his experiences writing for a wider audience, his motivations to do so, and what tips he might have for others hoping to do the same.

© Chris Armstrong

Matt Perry: Thanks again for agreeing to chat! First, I’d like to ask you why you decided to pursue a career in Political Theory, and what factors led you to address the topics your work focuses on?

Chris Armstrong: When I was at school, I had no conception whatsoever of what political theory might be, or even that it existed. People in my family didn’t go to university. I didn’t really realize you could think about power, ideologies, culture and society in quite an analytical way until I picked up a sociology textbook secondhand.

I announced to my teachers that I was going to completely change all the A levels that I had been intending to do, away from sciences, and then went off to university to do Politics and Sociology. I then did my master’s in International Relations. Still, I was fairly untutored in political theory until my PhD, and in that sense I’ve found my way slowly into the (sub)discipline from the outside. I did my PhD on gender inequality. I set myself the task of investigating whether Michael Walzer’s theory could help us think about gender inequality, which was an interesting project. I’ve been finding my way since then, and I’ve shifted the direction of my work a few times. I moved into thinking about global justice first and then thinking about more environmental issues.

Right now in my career, I’m really appreciating the fact that a lot of what I read is science, history and law. And I kind of read quite indiscriminately across disciplines. In a sense, what I’m doing there is finding my way back to the beginning, where I just read indiscriminately and was interested in everything.

MP: That’s great. I have a second general question before we get onto your public engagement: what do you perceive to be the role of academia, and more specifically the political theorist?

CA: I’ve never been particularly impressed by claims about the authority of political theory. I mentioned I did my PhD on Michael Walzer. Walzer is not someone I work on now. But one thing I was impressed by was his deflationary account of political theory. He essentially thinks that the political theorist is just one more citizen: a participant in public debate, but nothing more than that. I like that idea. It is a very democratic commitment to reasoning with your fellow citizens, arguing with people, not claiming that you’ve arrived at some kind of deep truth that the population just have to fall in with, but that we should have a continual commitment to engaging with others.

MP: That resonates with me, too. I wanted to ask you: what are your own motivations for public engagement in general, but also for writing your book, A Blue New Deal?

CA: Whilst thinking about global justice in my previous work, I got more and more interested in environmental issues. And I suppose at some stage, it dawned on me that there was this big, missing element in many political theory discussions about climate, environmental protection, territory, and natural resources: the ocean.

It’s probably the biggest carbon sink, definitely the biggest ecosystem, and it contains most of the territory on our planet, but it is often simply missing from political theory discussions. You can find bits of political theory on the ocean, of course. But you mainly have to go back to Grotius and the people who engage with him, or to Carl Schmitt, if that’s to your taste. But in the tradition of analytical political theory and reasoning about territory, territorial claims, and justice, it’s missing. And that’s intellectually interesting, but it’s also deeply problematic, if it is in fact the biggest haven of biodiversity, the biggest carbon sink, and so on. So one track that I was going down was to try to persuade other political theorists to engage with the ocean.

I suppose in the end I realized that talking to fellow political theorists was important, but not the only thing that I wanted to do. The more I learned about the governance of the ocean, the more I realized how massively dysfunctional it is. I felt that I needed to do my bit to stage an intervention to raise the public profile of these issues as much as I could, while also trying to persuade other political theorists to actually engage too. Over time, I’ve engaged more with speaking to ordinary citizens, people outside academia, NGOs, and so on. That’s come to feel more important.

MP: Of course, there’s not just a missing focus on the ocean in political theory as a discipline. It seems to be something that’s more broadly reflected in politics too. So it makes sense that those two pieces came together. It’d be good if you could tell us a bit more about your book — what are the key claims?

CA: So, what I try to do in the book is to persuade people that we are going through a double-edged crisis. We’re familiar with the idea that the ocean is facing an environmental crisis, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, you name it. But we also face a crisis of inequality in the way that we govern and relate to the ocean. The human impacts on the ocean are not being evenly caused by everybody, and the benefits from human interactions with the ocean are not being accrued evenly. This is a world in which some are benefiting from burgeoning ocean industries and others are not.

To some extent, the environmental piece is reasonably well understood and people in the sciences have made that case. My distinctive contribution was to draw those strands together and say that when we think about the environmental crisis, we should also always be thinking about questions of social and global justice. We have these hierarchies of power and influence that we also need to reckon with. Some people benefit from what gets called the “Blue Acceleration”, a creeping industrialization of the ocean. I argue we can’t really have good solutions to environmental problems that don’t also tackle these gulfs in power and advantage. The book draws those two things together and argues that we need to think a bit more ambitiously about the way that we are governing the ocean.

MP: One of the things I find impressive about the book is the way it draws together different topics: there’s history, ocean science, policy, and ideal theory. But the framing is around this practical proposal of the Blue New Deal. Did you have this idea already when you started writing? How did you come up with this framing given how encompassing the topic is?

CA: The Blue New Deal framing actually came in fairly late. In the beginning there was just a sense that there were three components to the project: (i) what’s wrong with contemporary ocean governance? (ii) How did we get here? And (iii) how can we do better?

I was going to call the book Ocean Justice: Political Theory for a Blue Planet. My editor at Yale quite sensibly pointed out that no one would know what that meant (like me as a kid, the general public don’t know what political theory is). So, she actually came up with the idea of naming it A Blue New Deal. I, as a theorist, flipped one way and the other and then thought, actually, she knows what she’s doing. Editors know much more than authors do about marketing.

But the Blue New Deal framing is ameliorative, not the end-result I endorse. Chapter 9 is titled ‘A Blue New Deal’, and Chapter 10 ‘Beyond the Blue New Deal’. Chapter 9 is asking how far we could get given existing institutions, and the argument is that we can get pretty far. We might do much better in bringing together a focus on socioeconomic injustice and environmental protection, even relying on existing institutions. But that isn’t entirely satisfying because I think existing institutions are deeply flawed. So, in chapter 10 I ask much grander questions about the way we think about and govern the ocean.

© Matt Perry

MP: I’m interested in what the uptake was like after releasing the book. What further public engagement did the book invite and how have people received the ideas you defend?

CA:  It’s all been great and kept me very busy in a way I was unused to. Unlike typical academic books where you wait a couple of years for reviews and citations, the response was immediate, largely thanks to my publisher’s publicity operation. There were reviews in newspapers, and I was invited onto podcasts. I was continually and positively surprised to find out that my book had in fact reached a wider audience and that people wanted to engage with it. There were two different kinds of audience. The first were policymakers and people with power. For instance, I got invited to go and talk to the board of this entity called Crown Estate Scotland, who govern and maintain the Scottish coastline.

But I also engaged with less formal audiences, such as Ocean Rebellion, a spinoff from Extinction Rebellion. They’re a vanguard of people, many of them artists, who are trying to raise the public media profile of ocean issues. Initially, they were pretty much exclusively focused on the environmental protection angle and not really on social and global justice. I’ve tried to encourage them to bring those things together.

In general, I’m much more engaged in speaking to NGOs and ordinary citizens, and getting them thinking about whether blue growth and the blue acceleration are the priorities we ought to have. Going back to the Walzerian idea of the theorist as another citizen arguing with his or her fellow citizens, I feel much more comfortable speaking to civil society actors and campaigning groups. I prefer trying to raise the profile of ocean issues, rather than trying to get the ear of princes, to use the political theory cliché.

MP:  That’s interesting. One thing it would be great to know is what the whole process of publishing for a wider audience has been like? What are some of the key challenges you faced?

CA: One self-imposed challenge was flip-flopping about what kind of book I wanted to write: public-facing, academic, or somewhere in the middle? I’m happy with where it ended up, but I wasn’t especially clear about that at the beginning. If I wanted to turn that into advice I would say: be really clear from the beginning about the exact audience you want to engage with.

If you’re going to take things seriously, you really need to read mass market books, or books that are in that hybrid academic/commercial space. I ended up in quite a good place, probably in part because I had a really good editor, but it’s obvious in hindsight that if you want to write a book that communicates to a wide audience, you ought to be reading lots of books that already do that, because there is a specific approach and method of addressing the reader. For instance, by working in lots of examples, using historical tidbits, and relying on real world cases — these are things that define the genre. It’s a bit different from the work that we academics are used to producing.

MP: That makes me wonder: has writing for a broader audience influenced your writing style more generally?

CA: That’s a really good question. I found the process of writing for a general audience really liberating. When writing for academics, you’re always thinking about qualifications, and considering the two or three interlocutors who are metaphorically sitting on your shoulders, or worrying about giving deference to various literatures. When you’re not writing for an academic audience, you don’t have that anymore. I found that very freeing. Instead, you’re trying to lay out a case as simply as possible — to cut things to the bone and get to the basics.

If there’s a wider lesson that I’ve learned from doing that, it would be to take some of that freshness and accessibility back into my academic work. I’ve always in my academic work taken accessibility quite seriously. But maybe I take it even more seriously now. You can communicate fairly complex ideas to a wider audience without sacrificing too much. Going forward, I might leave behind some of the formality, and so many gestures towards literatures. There’s a sense in which lots of academic work is quite literature-driven, whereas I suppose the work I’ve done more recently is issue-driven or ideas-driven, first and foremost.

MP: That’s really interesting. How did securing the book contract differ from typical academic publishing?

CA: The way things worked at Yale was quite different to my previous experiences in academic publishing. There was much more editorial input and a clear sense from the beginning that this was a project that the editor really liked. The book did go to academic reviewers, but this seemed to be a more advisory role compared with in mainstream academic publishing. To secure a contract, you need to find out what the editor is interested in, what they published previously, and what gaps there might be in the roster that they are hoping to fill. There’s no guarantee of success. But essentially, you have to tell a story about not just why this is intellectually interesting, but why it has broad appeal now. Timing, I think, is much more important.

MP: That’s helpful. I’ve got two more questions for you. First, I wondered how your public facing work has been received within the discipline of political theory.

CA: I’m not entirely sure. One kind of attitude is that there is primary work at the level of ideals and normative arguments, and secondary, “applied” work that shows the implications of those ideas for particular issues. There can appear to be a hierarchy between these. The thought might be that the work I was doing in A Blue New Deal might not be quite so cutting edge conceptually, that it is essentially a translation of normative ideals for a wider audience. I do think that is absolutely what I’m doing — I’m not claiming to be doing cutting-edge conceptual work and I’m unashamed about that. But I also think that “applied” work is really important and that we should be doing more of it.

Another attitude concerns the mission I had to try and persuade other political theorists to take up the issue of the ocean — which I don’t feel has been massively successful. One explanation for why is the view that “Chris has got this” so others don’t need to address it, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen. Again, with my subsequent book about the biodiversity crisis, I’m explicitly trying to open up issues to other academics, providing a map of the territory and introducing major debates in the hope others will join me and make their own contributions. I don’t want to do it alone.

MP: Yes, applying normative theory beyond academia and opening up discussions to others are both really key. My last question is: what’s on the horizon next for you? Will you continue with more public-facing work?

CA: I am excited to continue this trajectory and write another book about the ocean that is exclusively for a public audience rather than being a hybrid — but more on that soon!

Academia / Education / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy / Technology

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Should Universities Restrict Generative AI?

In this post, Karl de Fine Licht (Chalmers University of Technology) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the moral concerns of banning Generative AI in universities.

Rethinking the Ban

Universities face a challenging question: what should they do when the tools that help students learn also raise serious moral concerns?

Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT offer immediate feedback, personalized explanations, and writing or coding assistance. But they also raise concerns: energy and water use, exploitative labor, privacy risks, and fears of academic dishonesty. In response, some universities have banned or severely restricted these tools. That may seem cautious or principled—but is it the right response?

In a recent academic paper, I argue that while these concerns are real, banning GenAI is often not the most justified or effective approach. Universities should instead pursue responsible engagement: adopting ethical procurement practices, educating students on thoughtful use, and leveraging their institutional influence to demand better standards.

Do Bans Make a Difference?

Many arguments for bans focus on harm. Using GenAI may contribute to carbon emissions, involve labor under poor conditions, or jeopardize student privacy. But how much difference does banning GenAI at a single university make?

Not much. Models are trained centrally and used globally. Universities typically rely on existing, pre-trained models—so their marginal contribution to emissions or labor practices is negligible. Even if all universities banned GenAI, it’s not clear this would shift global AI development or halt resource use. Worse, bans may backfire: students may use GenAI anyway, without oversight or support, leading to worse outcomes for learning and equity.

Take climate impact. Training models like GPT-4 requires substantial energy and water. But universities rarely train their own models; they use centralized ones whose training would happen regardless. Further, GenAI’s daily use is becoming more efficient, and in some applications—like architectural design, biodiversity monitoring, and climate modeling—GenAI may even help reduce emissions. The better route is for universities to demand energy-efficient models, support green cloud services, and explore carbon offsetting—not prohibit tools whose use is educationally beneficial and environmentally marginal.

Or consider labor exploitation. Training GenAI models often relies on underpaid workers performing harmful tasks, especially in the Global South. That’s a serious ethical issue. But again, banning use doesn’t necessarily help those workers or change the system. Universities could instead pressure companies to raise labor standards—leveraging their roles as clients, research partners, and talent suppliers. This collective influence is more likely to yield ethical improvements than a local ban.

The Reduction Problem

Even if you think universities are morally complicit by using GenAI—regardless of impact—you face a further problem: consistency. If the right response to morally tainted technologies is prohibition, why stop with GenAI?

Much of higher education depends on digital infrastructure. Computers, smartphones, and servers are produced under similarly problematic labor and environmental conditions. If the logic is “avoid complicity by avoiding use,” then many standard technologies should also be banned. But that leads to a reductio: if universities adopted this policy consistently, they would be unable to function.

This doesn’t mean ethical concerns should be ignored. Rather, it shows that avoiding all complicity isn’t feasible—and that universities must find ways to act responsibly within imperfect systems. The challenge is to engage critically and constructively, not withdraw.

Hidden Costs of Prohibition

There are also moral costs to banning GenAI.

Students continue to use AI tools, but in secret. This undermines educational goals and privacy protections. Vulnerable students—those with fewer resources, time, or academic support—may be most reliant on GenAI, and most harmed by a ban. When students use unvetted tools outside institutional guidance, the risks to their privacy and integrity increase.

Instead of banning GenAI, universities can offer licensed, secure tools and educate students on their appropriate use. This supports both ethical awareness and academic integrity. Just as we teach students to cite sources or evaluate evidence, we should teach them to engage with GenAI responsibly.

Setting Ethical Precedents

Some argue that even small contributions to harm are morally significant—especially when institutions help normalize problematic practices. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t follow that bans are the best response.

A more constructive alternative is to model responsible AI use. That includes setting ethical procurement standards, embedding AI literacy in curricula, and advocating for transparency and fair labor. Universities, especially when acting collectively, have leverage to influence AI providers. They can demand tools that respect privacy, reduce emissions, and avoid exploitative labor.

In other words, universities should take moral leadership—not by withdrawing, but by shaping the development and use of GenAI.

Choosing a Better Path

GenAI is not going away. The real question is how we engage with it—and on whose terms. Blanket bans may seem safe or principled, but they often achieve little and may create new harms.

Instead, universities should adopt a balanced approach. Acknowledge the risks. Respond to them—through institutional advocacy, ethical licensing, and student education. But also recognize the benefits of GenAI and prepare students to use it well.

In doing so, universities fulfill both moral and educational responsibilities: not by pretending GenAI doesn’t exist, but by helping shape the future it creates.

Karl de Fine Licht is Associate Professor in Ethics and Technology at Chalmers University of Technology. His research focuses on the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on public decision-making and higher education. He has published extensively on trustworthy AI, generative AI, and justice in technology governance, and regularly advises public and academic institutions on responsible AI use.

Academia / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Teaching Freedom: Revisiting Berlin’s Two Concepts

A photograph showing a tiled wall with an ornate pattern. A poster is stuck on the wall, with a drawing of a hand with a broken chain on it. The text reads "Libertad es Sagrada".
A poster on a wall. Photo provided by author.

This is a guest post by Nick Boden (University of Bristol)

Teachers and academics face questions relating to freedom each day. How will students engage with the material? How should students be in the learning environment? Are students free to choose tasks or are their choices constrained by the practitioners preferred methods? These questions place instructors at the centre of an ongoing debate about freedom. Is freedom simply the absence of constraints? Or is there more going on?

At first glance, Isaiah Berlin’s (1958) idea of positive and negative freedom offers a useful framework. Positive freedom can be thought of as “the freedom to”. Rules or regulations are put into place to increase the options available to you. Negative freedom is explained as “freedom from” constraints. Barriers are removed and options are available to you. For example, advocates of negative freedom would explain being left alone to make decisions and choices increases freedom. Whereas advocates of positive freedom would welcome things like welfare funding, taking away the “freedom from” taxes, to “provide freedom to” buy basic goods whilst unemployed. A form of collective freedom.

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Academia / Education / Pedagogy / Teaching

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What we train need not be the same as what we assess: AI damage limitation in higher education

It has always been clear that ChatGPT’s general availability means trouble for higher education. We knew that letting students use it for writing essays would make it difficult if not impossible to assess their effort and progress, and invite cheating. Worse, that it was going to deprive them of learning the laborious art and skill of writing, which is good in itself as well as a necessary instruments to thinking clearly. University years (and perhaps the last few years of high school, although, I worry, only for very few) is the chance to learn one’s writing and thinking. When there is quick costless access to the final product, there is little incentive for students to engage in the process of creating that product themselves; and going through that process is, generally, a lot more valuable than the product itself. Last March, philosopher Troy Jollimore published a lovely essay on this theme. So, we knew that non-regulated developments in artificial intelligence are inimical to this main aim of higher education.

Even more concerning news are now starting to find us: Not only is the use of ChatGPT bad for students because the temptation to rely on it is too hard to withstand, but respectable studies such as a recent one authored by scholars at MIT show that AI has significant negative effects on users’ cognitive abilities. The study indicates that the vast majority of people using Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in order to write, forget the AI-generated content within minutes. Neural connections for the group relying on natural intelligence-only were almost twice as strong as those in the group using LLMs. And regular users who were asked to write without the help of LLMs did worse than those who never used ChatGPT at all. The authors of the study are talking about a “cognitive debt”: the more one relies on AI, the more they lose thinking abilities. All these findings are true of most users; a silver line, perhaps, is that users with very strong cognitive capacities displayed higher neural connection when using LLMs.

In short, LLMs are here to stay, at least until proper regulation – which is not yet on the horizon – kicks in; if this study is right, they can give valuable support to the more accomplished scholars (perhaps at various stages of their career) while harming everybody else. Part of the university’s job is to develop the latter group’s cognitive abilities; encouraging students to use LLMs appears, in light of these considerations, a kind of malpractice. And assigning at home essays is, in practice, encouragement.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Toby Buckle

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Sara van Goozen and Toby Buckle. Toby Buckle runs the popular Political Philosophy Podcast. He has a BA in PPE from Oxford University and an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of York. He spent many years working with political and advocacy groups in the United States, such as Human Rights Campaign, Environment America,  Working Families Party and Amnesty International. He started his podcast around seven years ago, and has interviewed academics including Elizabeth Anderson, Orlando Patterson, Phillip Pettit, and Cecile Fabre, as well as politicians (such as Senator Sherrod Brown, or Civil Rights Commission Chair, Mary Francis Berry), commentators (such as Ian Dunt) and public figures (such as Derek Guy AKA Menswear Guy). He is the editor of What is Freedom? Conversations with Historians, Philosophers, and Activists (Oxford University Press, 2021). He writes regularly for Liberal Currents. In this interview, we discuss running a podcast, the enduring relevance of historical philosophers, and what young academics can do to build a public profile.

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Academia / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Call for Papers: “Ethical and Epistemological Issues in the Teaching of Politics”

Justice Everywhere is pleased to share the following call for papers:


The Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) at UCL and the Teaching Political Theory Network (TPTN) at the University of York are co-organising a one-day workshop focussed on ethical and epistemological issues in the teaching of politics.

Time: Friday, 6 June 2025

Location: University College, London

The teaching of politics is taken to include the teaching of all relevant sub-disciplines (e.g., political science, international relations, political theory) as well as activities that inform and support it (e.g., related pastoral and administrative activities).

The aim of the workshop is to provide a platform for educators and researchers to critically explore contemporary philosophical issues, scholarly debates, and innovative pedagogical approaches related to the central theme.

We welcome presentations, case studies, papers, and panel proposals that might address, but are not restricted to, the ethical and/or epistemological dimensions of:

  • the teaching of argumentation in politics;
  • background methodological choices/assumptions;
  • neutrality of teacher viewpoint;
  • freedom of speech in the classroom;
  • teaching controversial/offensive/upsetting topics;
  • inclusive classroom practices;
  • decolonising/liberating the curriculum;
  • differential treatment of students;
  • modes of assessment;
  • reducing the emphasis on grades;
  • use of A.I.;
  • programme design;
  • co-designing teaching materials with students;
  • aiming to enhance student employability;
  • the teaching of interdisciplinary subjects.

Please send your expression of interest and a short abstract of no more than 100 words to polsci.cpp@ucl.ac.uk by the end of Wednesday 9th April 2025.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Academia / General / Migration / Rights / Social justice

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Limits of language promotion

This post is written by Dr. Seunghyun Song (Assistant professor, Tilburg University). Based on her research on linguistic justice, she provides a tentative answer to the issue of the limits of the linguistic territoriality principle and its aim to protect languages. She uses the Dutch case as a proxy for these discussions.

Image by woodleywonderworks from Flickr (Creative Commons)

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Academia / Education / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy / Technology

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Writing Assignments in the age of Gen AI

If Gen AI can consistently produce A grade articles across disciplines (for now, it seems they can’t, but they likely might), do we still need students to learn the art of writing well-researched long form texts? More importantly, do we need to test how well each student has mastered this art?

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Academia / Children / General / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Teaching students to be good

What’s the point of teaching moral and political philosophy?

Ancient philosophers around the world would have thought the answer to this question was blindingly obvious: the point is to make students better – better as citizens, rulers, or just as human beings.

Yet today I suspect very few academics would defend this position, and most would find the idea of inculcating virtue among their students to be silly at best, dangerous at worst.

I think the ancients were right on this one. We should educate our students to make them better moral and political agents. And I don’t think this has to be scarily illiberal at all – at least, that’s what I’m going to argue here.

The model of ethical discourse my students seem to be learning in secondary school
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Academia / Distribution / General / Health / Moral values / Technology

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Just do(pe) it? Why the academic project is at risk from proposals to pharmacologically enhance researchers.

In this post, Heidi Matisonn (University of Cape Town) and Jacek Brzozowski (University of KwaZulu-Natal) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which they explore the justifiability and potential risks of cognitive enhancement in academia.

Image created with ChatGPT.

The human desire to enhance our cognitive abilities, to push the boundaries of intelligence through education, tools, and technology has a long history. Fifteen years ago, confronted by the possibility that a ‘morally corrupt’ minority could misuse cognitive gains to catastrophic effect, Persson and Savulescu proposed that research into cognitive enhancement should be halted unless accompanied by advancements in moral enhancement.

In response to this, and following on from Harris’ worries about the mass suffering that could result from delaying cognitive enhancement until moral enhancement could catch up, in 2023, Gordon and Ragonese offered what they termed a ‘practical approach’ to cognitive enhancement research in which they advocated for targeted cognitive enhancement —specifically for researchers working on moral enhancement.

Our recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy suggests that while both sets of authors are correct in their concerns about the significant risks related to cognitive enhancement outrunning moral enhancement, their focus on the ‘extremes’ neglects some more practical consequences that a general acceptance of cognitive enhancement may bring — not least of which relate to the academic project itself.

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