There is a growing tendency to label some argumentative moves commonly performed in public discourse as “whataboutism”. A quick search on Google Trends shows that the term has begun to gain more serious traction in 2017, reaching its peak popularity in June 2020 and March 2022 – likely in the context of debates on the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, as Ben Zimmer points out, its roots can be identified much earlier on, first as a charge against defenders of the Provisional IRA’s actions during the Troubles and later as a charge against a particular brand of Soviet-style rhetorical strategy. When whataboutism is pointed at in public speech, it is usually done so as to discredit an objection to an argument not by showing that it fails on its own terms, but rather because it constitutes an illegitimate move aimed at deflecting attention from the topic on which the argument is focused. But is whataboutism, especially when it concerns questions of justice, problematic, or – to the contrary – is the charge of whataboutism largely vacuous?
Category: Distribution Page 2 of 9
by Hwa Young Kim and Andrew Walton
Image by Ilona S from Pixabay
Something as arbitrary as which neighbourhood we live in should not determine our future. However, residential segregation between people who are rich or poor and people who are black or white is highly pervasive and highly correlated with socio-economic inequality. Neighbourhoods that are disadvantaged face notably worse prospects in terms of economic opportunities, public services, and local amenities. To make this image starker, many people who are disadvantaged live in areas of concentrated poverty, with high rates of violence, street crime, and unemployment. Surely, this situation is unjust and requires action.
But what action? Some argue for providing those living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods subsidies to move to wealthier locations. Others have called for greater redistribution of wealth from rich neighbourhoods to those communities who have less than they should. In a recent article, we argue that there is potential to another, less conventional, route: reducing residential segregation through those who are advantaged relocating to disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Our reasoning is that integration has a beneficial role in reducing the prejudice that sustains inequality. What’s more, we think this can occur without crossing a line into a problematic form of gentrification.
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2021-22 season. This post focuses on our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
In 2019, Justice Everywhere began a collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The journal is a unique forum that publishes philosophical analysis of problems of practical concern, and several of its authors post accessible summaries of their work on Justice Everywhere. These posts draw on diverse theoretical viewpoints and bring them to bear on a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from the environment and natural resources to freedom, empathy, and medical ethics.
For a full list of these posts, visit the JOAP page on Justice Everywhere. For a flavour of the range, you might read:
- Megan Blomfield’s post, Should land be reclassified as a global commons?, which explores recent proposals for equitable and sustainable sharing of global commons and whether to apply this approach to land.
- Daphne Brandenburg’s post, Why we should think twice about persons who struggle to emphathize, which discusses the philosophical issues between empathy, communication, and responsibility.
- Paul Raekstad’s post, Why Property-Owning Democracy is Unfree, which considers the unfreedom of capitalism and problems with recent claims that a property-owning democracy might escape it.
- Emma Curran & Stephen John’s post, Why should we protect the vulnerable?, which unpacks the complexity of ethical discourse around the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and of the ethical commitments involved.
Stay tuned for even more from JOAP authors in our 2022-23 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing on 1st September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series (published on Thursdays). If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to contribute a guest post on a topical subject in political philosophy (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
In this post, Andrew McGee (Queensland University of Technology) and Drew Carter (University of Adelaide) discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the moral difference between withdrawing and withholding medical interventions.
Some health ethics writers and clinical guidelines claim that withdrawing and withholding medical treatment are morally equivalent: if one is permissible or impermissible, so too the other.
Call this view Equivalence. It is heir of a related view that has held sway in ethical and legal debate for decades, in support of the withdrawal of treatment that is no longer beneficial. The thinking was that if treatment no longer benefits a patient, then whether it is withheld or withdrawn does not matter – so there is no morally relevant difference between the two.
Equivalence goes beyond this. It applies to beneficial treatment, where two patients compete for one resource. The reasoning is: To save as many lives as possible, we would have no qualms about withholding a beneficial treatment from one person to give it to another who can benefit more. We should therefore have no qualms about withdrawing it either. In a recent article, we argue that Equivalence is false.
In this post, Paul Raekstad (University of Amsterdam) discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied philosophy on whether Property-Owning Democracy can resolve the unfreedom of capitalism.
Socialists rightly argue that capitalism cannot be free. This is because it’s built on the personal domination of workers by bosses, the structural domination of workers in labour markets, and the impersonal domination of everyone by market forces. The solution to domination is democratisation. But do we really need to replace capitalism with socialism to secure emancipation? Advocates of Property-Owning Democracy argue that we don’t. In a recent article I argue that they are wrong.
For many, having an animal companion during the pandemic has been a blessing. Someone to keep you company, someone to play with, someone who brings you joy and gives you a reason to get out of bed. Indeed, in the UK, the Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association (PFMA) reported that 3.2 million households in the UK have acquired an animal companion since the start of the pandemic. This brings the total number of animal companions in the UK up to 34 million, including 12 million cats and 12 million dogs, and equates to 17 million households being responsible for an animal’s welfare.
In this post, Megan Blomfield discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on treating land as a common good.
In a world confronting climate change, new questions arise about how land ought to be used and shared globally. Land has already become scarce relative to the demands of the global economy. Climate impacts and policies threaten to significantly exacerbate this problem. Some are suggesting that it is therefore time to classify land as a global commons, akin to other vital and endangered global commons such as the atmosphere. In a recent article, I identify reasons to fear that this move would not in fact promote land justice.
On October 8th, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced that 136 countries have adopted its two-pillar proposal to reform the taxation of multinational enterprises (MNEs).
Pillar One applies to MNEs with sales in excess of $20bn and profits over 10%. It shifts the taxing rights of the next 25% of profits above the 10% threshold to market jurisdictions, that is, to the country where the goods and services of the MNE in question are sold. The measure is thought to apply only to about 100 MNEs, many of them in the highly profitable digital services sector. Pillar Two introduces a minimum tax of 15% for all MNEs with revenues of more than $750m.
While Justice Everywhere takes a break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2020-21 season. This post focuses on our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
In 2019, Justice Everywhere began a collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The journal is a unique forum that publishes philosophical analysis of problems of practical concern, and several of its authors post accessible summaries of their work on Justice Everywhere. These posts draw on diverse theoretical viewpoints and bring them to bear on a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from the environment and immigration to economics, parenting, and punishment.
For a full list of these posts, visit the JAP page on Justice Everywhere. For a flavour of the range, you might read:
- Dick Timmer’s post, which explores the question: Can Someone Be Too Rich? In it, he spells out his version of “limitarianism” – a theory about why we should limit people’s wealth.
- Fiona Woollard’s post on Why There are Some Things You Can Only Know if You’ve Been Pregnant – and Why this Matters.
- Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s post, A Puzzle about Disability and Old Age, which explores the connections between disability-related disadvantages and old-age-related disadvantages.
- A Symposium on the Ethics of Indirect Intervention, co-edited by Helen Frowe and Ben Matheson, which includes contributions from James Christensen on Selling Weapons to Oppressive Regimes: Does it Make a Difference? and Helen Frowe on Why We (Usually) Shouldn’t Fund Rebellions.
What We Owe to Each Other is the title of Tim Scanlon’s famous work on contractualism. As the title reveals, Scanlon seeks to investigate how to treat others with the due respect and dignity they deserve. This post is not about contractualism or about the TV show. Rather, borrowing Scanlon’s book title, I suggest what rich nations should do to address the global vaccine inequity that is hampering poorer nations’ efforts to combat the pandemic. The account sketched here must stand a good chance of being accepted by the relevant rich states. To this end, the following constraints must be accepted. First, governments are primarily driven by concerns for their own citizens and residents. This means that, as non-ideal as it may sound, global egalitarian ideals would not be realised, at least for now. Second, and relatedly, access to vaccines would always likely to be decided by free market principles. Again, legitimate objections, especially egalitarian ones, can be raised against this but this is a constraint that must be accepted, given the dominance of free market thinking in Western countries. Third, as a result, COVAX’s original goal – ‘to ensure that people in all corners of the world will get access to COVID-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth’ – was always a wishful thinking.