A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Duties

Duties / General / International / Moral values / Rights / Social justice

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We Should Talk About Caste (alongside Gender and Race)

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.

Image Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-friends-laughing-on-a-night-out-32105833/

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 →GenderRaceCaste
1Basis for discrimination / affirmative actionYesYesYes
2Typically ascribed at birthYesYesYes
3Hard(er) to change or disavowYesYesYes
4Genetic basis to ascriptionYesYesNo
5Visibility claim / Marked bodyYesYesNo

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.

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

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On Using Affirmative Action as a Tiebreaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distribution / Duties / General / Moral values / Social justice

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The Anarchist Banker and the Acceptability of Effective Altruism

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister | 1539 | Massijs, Jan

In his book The Anarchist Banker, the Portuguese poet and novelist Fernando Pessoa tells the story of an anarchist who also happens to be a banker. His old comrades are shocked by this apparent contradiction of normative beliefs and actions. But the anarchist justifies his unexpected choice of occupation by pointing out that anarchists can achieve none of their ideals if they don’t have the means to do so. Becoming a banker is, in fact, the best way to contribute to the anarchist cause! Or so, at least, is the banker’s argument.

At first, one may suspect that Pessoa’s anarchist banker is not honest. We could rightly infer from his choice of occupation that he has relinquished the ideals of his youth and that his anarchist talk is just that: mere talk. But another interpretation is possible: what if the anarchist banker is in fact honest? And what if his way of life is, in fact, the best way to contribute to anarchism, because the money he generates through his banking activities allows him to support the anarchist cause more effectively than most other anarchists? Isn’t he simply a sort of effective altruist? For, like effective altruists, he has considered the evidence and applied reason to work out the most effective ways to improve the world (i.e. by becoming a banker), though he may never have heard about act-utilitarianism.

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Animals / Duties / Education / Environment / General / Health / Moral values

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Using wonder to achieve animal rights

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.

Par Arnaud 25 — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27321151

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.

Children / Climate / Duties / Environment / General

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My child, whose emissions?

In this post, Serena Olsaretti (ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Isa Trifan (University of Essex) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, where they explore the morality of having children in light of climate change.

Created with GenAI

‘Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children!’  So announced the title of an article in The Guardian in 2017, when the idea that procreation is bad for the environment started to once again garner significant public attention. The Guardian article pointed to recent empirical evidence about the carbon impact of different ‘green’ choices a person could make if they wanted to reduce their carbon emissions. The evidence suggested that the carbon ‘savings’ a person could make by choosing to ‘have one fewer child’ in a developed country far exceeded the carbon reductions a person could make by making typical, green choices like giving up one’s car, going on fewer flights, or recycling put together.

Since then, in political theory as in the public sphere, this question has been gaining traction, with newspapers articles in France, Germany, Italy and Spain exploring the same issue. So, is having children in developed societies just as bad, or worse, from the point of view of climate justice as living a lavish, high-consumption lifestyle?

Our answer is: it depends. The kind of ‘moral equivalence’ that many have sought to draw between procreation, on the one hand, and a high-consumption/high-emissions lifestyle (or eco-gluttony), on the other hand, can be interpreted in at least two ways. The first interpretation is that both procreation and eco-gluttony are wrong because both involve overstepping our carbon budget. Assuming that we all have a moral obligation to keep our carbon emissions within a certain limit, or budget, the idea is this. If it is wrong for an eco-glutton to overstep her carbon budget by going on frequent, far-flung holidays every year, then, by logical consistency, it is also wrong for a person to overstep their budget by choosing to bring a child (and therefore a new carbon emitter) into a developed, high-consumption society.

We argue that this ‘strict’ way of drawing the moral equivalence between procreation and eco-gluttony fails because it wrongly assumes that the carbon costs of children should be ‘paid for’ from their parents’ budgets only. But, we argue, insofar as all of society benefits from a certain amount of demographic renewal, the carbon costs that come with bringing new people into the world should be shared between the parents and the rest of society. The carbon costs of some demographic renewal should be treated like we treat the carbon costs of producing other public goods like road infrastructure and national defence: they should be covered by everyone’s carbon budgets. If so, for some parents, at least, it is not true that having children will cause them to overstep their personal carbon budgets.

But there is a second way to interpret the moral equivalence between procreation and eco-gluttony. Procreation and eco-gluttony may be morally on a par, but only in the ‘lax’ sense in which both may be liable to moral criticism from a climate justice standpoint. While eco-gluttony is, indeed, a way of overstepping one’s carbon budget, having children need not be, as we have seen. Nevertheless, those considering procreation in developed societies may have good reason to ‘have one fewer child’ if doing so would contribute to reducing the harms of climate warming.

The basic idea is that if we are well placed to help reduce harm, we ought to do so, at least when this is not unreasonably burdensome for us. If having one fewer child than originally planned is not unreasonably burdensome for some prospective procreators, they may have good reason to refrain from having that child in virtue of the fact that they are uniquely well placed, practically and morally, to stop the entire chain of emissions that their child, and their child’s descendants, would produce. A would-be procreator is uniquely well placed, both practically and morally, to prevent 100% of the emissions of their child and of further descendants because, by contrast to most other individual choices that can reduce global emissions, the choice to refrain from having a child is one that we are (i) morally permitted to make, (ii) uniquely (justifiably) legally entitled to make, and such that (iii) we are able to singlehandedly ensure that a chain of emissions is not produced. If stopping this potentially enormous chain of emissions would help to reduce the harms of global warming, prospective procreators have good reason, perhaps even a moral obligation, to have one fewer child after all.

Children / Duties / Gender / General / Health / Rights

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Pregnancy is not caregiving

In this post, Christie Hartley (Georgia State University) and Ashley Lindsley-Kim (University of British Columbia) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy  in which they argue against the claim that the feminist commitment that all persons are owed care could obligate pregnant persons to gestate unwanted fetuses.

Photo Credit: Tima Miroshnichenko, available at https://www.pexels.com/]

Is pregnancy a kind of caregiving? This might seem initially plausible since it is through pregnancy that essential fetal needs are met. Furthermore, at least in some societies, it is commonly thought that pregnancy is a labor of love or that continuing a pregnancy is a way of caring for another. Yet, it is a mistake to think of pregnancy in this way, that is, as a kind of caregiving. Understanding why is crucial for thinking well about the ethics and politics of abortion.

Let’s start with caregiving, which involves providing material or emotional care for another or oneself. Examples of the former include feeding, bathing, or dressing someone; examples of the latter include comforting or simply listening to another. Both types of caregiving are social practices and, as such, involve patterns of behavior that are part of a society or a group’s culture and that emerge or follow from a society or a group’s values and beliefs. Pregnancy, by contrast, is not a social practice. It’s a progressive biological condition characterized by numerous nonvoluntary changes in a female’s body. Some of these changes help maintain and support fetal development; others prepare the body for birthing and breastfeeding. While essential fetal needs (e.g., the fetus’s need for oxygen, nutrients, waste disposal) are met through pregnancy, these needs are not met through social practices.

This is not to deny that cultures have values and beliefs about pregnancy that result in social practices related to pregnancy or that pregnancy is implicated in our social lives. Regarding social practices, pregnant persons often engage in self-care for their pregnancy by, for example, consuming extra calories, or they engage in practices related to supporting fetal development by taking prenatal vitamins or avoiding certain foods. Many pregnant persons also develop a social relationship with their fetus during gestation and express a caring attitude towards their fetus. All these things influence how pregnant persons think about and respond to their pregnancy.

Yet, we should not conflate pregnancy with caregiving. Consider some important differences. Intentionally ceasing material caregiving does not involve some kind of physical intervention, such as surgery or medical care. And, for those who engage in material caregiving, when they are meeting their own needs – by eating, taking medication, etc. – they are not necessarily affecting others (at least, when they are not pregnant). These differences have to do with the fact that material caregiving lacks the distinctive kind of physical intertwinement and entanglement that characterizes pregnancy. Indeed, as the fetus comes into existence, it is necessarily integrated with the pregnant person. From the beginning of a pregnancy, when a fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall, the fetus’s internal entanglement is established. Continued development requires considerable integration with the pregnant person, in addition to the physical expansion of the pregnant person’s body.

Indeed, this kind of considerable physical intimacy is necessary for fetal development, and it is different from other types of intimacy in two important ways. First, this kind of invasive relation poses especially significant risks to a pregnant person’s health and wellbeing. A pregnant body undergoes physiological and anatomical changes – such as weight gain, fluid retention, ligament laxity, hormonal changes, and compression of soft tissues and nerves – which can be painful and debilitating. Additionally, a pregnancy person’s cardiac output increases, putting stress on the heart and putting them at persistent higher risks for cardiovascular disease and premature death for the rest of their lives. Second, physically invasive intimacy fundamentally concerns bodily integrity, and persons have a morally weighty interest in its protection. We are our bodies in an important sense, and pregnancy changes how a person’s body functions, how a person’s internal systems operate, and how a person is internally organized. Moreover, successfully carrying a fetus to term requires birthing, whether a birth is vaginal or cesarean. This is a physically traumatic end to a fetus’s invasive physical integration with a gestating person and, all by itself, raises concerns about forced pregnancy given the importance of bodily integrity.

Comparing pregnancy and material caregiving leads us to ignore the distinctive ways in which a person’s bodily integrity is at stake in pregnancy and not in caregiving. Of course, we certainly do not intend to minimize the demandingness of caregiving or its costs. We hold caregiving to be socially necessary, valuable work that can be demanding and costly and that we have a shared, moral obligation to provide. Yet, analogizing pregnancy to material caregiving suggests that pregnant persons have far more agency over what occurs in the progressive condition of pregnancy than they do. Further, considering pregnancy as a form of caregiving suggests that pregnant persons may have a moral obligation to gestate. This perpetuates the pernicious view that those who can gestate must use their bodies in the sexual and reproductive service of others. This threatens to naturalize sex-based caregiving.

In today’s political climate, thinking of pregnancy as a kind of caregiving is especially dangerous. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) and held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. At this time, 12 U.S. states have almost completely banned the practice, and Florida, Iowa, Georgia, and South Carolina have banned abortion at about 6 weeks. Other states have taken measures to protect the practice and make it more accessible. In states with restrictive abortion bans, pregnant persons are legally required to gestate and, then, legally required to birth. This forces pregnant persons – overwhelmingly women – to be in the forced service of the state. Given the importance of caregiving duties, the suggestion that pregnancy is a form of caregiving provides support for such sexual servitude.  

Children / Climate / Duties / Environment / General

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Why it can be OK to have kids in the climate emergency

In this post, Elizabeth Cripps (University of Edinburgh) discusses her new article published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, in which she explores whether it is justifiable to have children despite the carbon footprint it creates.

Credit: Andrea Thomson Photography.

In the US, having a child has a carbon price tag of 7 tonnes a year. In France, it’s 1.4 tonnes. Going vegan saves only 0.4 tonnes yearly, living car free 2.4 tonnes, and avoiding a Transatlantic flight 1.6 tonnes.

For those of us who have or want kids, this is an uncomfortable fact. We know we should pursue climate justice, including by cutting our own carbon impact. Does it follow that someone living an affluent life in a country like the UK or the US should stay childless?

Not necessarily. What’s more, by putting this argument under pressure, we learn some important lessons for moral philosophers. We need to talk more about individual sacrifice in the face of global emergencies. In so doing, we must engage carefully with sociological and psychological scholarship and attend to the insights of demographic groups who have experienced injustice.

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Duties / International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Against the Odds: Defending Defensive Wars

A photograph of an apartment building damaged by bomb impacts. In the foreground, a child's climbing frame is visible.
Saltivka, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland

This is a guest post by Professor Gerald Lang (University of Leeds), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Peace is better than war. It takes two to fight. These are truisms: they’re true, but so obvious that they’re not usually worth stating. But they swiftly generate conundrums in the ethics of war in general, and the Ukraine conflict in particular. We can learn something, in my view, from thinking about these conundrums. But we may need to tackle the understandable concern that it’s unhelpfulto explore them at a time when energy and attention levels are flagging in the international community, even though Ukraine remains under attack from Russia and arguably requires all the support, moral and otherwise, that it can get. In some circumstances, indulging in more theoretical speculations—the kind of speculative and hypothetical thinking that forms the daily diet of philosophers of war—may come across as being objectionably detached, or perhaps as just another way of being a useful idiot. These worries deserve careful consideration, not hasty dismissal. If there’s to be a place for serious philosophizing about war, it needs to be reconciled with the more engaged concerns of those who care deeply about the Ukraine war but lack specifically philosophical concerns about it.

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Animals / Duties / General / Rights

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Free as a Bird?

We often use visual representations and metaphors involving animals to represent human freedom. Consider, for instance, “It’s time to spread to your wings”, “I couldn’t persuade her to do otherwise. It was like trying to hold back wild horses”, “She’s a bit of a lone wolf”, “A lion does not concern himself with the opinion of sheep”. Conversely, the caged animal often serves as a symbol of human suffering, imprisonment, and oppression.

Yet many philosophers do not think animals have a genuine interest in freedom. For these thinkers, freedom only matters for nonhuman animals insofar as it contributes to their welfare. On such a view, there is nothing wrong with enslaving – if it can be called that – a nonhuman animal provided we can keep them healthy and happy. By contrast, enslaving a human is never acceptable, no matter how happy you can make them. This is because humans (and perhaps a few of the so-called higher animals) have a unique noninstrumental interest in freedom, which means that freedom matters for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else.

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Animals / Duties / General / Moral values / War

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If animals have rights, why not bomb slaughterhouses?

In this post, Nico Müller (U. of Basel) and Friderike Spang (U. of Lausanne) discuss their new article published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, in which they look at the relation between animal rights and violent forms of activism. They argue that violent activism frequently backfires, doing more harm than good to the animal rights cause.

Created with DALL.E (2024)

In 2022 alone, some ten billion land animals were killed in US slaughterhouses. That’s ten billion violations of moral rights, at least if many philosophers since the 1960s (and some before that) have got it right. If the victims were human, most of us would condone the use of violence, even lethal violence, in their defense. So regardless of whether you agree with the values of the animal rights movement, you may wonder: Why isn’t this movement much more violent? It seems like it should be, on its own terms.

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