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Category: Duties

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.

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‘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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Animals / Duties / General

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2024 Grand National: Horses, Harm, and Shared Responsibility

Horses have a purpose in life, just like us all. Unfortunately, when people go to work, sometimes bad things happen.

(AP McCoy, former jockey, quoted in The Telegraph)

On Saturday the 13th of April 2024, one of the world’s most famous horse races, the Grand National, is scheduled to take place. The race first took place at Aintree Racecourse in 1839, where it continues to be hosted, and this will be its 176th annual running. The race is very popular in the UK with 70,000 people in attendance last year, and ten million watching on TV. Beyond the UK, its appeal is wide-reaching with an estimated 600 million people watching across the globe. And it’s not just horseracing enthusiasts who get involved. People who usually have no interest in horseracing will watch the event, and workplace or family sweepstakes are common. In sum, the Grand National is an institution that is loved by many and enjoys significant national and global support.

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Duties / General / Liberty / Moral values / Punishment / War

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When whatever you do, you get what you least deserve

In this post, David Benatar (U. Cape Town) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the paradox of desert, exploring the issues that arise from ‘acting rightly’ and the costs it may incur.

(C) David Benatar. Camondo Stairs, Galata, Istanbul, 2022

Imagine that you are a soldier fighting a militia that is embedded within an urban civilian population. You face situations in which, in the fog of war, you are unsure whether the person you confront is a civilian or a combatant, not least because the combatants you are fighting often dress like civilians. You can either shoot and ask questions later, or you can pause, even momentarily, to take stock, and risk being shot.

Depending on the precise circumstances, pausing may be either a moral requirement or merely supererogatory (that is, a case of going beyond the call of duty). Either way, the soldier who pauses is morally superior to the soldier who shoots without hesitation. However, there will be situations in which a soldier is killed precisely because he acted in the morally better way.

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Duties / General / Liberty / Moral values / Rights / Work

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Invisible discrimination: the double role of implicit bias

In this post, Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (Stockholm University & Institute for Futures Studies) discusses her recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (co-authored by Nicolas Olsson Yaouzis) exploring the roles that implicit bias and social norms play in discriminating hiring practices.

Image by Roland Steinmann from Pixabay

The US, like many other countries, is marked by pervasive racial inequalities, not least in the job market. Yet many US Americans, when asked directly, uphold egalitarian “colour-blind” norms: one’s race shouldn’t matter for one’s chances to get hired. Sure enough, there is substantial disagreement about whether it (still) does matter, but most agree that it shouldn’t. Given such egalitarian attitudes, one would expect there to be very little hiring discrimination. The puzzle is how then to explain the racial inequalities in hiring outcomes.

A second puzzle is the frequent occurrence of complaints about “reverse discrimination” in contexts such as the US. “You only got the job because you’re black” is a reaction familiar to many who do get a prestigious job while being black, as it were. Why are people so suspicious when racial minorities are hired?

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