The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically reminded us of our shared vulnerability and our need of care, and as a result, calls for care have been widespread since the pandemic began. Some of these calls to care, as well as celebrations of essential care workers, have appeared disingenuous when coming from governments and parties with a long history of carelessness. It is precisely this carelessness, which ranges from cuts to public health services to a general lack of concern for the fate of the most vulnerable in society, that has been deemed responsible for many of the difficulties and the failures in facing Covid-19. Many calls to care have been motivated precisely by this critique as well as the idea that care should be central in our societies. How, then, should we conceive of a caring society? In what follows, I address this issue by reflecting on the ambivalence of care and the idea of communities of care.
Category: Gender (Page 1 of 5)
While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2020-21 season.
Here are three good reads on issues relating to children and upbringing that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:
- Anca Gheaus’s post, Having Slaves and Raising Children, which discusses just how far one may push the analogy between holding slaves and raising children in a world like ours, which has not yet fully outgrown the long tradition of denying rights to children.
- Daniela Cutas and Sabine Hohl’s post, which explores the question: What Do Co-Parents Owe Each Other? (This post is part of our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.)
- Helen McCabe’s guest contribution, Ending Child Marriage in the UK, which examines the philosophical dimensions of a recent bill proposing to raise the minimum age of marriage in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to 18 – namely, questions about what decisions people should be permitted to make at 16, and about the balance between maximising people’s options and protecting a small number from significant harm.
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.
In this contribution, Katarina Pitasse Fragoso and Nathália Sanglard reflect on gender violence and public policies.
Gender violence is a form of physical, verbal, psychological or symbolic damage, caused directly or indirectly to the person due to her gender identity. It is an injustice, because, according to Elizabeth Anderson, it has been generated by arbitrary systems, such as patriarchal ones, which use gender as a justification to harm others and prevent access to resources, rights, the job market and other services. In this article, we will explore how these types of violence disproportionately affect women and feminized subjects, and we will propose some ways to enhance mainstream public policies, through a combination of actions and participatory devices.
On 16 June 2021, Sajid Javid MP introduced a Private Members’ Bill into the UK Parliament to raise the minimum age of marriage in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to 18. This follows earlier attempts by Pauline Latham MP to criminalise child marriage. Currently, teenagers aged 16-18 may marry with their parent’s consent (in Scotland, they can already marry without parental consent). From an international law perspective, this Bill would end child marriage in the UK (which the international community has pledged to stop by 2030). Philosophically, it raises interesting questions about what decisions people should be permitted to make at 16; and the balance between maximising people’s options, and protecting a small number from significant harm.
In the past few months, a central topic of discussion in Italian public debate has been the Ddl Zan, a proposed bill to combat discrimination and violence on the grounds of sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability. The bill does not create any new crimes but extends to these categories existing criminal legislation that currently covers discrimination and violence on the grounds of racial, ethnic and religious reasons as well as incitement to commit such acts. Such acts of discrimination and violence and their incitement can either be punished with a fine or a prison sentence to up to 4 years or, in case these actions already constitute a more serious crime, the penalty can be increased to up to double. The Ddl Zan also includes measures to support victims as well as broader initiatives to fight discrimination and inequalities, including the creation of a National Day against homophobia. Unsurprisingly, the bill has been the object of a heated debate. The LGBTQ+ movement and the majority of the feminist movement as well as other progressive forces are fighting for its approval, while conservatives argue that the bill endangers freedom of speech and imposes a supposedly divisive worldview. Setting this aside, I want to address another issue in connection to this bill, namely that of whether the criminal law should be regarded as the right instrument to fight discrimination and this kind of violence.
In this post, Daniela Cutas and Sabine Hohl discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on duties of co-parenting.
One of the authors of this post remembers her mother telling her, many years ago, that people spend too much time fretting about who to marry and not enough about who they want to co-parent with, since it is that relationship which lasts for life. And we could not agree with her more. (Spoiler alert: this author’s parents have since divorced. But they are still her parents.) In a new paper, we discuss co-parenting as a moral relationship in its own right, and we explore the duties that it generates between co-parents.
What is a good way to learn about political philosophy? Plausibly there is a variety of reasonable answers to this question, depending on what and why one wants to know about the subject, and it is some testament to this that there are excellent introductions that focus on the issues, concepts, and key thinkers in the field.
In our recent book – Introducing Political Philosophy: A Policy-Driven Approach – Will Abel, Elizabeth Kahn, Tom Parr, and I offer an approach that focuses on introducing the subject through the lens of public policy.
When it comes to strategies for pursuing ideals of justice in the real world, a practice mostly neglected by philosophers but with considerable real-life purchase is that of refusing or withdrawing a public platform or position. There are various reasons for thinking that supporting what is commonly referred to (mainly by its opponents) as “cancel culture” would further women’s interests, but I will argue that due to the background sexism in society, cancel culture is in fact bad for women.
Shawn raises his hand and asks quietly: “Mr Warner?” […] Mr Warner does not hear Shawn or notice his raised hand. Instead, Mr Warner is fielding questions from a group of middle-class students […] Shawn sighs and puts his hand down (Calarco 2018: 164).
Post by Leonie Smith and Alfred Archer
Introduction
When middle-class students are regularly heard in the classroom and working-class students, such as Shawn, are regularly not heard, and when news reporters consistently fail to seek out women experts to the same extent that they seek out men experts, something unjust is happening. In a recent paper, we argue that this something is an epistemic attention deficit.