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Category: General

Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Children / General / Governance / Public Philosophy

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From the Vault: Good Reads on Public Philosophy

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 public philosophy that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:

  • In From Armchair to Engaged Philosophy, Nicolás Brando reflects on the the benefits of philosophers directly engaging with their subjects of research throughout the whole research process – applying this to children as the subject of an important strand of recent and current philosophising. Nicolás’s post references Diana Popescu’s interview with Jo Wolff, which discusses the idea of “engaged philosophy”, published as part of our Beyond the Ivory Tower series.
  • Anh Le’s post, which addresses the question: Should Academics also be Activists?
  • Lisa Herzog’s interview with Rowan Cruft, the latest in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, in which they discuss his public philosophy, and in particular his contribution to the Leveson Inquiry into the practices and ethics of the British media.

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General / Governance / Liberty / Public Philosophy / Punishment

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Wrongly Weeded Out: Richardson’s Removal and Unreasonable Rules

In this guest post, John Tillson and Winston C. Thompson discuss the recent case of US track star Sha’Carri Richardson’s suspension from competing at the Olympics.

Sha’Carri Richardson was suspended from the US Olympic team after testing positive for marijuana. This is ultimately because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) decided to ban THC in-competition in all sports. THC (or tetrahydrocannabinol) is the main psychoactive component of cannabis/marijuana. WADA can prohibit athletes’ use of substances in order compete in the Olympics and other major sporting events such as those organized under the auspices of World Athletics. Richardson has apologized for her actions and US President Biden has commented on the case saying, ‘the rules are the rules’. (more…)

General

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Out today: Political Philosophy in a Pandemic

We’re very pleased to announce that our book, Political Philosophy in a Pandemic: Routes to a More Just Future, is released today in e-book format. The print versions will follow, on 23rd September. You can order the e-book and/or pre-order a print copy here (or via other booksellers, such as Waterstones, Amazon, etc.). You can also read an extract of the book — which includes the Table of Contents, Foreword by Onora O’Neill, and Introduction — here.

Edited by two of the Justice Everywhere editors (Fay Niker and Aveek Bhattacharya), with several of the chapters written by Justice Everywhere contributors, and having its genesis in a blogpost for this website, this is very much a Justice Everywhere book. We hope you will read and find it stimulating.

Children / General / Liberty / Rights

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Having slaves and raising children

When I said yes to co-writing a book on surrogacy, I thought it would be just a straightforward application of my general view that moral rights over children, including the right to custody, are grounded in children’s own interests rather than in any interest of the right holder. And in a way it is: in a nutshell, I argue that custody is a prerogative, and hence cannot be sold or gifted. A practice that permits people to transfer it at will is illegitimate. But, along the way, I’m making interesting discoveries; one of them is 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. Many contemporary philosophers of childrearing should find the analogy plausible, even if they don’t share my view about the justification of the right to custody. Let me explain. (more…)

Children / Gender / General / Governance / International / Liberty

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Ending Child Marriage in the UK

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.

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Education / General

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What Epistemic Profiles Should We (Not) Foster?

It is often said that the main task of teachers is to foster learning. But what kind of learning? What knowledge can we hope to attain through such learning? And what kinds of people should children aspire to become in the process? We imagine that fostering learning in the right way would ensure not only that adults lead flourishing lives, but that they can help others in acquiring knowledge. As epistemologists show, some intellectual virtues are other-regarding, meaning that individuals can and should affect others in their knowledge acquisition and intellectual flourishing; such is, for instance, the drive to discover socially relevant findings, or honesty and integrity in communicating information (Turri and Alfano, 2017). (more…)

Democracy / Distribution / Economics / General

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More equal compared to what? How central banks are fudging the issue on inequality

Since the financial crisis of 2007, central banks have become the central tool of macroeconomic management, being described as the “only game in town.” To avert financial meltdown and, subsequently, to stimulate the economy, they have launched unconventional monetary policies such as quantitative easing (QE). The latter injects huge amounts of liquidity into the economy through large-scale purchases of financial assets by central banks. Central banks have doubled down on QE in reaction to the Covid-crisis.

QE has unintended side-effects. By pushing up the prices of the financial assets purchased, it favours already well-to-do asset holders. Given these consequences, central banks found themselves in the spotlight and pressured to justify their policies.

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Academia / Democracy / General / Governance

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Should we revive the ancient practice of ostracism?

A well-known aphorism by George Santayana says that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Less well-known, though, is the sentence used to preface this aphorism, namely that “when experience is not retained […] infancy is perpetual”. While the former is often used to highlight the importance of learning from past mistakes, the latter underlines the importance of learning from the beneficial (albeit defunct) practices of the past. But can historical practices inform contemporary political philosophy? Anthoula Malkopoulou’s insightful analysis of the Athenian institution of ostracism suggests a positive response. On her view, we should understand ostracism as a mechanism of democratic self-defence, which could plausibly be revived in a modern version. In the following lines I will further explore this suggestion.

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General / International / Technology / War

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What’s the problem with killer robots? Some reflections on the NSCAI final report

At the start of March, the US National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), chaired by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and Robert Work, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, issued its 756-page final report. It argues that the US is in danger of losing its technological competitive advantage to China, if it does not massively increase its investment in AI. It claims that

For the first time since World War II, America’s technological predominance—the backbone of its economic and military power—is under threat. China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.

At the same time, it highlights the immediate danger posed to US national security by both China’s and Russia’s more enthusiastic use of (and investment in) AI, noting for instance the use of AI and AI-enabled systems in cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.

In this post, I want to focus on one particular part of the report – its discussion of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) – which already received some alarmed headlines before the report was even published. Whilst one of the biggest  challenges posed by AI from a national security perspective is its “dual use” nature, meaning that many applications have both civilian and military uses, the development of LAWS has over the past decade or so been at the forefront of many people’s worries about the development of AI thanks to the work of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and similar groups.

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Children / Education / General

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Free Speech, Cartoons and Anti-Racism

In this post, John Tillson (Liverpool Hope University) discusses a recent case in British news on the use of satirical cartoons in the classroom. 

A teacher at a UK school was recently suspended for showing satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad during a Religious Education (RE) lesson. Parents protested outside the school in response to the use of the cartoons, and the school’s headteacher apologised saying that their use was inappropriate. (more…)