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

Category: General

Academia / Education / General / Public Philosophy

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To Strike or Disrupt?

In this post, guest contributor Liam Shields discusses an important dilemma related to the strike in UK higher education institutions.

Members of the University and College Union, the trade union that represents many lecturers and other university staff in the UK, at 60 universities will be called upon to withdraw their labour from their employers from 25th November to 4th December. However, some are on research leave, or will not be doing any teaching on some or all strike days, so their striking will go unnoticed. The question then is: should they go on strike or not? (more…)

Academia / Democracy / Distribution / Economics / General

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Announcement: MOOC on ‘Inequality and Democracy’

This is an announcement on behalf of the Private Property and Political Power project at Utrecht University. Its members have developed a freely-available Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) entitled “Inequality and Democracy” that may be of interest to our subscribers, readers, and/or their students.

Most countries are getting more and more unequal. But the core of democracy is political equality: that everyone should have an equal say in how their country is run. Can we really expect these things to go together? Can people have equal political power while economic inequality grows and grows? Take this course and decide for yourself. (more…)

Democracy / General / Rights

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Compulsory voting and same-sex marriage referendums

Electoral turnout is declining. In the past three decades, the average turnout for legislative elections has registered a sharp drop, of about 10% at the global level, a drop which spans across all continents and among both established and emerging democracies. If we find this trend to be concerning, there is one fairly simple mechanism that we could employ in order to reverse it: compulsory voting. In this post I argue that while it might be attractive at first sight, compulsory voting is, however, sometimes inimical to justice, drawing on the recent cases of same-sex marriage referendums held in several Eastern European countries.

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Climate / General / International

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What should I do about climate change and other global environmental problems?

In this post, Christian Baatz, Laura García-Portela and Lieske Voget-Kleschin present the special issue on questions related to individual environmental responsibility they recently published in Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (JAGE).

Is it enough to lobby for climate change politics? Or do I need to limit my personal greenhouse gas emissions? While these questions seem like a non-starter for environmentally aware people, they are actually at the core of a broad ethical debate. The special issue tackles what individuals should do, when moral requests become overly demanding and if we need new ethical theory to adequately address these issues. (more…)

General

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Justice Everywhere is back!

After a brief Summer break, Justice Everywhere is back for the 2019-20 session! We are really excited to be back, especially with so many justice and ethical issues to discuss at the moment, and we look forward to debating them with you.

We are welcoming back several authors who have been writing for Justice Everywhere for some time now, and we also have the pleasure of welcoming some new writers to the team. Together, we’re a diverse bunch working on a huge range of issues in moral and political philosophy, as well as some whose focus is in social policy and political economy. For more details, please see our List of Authors page.

We are also pleased to announce that Justice Everywhere will collaborate with the Journal of Applied Philosophy, one of the top journals in the field, covering a broad spectrum of issues in applied philosophy. Authors of articles on issues of justice and public affairs will give us an insight in their research published in the journal. In addition, we will host a number of guest posts written by experts to broaden our scope even further

We take inspiration from an idea voiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1963, he was incarcerated for participating in protests against the treatment of black people in Birmingham, Alabama. During his time in jail, he wrote the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, in which he notes that:

 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

 

With this, King acknowledges that communities and people are all interrelated; if one person suffers from an injustice, we are all affected.

Inspired by this thought, Justice Everywhere explores philosophy in public affairs, and in particular issues of justice and injustice, the ethical and the unethical, and the moral and the immoral in all areas of public, political, social, economic, and personal life. Constructive debate of these issues can help clarify their nature, and how to address them.

Accordingly, our aim is to provide a public forum for the exchange of ideas regarding what justice and morality ask of us. We highly value active engagement with a wide audience on the ethical dimensions of contemporary issues.

So please follow us, read and share the posts on social media, and feel free to comment on posts (using the comment box at the bottom of each post). 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.

We very much look forward to this new season, and we hope you do too!

Climate / General

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Are ‘New Harms’ really all that new?

Some theorists argue that contemporary problems such as climate change, sweatshop labour, biodiversity loss, … are New Harms – they are unprecedented problems, and differ in important respects from more familiar harms. Intuitively, this view seems to make sense, but in this post I argue that this view is mistaken.* (more…)

Climate / Economics / General / Moral values

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Why We Need More Materialism

As the famous adage holds, we should try to Do More With Less. We’re living in a time in which minimalism has become a movement and to Marie Kondo has become a verb. As we all know, materialism is bad for the planet and people around us, but I will only focus on how self-interest might also be a significant motivator to reduce our materialism, and also give a humble suggestion as to what fundamentally underlies moving to Doing More With Less (or getting even better at it if you’re already on the programme). (more…)

Academia / Democracy / General / Governance / International / MediaPhilosophy

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What would it take to turn Facebook into a democracy?

by Severin Engelmann and Lisa Herzog*

When the relation between “Facebook” and “democracy” is discussed, the question usually is: what impact does Facebook – as it exists today – have on democratic processes? While this is an urgent and important question, one can also raise a different one: what would it mean to turn Facebook into a democracy, i.e. to govern it democratically? What challenges of institutional design would have to be met for developing meaningful democratic governance structures for Facebook? (more…)

General

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Plastic Pollution: How to avoid further degrading our natural environment

Plastic pollution on a beach. Image source https://www.pollutionsolutions-online.com/news/water-wastewater/17/breaking-news/which-countries-are-the-worst-for-ocean-pollution/50933

The theme of this year’s World Environment Day (5 June 2018) is Beat Plastic Pollution. Plastic pollution is indeed a serious problem, severely affecting animals, humans, and marine ecosystems.  Removal of the pollutants that are already in the environment is exceedingly difficult, so we should also ask: How can we avoid plastic and other pollutants entering the environment in the first place?

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General

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Moral progress in beliefs and practices

Abraham Lincoln said: “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong”. Similarly we could say: “If the abolition of slavery is not an instance of moral progress, then nothing is an instance of moral progress.” The abolition of slavery is the favourite example of philosophers who write about the topic of moral progress. While the existence and the possibility of moral progress are contested, the view that if there were such a thing as moral progress, the abolition of slavery would be an instance of it is not. (By the way, I fully acknowledge that slavery still exists, especially new forms of slavery, which are in some respects even worse than the old forms. But this doesn’t change the fact that the slave trade that we used to have for centuries is now illegal in every country in the world.) Other popular examples of moral progress include the development of a human rights regime, the emancipation of women and the abolition of foot binding. In a previous post, I argued that moral progress is not impossible and cited evolutionary considerations. In this post, I challenge Michelle Moody-Adams’ view of moral progress in social practices as the realization of previously gained moral insights. (more…)