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

Category: Governance

Democracy / Distribution / Governance / Technology

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Public-private collaboration in the governance of AI

Artificial Intelligence – Adobe Stock

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have seen impressive developments in the last decades. Think about Google’s DeepMind defeating Lee Sedol, the best human player of Go, with their program AlphaGo in 2015. The latest version, AlphaZero, is remarkable because it relied on deep reinforcement learning to learn how to play Go entirely by itself from scratch: with only the rules of the game, through trial and error, and playing millions of games against itself. Machine learning algorithms have a range of other practical applications, from image recognition in medical diagnostics to energy management. (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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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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Children / Climate / Democracy / Distribution / Duties / Economics / General / Governance / Health / International / Liberty / Public Philosophy

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Political Philosophy in a Pandemic (Book Announcement)

We have some exciting news to share: the first ever Justice Everywhere book is on its way. Entitled Political Philosophy in a Pandemic: Routes to a More Just Future, it will be published in  print in September by Bloomsbury Academic (pre-order here). We are hoping that the e-book version will be out in the summer. Edited by Fay Niker and Aveek Bhattacharya, two of the convenors of the blog, the idea for the book developed out of the ‘Philosophers’ Rundown on the Coronavirus Crisis’ that we published here in April last year.

Political Philosophy in a Pandemic contains 20 essays on the moral and political implications of COVID-19 and the way governments have responded to it, arranged around five themes: social welfare, economic justice, democratic relations, speech and misinformation and the relationship between justice and crisis. Almost all of the contributors have featured on Justice Everywhere in recent years in form or another, either as authors or interviewees. (more…)

Distribution / Economics / Governance / Health

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The Political Power of Food as Medicine

What is the inter-relationship between food and medicine? At various points in history, such as in the Byzantine empire, food and medicine were seen as almost the same thing. The basic idea was that medicine and food both performed the same function of balancing bodily humors. In contemporary countries, such as the US, many people are aware that food has a significant impact on health. But, I think that it’s fair to say, food and medicine are increasingly construed as very different things. Crudely speaking, medicine is a public good that requires great scientific expertise; food is a private affair that depends on different people’s cultures, whims, and private financial resources.

I want to discuss a new policy development that raises questions about what the inter-relationship between food and medicine could and should be. This policy development has largely been overlooked by philosophers. But, I will argue, it raises interesting theoretical questions about the framing of public policies, feasibility, and justice. (more…)

Animals / Distribution / Duties / General / Governance

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The COVID-19 crisis: what should we do about the zoos?

 

Brown bear, Germany, 2016. Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / Born Free Foundation

The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced many of us to reassess what we value, what kinds of communities we want to live in, and how we spend our money. The financial pressures caused by repeated lockdowns and rising unemployment means that many businesses and other organisations will not survive without targeted support. And, with so many in need of financial assistance, many of us are faced with the question of who we should help.

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Democracy / Governance

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The precarious role of social norms in journalism

In this post, Lisa Herzog discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the role of shared norms in journalism.

Imagine that you’re competing fiercely with someone – but there are no legal rules to keep the competition fair! All that you and the other competitors can hope for is that all of you will stick to certain norms of fairness. This hardly sounds like a comfortable situation. Yet, it is, arguably, the situation news outlets currently find themselves in. Such concerns motivate my recent paper, where I argue that we need to consider the role of competition for journalism ethics, not least because this helps understand the precarious role of social norms in journalism. (more…)

Academia / General / Governance / Liberty / MediaPhilosophy

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With Friends Like These, Free Speech Doesn’t Need Enemies

Conservatives are the only people who believe in free speech nowadays. At any rate, that’s what many conservatives seem to think. Witness the wearying succession of anti-leftist think-pieces about how progressives have turned into authoritarian censors. Or notice the meteoric rise (and fall) of Parler, a social media site touting itself as a free-speech-friendly rival to censorious Silicon Valley tech giants. Or see the many comedians who, while mostly sharing the progressive sensibilities of coastal elites, bemoan the chilling of free speech at universities. Today, if you care about free speech and you’re looking for staunch allies, they’re more likely to be found in conservative circles. (more…)

Democracy / Governance

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How democratic are pre-election polls?

In most Western democracies nowadays, pre-election periods are littered with polls. Some polls, conducted by polling organizations, are sophisticated and more likely to be challenged for their accuracy (as are the media houses that publish them). Other polls are simple. For instance, a news website may ask its readers who they would vote for if the election happened on that day. Polls represent a simple and cheap commodity for the commercial news media to offer to their audiences. As Jesper Strömbäck notes, polls generate fresh and often dramatic news items that are easy to analyze for journalists and easy to digest for audiences.

But how do polls, and particularly pre-election polls, fit into a normative vision of democracy? Do they enrich our democratic practices and institutions, or do they undercut democratic ideals? Despite being an epitome for divisive issues (49% of countries restrict the publishing of pre-election polls in some capacity, as Petersen notes), pre-election polls have attracted little interest of democratic theorists. Reaching a verdict on whether they are normatively compatible with democracy has been left almost entirely to political scientists and journalists. (more…)

Democracy / Duties / Governance

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The news media are a watchdog, but so are you

In this post, Emanuela Ceva & Dorota Mokrosinska discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on what grounds the duty of the news media (and citizens) to act as a watchdog.

The news media often claim a quasi-political role as a watchdog entrusted by the people to keep the government in check. This claim has a particular purchase when it comes to the dissemination of whistleblowers’ unauthorized disclosures. The publication in the Guardian and the Washington Post of Edward Snowden’s revelations of classified information about British and US governments’ surveillance programs provide a textbook illustration of this claim.

Widespread as it is, this view of the unique quasi-political role of the news media is hard to justify. In a recent article, we argue that the watchdog role of the news media does not derive from their special status in society. It is rather an instance of a general duty that accrues to any member of a well-ordered society in the face of institutional failures. (more…)