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

Category: Governance

Beyond the Ivory Tower / Democracy / Governance / Liberty / Public Philosophy

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An interview with Rebecca Lowe (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the fourth interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series (following Onora O’Neill, Marc Stears and Jonathan Wolff). In February, Aveek Bhattacharya spoke to Rebecca Lowe about her efforts to increase the level of philosophical discussion on the political right.

Rebecca Lowe was founding director of FREER, a think tank dedicated to promoting social and economic liberalism. She was the Conservative party candidate for the City of Durham in the 2015 general election, and for several years wrote a regular column for the ConservativeHome website, where she was an assistant editor. She is currently working as research director at an investment company, while studying for a PhD at King’s College London, researching Lockean justifications of private property.

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Distribution / Economics / Governance / International / Liberty / Moral values

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Left Unity: An Interview with Marius Ostrowski

Fay Niker recently talked with Marius Ostrowski about his new book Left Unity: Manifesto for a Progressive Alliance. 

I want to make the case for why the left urgently needs to snap out of its current mindset, stay abreast of the deep changes taking place in society, and find new ways to counteract its fragmentation.

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Climate / Distribution / Economics / Education / Governance / Health / International / Public Philosophy / Technology

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Philosophers’ Rundown on the Coronavirus Crisis

The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised several ethical and political questions. In this special edition, Aveek Bhattacharya and Fay Niker have collected brief thoughts from Justice Everywhere authors on 9 pressing questions.

Topics include: the feasibility of social justice, UBI, imagining a just society, economic precarity, education, climate change, internet access, deciding under uncertainty, and what counts as (un)acceptable risk.    (more…)

Duties / Governance / Health / Liberty / Punishment

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Should We Shame Those Who Ignore Social Distancing Guidelines?

In this post, Paul Billingham and Tom Parr apply some of their recent thinking on the morality of public shaming to the case of social distancing guidelines.

Social norms can change astonishingly quickly. Within a matter of days, and in response to the ongoing pandemic, we’ve witnessed the emergence of strong social norms against going out for all but a handful of reasons. All of a sudden, each of us is expected to stay at home, at least for the overwhelming majority of our days. And, when we do venture out, we must be careful to maintain appropriate distance from others.

This turnaround in social norms has been hastened and enforced by the public shaming, often on social media, of those who breach their demands. This involves posting, sharing, commenting on, and liking photos and videos of those who seem to be violating these norms, for example, by taking leisurely strolls in a busy park, sunbathing at the beach, or boarding a packed train. Twitter is currently awash with examples, from all around the world, using the hashtag #COVIDIOTS. Even the authorities have got in on the action, with Derbyshire Police releasing drone footage of people walking in the Peak District. And Italian mayors have been real trailblazers. (more…)

Democracy / Governance / Moral values / Rights

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Making Sense of “Erasing History”

In this post, Daniel Abrahams discusses his recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the role of history in erasing-history.

The last five years have seen a re-evaluation of public history. Beginning with the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Cape Town, popular movements have argued and fought for the removal of commemorative statues of toxic historical figures. Movements have targeted memorials of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, statues honouring Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War, and honourifics for Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A Macdonald.

In each case, defenders of the statues have argued that removing the statues would constitute “erasing history.” This might seem like a curious complaint at first: Canadians are not about to forget about Canada’s first Prime Minister any time soon. The internet provides plenty of resources, and history will still be taught in schools. Taking down a statue is obviously a long way from the Orwellian project of deleting something from the historical record. However, the complaint must have some intuitive pull as people keep making it. In a recent article, I take up the case of Macdonald and use it to spell out both the best way to understand the erasing history defence, and suggest ways to engage it on its core concern.

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Distribution / Governance / Health

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Supply Chains, Disaster-Mitigation, and State Manufacturing

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed serious vulnerabilities in healthcare supply chains in many countries, including the UK. Shortages in protective equipment are leading to staffing problems in many hospitals. If these problems aren’t soon resolved they could jeopardise the operations of the entire health system. The same threat looms over the care sector. And even if the NHS remains well-enough staffed to sustain its operations, ventilator shortages may mean that critically ill patients don’t have access to essential life-saving treatments at the peak of the pandemic. And stocks of the chemical supplies needed in order to produce test kits, and vaccines – if and when one is viable – are running short as well.

Countries should try to take proactive measures to pre-emptively mitigate the harm done by future pandemics by disaster-proofing their healthcare supply chains. The probability of another pandemic in the foreseeable future that’s as bad as or worse than COVID-19 may be small. But the probability-weighted downsides of this possible outcome are great enough that they warrant action in strengthening supply chains. This is just one action that’s warranted among others. The question I want to home in on here is how we can disaster-proof supply chains without it being so expensive as to (a) carry prohibitive op-portunity costs, or (b) become politically untenable once the galvanised mood around COVID-19 subsides. (more…)

Democracy / Duties / Economics / Governance / International

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Should we buy from dictatorships?

This a guest post by Chris Armstrong (Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton). He researches matters of global justice. Here he discusses his recent work on dealing with dictators.

Dictators have been responsible for many grievous crimes. They have left behind them a trail of genocides and ill-considered wars. Even when they are not killing innocent people, dictators commit a major wrong by denying a voice to their subjects. They also frequently squander their countries’ wealth on Western luxuries even in the face of grinding poverty at home. There is little doubt, therefore, that a world with fewer dictators would be a far better one in many respects.

This leads naturally to the thought that those of us who are fortunate not to live under tyrants ought to do whatever we can to avoid supporting dictators – and indeed to avoid incentivising the emergence of more of them. But what can we do? One thought is that we should avoid buying goods such as oil from them, because in so doing we provide a stream of income for continued repression, and remove from dictators the need to rely on their own citizens for revenue (a reliance which, many political economists believe, can lead to improvements in governance over time). Another suggestion is that we should deepen our engagement with dictators, trading with them to an even greater extent. While this will strike many readers as deeply controversial, in a recent paper I argue that this is the more persuasive view: we should probably buy more, not less, from dictators. (more…)

Democracy / Duties / Governance

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Should Parties Be Democratic?

Should political parties organize their internal affairs in a (more) democratic way? By this, I do not mean merely allowing party members to select candidates for a presidential election or to elect the president of the party. The question is also whether party members should be involved in the writing of political programs and in deciding which policies to pursue.

The answer might seem obvious at first sight: given that parties play an important democratic function (aggregating multiple demands and uniting citizens behind competing political projects), it would seem odd if they were themselves organized undemocratically. And yet we know that parties tend to be very hierarchical – it has even been described as an “iron law”. To what extent is this regrettable?

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "cartoon party discipline"

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Duties / Governance / International / Migration / Rights

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Indigenous Immigrant Identities and Epistemic Injustice

In this post, Amy Reed-Sandoval discusses her recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on settler-state borders and indigenous identity.

Indigenous philosophies of the Americas provide epistemic resources that are needed to attend to the widespread marginalization of Latin American Indigenous identity in the United States. In a recent article, I argue that politicians, policy makers, activists, and other members of settler society should carefully engage this work as part of an informed effort to combat the attendant injustices.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Governance / Health / Moral values / Public Philosophy

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An Interview with Jonathan Wolff (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the third interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series (previous interviewees: Onora O’Neill and Marc Stears). Back in December, Diana Popescu spoke to Jonathan Wolff about his experience working on public policy committees and what philosophers have to learn from engaging with real-life problems and social movements. 

Jonathan Wolff is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford, he was Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCL. He is currently developing a new research programme on revitalising democracy and civil society. His work largely concerns equality, disadvantage, social justice and poverty, as well as applied topics such as public safety, disability, gambling, and the regulation of recreational drugs. He has been a member of the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, the Academy of Medical Science working party on Drug Futures, the Gambling Review Body, the Homicide Review Group, an external member of the Board of Science of the British Medical Association, and a Trustee of GambleAware. He writes a regular column on higher education for The Guardian.  (more…)