In human relationships, we often operate with the ‘benefit of the doubt’. When a friend cancels a plan or a family member behaves differently to normal, we might assume there is something going on that has little to do with us. Although we might be uncertain, we operate on a presumption that works in their benefit.
By analogy, our fundamental attitude to the subjective lifeworlds of other animals ought to begin with a presumption that works in their benefit, too: that there is a somebody there to be socially engaged with. Like the benefit of the doubt, such a presumption of subjectivity ought to exist even in the face of uncertainty concerning the extent and kind of subjectivity animals possess.
Yet, rather than being a social grace, assuming that animals are somebodies is necessary for justice in social relations with them to even get started. We must see animals as somebodies to see them as belonging to our social worlds. Indeed, this presumption goes radically beyond an acknowledgement (already common to animal ethics) that animals have morally important interests. To see why, we need to start by looking at our traditional attitude to animal minds.
In this post, Ajinkya Deshmukh from The University of Manchester discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on why thinking about caste can help us better understand social identities like gender and race that impact our lives.
Features of our identity that we have little to no control over can influence how we think, what we do, and who we become. The lottery of birth – what the famous investor Warren Buffet called the ovarian lottery – heavily determines things like nationality, gender, and race. Your passport influences how easily you can pursue international opportunities. Your gender can govern where and when you can be out in parts of the world. Your race can affect if you get that job. No wonder then that philosophers have thought about social categories like gender and race. Caste – which is also determined at birth and also impacts life trajectory – has not gotten similar attention.
“So what?” you might ask. Surely it is a niche phenomenon not affecting most of the world. But the numbers are staggering. Caste-based discrimination affects hundreds of millions of people globally, and manifests as segregation in schools, housing, and public life; reduced access to political and civil rights; and inadequate representation in educational curricula and the media. Caste is found in Asia, Europe and the Americas, and among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians. Anti-discrimination policies at Universities, in cities, and even countries are being revised in light of caste.
What is caste anyway? It is a centuries-old hierarchical grouping of individuals in society wherein caste membership comes with corresponding expected behavioural, social, or cultural practices. Failure to adhere to these expectations can result in varying degrees of social sanctions, including (in serious cases) “honour” killings and mob lynching. Castes are divided into so-called “upper” and “lower” stratas. Many practitioners follow the outlawed practice of “untouchability”, physically and socially distancing themselves from so-called “lower” caste members. The most persistent feature of the caste system is endogamy, where members of a caste will only marry within their caste or their caste strata. In India, for instance, most people have friends from within their caste/strata and most will go on to marry within their caste.
Three things stand out as strange about caste, especially to those who did not grow up in societies where it operates.
1. It is inherited from one’s parents but there are no genes that determine any visible features by which one could tell somebody’s caste. Indeed, there are not even invisible traits expressed by one’s genes that correspond to one’s caste identity.
2. Despite being the foundation of a lot of discrimination, it is invisible. You cannot tell somebody’s caste just by looking at them. Go on, try it. You don’t need to know the names of castes. Just look at the picture at the head of this post and see if you can hierarchically group the individuals based on anything other than a hunch. You have to ask or infer one’s caste from other information. And yet, people cannot easily ‘pass’ as belonging to a caste other than their own because caste bona fides are often verified communally and institutionally.
3. For an invisible, non-genetic property, it is nevertheless ‘sticky’ like gender and race. Just as one cannot easily change one’s gender or race, caste also sticks to the person. This table from my paper summarises these peculiar features of caste.
#
Features↓ / Social Kinds →
Gender
Race
Caste
1
Basis for discrimination / affirmative action
Yes
Yes
Yes
2
Typically ascribed at birth
Yes
Yes
Yes
3
Hard(er) to change or disavow
Yes
Yes
Yes
4
Genetic basis to ascription
Yes
Yes
No
5
Visibility claim / Marked body
Yes
Yes
No
Table 1: Similarities and dissimilarities between various social kinds.
Yet most theoretical accounts of social kinds focus on gender and race, then generalise from there. This often leads to explanatorily inadequate theories. I argue that using caste as a test case for understanding systems of social identity will benefit both the scholarship on caste and our broader understanding of the social world.
Broadly speaking, I argue that theories of social identity that try to give fixed, unchanging definitions – often called ‘essentialist’ accounts – fail to capture the changing fortunes and social dynamics of these identities. Further, while such accounts might do a good job of capturing a snapshot of present-day conditions, they risk fueling views that see certain social identities as perpetually dominant or subordinate. A good theory, I claim, must not only aid in emancipatory efforts against social-kinds-based discrimination, but also be able to explain how an erstwhile oppressed group can redefine itself on its own terms.
If you want a very quick primer on caste, I encourage you to read section 2 of my paper. If you want to learn how caste is like and unlike gender and race, sections 4 and 5 do exactly that. If those sections pique your interest, read the rest of the paper!
Ajinkya Deshmukh is a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy at The University of Manchester. His research interests are social ontology and epistemology, the philosophy of attention, and Buddhist philosophy.
In this post, Sushruth Ravish (IIT Kanpur) and Ritu Sharma (University of British Columbia) discuss their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on experiential injustice in cases of marital rape.
“El Requiebro” by José Agustín Arrieta (from WikiCommons).
Can one fail to know that they have been wronged?
Often, our knowledge of being wronged arises not from detached reasoning but from the body’s own signals—anger, fear, humiliation, pain. These feelings are not just reactions to harm; they are how we recognise harm. They tell us that a boundary has been crossed and that something ought to be resisted. Now imagine losing that capacity altogether—to endure a wrong yet fail to sense its wrongness; to experience harm as ordinary, expected, or even obligatory. We argue in our recently published paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy that such a loss is a distinct kind of injustice, namely experiential injustice.
When harms are unrecognisable
In 2018, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that the home is the most dangerous place for women. The majority of women who are raped are assaulted by partners, family members, or acquaintances. Yet in many countries, marital rape is still not a criminal offence, or is treated as less severe than other forms of rape. Even where laws have changed, underreporting remains a widespread issue. Many survivors do not identify what they have experienced as rape, describing it instead as “just how marriage works.” Philosophers often interpret this through the concept of hermeneutical injustice. Miranda Fricker defines this as a harm that occurs when people are wronged in their capacity as knowers because they lack the shared interpretive resources needed to understand their experiences. In societies where “marital rape” is an unavailable or marginal concept, victims may endure violations without being able to recognise or articulate them.
Beyond hermeneutical injustice
While this account is important, it stops short of capturing the entire range of epistemic harms. Hermeneutical injustice assumes that victims can at least sense that something is wrong, even if they lack the words to describe it. But what if that sense itself collapses? In our recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, we propose the concept of experiential injustice to capture a deeper kind of epistemic harm. Experiential injustice occurs when trauma, oppression, or internalised domination not only distort interpretation but also erode the very capacity to apprehend one’s experience as morally or epistemically significant. Put simply, hermeneutical injustice presupposes an intact sense of wrongness. Experiential injustice goes one step deeper—with the loss of that sense altogether.
Losing epistemic self-trust
Survivors of marital rape often describe going numb, dissociating, or complying mechanically. They may say they “stopped feeling anything” or came to believe that sex is “a wife’s duty.” From the outside, such reactions look purely psychological—symptoms of trauma or depression. But they are also epistemic. When we lose the capacity to perceive a violation as a violation, we lose access to a fundamental kind of knowledge. Our ordinary mechanisms for recognising and evaluating harm—our emotions, our bodily awareness, our moral perception—no longer function as they should. This marks a collapse of epistemic self-trust: the ability to rely on one’s own affective and perceptual cues as sources of knowledge.
How experiential injustice arises
Our paper identifies three mechanisms through which experiential injustice develops:
1. Trauma-induced disruption.
Repeated coercion can fracture the link between experience and meaning. Over time, the body suppresses sensations that signal danger as a means of survival. This is not merely psychological numbing—it is epistemic damage. The body is one of the primary sites through which we make sense of the world, and when it stops signalling wrongness, understanding falters.
2. Adaptive numbing.
In oppressive environments, emotional detachment often becomes a survival strategy. When resistance brings punishment or social ostracism, submission may seem like the only viable path. Over time, this adaptation hardens into a stable state of indifference, making it difficult to access one’s own sense of violation.
3. Internalised norms.
Patriarchal scripts about wifely duty and marital obligation can make coercion appear not only normal but morally appropriate. When refusal is framed as selfish or disobedient, compliance can feel virtuous. Here, moral evaluation itself has been reprogrammed. These processes often overlap: trauma feeds numbness, numbness eases internalisation, and internalisation prevents recovery.
Why this matters
Recognising experiential injustice alters how we perceive epistemic harm. It reminds us that knowing is not only conceptual in nature. It is also affective and embodied. Conceptual gaps, the focus of hermeneutical injustice, can often be addressed by social or legal reform. But experiential injustice resists such repair. You can introduce a new term like “marital rape,” yet for someone whose evaluative framework has collapsed, the term may carry no meaning. To restore epistemic agency, one must first restore the capacity to feel when something is wrong. This also means that epistemic repair must go beyond conceptual interventions. It must attend to the restoration of self-trust, bodily awareness, and emotional attunement. Survivors need conditions that allow them to feel and to trust those feelings again. Recognising experiential injustice illuminates the profound internal consequences of oppression.
Taking experiential injustice seriously means acknowledging that epistemic repair is not complete when victims can name their experiences. It is complete only when they can once again feel that what happened to them was wrong—and trust that feeling as constituting knowledge. Only then can survivors begin not merely to speak, but to recognise, in the most intimate sense, that what happened to them was wrong.
About the Authors:
Sushruth Ravish currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He earned his PhD from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Naik and Rastogi Prize for Excellence in PhD Thesis. His research lies at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, focusing on the nature of epistemic norms and moral judgments, as well as exploring the limits of transparency and explainability in AI systems. His publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Philosophia, Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy, the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research,Indian Philosophical Quarterly, and the South African Journal of Philosophy.
Ritu Sharma is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She previously completed a PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and has held teaching positions at the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, and at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) in Mumbai. Her research lies at the intersection of Practical Ethics and Social Philosophy, with a current focus on marital rape, unjust sex, hermeneutical injustice, and questions of agency. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, and the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.
In his book The Anarchist Banker, the Portuguese poet and novelist Fernando Pessoa tells the story of an anarchist who also happens to be a banker. His old comrades are shocked by this apparent contradiction of normative beliefs and actions. But the anarchist justifies his unexpected choice of occupation by pointing out that anarchists can achieve none of their ideals if they don’t have the means to do so. Becoming a banker is, in fact, the best way to contribute to the anarchist cause! Or so, at least, is the banker’s argument.
At first, one may suspect that Pessoa’s anarchist banker is not honest. We could rightly infer from his choice of occupation that he has relinquished the ideals of his youth and that his anarchist talk is just that: mere talk. But another interpretation is possible: what if the anarchist banker is in fact honest? And what if his way of life is, in fact, the best way to contribute to anarchism, because the money he generates through his banking activities allows him to support the anarchist cause more effectively than most other anarchists? Isn’t he simply a sort of effective altruist? For, like effective altruists, he has considered the evidence and applied reason to work out the most effective ways to improve the world (i.e. by becoming a banker), though he may never have heard about act-utilitarianism.
In this post, Steve Cooke, (University of Leicester) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the experience of wonder as a route towards justice for nonhuman animals.
Every year, more than 90 billion land animals are killed for food. Most are raised in factory farms. Campaigns for animal rights often rely upon shocking images of their suffering to gain attention and drive change. Whilst this often succeeds, it can also be counter-productive and drive people away. Being confronted by the harms we cause is uncomfortable. Rather than change behaviour, many people instead try to escape feelings of shame, disgust, horror, and sadness. They do this through rationalisation and carefully avoiding evidence. Hence, there’s a need for other strategies, ones that make use of more pleasant emotions. The feeling of wonder is just such an emotion. Cultivating wonder at nonhuman animals has the potential to change how they are treated.
Wonder is an emotion we feel when confronted by the mysterious and magical and we often feel it when confronted by things we don’t fully understand. When we encounter something wonderous, our attention is grabbed and we begin to search for meaning and understanding. For this reason, wonder has been considered an important emotion many philosophers. One important feature of it is that things we feel wonderment at cannot easily be ignored. Because wondrous things press us to find meaning and significance, wonder can also cause an ethical re-evaluation. Not only that, but wonder is by nature a positive attitude. When we experience wonder towards something, we attend to it closely and regard it as especially valuable.
These features of wonder make it a useful emotion to for animal activists to encourage. One change is difficult is because animal lives have been made banal. For example, animals are frequently conceived merely as products and described in ways that remove individuality. Modern animal agriculture is directed at sameness, routine, and predictability. It treats animals as replaceable units of production. Mass killing is made routine and thus uninteresting. Finding wonder in the lives of individual animals acts as a counter to these processes of disenchantment.
For as long as it has been possible, the mass slaughter of nonhuman animals has been moved away from the public’s gaze. Studies have shown that the more visible the lives of animals are, the more legal protections they receive. As a result, the meat industry works hard to conceal and sanitise what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. In response, animal activists use what is known as ‘the politics of sight’. This form of activism involves drawing attention to harm in order to stimulate compassion. But, because it makes people feel bad, it needs them to be willing to experience and attend to that discomfort. Many are not. Here, wonder can function to draw attention without provoking discomfort. Wonder can replace compassion or cause people to value animals enough to take on its emotional burden.
Radically changing how animals are treated, such as by ending factory farming, requires paying much more attention to animal suffering. Before they can be granted rights, animals need to be seen as unique and valuable individuals. Rational arguments, no matter how sound, often fail if made without heed to moral psychology. Hence, achieving moral progress requires us to also think about how we experience encounters with other beings. Documentaries like My Octopus Teacher have probably helped campaigns against octopus farming more than any rational argument. Those working towards justice for nonhuman animals should therefore consider how to harness emotions like wonder to support their objectives.
Steve Cooke works on animal rights and the ethics of activism. He is primarily interested theories of justice for animals, moral progress, and duties in non-ideal circumstances.
In this post, Vincent Chiao, discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on how to understand the “mass” part of “mass incarceration.”
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. On a per capita basis, the United States incarcerates at a higher rate than any other democracy, with the possible exception of El Salvador. Yet at the same time, a disturbingly large share of crime is never reported much less punished. This raises the simple question: how do we know when a penal system incarcerates too many people? Even as “mass incarceration” has become a staple of both academic research and political discourse over the last decade, and even as renewed attention has been paid to glaring racial disparities, the question of scale – how much is too much – has remained surprisingly elusive.
It is true that people tend to be incarcerated for longer in the United States than in other parts of the world, but that alone does not show that the United States incarcerates “too many” people. In part, this is because punishments of varying degrees of severity might all be in some sense “proportionate,” and in part because the large number of unpunished crimes creates significant headroom in incarceration rates. The United States could incarcerate many more people, and potentially incarcerate them for longer, without violating basic rights against punishing the innocent or disproportionate punishment of the guilty.
Otherwise put: incarceration rates tend to be driven more by policy than by crime. What makes this into a philosophical problem is principled disagreement about what we are trying to do when we punish people for committing crimes. Crime prevention? Reparation? Symbolic vindication? Rehabilitation? Something else? We tend to be more confident that criminals should be punished than we are as to why they should be punished. But that makes it difficult to say if what we are getting is too much, too little, or just about right.
What about crime prevention?
Crime prevention is the most common, and most popular, answer to “why do we punish criminals?” But it is easy to see why one might hesitate. “Is incarceration an efficient way of preventing crime?” quickly leads to comparing the interests of the innocent in not being victimized against the interests of the guilty in not being imprisoned. Not only is that a hard question to answer objectively, but it also involves intrusive value judgments that liberals have reason to eschew. Telling people that their safety isn’t “worth the cost” can easily sound condescending, particularly when the costs mostly fall on those who choose to break the law.
Three conceptions of excess
This presents a difficult, though not insurmountable, challenge. For starters, we could define excess incarceration in strictly Paretian terms: can we release people from jails and prisons without increasing crime? Since this approach makes some people better off without making anyone worse off, it does not require trading off different people’s interests.
Alternatively, we could consider whether alternative modes of preventing crime could substitute for incarceration, again holding crime constant. By holding crime constant, we would only be asking whether there are ways of controlling crime that have a less malign impact on people’s lives than prisons. This too does not involve weighing competing interests.
The main limitation of these approaches is that they take existing levels of criminal victimization as sacrosanct. As a result, a quite substantial degree of incarceration could potentially be justified if it prevented trivial increases in crime. That might lead us to seek a more demanding conception of excess. That will, however, require weighing competing interests – those of potential victims in not having their rights violated and those of potential prisoners in not being incarcerated. As noted, this can easily come across as condescending, and worse, as involving intrusive judgments of worth.
That said, it’s worth noting that very few people are absolutists about crime. Most of us regularly make practical trade-offs between convenience and safety, for instance, which routes we will walk, where to lock our bikes, whether to install a security system. These mundane decisions – along with jury awards, tangible costs, and survey data – reveal how people subjectively value safety versus other goods.
Such information would, of course, need to be carefully considered to control for morally salient biases. Nonetheless, the broader point is that a utilitarian conception of excess is not committed to paternalistically evaluating whether people are wrong to fear crime as much as they do. Its theory of value can be constructed from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. Doing so can help mitigate concerns about condescending or intrusive value judgments.
So what?
Mass incarceration is unjust. This is in part because the burdens of incarceration are unfairly distributed, but it is also in part because those burdens are excessive in absolute terms. The moral critique of mass incarceration thus depends on an analytical metric—a theory of what it is to incarcerate too many people. The metric we choose will tell us what it means to truly bring the era of mass incarceration to an end.
Vincent Chiao’s research interests are in public law, with a particular focus on the philosophy of criminal law. He is the author of Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (OUP 2018). Themes in his work include the place of law in formal and informal social orders, punishment and the evolution of cooperation, and the rule of law as a social technology.
Some people center their life on work. They identify with their job and derive most of their life’s meaning from it. The writer Derek Thompson coined the term ‘workism’ to describe this phenomenon. Other people center their life on family (think of a stay-at-home parent who finds raising children deeply meaningful), a hobby, or something else entirely. Finally, some people don’t center their life on any single thing. Instead, they try to live a well-rounded life, drawing meaning and identity from a plurality of sources.
Are each of these lifestyles reasonable ways to live a life, or are some of them mistakes that lead to less fulfilling lives? In recent years, workism has come under fire and been dismissed as an especially poor life choice. In my article ‘What is wrong with workism?’ I challenge that view and defend workism as a viable way to live a good life. In case you are wondering, I am not a workist myself—I find meaning from a plurality of sources. Still, from a philosophical perspective, I don’t see what’s wrong with some people choosing to center their lives on work.
The human desire to enhance our cognitive abilities, to push the boundaries of intelligence through education, tools, and technology has a long history. Fifteen years ago, confronted by the possibility that a ‘morally corrupt’ minority could misuse cognitive gains to catastrophic effect, Persson and Savulescu proposed that research into cognitive enhancement should be halted unless accompanied by advancements in moral enhancement.
In response to this, and following on from Harris’ worries about the mass suffering that could result from delaying cognitive enhancement until moral enhancement could catch up, in 2023, Gordon and Ragonese offered what they termed a ‘practical approach’ to cognitive enhancement research in which they advocated for targeted cognitive enhancement —specifically for researchers working on moral enhancement.
Our recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy suggests that while both sets of authors are correct in their concerns about the significant risks related to cognitive enhancement outrunning moral enhancement, their focus on the ‘extremes’ neglects some more practical consequences that a general acceptance of cognitive enhancement may bring — not least of which relate to the academic project itself.
The popularity of AI girlfriend apps is growing. Unlike multi-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, companion chatbots are designed to build relationships. They respond to social, emotional or erotic needs of their users. Numerous studies indicate that humans are capable of forming emotional relationships with AI, partly due to our tendency to anthropomorphize it.
The debate on the ethical aspects of human-AI emotional relations is multi-threaded. In my recent article, I focus only on one topic: the problem of self-deception. I want to explore whether there is anything wrong with allowing oneself to feel liked by a chatbot.
St. Sophia’s Catherdral, Kyiv, November 2023. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland
This is a guest post by Professor George Pattison (University of Glasgow), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
Nine months after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in which he argued that although Western leaders always claim to be the champions of freedom, Western liberalism was now engaged in the complete suppression of anything that contradicted its view of what was socially and culturally desirable. As he told his audience, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky prophetically foretold all this back in the 19th century”. Specifically, Putin cites Shigalev, one of the nihilistic conspirators in The Possessed (or Demons). Shigalev is a gloomy theorist who realizes that his plans for unlimited freedom will result in unlimited despotism. “This,” says Putin, “is what our Western opponents have come to”. Specifically, he applies Shigalev’s remark to the so-called “cancel culture” of the West, comparing it to Nazi book-burning and contrasting it with the fact that, even during the Cold War, American and Soviet leaders maintained a respect for each other’s cultural achievements (indeed, I remember posters outside one of our local venues advertising the Red Army choir and dancers). Probably referring to the cancellation of a course on Dostoevsky at Milan-Bicocca University days after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin told his listeners that even Dostoevsky is now cancelled in the West—ignoring the fact that the course was swiftly reinstated following a public outcry.
This blog explores issues of justice, morality, and ethics in all areas of public, political, social, economic, and personal life. It is run by a cooperative of political theorists and philosophers and in collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
