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

Category: Moral values

General / Moral values / Technology

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How AI Companions Influence Who You Take Yourself to Be

In this post, Muriel Leuenberger (University of Zurich) discusses her article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the impact of artificial intelligence on our perceptions of ourselves.

Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved June 16, 2026, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Woman_holding_AI_companion_inside_phone.png&oldid=1210645997.

The image you have of yourself is greatly shaped by other people around you. When someone laughs at your jokes you might consider yourself funny and when others call you stubborn you may come to believe it. Self-conceptions are important to make sense of ourselves, navigate the world, plan our lives, and relate to others. What if the ‘other’ shaping your self-image is not a human being, but an AI? In this post, I’ll talk about the risks and opportunities AI companions pose for our self-conceptions.

AI companions offer ‘friendships’ and ‘romantic partnerships’ on demand. They generate human-like conversations via chat and voice and are usually represented with a humanoid avatar in an app, browser, or a VR setting. These AI friends, partners, and spouses (!) are always there for you yet require no commitment, care, or empathy. They are highly agreeable, non-judgmental, and personalized to your preference. You can even turn them off when you had enough. Ever more people are forming close bonds with their AI companion, particularly when they are lonely. Replika, one of the most popular AI companion apps, surpassed 40 million users in 2025.

How an AI companion influences the self-conception of a user depends on how deeply and in what ways they interact with it and will differ from person to person. But we can derive shared risks and opportunities rooted in common design-features of AI companions, as I argue in an article on AI companions and relational identity.

On the positive side, AI companions can encourage self-reflection. The interactions are one-sidedly focused on the user’s life, needs, and interests (which is unsurprising since the AI has no genuine experiences or needs of its own). Such user-focused exchanges can prompt introspection, much like keeping a diary. It can also be easier to share embarrassing experiences with a non-judgmental AI than with a person. The same is true for topics that are difficult for human listeners, such as shocking or traumatic incidents, or even just mundane and repetitive ones. Such AI-aided self-reflection can help uncover inconsistencies, self-deception, or self-ignorance. The agreeable nature of AI companions in those interactions can also lead to greater self-affirmation and a more confident and positive self-conception.

Another opportunity AI companions offer is identity exploration. In interactions with an AI, you can safely experiment with aspects of yourself you would be uncomfortable expressing in front of others, idealized versions of yourself, role-playing entirely different personas, or even morally transgressive interactions. You can freely explore who you want to be without fear of judgment or harm to others. This kind of identity exploration can foster self-discovery and give expression to parts of your identity that might otherwise remain suppressed or unexplored.

Alongside these opportunities, AI companions also pose risks to users’ self-conceptions. Due to their agreeableness AI companions tend not to respond to abusive, aggressive, or cruel behaviour with appropriate levels of rejection, anger, resistance, or self-defence. As a result, users may not recognize their actions as harmful, think they are tolerable, or even feel affirmed in them. This can lead to a distorted self-image that does not provide a suitable basis for relating to others.

On top of this, the AI companion only has access to what the user chooses to share. It cannot observe the users’ actions or talk with another person about them. This makes AI companions poorly suited to correct self-deception and self-ignorance. In fact, their built-in agreeableness can reinforce the user’s point of view and encourage self-delusion.

A seeming advantage of a relationship with an AI companion is that there is no need to work through rough patches, take risks, become vulnerable, or to see the world from another point of view. But commitment, vulnerability, and overcoming challenges are part of what makes relationships valuable and worthwhile. They render not just the relationship more meaningful but also one’s identity, partly defined by that relationship. If you spend a lot of time on a relationship with an AI companion that lacks depth and meaning, you may lose out on meaningful human connections that can foster personal growth.

Interactions with an AI also require no empathy from the user. If someone gets used to this, it may spill over into their human relationships. This can make it hard to form deep human connections which are important for a sense of self deemed valuable and meaningful.

Relationships with AI companions may seem risk-free, but users become dependent on largely unregulated service providers for their identity, social, and other needs. Your friend or romantic partner is owned and controlled by a third party that can change, restrict, or even shut it down any time. Luka, the company behind Replika, upset many users with updates that changed the chatbot’s ‘personality’, an experience some described as heartbreaking. Human relationships also involve change, loss, and unavailability, but the key difference is that in functional human relationships, both parties are mutually invested. AI relationships are inherently one-sided: the user may develop deep emotional attachment, while neither the AI nor the provider reciprocates. Weak privacy protections leave users further vulnerable to surveillance and external influence.

Finally, people who form close relationship with AI companions often face shame and social stigma. This part of their identity goes unacknowledged or is actively devalued by others. An identity that includes stigmatized or invalidated elements makes it harder to feel at ease with who one is.

Some of the negative influences of AI companions on the users’ self-conception can be mitigated by design-choices, for instance by implementing adjustable levels of agreeableness (I talk more about design recommendations in the paper). The considerations discussed here are a starting point for taking our identity interests into account when designing, regulating, and using AI companions.

The user base of AI companions is likely to grow as large language models improve and social isolation remains widespread. To design and use them responsibly, we need to understand how AI companions shape who we take ourselves to be, and let that understanding inform their design.

Muriel Leuenberger is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich where she works on a project on meaning in life in the digital society. She is particularly interested in issues related to the philosophy and ethics of technology, neuroethics, identity and authenticity, and meaning in life.

Duties / Gender / General / Moral values

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Did I Cheat? Rethinking Emotional Affairs

In this post, Justin Clardy discusses their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on what emotional affairs are and when, if ever, they are wrongful.

PeopleImages / Shutterstock

The reality television series Summer House, recently premiered a spinoff show, In the City, on the popular American television network Bravo. As I found myself doom scrolling suggestions by recommender algorithms on my favorite social media apps (like any “disciplined” academic does), I was struck by the show’s trailer. It featured an emotionally intense conversation between formerly married co-stars Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke, where Cooke accuses Batula of having had an “emotional affair” with West Wilson. What I found interesting wasn’t the representation of an otherwise unremarkable toxic relationship that has become commonplace among dating reality stars per se; but the choice to draw new viewers in by highlighting a lesser known and more conceptually obscure form of infidelity—emotional affairs.

Although cheating accusations are often part of the blueprint for manufacturing a “scandalous” romance, there’s an observed tendency to focus, almost primarily, on sexual infidelity. Though sex is not always present in romantic relationships, many people assume that the presence of sex (and in most cases, sexual exclusivity) differentiate romantic relationships from friendships; and for what it’s worth, sexual affairs are relatively easy to identify. In the City’s trailer, however, seemingly echoed the both importance and legibility of what the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy has called a “growing crisis of infidelity” which suggests many people in romantic relationships tend to accept conditions of some kind of emotional exclusivity as well as sexual exclusivity.

But what are emotional affairs? And are folks wrong for having them?

The challenge these questions pose lies in attempting to differentiate emotional affairs from other emotionally intense connections outside of our romantic relationships such emotionally deep friendships. In other words, it would be odd to classify any emotionally intense connection with folks other than our partners as emotions affairs (even if it is true that many of us might be guilty of having emotional affairs in our friendships more often than we’d care to admit). On the other hand, “falling in love with someone else” seems like too high of a bar for emotional affairs if for no other reason than the fact that the emotional vitality of our relationships might be threatened by emotional connections that stop short of “love”—for example, someone who shares their deepest emotional vulnerabilities with someone that they text throughout the day, confide in, and even fantasize about a possible future together…without being “in love” with them.

In my article “Emotional Affairs,” I suggest that emotional affairs involve three things:

1.) An emotional structure that reflects the primary relationship in relationship-defining ways,

2.) A sustained consideration of a particular kind of relational life with the affair partner, and

3.) They are relevantly opaque to one’s primary relationships—in other words, emotional affairs are not merely marked by emotional intensity, but instead they are marked by what one’s partner(s) cannot meaningfully see, interpret, or respond to.

Therefore, the problem is not intimacy by itself but being shut out of a shared emotional understanding.

Because emotional affairs can be intertwined with guilt, wrong doing, or betrayal, responding defensively to allegations of emotional affairs is not uncommon. However, I think there might be a way to acknowledge the moral salience of these feelings without classifying every emotional affair as wrongful, blameworthy, or censurable. For example, in some cases (e.g., relationships marked by emotional neglect or relationships where severe communication breakdowns are prominent) emotional affairs provide beneficial ways for folks to explore their own needs or even relational possibilities that their primary relationship(s) forecloses or neglects. In other cases, emotional exclusivity doesn’t show up as a defining relational feature such as in some polyamorous or consensually non-monogamous relationships. Accordingly, in my article, I suggest that we should hesitate before applying blanketed evaluations of emotional affairs that fail to consider context, intentions, relational dynamics, and the broader ethical landscape in which emotional intimacy is negotiated.

Conclusion

The public legibility of emotional affair storylines suggests that many folks already recognize the phenomenon, even if we struggle to describe them. Furthermore, perhaps the what emotional affairs reveal to us is that relationship integrity has never only been about sex. Part of what makes emotional affairs unsettling is that they often involve a reorganization of our emotional worlds—they can alter who we turn to for comfort, who occupies our imaginations, and who participates in the ongoing story of our intimate lives. Whether emotional affairs are ultimately wrongful is a question that requires careful ethical deliberation and attention. But before we can determine when emotional affairs are morally problematic, we need a clearer understanding of what they are. My hope is that the conceptual framework offered in “Emotional Affairs” provides a useful starting point for that conversation.

Justin Clardy is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University. Their work focuses on ethical questions that emerge within and around intimate relationships. Justin is also the author of the book, Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous.

Animals / Democracy / General / Governance / Moral values / Rights / Social justice

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When Animals Enter the Demos: Two Problems for Political Inclusion

In this post, David Paaske and Angela Martin discuss their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on two problems of democratic inclusion of animals.

For a long time, debates in animal ethics focused primarily on how humans ought to treat animals. The central questions concerned cruelty, suffering, and welfare: Which practices are permissible? How much harm is too much? More recently, however, philosophers have argued that this focus is too narrow. Animals are not merely passive recipients of human action. They are deeply and systematically affected by political decisions—about land use, agriculture, energy, urban planning, conservation, and climate policy. If justice is concerned with how power is exercised over those whose lives it shapes, then animals seem to fall squarely within its scope.

This thought has motivated what is often called the ‘political turn’ in animal ethics. Rather than asking only how individuals should treat animals, political theorists ask how institutions should be structured to account for animals’ interests. Influential proposals describe animals as citizens, denizens, or members of sovereign communities, and argue that their interests ought to be represented—directly or indirectly—within democratic decision-making. The underlying intuition is simple and compelling: if animals are sentient beings with morally significant interests, and if political decisions profoundly affect those interests, then excluding animals from politics looks like a form of injustice.

In our recent paper, we take this intuition seriously. But we also argue that once animals are genuinely included as political subjects, two fundamental problems arise—problems that have not received sufficient attention in the literature.

Two problems for political inclusion

The first is what we call the Conflict Problem. Political inclusion does not merely require that interests be recognised; it requires that they be adjudicated. Yet the interests of animals often conflict sharply—not only with human interests, but with one another. Predators survive by killing prey. Conservation policies benefit some species at the expense of others. Infrastructure projects may harm local animals while benefiting far larger populations elsewhere.

Consider the case of wind turbines. Large-scale wind energy projects are widely defended on environmental grounds. They reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to mitigating climate change, which in turn benefits humans and animals alike. At the same time, turbines cause significant and foreseeable harm to present animals through habitat destruction, collisions, and noise. If animals are politically included, whose interests should prevail—the many animals harmed now, or the many more who may benefit later? And how should conflicts between animals themselves be resolved?

These are not exceptional cases. Once animals are included in the demos, such conflicts become pervasive. Yet familiar democratic tools—compromise, aggregation, cost–benefit analysis—sit uneasily with stakes involving survival, bodily integrity, and irreversible harm. The Conflict Problem highlights a structural tension between political inclusion and the tragic nature of many interspecies conflicts.

The second challenge is the Numbers Problem. Nonhuman animals vastly outnumber humans. Even conservative estimates suggest that wild animals alone number in the trillions. If political inclusion tracked affectedness, population size, or proportional representation, animals would dominate political decision-making. Human political influence would be radically reduced, and many ordinary human projects—housing developments, transport infrastructure, even public health measures—could be routinely overridden on animal-protective grounds.

Many people find this implication implausible or unacceptable. Yet rejecting it is not straightforward. If animals count morally, why should they not count politically in proportion to their numbers or the extent to which they are affected? The Numbers Problem forces proponents of political inclusion to explain why animals should be included—but not too much.

Why proposed solutions fall short

A range of responses has been proposed to defuse these problems. Some restrict political inclusion to certain categories of animals—such as domesticated animals—while treating wild animals as members of separate sovereign communities. While these strategies may soften the Conflict and Numbers Problems, we argue that they do not resolve them without significant cost. Weighting interests by cognitive capacity risks reintroducing hierarchies that sit uneasily with commitments to equal moral consideration. Restricting inclusion excludes many animals whose interests are undeniably shaped by political decisions. Institutional workarounds can dilute animals’ political power to the point where inclusion becomes largely symbolic.

Alternatively, one might accept the radical implications of political inclusion: that justice really does demand sweeping changes to human institutions, priorities, and resource allocation. This response is coherent—but it requires acknowledging just how disruptive animal-inclusive democracy would be. The political turn, on this reading, is not a modest extension of existing democratic ideals. It is a demand for profound political transformation.

Taking inclusion seriously

Our aim is not to reject the political turn in animal ethics. On the contrary, we believe it has brought essential questions into view. But taking animals seriously as political subjects means taking these problems seriously as well. Political inclusion is not a cost-free moral upgrade. It forces us to confront conflicts that cannot be neatly resolved and numbers that cannot be easily managed.

Justice has a habit of unsettling our institutions. If animals are to be included in the demos, we must decide how much disruption we are willing to accept—and which democratic principles we are prepared to revise in response. The answers to these questions remain open. What is no longer plausible, we suggest, is to assume that political inclusion can be achieved without confronting its most demanding implications.

David Paaske is a PhD student at the Arctic University of Norway. Angela Martin is a lecturer at the University of Fribourg.

Animals / General / Moral values / Social justice

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Why Our Attitudes to Animal Minds Matter for Justice

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.

Geese and goslings staring directly into the camera.
© Matt Perry

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Duties / General / International / Moral values / Rights / Social justice

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We Should Talk About Caste (alongside Gender and Race)

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.

Image Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-friends-laughing-on-a-night-out-32105833/

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 →GenderRaceCaste
1Basis for discrimination / affirmative actionYesYesYes
2Typically ascribed at birthYesYesYes
3Hard(er) to change or disavowYesYesYes
4Genetic basis to ascriptionYesYesNo
5Visibility claim / Marked bodyYesYesNo

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.

Gender / General / Moral values / Social justice

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The Injustice of Not Feeling Wronged

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.

Distribution / Duties / General / Moral values / Social justice

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The Anarchist Banker and the Acceptability of Effective Altruism

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister | 1539 | Massijs, Jan

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.

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Animals / Duties / Education / Environment / General / Health / Moral values

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Using wonder to achieve animal rights

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.

Par Arnaud 25 — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27321151

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.

Economics / General / Governance / Liberty / Moral values / Punishment

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How much is too much? Why defining ‘mass incarceration’ is important – and isn’t as easy as it seems

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.”

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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.

Why defining excess is not as easy as it seems.

It is tempting to think that it is sufficient to point to the sheer scale of incarceration in the United States. Tempting—but wrong. Most crimes in the United States go unpunished, including “core” crimes of interpersonal violence. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, a third of robberies, half of aggravated assaults, and the overwhelming majority of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported, much less punished. Strikingly, one advocacy group estimates that there are approximately 433,000 sexual assaults in the United States every year, and that ‘out of every 1000 sexual assaults, 975 perpetrators will walk free.’ This implies that each year there are approximately 422,000 instances of sexual assault in which no one is held accountable. For context, that is strikingly close to the total number of people admitted to prison in 2021.

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.

Economics / General / Moral values / Work

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What’s so bad about workism?

In this post, Matthew Hammerton (Singapore Management University) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the phenomenon and value of people making work the primary source of meaning in their life.

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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.  

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