What’s the point of teaching moral and political philosophy?
Ancient philosophers around the world would have thought the answer to this question was blindingly obvious: the point is to make students better – better as citizens, rulers, or just as human beings.
Yet today I suspect very few academics would defend this position, and most would find the idea of inculcating virtue among their students to be silly at best, dangerous at worst.
I think the ancients were right on this one. We should educate our students to make them better moral and political agents. And I don’t think this has to be scarily illiberal at all – at least, that’s what I’m going to argue here.
The model of ethical discourse my students seem to be learning in secondary school
Of course, history is important, but it is not decisive. As we are not slaves to the current conditions, we are not slaves to our history. We are not really defined by what was said. We are creators of ourselves. I think it is in the dialogue, in thinking and in the exchange of thoughts that we can decide what we want to be, what is really important to us. And that is the moment where philosophical thinking becomes not just a matter of academia but a matter of public strength.
This is the latest interview in the Beyond the Ivory Tower series and part of our series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. Costanza Porro spoke with Professor Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy and her experience of teaching in wartime Ukraine. Bila is the director of the philosophy department at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She holds degrees from Ukrainian Catholic University and a PhD from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research interests include the philosophical legacy of Michel Foucault, ethics and global political theory, the ethics of memory, as well as Christian theology in a postmodern context. Together with Joshua Duclos, she wrote an essay on teaching philosophy, originally published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica dedicated to the war in Ukraine, which we published in an edited form as part of our ongoing series on the Russia-Ukraine War.
I am currently designing an undergraduate course on ‘contemporary non-western political theory’, a task fraught with difficulties. Ever since I moved to Europe for my postgraduate studies, I have felt a certain discomfort with the ethnocentrism in analytical political theory departments here, that is at once apparent and not-so-apparent. Apparent, because 99% of the authors I read in a ‘global’ justice course or the scholars I meet at ‘international’ conferences turn out to be people who grew up and trained in the ‘west’. Not-so-apparent because the content of the research taught and produced by these scholars is often genuinely universal. Questions such as ‘what justifies democracy’ or ‘is equality inherently valuable’ or ‘what grounds human rights’ can and often do have answers that transcend cultural particularities. That is, in fact, what attracted me to analytical political theory in the first place – it’s concern with some basic, normative issues that presumably affect all human societies.
On Tuesday, November 5, citizens of the United States will vote for who they want to serve as their president for the next four years. They will also vote for federal congressional representatives as well as a host of other state and local government officials.
U.S. political campaigns—especially presidential campaigns—are exhausting. This is in part because they are much longer and more expensive than the political campaigns in many other nations.
At least part of the reason that so many Americans believe this patent falsehood is because Trump and his allies have told this lie repeatedly. However, it seems that Trump and his allies don’t really believe it because they have been unwilling to make these same claims in court or in other contexts in which they could face legal sanctions for lying.
In the United States, freedom of speech protects one’s right to lie on the campaign trail but not in the courtroom. In the latter context, liars can be convicted of perjury.
This helps explain the truth-revealing power of courts. The best explanation for why Trump and his co-conspirators refuse to make these false claims about the 2020 election in court where they realize that lying can have significant legal consequences is that they know they are lying.
If significant legal consequences for lying are enough to stop Trump and his co-conspirators from lying in court, one might naturally conclude that the best course of action might be to create similarly significant legal consequences for lying as part of political campaigning. This is a reasonable thought, but it’s not that simple—at least not in the United States. This is because such a course of action conflicts with contemporary social and legal understandings of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech.
Soldier with Javelin, Odesa, July 2022. Photograph by Aaron James Wendland
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series and the first post of a new series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. For this interview, Diana Popescu-Sarry spoke to Professor Aaron James Wendland. Aaron is currently a Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London and Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of Public Philosophy at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Aaron has spent considerable time in Kyiv and has published in Ukraine World and The Kyiv Independent, where he is currently the Head of Ideas. In March 2023 Aaron organised a benefit conference for the Ukraine academy, the proceedings of which were published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica last month – featuring an interview by Aaron with Margaret Atwood as well as essays by Timothy Snyder, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Orysya Bila, Joshua Duclos, Jeff McMahan, and Jo Wolff to name but a few. Over the course of the next few weeks, Justice Everywhere will feature these contributions, as well as an interview with Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine.
Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2024-25 season!
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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing in September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series (published on Thursdays). If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.
Not only are there more democratic and egalitarian alternatives theoretically, but also policies being pursued successfully at the city and the regional level, in many places, that do give people a sense of control in the economic sphere. It’s not just wishful and abstract thinking; there is abundant proof of concept. We have to remain hopeful; we have to shine a light on those examples and talk about why they represent elements of a different kind of settlement, a more justifiable and more human political and economic system, that we ought to strive to see realized more widely and more deeply.
(This interview took place at Alma Café, a beautiful family-owned café in York, England)
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Davide Pala and Dorothea Gädeke, revolving around Gädeke’s research project “Theorising Freedom From Below”. Dr. Dorothea Gädeke is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University. She joined Utrecht University in 2018. Before that, she taught at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany, and at TU Darmstadt, Germany and spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and at Princeton University, USA. Her research is motivated by the urge to understand and address current social and political challenges. It is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, social philosophy and legal and constitutional theory. She specialises in domination and structural injustices and analyse how they are connected to practices of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. She is particularly interested in transnational relations between the global north and the global south. Currently, she is setting up a new project on agency and resistance against unfreedom.
During the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968, protestors marched through the streets carrying signs bearing the slogan ‘I Am a Man’. Today, protesters march through the streets carrying signs declaring ‘Trans Rights are Human Rights’, while others proclaim ‘No Human is Illegal’. What’s going on here? And more importantly, what explains the rhetorical power of such statements?
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.
