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Category: Rights

Democracy / Distribution / Duties / Education / General / Governance / Rights / Social justice / Work

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On Using Affirmative Action as a Tiebreaker

In this post, Shalom Chalson (National University of Singapore) and James Bernard Willoughby (Australian National University) discuss their article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on using affirmative action to break ties in competence between candidates for a job or university place.

Affirmative Action is consistent with merit-based selection practices. This is what we argue in our paper, “Using Affirmative Action as a Tiebreaker”, forthcoming at the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

This consistency is surprising. The idea that affirmative action is opposed to selecting the most competent candidates is a powerful motive to reject such policies. For example, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that race-conscious affirmative action policies were unconstitutional, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion:

Meritocratic systems, with objective grading scales…have always been a great equalizer—offering a metric for achievement that bigotry could not alter. Racial preferences take away this benefit, eliminating the very metric by which those who have the most to prove can clearly demonstrate their accomplishments—both to themselves and to others.

The thought here is that affirmative action—such as in the form of race-conscious selection practices—removes opportunity for the marginalised to succeed by proving their competence. So affirmative action is, supposedly, inconsistent with meritocracy.

We disagree. There is at least one way that you can implement an affirmative action policy with no expected loss in competence. How? By using affirmative action as a tiebreaker.

First, identify all the people that, for all you can tell, are as competent as each other and more competent than everyone else. What you now face is a tie in competence. Second, apply affirmative action, say by preferring people from historically marginalised groups among the equally competent, to break the tie. Following these steps should not compromise competence.

What about those ‘objective grading scales’? If you are truly selecting for competence, then you might think that the scales are all that matter. But the fact is that our measures of competence don’t always measure actual competence. The same grades do not mean that two students are equally competent. All you can do in a meritocracy is identity the people you expect to be most competent.

Let’s think through an example. Suppose a newly admitted university student’s job is to get good grades in their first year. Now, suppose you know two things about each prospective student: their high school grades and their financial background (whether their family’s income is higher or lower than the average). How would you select the most competent candidate?

In suggesting that grading scales do all the work, Justice Thomas implied an answer: select the students with the best grades and ignore any other information. But this would not pick out the students who are most likely to get the best first year university grades.

According to George Messinis and Peter Sheehan (2015), when comparing students in Australia with roughly the same high school grades, the students from poorer backgrounds get better first year grades than students from richer backgrounds. So, if you preferred a poorer student whose grades were just a little behind the richer student, you would in fact select a student likely to get better first year grades. This is an affirmative action policy that is not only consistent with meritocracy but improves on a policy that focuses only on objective grading scales.

Above, we pretend that all a student must do is get good grades. This makes sense of using high school grades as a metric for competence. In reality, students also must gain the skills necessary for future employment. High school grades are much less likely to matter when assessing future competence.

As we get a more realistic understanding of what we are selecting for, it becomes more doubtful that our selection practices model a perfectly functioning meritocracy. In the actual world, we don’t always select the most competent people. In fact, sometimes the metrics that we use aren’t about competence at all.

In a 2009 article about the United States Space Program, Marie Lathers discusses the requirements for joining the first astronaut program in 1958. Candidates had to both be jet test-pilots and have a bachelor’s degree. However, no woman could be a jet test-pilot at the time. So no women qualified. Of the seven men chosen, two did not have bachelor’s degrees (but were taken to have ‘equivalent experience’). However, the requirement that candidates be jet test-pilots was unrelated to competence in flight. Lathers writes:

Although the first draft of the call for astronauts did not set the requirement of jet test-pilot experience, the final version did, following President Eisenhower’s opinion that those with security clearances who could be called to Washington at any time—that is, military personnel—would be NASA’s most efficient pool.

These metrics ruled women out. Nonetheless, when the same metrics ruled out some good male candidates, the metrics were applied more flexibly. After all, some people can have the required knowledge for a job without having a degree. But some women can be excellent astronauts, despite not being jet test-pilots.

The metrics used to assess competence can be a result of tradition, epistemic mistake, or a direct order from a superior without appropriate justification. Our current selection practices are likely replete with errors. We argue that because of these errors, policies informed by a realistic understanding of our epistemic limitations, and that use affirmative action to break the ties in competence we are likely to encounter, can be implemented without cost in competence. 

To be sure, there are many ways to object to our proposal. One might think that employing affirmative action over a lottery in the event of a tie is simply unfair. One might worry that affirmative action harms those it is designed to help, such as by bolstering stigma. And one might question whether selectors ought to prioritise competence at all. We address objections like these in our paper.

There is a common belief that affirmative action is incompatible with meritocracy. However, we don’t live in a perfect meritocracy. Affirmative action policies can be just as good as current practices for selecting competent candidates, if not better. They can do so while making our society overall more equal, more just, and a better place to live.

Shalom Chalson is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. She works on philosophical issues to do with wrongful discrimination.

James Bernard Willoughby specialises in epistemology, and in particular, on epistemic instrumentalism. However, he is currently working on a range of experimental projects: counterfactuals and retraction; what makes people judge a belief as more or less justified; and assessing legal compliance of AI.

Animals / Rights / Social justice

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Relational equality and the status of animals

a photograph showing three calves, a dog and a monkey resting in the shade in an Indian street
Dogs, calves and a monkey photographed in a city in India. Image by Simon from Pixabay

This is a guest post by Pablo Magaña and Devon Cass

Three challenges

Relational egalitarians believe we should eradicate certain inequalities of rank and status, such those based on gender, race, or caste. Almost without exception, these concerns are focused on humans (typically adult and able-minded). But it is worth noticing that nonhuman animals have also held, across time and space, drastically different statuses. Some have been treated as divinities to be revered, many more as plagues to be eradicated, and even a few as war enemies—as in Australia’s failed campaign against Emus. One might wonder then: can we apply the ideal of relational equality—or, more generally, a relational approach to justice—to our relationships with the other animals? This is a question few have addressed. (Two commendable exceptions are Andreas Bengtson’s “Animals and relational egalitarianism(s)”, and, with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Relational egalitarianism and moral unequals”)

Well, that’s unsurprising, or so one may think. For the extension of relational egalitarianism to animals seems to stumble, at first glance, upon three significant obstacles. First, relational equality requires that we treat one another as equals, a kind of reciprocity to which animals cannot correspond (the absence of social relations problem). Second, even if humans and animals are socially unequal, it’s not clear why this would be objectionable. After all, animals do not seem to possess a sense of self-worth that could be damaged when treated as inferiors (the absence of understanding problem). Third, relational equality seems dependent or grounded on moral equality. But, many argue, humans and animals are not moral equals (the absence of moral equality problem).

In a recent paper in Philosophical Studies, we argue that this pessimism is premature. To answer the above problems, one may call into question their empirical assumptions. Perhaps, one could suggest, maybe some animals do possess a sense of self-worth that can be damaged when treated as inferiors. In our article, we pursue a different strategy: whatever the truth of the empirical assumptions, the three problems rest on a controversial (and, we suggest, mistaken) understanding of the demands of relational equality—or, more generally, relational justice.

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Animals / General / Rights / Social justice

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Is it Wrong to Make Animals Work for Us?

Husky ride in Lapland / Photo by Ugur Arpaci on Unsplash

In debates about the ethical dimensions of using nonhuman animal labour, people increasingly argue that some forms of labour are compatible with animals’ interests, including their interests in freedom. The reason for this is that animals can choose to cooperate with us and choose to work for us. These choices manifest themselves in the animals’ informed enthusiasm for the activity, and this affirmation is considered especially significant when the animal has meaningful opportunities for dissent but chooses not to take them up. Under such circumstances, some suggest that we can interpret the animal’s wilful engagement as a form of consent. Examples of the kinds of jobs that animals might consent to – compatible with their basic interests, like not being harmed – are some forms of human therapy, conservation work, sporting activities, and non-invasive research.

I disagree. I have argued elsewhere that an animal’s willingness to engage in discrete activities and interactions within a role is not sufficient to show that they consent to the role itself. Here I want to try out a different argument: the fundamental problem with making animals work for us is that it typically involves us usurping their purposive will and harnessing their bodily powers to achieve human-given ends.

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Children / Duties / Gender / General / Health / Rights

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Pregnancy is not caregiving

In this post, Christie Hartley (Georgia State University) and Ashley Lindsley-Kim (University of British Columbia) discuss their recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy  in which they argue against the claim that the feminist commitment that all persons are owed care could obligate pregnant persons to gestate unwanted fetuses.

Photo Credit: Tima Miroshnichenko, available at https://www.pexels.com/]

Is pregnancy a kind of caregiving? This might seem initially plausible since it is through pregnancy that essential fetal needs are met. Furthermore, at least in some societies, it is commonly thought that pregnancy is a labor of love or that continuing a pregnancy is a way of caring for another. Yet, it is a mistake to think of pregnancy in this way, that is, as a kind of caregiving. Understanding why is crucial for thinking well about the ethics and politics of abortion.

Let’s start with caregiving, which involves providing material or emotional care for another or oneself. Examples of the former include feeding, bathing, or dressing someone; examples of the latter include comforting or simply listening to another. Both types of caregiving are social practices and, as such, involve patterns of behavior that are part of a society or a group’s culture and that emerge or follow from a society or a group’s values and beliefs. Pregnancy, by contrast, is not a social practice. It’s a progressive biological condition characterized by numerous nonvoluntary changes in a female’s body. Some of these changes help maintain and support fetal development; others prepare the body for birthing and breastfeeding. While essential fetal needs (e.g., the fetus’s need for oxygen, nutrients, waste disposal) are met through pregnancy, these needs are not met through social practices.

This is not to deny that cultures have values and beliefs about pregnancy that result in social practices related to pregnancy or that pregnancy is implicated in our social lives. Regarding social practices, pregnant persons often engage in self-care for their pregnancy by, for example, consuming extra calories, or they engage in practices related to supporting fetal development by taking prenatal vitamins or avoiding certain foods. Many pregnant persons also develop a social relationship with their fetus during gestation and express a caring attitude towards their fetus. All these things influence how pregnant persons think about and respond to their pregnancy.

Yet, we should not conflate pregnancy with caregiving. Consider some important differences. Intentionally ceasing material caregiving does not involve some kind of physical intervention, such as surgery or medical care. And, for those who engage in material caregiving, when they are meeting their own needs – by eating, taking medication, etc. – they are not necessarily affecting others (at least, when they are not pregnant). These differences have to do with the fact that material caregiving lacks the distinctive kind of physical intertwinement and entanglement that characterizes pregnancy. Indeed, as the fetus comes into existence, it is necessarily integrated with the pregnant person. From the beginning of a pregnancy, when a fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall, the fetus’s internal entanglement is established. Continued development requires considerable integration with the pregnant person, in addition to the physical expansion of the pregnant person’s body.

Indeed, this kind of considerable physical intimacy is necessary for fetal development, and it is different from other types of intimacy in two important ways. First, this kind of invasive relation poses especially significant risks to a pregnant person’s health and wellbeing. A pregnant body undergoes physiological and anatomical changes – such as weight gain, fluid retention, ligament laxity, hormonal changes, and compression of soft tissues and nerves – which can be painful and debilitating. Additionally, a pregnancy person’s cardiac output increases, putting stress on the heart and putting them at persistent higher risks for cardiovascular disease and premature death for the rest of their lives. Second, physically invasive intimacy fundamentally concerns bodily integrity, and persons have a morally weighty interest in its protection. We are our bodies in an important sense, and pregnancy changes how a person’s body functions, how a person’s internal systems operate, and how a person is internally organized. Moreover, successfully carrying a fetus to term requires birthing, whether a birth is vaginal or cesarean. This is a physically traumatic end to a fetus’s invasive physical integration with a gestating person and, all by itself, raises concerns about forced pregnancy given the importance of bodily integrity.

Comparing pregnancy and material caregiving leads us to ignore the distinctive ways in which a person’s bodily integrity is at stake in pregnancy and not in caregiving. Of course, we certainly do not intend to minimize the demandingness of caregiving or its costs. We hold caregiving to be socially necessary, valuable work that can be demanding and costly and that we have a shared, moral obligation to provide. Yet, analogizing pregnancy to material caregiving suggests that pregnant persons have far more agency over what occurs in the progressive condition of pregnancy than they do. Further, considering pregnancy as a form of caregiving suggests that pregnant persons may have a moral obligation to gestate. This perpetuates the pernicious view that those who can gestate must use their bodies in the sexual and reproductive service of others. This threatens to naturalize sex-based caregiving.

In today’s political climate, thinking of pregnancy as a kind of caregiving is especially dangerous. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) and held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. At this time, 12 U.S. states have almost completely banned the practice, and Florida, Iowa, Georgia, and South Carolina have banned abortion at about 6 weeks. Other states have taken measures to protect the practice and make it more accessible. In states with restrictive abortion bans, pregnant persons are legally required to gestate and, then, legally required to birth. This forces pregnant persons – overwhelmingly women – to be in the forced service of the state. Given the importance of caregiving duties, the suggestion that pregnancy is a form of caregiving provides support for such sexual servitude.  

Economics / General / Liberty / Rights

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ARE NUDGES FAILING VULNERABLE POPULATIONS?

In this post, Viviana Ponce de León Solís discusses her article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on  how nudging interventions can have uneven effects on low-income individuals, potentially worsening inequalities.

Image by Reinhard Dietrich from Wikimedia Commons

Nudges can be powerful tools for influencing behavior, but their impact on vulnerable populations—especially low-socioeconomic status groups (SES)—remains a topic of debate. Research reveals three possible outcomes: these groups may respond more strongly, less strongly, or similarly to nudges compared to the general population. While the type of nudge—cognitive, affective, or behavioral—matters, the real key to success lies in the intervention’s design and its ability to address the unique barriers faced by the target audience. Without careful consideration, “one-size-fits-all” nudges risk deepening inequalities or stigmatizing vulnerable communities.

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Academia / General / Migration / Rights / Social justice

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Limits of language promotion

This post is written by Dr. Seunghyun Song (Assistant professor, Tilburg University). Based on her research on linguistic justice, she provides a tentative answer to the issue of the limits of the linguistic territoriality principle and its aim to protect languages. She uses the Dutch case as a proxy for these discussions.

Image by woodleywonderworks from Flickr (Creative Commons)

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Migration / Punishment / Rights / Social justice

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Mass Deportation and Migrant Crime

A photograph of a Trump rally during the 2024 US Presidential Election campaign. Trump is visible in the front, and behind him are several rows of fans, some holding signs including "Latinos for Trump" and !Make America Great Again" signs.
President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a “Make America Great Again” campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Goodyear, Arizona. (c) Gage Skidmore

This is a guest post by Mario J Cunningham M.

“Mass deportation now!” was the omnipresent motto of banners at the 2024 Trump rallies – replacing the “Build the wall!” of 2016. The re-election of Donald Trump, who openly ran on a mass deportation platform, represents a hard blow for all those concerned about migration justice. The hardening of anti-immigrant rhetoric is now understood as a mandate in the most prominent Western liberal democracy. How should we make sense of this? Paying attention to how this policy was marketed and the role “migrant crime” played in its success sheds light on an often-overlooked normative challenge migrant advocates need to come to terms with.

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Duties / International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Against the Odds: Defending Defensive Wars

A photograph of an apartment building damaged by bomb impacts. In the foreground, a child's climbing frame is visible.
Saltivka, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland

This is a guest post by Professor Gerald Lang (University of Leeds), 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.

Peace is better than war. It takes two to fight. These are truisms: they’re true, but so obvious that they’re not usually worth stating. But they swiftly generate conundrums in the ethics of war in general, and the Ukraine conflict in particular. We can learn something, in my view, from thinking about these conundrums. But we may need to tackle the understandable concern that it’s unhelpfulto explore them at a time when energy and attention levels are flagging in the international community, even though Ukraine remains under attack from Russia and arguably requires all the support, moral and otherwise, that it can get. In some circumstances, indulging in more theoretical speculations—the kind of speculative and hypothetical thinking that forms the daily diet of philosophers of war—may come across as being objectionably detached, or perhaps as just another way of being a useful idiot. These worries deserve careful consideration, not hasty dismissal. If there’s to be a place for serious philosophizing about war, it needs to be reconciled with the more engaged concerns of those who care deeply about the Ukraine war but lack specifically philosophical concerns about it.

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International / Reflections on Ukraine / Rights / War

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Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War

A photograph of male and female Ukrainian soldiers standing in a line.
Ceremony on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Photo: President of Ukraine, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain

This is a guest post by Professor Jeff McMahan (Oxford University), 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.

There are three wars currently in progress in Ukraine: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian war against Ukraine, and the Ukrainian war against Russia. It is necessary for the purpose of evaluation to make these distinctions, for the first of these wars is, like the Second World War (understood as a war between allied and axis powers), neither just nor unjust. Only a war fought by one or more belligerents against an opponent can be just or unjust. Many or most of what we refer to as wars consist of a just war on one side and an unjust war on the other – or, to be more precise, a war with predominantly just aims on one side and a war with predominantly unjust aims on the other.

There is no credible understanding of a just war according to which the Russian war against Ukraine is a just war. It is a wholly unprovoked war of aggression intended by those who initiated it – primarily Putin – to conquer Ukraine, annex its territory, and assimilate its population. The motives of the war’s planners are doubtless many and various but some stand out as obvious and dominant. One is to expand the Russian empire until it is at least coextensive with its earlier boundaries under the tsars and the post-revolutionary Soviet dictators. Another motivation echoes the American concern about “falling dominoes” as a reason for invading Vietnam. Many of the states that were ruled by Soviet puppet regimes during the Cold War have, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, been adopting more and more elements of Western culture, in particular liberalism and democracy. Ukraine was a falling domino that threatened to become a fully independent, economically flourishing democracy in a large border territory that Russia had repeatedly ravaged in the past – a state that would be an example, highly visible to Russians, of an appealing alternative to Putin’s tyrannical kleptocracy.

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Animals / Duties / General / Rights

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Free as a Bird?

We often use visual representations and metaphors involving animals to represent human freedom. Consider, for instance, “It’s time to spread to your wings”, “I couldn’t persuade her to do otherwise. It was like trying to hold back wild horses”, “She’s a bit of a lone wolf”, “A lion does not concern himself with the opinion of sheep”. Conversely, the caged animal often serves as a symbol of human suffering, imprisonment, and oppression.

Yet many philosophers do not think animals have a genuine interest in freedom. For these thinkers, freedom only matters for nonhuman animals insofar as it contributes to their welfare. On such a view, there is nothing wrong with enslaving – if it can be called that – a nonhuman animal provided we can keep them healthy and happy. By contrast, enslaving a human is never acceptable, no matter how happy you can make them. This is because humans (and perhaps a few of the so-called higher animals) have a unique noninstrumental interest in freedom, which means that freedom matters for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else.

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