Category: Rights

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.  

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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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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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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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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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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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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Why is the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness morally important?

Last week was a milestone for animals. Prominent scientists, philosophers and policy experts came together to sign the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a statement detailing a consensus that mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, cephalopods (like octopuses), crustaceans (like crabs) and even insects most probably have subjective experiences, known as “sentience”.

This may not come as a surprise to many of us, but academic research is often characterised by disagreement. A public announcement of consensus is not only profoundly unusual, it also brings into view just how substantial the evidence is that many more animals have conscious experiences than we often assume.

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Why we need alternative voting methods

Don’t you find it highly frustrating when you want to vote for a person or party you like but you can’t really do it because you know that the person or party has a very low chance of being elected or being part of a coalition government? You may think it’s frustrating yet unavoidable. After all, isn’t it part of what making a choice means to sacrifice some attractive options? Well, no, or so I argue in a recently published article. We have a right to voting methods that allow for a more honest and complex expression of our preferences, that do not force us to sacrifice the expression of our genuine preferences. And the good news is that appealing alternative voting methods exist.

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Invisible discrimination: the double role of implicit bias

In this post, Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (Stockholm University & Institute for Futures Studies) discusses her recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (co-authored by Nicolas Olsson Yaouzis) exploring the roles that implicit bias and social norms play in discriminating hiring practices.


The US, like many other countries, is marked by pervasive racial inequalities, not least in the job market. Yet many US Americans, when asked directly, uphold egalitarian “colour-blind” norms: one’s race shouldn’t matter for one’s chances to get hired. Sure enough, there is substantial disagreement about whether it (still) does matter, but most agree that it shouldn’t. Given such egalitarian attitudes, one would expect there to be very little hiring discrimination. The puzzle is how then to explain the racial inequalities in hiring outcomes.

A second puzzle is the frequent occurrence of complaints about “reverse discrimination” in contexts such as the US. “You only got the job because you’re black” is a reaction familiar to many who do get a prestigious job while being black, as it were. Why are people so suspicious when racial minorities are hired?

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