This is a guest post by Hollie Meehan (University of Lancaster).
We have been warned by the CEO of AI company Anthropic that up to 50% of entry-level jobs could be taken by AI in the coming years. While reporters have pointed out that this could be exaggeration to drive profits, it raises the question of where AI should fit into society. Answering this is a complicated matter that I believe could benefit from considering virtue ethics. I’ll focus on the entry-level job market to demonstrate how these considerations can play an important role in monitoring our use of AI and mitigating the potential fallout.
Over the last few weeks, I have been marking exams for the economic ethics course I taught this year. The experience has not been particularly joyful. Admittedly, marking rarely is, but it gets worse when one develops a feeling of uselessness and failure, as I experienced on this occasion.
The source of this feeling was the realization of the grip of inegalitarian ideologies on my students. Since most of them were studying business, I should maybe have expected it, but I naïvely hoped that their ethics course might have led them to somewhat question their inegalitarian beliefs. And perhaps it has. It would take a combination of anonymous ex-ante and ex-post opinion surveys to measure it.
Whether it would be ethical to conduct such a survey is an interesting question (your opinions are welcome), but not the one I wanted to discuss in this post. The one I am concerned with is whether it would be acceptable, from an ethics of teaching perspective, to engage more straightforwardly in ideology-critique in my course, in the future.
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.
The Fridays for Future or ‘Climate Strikes’ have been a striking feature of political action on climate change. Most associated with Greta Thunberg, these actions reveal the power of children to intervene effectively in political spaces. In doing so, they raise ethical, political, and sociological questions. In my paper I focus on two: first, whether recognizing children’s right to protest should affect the age thresholds for other activities, especially voting; and second, the impact on the child protesters themselves.
Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk speaking with attendees at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Photography by Gage Skidmore.
This is a guest post by Zsolt Kapelner (University of Oslo).
‘Flooding the zone’ is a term often used to describe the strategy Trump and his team have followed in recent weeks. This strategy involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion. Many have criticized this strategy and, in my view, rightly so. But what precisely is wrong with it? In this short piece I want to argue that ‘flooding the zone’ is not simply one of the, perhaps dirtier, tricks in the toolbox of democratic competition; instead, it is an inherently antidemocratic strategy which deliberately aims at exploiting one of our crucial vulnerabilities as a democratic public, i.e., our limited attentional capacity.
I have argued in previous posts (here and here) that we have good moral reasons to end the practice of keeping pets (for a full defence see here). Pet keeping involves the unjustifiable instrumentalisation of animals, sets back animals’ interests in self-determination, and exposes animals to unnecessary risks of harm. Not to mention the many attendant harms that the practice involves to farmed animals, wild animals and the environment. Given all this, we should seek to transition to a pet-free world.
In this post, I suggest we won’t be able to make progress towards a more just world for animals until we’ve engaged in some honest soul-searching about our desire to keep animals as pets.
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.
This interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The interview has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original interview can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel under the heading: ‘What Good is Philosophy? – A Benefit Conference for Ukraine.’
Contributors to the conference have published their work in an edited volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere has published edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the past few weeks.We now reproduce Aaron’s interview with Margaret Atwood as a conclusion to the series.
Vancouver’s official city bird is the small but charming Anna’s Hummingbird. This bird’s namesake was a 19th Century Italian Duchess – Anna Masséna. These hummingbirds are not found in Europe, so the chances are Anna never even saw one in flight. And yet, the whole species unknowingly trills through the sky carrying her banner.
The colonial practice of giving birds eponyms (names after a particular person) was frequently used to uphold a person’s legacy, curry favour, or directly honour them. In North America alone, there are over 150 bird species with eponyms.[1] They include the Stellar’s Jay, the Scott’s Oriole and the Townsend’s Warbler. And this practice is not reserved just for our feathered friends. Many mammals, reptiles and fish are named eponymously, too. The mammals include the Abert’s Squirrel, the Heaviside’s Dolphin, and the Schmidt’s Monkey.[2]
This post provides a short case in support of renaming animals currently named eponymously. It defends two ideas that should inform the renaming process. First, renaming prevents the improper glorification of racist or colonial figures and so it is morally required to create a social environment necessary for human equality. Second, renaming as a process productively reorients us to each animals’ importance – independent of human history.
Among Chagossians the feelings seem more mixed. Some see it as a step in the right direction, suggesting that Mauritius is more likely to put resettlement plans in place. Others, however, have criticised the fact that, even in a decision like this, Chagossians have been systemically excluded from the discussion. One group representing Chagossians in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles claimed that “Chagossians have learned this outcome [of the negotiations] from the media and remain powerless and voiceless in determining our own future and the future of our homeland”. Others, speaking to the BBC, expressed frustration that, once again, decisions about their future were made without their input.
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.
