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Category: Social justice

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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Territoriality: what is it and why is it nice?

In philosophical terms, promotion and protection of languages found within its territory is called language policies that operate on the so-called territoriality principle (e.g. Van Parijs). Such language policies are found commonly around the world, such as Belgium, Canada, Spain, etc. I am for this territoriality principle. Let me just start with that. It is not only because of speakers of certain languages, where I wish their language-related interests to be met, but also because of the worth of seeing a unique language thrive.

Linguistically ‘wealthy’ want to get richer?

But where does the limit of territorial language policies lie? I think the limit lies depending on the current distribution of resources, for instance. In my view, a problem begins when already thriving linguistic groups impose policies to further their chances.

To illustrate what I mean, consider the academic linguistic scene in the Netherlands as an actual example (note, that similar circumstances may be happening in many other contexts as well).

In the past decade, English has been long embraced as the medium of instruction in Dutch higher education. This is partly due to the Dutch higher education heralding internationalization as one of its main virtues. And this rising dominance of English in Dutch higher education has been especially palpable after Brexit, where many international programs taught in English were offered widely to lure European international students (e.g., Erasmus students)

Recently, said presence of English as one of the (if not the) main tool of communication has triggered political scrutiny and concern. For instance, the Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the current Dutch government Eppo Bruins worried, “over the past several years international student numbers have grown sharply [in the Netherlands], resulting in … diminishing use of Dutch as the language of instruction.”

Significant attempts have been made to reverse this linguistic trend in the Netherlands, where the use of English increases while the use of Dutch diminishes. To restore Dutch as the main language of instruction, an educational bill named “Wet Internationalisering in Balans” (translated in English as “Internationalization in Balance”) was submitted to the House of Representatives in May 2024, which requires two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees to be taught in Dutch. As education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf describes, the bill allows “room in the curriculum for another language, but … it should not be more than a third. That means that most of your education is in Dutch.” This bill was explicitly stated as the means to restore Dutch as the norm in Dutch higher education and to safeguard Dutch citizens’ access to higher education.

The effects of this bill were palpable, especially at the level of informal practices. In some universities, while the majority of hires before the introduction of the bill included many international candidates with no Dutch proficiency, after the introduction of the bill, many of the hires (whether for fixed-term lecturer positions or assistant professorships) prioritized those who spoke Dutch as their primary or native language. One may argue that the bill has impacted the hiring process in Dutch University to become more local, if not nationalist.

Why is this a problem?

The problem consists of linguistic minorities being pushed away even further with such bills. Often, there are the costs of promoting and protecting a language, especially when a linguistically well-off groups impose further regulations to those who are not really thriving. This linguistic turn in Dutch academia may marginalize linguistic minorities in academia, enabling objectionable hierarchal relations among academics by dividing them into different linguistic groups: Dutch speakers and non-Dutch speakers.

So, although I am in agreement with territorial language policies, I do think it should come with a limit. When the groups who are already linguistically ‘wealthy’ wants to get richer, perhaps the implementation of strong territorial language policies may come with unwanted problems, such as the hierarchy of linguistic groups within said territory.

On the other hand, if territorial language policies are used for linguistic minorities who don’t have the such resources, who face the threat of language endangerment or more, then the worry may not arise (see Song 2023).  Thus, the limit of territorial language policies lies depending on the current distribution of resources. In my view, a problem begins when already thriving linguistic groups impose policies to further their chances and this should not always be encouraged.

I think there is a worth in looking at current distribution of resources, whether one is privileged or not, before advancing territoriality principle. This way, we check whether the current status is unfair, linguistically speaking, and aim at how the world may be changed for the better.

Dr. Seunghyun Song is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University (The Netherlands). Before coming to Tilburg, she was at KU Leuven (Flanders, Belgium), where she held FWO junior postdoc mandate. She also completed her PhD at KU Leuven prior to her postdoc there. Her main area of expertise is in linguistic justice and intergenerational justice. She is particularly interested in issues of reparative justice, historical injustice, and structural injustice approach. She is also invested in the field of social epistemology, especially on epistemic injustice and reparation, and lived experiences of marginalisation. 

Children / Climate / Democracy / Environment / General / Social justice

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Innocence and Agency: The ethics of child protests

In this post, Tim Fowler (University of Bristol) discusses his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which he explores whether children can be deemed as competent to engage in political activism.

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.

I’ve long been interested in questions about children and childhood, partly because children don’t always ‘fit’ within liberal frameworks. Liberalism, as the ideology of the Enlightenment and modern world, emphasizes autonomous, independent agents. Our democratic practices presume people who can make and bear the consequences of their choices. Children are excluded from voting, driving, drinking, etc., on the grounds that they lack such capacities. Yet Greta Thunberg and others challenge this through the commitment, agency, and skill the strikes demand. It’s inappropriate to dismiss their actions as merely ‘childish’ or of no value.

For those committed to consistency in how we distinguish adults from children, two options seem to follow: either deny the competence of child protesters and ignore them, or recognize their competence and lower the voting age. But if we accept the latter, consistency might also suggest lowering the drinking or sexual consent age. Instead, I propose a more piecemeal approach, recognizing different kinds of competence. Voting should involve weighing complex national issues — something children, on the whole, may lack capacity for — even if they can express thoughtful views on specific topics.

The second question is whether striking is good for children. While this depends on individual cases, we can ask more broadly whether political engagement benefits children. I argue that there is a cost, as it takes away a period of life when one might be innocent of the world’s burdens — a quality long seen, though sometimes controversially, as central to childhood. The philosophical concept of the intrinsic goods of childhood — those things good in themselves about being a child — is useful here. Thinkers like Samantha Brennan, Anca Gheaus, and Colin McLeod have emphasized childhood’s value in its own right, with McLeod highlighting innocence as part of what makes childhood special.

From this perspective, the rise of eco-anxiety — children’s deep worry about climate change, and now, wars like Ukraine and Gaza — is profoundly regrettable. Political anxiety is troubling for anyone, but especially for children, as it undermines goods of childhood that cannot be reclaimed. Yet while innocence is important, insisting on it too strongly ignores that many children are already exposed to politics. Given this, preventing them from acting on their concerns is unfair, and activism may be a psychologically healthy response to their anxieties. As I argue in the paper, the worst situation is one where children are exposed to politics but forbidden to act.

This leads to an ambivalent conclusion. On one hand, I argue that society can grant children the right to protest without granting them the right to vote; the issue of consistency is overstated. Different institutions and practices have good reasons for drawing the child/adult line differently. For many children, protesting is a positive act — both as a means of pursuing political change and as a way to feel agency. Yet we should also regret that children feel the need to protest at all, since it signals that we, as adults, have let them down and that they have lost something of real significance.

Democracy / General / Governance / Social justice

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‘Flooding the zone’ and the politics of attention

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.

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Animals / General / Liberty / Social justice

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The Heart Wants What It Wants (But That Doesn’t Make It Right)

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.

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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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General / Reflections on Ukraine / Social justice

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The Sword is Mightier than The Pen and Reflection on the Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy

A portrait photograph of Margaret Atwood wearing a colourful scarf against a dark background
Margaret Atwood. Credit: © Luis Mora

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.

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Animals / General / International / Social justice

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More Than a Name: Decolonising Wildlife

Anna’s Hummingbird hovering © Matt Perry

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.

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Democracy / Governance / International / Social justice

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At last, justice for the Chagos Islanders?

Aerial photograph of the coconut plantation at East Point, Diego Garcia. Photograph shows strip of land between both ocean and lagoon, with the dilapidated plantation buildings sitting in a lawn surrounded by coconut trees.
Aerial photograph of an abandoned coconut plantation at East Point, Diego Garcia. See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, the news that the UK has agreed to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius was widely reported. The agreement was denounced by many in the British press and political establishment – including by all current candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party. On the other hand, in other quarters the deal was greeted with cautious optimism. US President Joe Biden welcomed the agreement as a “clear demonstration that … countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”. In a joint statement, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth called it “a seminal moment in our relationship and a demonstration of our enduring commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and the rule of law”.

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.

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Democracy / Distribution / Economics / Social justice

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In Wisława Szymborska Park: Reflections on 15 Years of Citizens’ Budgets in Poland

This is a guest post by Callum MacRae (Jagiellonian University, Krakow)

A photograph of Wisława Szymborska park. It shows a stone waterfeature running alongside an area of mixed wild plants and flowers.
Wisława Szymborska park, photograph provided by Callum MacRae

Tucked behind the public Voivodeship library, connecting Karmelicka street to the east with Dolnych Młynów to the west, lies Krakow’s Wisława Szymborska park. The park is new to Krakow, having opened just last year. But, sitting just a short walk from the historic old town, those who live in the city have already come to know and love it as a precious area of public greenspace. On warm days, the park’s carefully considered design is alive with people; playing, chatting, reading, passing time, watching the world go by.

But the park represents more than just an impressively successful example of green, public, urban design. It is a product of Krakow’s Citizens’ Budget scheme, having been approved in the 2019 round of funding, and as such it also represents the power and potential of Poland’s remarkable modern engagement with participatory budgeting in local government.

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Distribution / Economics / General / Social justice

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The small-mindedness of means-testing

The hot topic in British politics last week was the government’s decision to scrap the winter fuel payment. People over the age of 65 used to be able to claim a lump sum of between £200 and £300 pounds each winter. Desperately scrabbling around for cash, the government has changed the policy so that now only elderly people who are already receiving state financial help are eligible for the payment. This is a classic example of “means-testing”: making state benefits only available to those who do not have the means to pay for things themselves.

Means-testing tends to be popular because it seems to make a lot of sense. Why waste money providing benefits to millionaires? At the most general level, a state with any egalitarian ambitions must treat the rich and poor differently.

Nonetheless, means-testing is generally small-minded and regrettable.

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