Social Theory and Practice

I give an argument for veganism by drawing parallels between a) bestiality and animal fighting, and b) animal product consumption. Attempts to draw principled distinctions between the practices fail. The wrong-making features of bestiality and animal fighting are also found in animal product consumption. These parallels give us new insight into why popular objections to veganism, such as the Inefficacy Argument, are inadequate. Because it is often difficult to enact significant life changes, I hope that seeing the parallels between animal product consumption and acts we are already so strongly motivated to avoid can help us abstain from animal products.

Should voting rights be conditional upon competence? Proponents of epistocracy think so, but most political theorists dismiss this view. At the same time, the practice of disenfranchising citizens below a certain age is widely endorsed. This paper raises a challenge for proponents of the voting age. Drawing on a revised version of Estlund’s influential account, I argue that electoral inequality is justifiable only if all qualified points of view can accept that it promotes the epistemic reliability of democratic procedures. This condition rules out epistocracy, but it also implies that the voting age is harder to justify than commonly assumed.

On the standard version of political liberalism, the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justifiable to all reasonable persons. Correspondingly, reasonable disagreement about the moral doctrines underlying a law makes that law not justifiable to all reasonable persons. In this paper, I argue that political liberals are committed to understanding reasonable disagreement as being rational, rather than praiseworthy disagreement between morally reasonable person because other conceptions of reasonableness commit them to an incoherent triad of claims.

Deepfake technology can be used to produce videos of real individuals, saying and doing things that they never in fact said or did, that appear highly authentic. Having accepted the premise that Deepfake content can constitute a legitimate form of expression, it is not immediately clear where the rights of content producers and distributors end, and where the rights of individuals whose likenesses are used in this content begin. This paper explores the question of whether it can be plausibly argued that Deepfake content involving the likenesses of real individuals violates the rights of these individuals.

It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations (CSOs), but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. Thus, we do not have full discretion when deciding whether to join collective actions or not. Under certain conditions, we can even be forced by others to do our share.

What is the relationship between republicanism and relational egalitarianism? According to Andreas Schmidt, republicanism, in particular Pettit’s theory of republicanism, is able to capture some relations as objectionable which relational egalitarianism cannot, to wit, relations of mutual domination. This shows that relational egalitarianism is inadequate. In this paper, I explore the relationship between republicanism and relational egalitarianism and argue, first, that Schmidt is wrong. Relational egalitarianism, on a plausible understanding, does object to relations of mutual domination. I then argue that relational egalitarianism, unlike republicanism, is able to capture why some relationships involving racism are objectionable. I end the paper by arguing that we should not see the views as competitors: republicanism, on a plausible understanding, provides a necessary condition of what it means to relate as equals (i.e. non-domination), whereas relational egalitarianism provides necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of what it means to relate as equals.

Should Marxists support universal basic income (UBI), i.e., a regular cash income paid to all without a means test or work requirement? This paper considers one important argument that they should, namely that UBI would be instrumentally effective in helping to bring about communism. It argues that previous answers to this question have paid insufficient attention to a logically prior question: what is Marx’s account of communism? In reply, it distinguishes two different accounts: a left-libertarian version that associates communism with the freedom to live and work how one wants, and a perfectionist version that associates communism with the overcoming of alienated labour and self-realisation in work. It argues that UBI would make steps towards the left-libertarian account but not the perfectionist account. Ultimately, then, the question “should Marxists support basic income?” is shown to partly depend on which account of communism Marxists want to bring about.

This article provides a survey of the emerging debate on the political representation of nonhuman animals. In Section 1, I identify some of the reasons why the interests of animals are often disregarded in policy-making, and present two arguments why these interests should be considered. In Section 2, I introduce four institutional proposals that have been discussed in the relevant literature. Section 3 attempts to make explicit the underlying logic of each proposal (i.e. which specific problems it wants to tackle). Section 4 discusses some of the main normative pros and cons of each proposal.

This paper discusses the idea that the concept of privacy should be understood in terms of control. Three different attempts to spell out this idea will be critically discussed. The conclusion will be that the Source Control View on privacy is the most promising version of the idea that privacy is to be understood in terms of control.

According to a standard picture in the educational policy and educational ethics literature, justice requires significant alterations to higher-education arrangements, in order to equalize opportunity and benefit badly-off social groups. I argue that, if political liberalism is correct, then a range of higher-education reforms favored by the standard picture lack support. After canvassing the standard picture (section 2), I explain why political liberalism entails that some institutions have a special status that prohibits certain kinds of interventions on them (section 3), and I explain why this means that political liberalism cannot vindicate the standard picture (sections 4 and 5).

In this article, I defend two claims about domination. The first is that dispositional theories, which hold that domination obtains just in case one has the ability to interfere with another, are not compelling in accounting for the domination of persons with severe cognitive disabilities. This is because these accounts fall victim to, what I call, the dependency challenge. The second claim is that exercise theories of domination, which hold that domination obtains only when one has actually interfered with another, more plausibly account for the domination of persons with severe cognitive disabilities.

Why does respect for persons involves accepting that persons have responsibilities, and not just authority, for their lives and interactions? I show how we can answer this question with a role-based view: respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing others for a social role they occupy. To fill in a role-based view, we need to describe the practice into which the pertinent role figures. To do this, my account draws on the Rousseauian idea of inflamed amour-propre. Roughly, respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing persons for the role they occupy in a social practice that helps solve the problem of inflamed amour-propre.

In this article, I develop W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to demonstrate the limitations of Kant’s and Rawls’s models of self-respect. I argue that neither Kant nor Rawls can explain what self-respect and resistance to oppression warrants under the conditions of violent and systematic racial exclusion. I defend Du Bois’s proposal of voluntary black self-segregation during the Jim Crow era and explain why Du Bois believes that the black American community has a moral right to assert its self-respect by mitigating its exposure to racial violence and animus in a white-controlled polity.

Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures that significantly curtail the rights and liberties of individual citizens. These measures must receive public justification in order to be politically legitimate. By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this article we argue that liberal democratic governments have so far failed to adequately justify these measures, since they have not systematically targeted the scholarly study of COVID-19 in everyday environments, consequently implementing rules that are epistemically unsound and not publicly justified, at least not fully.

Claudia Card has developed a very helpful and highly-regarded theory of evil action. However, the theory isn’t able to distinguish between evil action and complicity in evil deeds as she intends. As a result, some actions which seem to be merely wrongful turn out to be evil on her account. The root problem is Card’s failure to recognize the importance of relationships for evil action. The solution is to draw on the work of other feminist ethicists, most notably Nel Noddings and Eva Kittay, and append a relational component to Card’s theory of evil.

Most contemporary justice theories focus on the basic structure of society but pay relatively little attention to the implementation of laws and policies at the street-level. As agents of the basic structure, social caseworkers and street-level bureaucrats are, however, potentially in a unique position in the fight to deliver justice at the coalface of social inequality. Introducing a paradigm of ‘Justice as Action’, we explore how street-level bureaucrats can work with both citizen-clients and, indeed, political philosophers, to promote justice. Although the Justice as Action paradigm does not involve entirely abandoning ideal justice theories, we show how it provides a potential method for paying heed to the objections of political realists about the need to direct attention to the concerns of people ‘now and around here’ if we are to produce both meaningful political theory and meaningful political action. Our conclusion is that it is essential for front-line workers and street-level bureaucrats and political theorists to have more conversations with one another than they currently do in order to advance their shared cause.

When someone is prepunished, they are punished for a predicted crime they will or would commit. I argue that cases of prepunishment universally assumed to be merely hypothetical—including those in Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report”—are equivalent to some instances of the real-life punishment of attempt offenses. This conclusion puts pressure in two directions. If prepunishment is morally impermissible, as philosophers argue, then this calls for amendments to criminal justice theory and practice. At the same time, if prepunishment is not imaginary, then the philosophers who reject it cannot claim that their view is supported by common sense.

Screening for asymptomatic disease is a routine aspect of contemporary public health practice. However, it is also controversial, because it leads to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, with many arguing that programmes are “ineffective,” i.e., the “costs” outweigh the “benefits.” This paper explores a more fundamental objection to screening programmes: that, even if they are effective, they are ethically impermissible because they breach the principle of non-maleficence. In so doing, it suggests a new approach to the ethics of risk, justifying a concern with how policies affect individuals’ absolute ex-ante prospects. Part 1 sets up the tension between screening and non-maleficence. Part 2 introduces and motivates a novel interpretation of the non-maleficence principle, “ex-ante Do No Harm,” which resolves this tension. Part 3 defends and clarifies this principle by discussing its relationship to the ex-ante Pareto principle. Part 4 discusses the worry that risk estimates are too “subjective.”

In social justice theory, it seems both important, but also potentially normatively and metaphysically suspect, to treat social groups as units of normative concern. This is also the source of much current controversy surrounding social justice politics. I argue that normative individualism is a (correct) metaethical clarification, but not necessarily a binding guide for all other (non-metaethical) normative theory or practice in the way we might assume. Supra-individual social entities can, in fact, be the irreducible subjects of concern in valid normative evaluations or prescriptions, owing to future-relevant causal properties. However, this idea is complex and requires careful elucidation. I address likely objections pertaining to group definitions, social ontology, conceptions of causation, counterfactuals, and the non-identity problem.