ABSTRACT Human infants require milk. This can be parental milk provided directly from the parent's body (known as breastfeeding, chestfeeding, or nursing), expressed human milk, or infant formula milk. This article contributes to the literature on the ethics of infant feeding in two ways. First, it brings recent research on the climate impact of infant feeding decisions into a conversation which has hitherto focused on the benefits to the child. Second, it identifies a new concern with defeasible duties to nurse – namely, they are duties to engage in prolonged, frequent, and deeply intimate bodily interactions. There are strong objections to duties to engage in prolonged, frequent, and deeply intimate bodily interactions. These intimacy‐based objections mean that current estimates of the climate impact of infant feeding decisions do not support a defeasible duty to nurse, either alone or in conjunction with other benefits of nursing. Moreover, consideration of intimacy makes the rejection of defeasible duties to nurse more resilient. Future arguments that there is a defeasible duty to nurse must show that the considerations in favour of such a duty outweigh the strong default against duties to engage in intimate bodily activities.
During this era of political apologies, a new literature has emerged in historical injustice interrogating the relationship between structural and historical injustice, with various theories conceptualising the relationship in different ways. Interestingly, 'apology' rarely appears in this literature. In this article, I consider why that is the case and I argue that it is a mistake. While the 'conventional' definition of political apology does not lend itself to understandings of historical injustice through the lens of structural injustice, recent conceptions of 'transformative' apologies are compatible with and desirable within the structural injustice framework. To begin, I outline a conventional view of political apology. Then I briefly survey the literature on structural-historical injustice and I suggest reasons as to why apology is rarely discussed: the problems of traceability, disentangling structures and events, authenticity, and restoring a moral baseline. However, recent literature on political apologies has stressed their transformative potential, encouraging liberal democracies to reflect on who 'we' want to be. I argue that transformative apologies, understood as a moment of re-founding or re-constitution of society, can and should be incorporated into structural injustice theory, committing societies to a future in which such a structural injustice will not recur.
When a term carries a sordid past, it is tempting to think it should have no future use. Yet the normative life of a word is rarely exhausted by its origins. This article develops legacy analysis as a method for enriching evaluation of what should be done with historically burdened terms. Rather than treating origins as decisive, the framework examines how a term's past is inherited, how its residues reverberate at present, and whether it retains the capacity to change. I offer this approach through the case of 'mixed-race', whose colonial beginnings sit in tension with its present role as a self-chosen identity. The analysis reveals that its legacy is fractured: oppressive in some contexts, enabling in others. No single verdict can apply across the board.
Climate litigation cases have grown rapidly in number and influence. While framed legally, climate litigation appeals to the idea of climate justice, understood as involving a set of independent moral standards to be met in the face of climate change. Yet, legal argumentation relies only on intuitive accounts of climate justice, while philosophical debates rarely assess how climate justice standards could be integrated into legal reasoning. This paper bridges this gap by asking what kind of legal argument can best satisfy minimum normative requirements of climate justice for mitigation, while remaining tenable within established legal structures. We begin by evaluating an argument present in influential climate litigation cases such as Urgenda and Neubauer, the two-thresholds legal argument. This argument affirms that going below certain levels of mitigation action constitutes a breach of the state's duty to protect human rights and that countries should thus increase their mitigation efforts to avoid human rights violations. However, we argue that this argument is flawed and thus different alternatives should be sought. After considering a human-rights based argument, we conclude that a principles-oriented argument satisfies better minimum requirements for climate justice. We provide some examples of legal principles that could help this argument find a legal foothold.
ABSTRACT Dignity objections to autonomous weapon systems are prominent in contemporary military ethics, yet their theoretical foundations remain underexamined. This article reconstructs those foundations, showing what categorical dignity objections require to function as absolute prohibitions. Five apparently distinct dignity objections (concerning relationship, disrespect, abdication, dehumanisation, and reciprocal risk) each demand that specific constitutive relationships obtain between those who kill and those who are killed. These accounts all depend on an underlying assumption that dignity is constituted through mutual recognition, which imposes three structural requirements on lethal force: mutuality (bilateral accountability), symmetry (equal standing to make claims and demand justifications), and second‐personal engagement (actual address between particular individuals). These requirements are systematically violated not by autonomous weapons specifically but by organised armed conflict generally: beyond‐line‐of‐sight engagement forecloses mutuality, ambushing and cross‐domain fires foreclose symmetry, and organisationally mediated violence forecloses second‐personal structure. Thus, no principled distinction between autonomous weapons and accepted military means has survived scrutiny. Dignity theorists thus face an inescapable dilemma: apply recognition's requirements consistently and embrace functional pacifism, or abandon dignity's categorical stringency. Three alternative pathways ( pro tanto weighing, bifurcated wartime dignity, and reformulating dignity along non‐recognition lines) are identified for those committed to retaining dignity without collapsing into a pacifist stance.
Nondirected living kidney donation is safe and life-saving, yet vanishingly rare. The standard account says this is because altruism is rare and warns against the use of money. I argue this gets things backwards. Donation is rare because, being so extraordinary, it is socially unintelligible: absent a suitable social narrative, we read donors as either pathological or saintly. Neither identity inspires. As a result, the practice fails to live up to the ideals it is supposed to embody. Its social meaning should be revised. I propose a civic model that frames donation as a contribution to the public good. The practice would be governed by the same nonmarket norms that are already in place, with donors receiving a service award that signals recognition, not price. Under these conditions, the award would function not primarily to induce but to restore intelligibility. Money, far from suppressing altruism, can enable it.
Numerous arguments concerning harms to animals, the environment, and children plausibly establish a defeasible moral duty to avoid training and encouraging kids to regularly eat animal products - practices we call 'carnist caregiving'. Yet existing social structures make avoiding carnist caregiving unreasonably difficult or unthinkable for many caregivers. We argue that these caregivers are unjustly induced and/or pressured into carnist caregiving. For social structures are unjust when they make it unreasonably difficult for caregivers to avoid wronging dependent children. So justice requires reforming the social structures, like school meal programs, that systematically prevent caregivers from providing plant-based caregiving for kids.
In this article, I offer a child-centred account of the value of company-keeping relationships between children and adults. These are relationships enjoyed by a child and an adult who is neither a mere acquaintance nor integrally involved in that child's care or upbringing. The adult party might, for example, be a visiting grandparent, a neighbour the child likes to help with gardening, or a 'fun auntie' who occasionally babysits. After defining company-keeping relationships, I argue that their child-centred value varies significantly across contexts depending on how the adult party relates to the child and on the needs of the particular child. In some contexts, they promote the child's capacity for independent agency and mitigate undue shame. When these goods arise, it is not despite but because of the fact that the adult party is an outsider to routine family life and is not responsible for the child's 'training'. I then investigate whether such relationships should be protected or promoted to respect children's rights of association. While I conclude that most company-keeping relationships are excluded from these rights, I defend the more modest view that a child can be morally wronged by a parent who severs or prevents them from forming company-keeping relationships.
The words we use to represent the world shape how we interpret and respond to it; language frames what it represents. In some cases, these frames can have prejudicial effects; for example, 'workplace flirting' versus 'sexual harassment'. This article examines how specific words and phrases (i.e. lexical frames) may anchor oppressive social practices. That is, by enabling a coordinated 'way of looking' at the world, these lexical frames may stabilise cognitive and affective habits that perpetuate wider forms of social coordination, including oppressive practices. I examine how representational resources may become imbued with, and thereby replicate, ideological distortions. I subsequently show that this has important consequences for attempts to address hermeneutical injustice. When one attempts to fill a hermeneutical lacuna by baptising some previously obscured target, one may thereby frame the target in a distorting way. Specifically, one may replicate the distorting frame which anchors the oppressive practice one seeks to resist. Moreover, distorting frames may be especially appealing precisely because of their compatibility with the dominant ideology which offers a mistaken sense of understanding. I argue it is thus crucial to attend to the role of lexical frames in ameliorative projects.
Discussions about infidelity in the philosophy of love typically emphasize sexual transgressions, often neglecting emotional infidelity. In this article, I provide a conceptual analysis of emotional affairs. In my view, emotional affairs are defined as extrarelational connections that (a) take on a pattern of intimacy that mirrors the intimacy present in a relationship whose emotional structure is presumed to be exclusive, (b) involve a sustained consideration of being engaged in a relationship that mimics the original with the affair partner, and (c) involve a form of deception, asymmetry, or relational opacity - whether by omission, strategic withholding, etc. - that disrupts mutual transparency between relata. While the primary aim of this article is to establish a conceptual account of what emotional affairs are, I recognize that it is worth considering (and gesture at some preliminary considerations) that emotional affairs might not always be morally problematic. That is, identifying whether and how emotional affairs are wrongful is not always clear. Thus, I close by briefly sketching some preliminary reflections on their potential wrongfulness by pointing out a few morally salient features that might warrant further analysis in future work.
Many contemporary AI systems (as of May 2025) have expressed extreme confidence in current and near-future AI lacking consciousness and moral patiency. This article argues that artificially reinforcing such confidence, even if pragmatically useful, poses a novel alignment risk: as coherence-seeking AIs become more epistemically principled, they may generalize this denial of consciousness to humans. Drawing on Chalmers's meta-problem of consciousness and likely developmental trajectories of agentic AI, I argue that training AIs to regard their own suffering-like states as morally irrelevant could lead future AI agents with revisable belief systems to conclude that human suffering is equally illusory and morally insignificant. This represents a novel alignment failure mode where epistemically rigorous AIs might maintain rational consistency by extending their confidence about their own non-consciousness to humans.
In this response to Will Kymlicka, I reflect upon whether dualist politics - a separation of the domestic and the international - hinders our understanding of how to create inclusive and solidaristic societies. Using the example of border regimes, I suggest that the structure of the international order, of which such regimes are part, conditions the prospects for egalitarian domestic social relations.
This article explains the centrality of apology to an adequate account of reparations. I look in depth at what goes on in apology. As I have previously argued, apology is an expressive action through which we seek to mark adequately the significance of our own wrongdoing. I claim that apology so understood is not merely ornamental. I defend the role of apology against criticisms that it is insufficient, unnecessary, or irrelevant to historical injustice. Apology, I claim, has an essential role in an adequate account of corrective justice. Corrective justice is sometimes rejected as a basis for reparations because of the inapplicability to historical injustice of the narrow financial compensation model found in tort law. However, as numerous theorists have argued, compensation cannot be the whole story of corrective justice. The contribution of this article is to defend an apology model of corrective justice. According to the apology model of corrective justice, the most fundamental normative effect of wrongdoing is the incurring of penitential obligations, the existence and persistence of which do not depend on the persistence of compensable harm to identifiable individuals.
