Theoretical and empirical work provides us with multiple models for explaining why people perpetrate or are complicit in injustice, and a familiar taxonomy distinguishes models of injustice which appeal to common or collective individual psychologies from those which utilize social practices, institutions, and status. In recent years, a well-known fictional wrongdoing with historical antecedents has mistakenly entered the philosophical imaginary as a paradigm case of prejudice-caused collective injustice. Critics and philosophers alike have portrayed the 1930s Southern white jurors in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, who unanimously sentence a black man to death in the face of decisive evidence of his innocence, as too racially prejudiced to believe his word over that of his white accusers. Both the novel and the historical record suggest otherwise. My alternative explanation relies on the model of social normativity developed by David Hume in Book 3 of the Treatise, a model which in my view deserves more attention in this discourse. Humean conventions are exceptionless norms which arise and persist in a population, along with associated ‘artificial’ virtues and vices. I argue that the expectations of one Humean convention – the white prohibition on interracial relationships – leaves the jurors with no reasonable choice but to violate another – obedience to government officials – a practice oriented toward ensuring a fair trial for the defendant. Knowledge of Humean conventions at work in the segregated US South obliges us to reconsider the role of bias not only in Mockingbird, but in any society divided by enforced and exceptionless norms.
An appealing account of dishonesty subsumes it under the paradigm of lying. However, the account faces clear trouble from a wide range of cases, including cases of bullshit and brazen dishonesty. Such cases show not only that lying is inessential to dishonesty but also that honesty requires more than the absence of dishonesty. We propose an alternative account grounded in norms associated with games. On our account, dishonesty is better understood in terms of cheating or of breaking the rules of a game; being honest requires upholding those rules.
The concept of "the hinge of history" suggests a unique period in which human actions have unprecedented and potentially irreversible consequences for the long-term future of civilization. This paper critically examines the coherence and utility of this idea by assessing six candidate definitions drawn from philosophical, futurist, and activist literature, as well as proposing a novel decision-theoretic definition. Using three evaluative criteria—centering human agency, decision-relevance, and resource implications—we find that none of the definitions fully meet all criteria. While the hinge metaphor is rhetorically powerful, attempts to render it precise fail to provide actionable guidance or suffer from conceptual vagueness. We argue that, although current existential risks warrant urgent attention, identifying the present as the unique or most critical moment in history is not necessary for justifying strong action. Instead, a more productive approach focuses on specific risks and decisions without reliance on the hinge concept.
Given the current and future suffering associated with human-made climate change and the lack of political action in response to it, it seems only natural to feel despair. However, despair has a bad reputation among climate ethicists and in the wider public. In this paper, we will push back against this view and argue that there is considerable value in climate despair. More specifically, we shall maintain that climate despair can be valuable in two respects. First, it is epistemically valuable because it constitutes a particularly apt way of recognizing the severity of what has already happened and is likely to happen because of human-made climate change, and because it can provide a “reflective break” that allows us to rearrange our values and find new strategies to tackle climate change. Second, climate despair can have various valuable expressive and signaling functions. Most importantly, perhaps, it can send the message that the despairing person cares about important moral values and norms, and remind us all of how big a moral problem climate change, in fact, is.
Faced with the failures of existing democracies, many democratic theorists conclude from recent empirical work in political science critical of the functioning of electoral institutions that citizens are too ignorant to hold office-holders to account and that representative democracies are not responsive to ordinary citizens. We argue that these conclusions are unwarranted. They hinge on highly contestable interpretations of the work in question and conflict with important contrary theoretical and empirical findings that democratic theorists have ignored. If our argument is convincing, it should weaken the case for alternative regime types (e.g., lottocracy or epistocracy), which rests in part on empirically grounding the assertion that representative democracies cannot deliver meaningful accountability. Our argument also highlights the importance of engaging with the social-scientific literature in a more careful and wide-ranging manner.
This article investigates how future climate governance might be made legitimate and compatible with collective self-determination. I develop an original account of international legitimacy through a domestic analogy between relations among self-determining individuals and relations among self-determining political communities. I argue that ideally, future climate legislation should be authorized by an assembly of the world’s peoples and other relevant constituencies, through qualified majority voting, and it should be enforced through carbon tariffs applied by cooperating states. Though this proposal may not be immediately actionable, it performs an important guidance function, helping us evaluate currently feasible climate governance options according to whether they facilitate a transition toward this ideal.
Contemporary philosophers have argued that framing new concepts can bring about both moral and epistemic progress. In this paper, I argue that such intelligibility also has downsides. This paper introduces the phenomenon of ‘over-intelligibility,’ which obtains when a concept truly applies and facilitates understanding, yet hinders someone as a knower. This takes place when concepts normalize or detrimentally standardize our epistemic lives.
Free speech is a core value of liberal democracies, but for 1.8 million incarcerated Americans, it is largely inaccessible. Incarcerated people have scarce access to phone calls and in-person visits, are prohibited from using social media, and face severe reprisals (such as transfer to solitary confinement) for engaging in protest. Are such authoritarian controls on speech—which it would be unthinkable to impose on the general public—justified behind the prison gate? I argue that they are not. First, I discuss how this silencing regime undermines the dignity of incarcerated people, by endangering their self-respect. Second, I explain how it increases moral ignorance among the public—about injustices related to our prison system, and beyond.
Philosophers have been paying increasingly more attention to the notion of manipulation. Perhaps surprisingly, however, most of the recent literature has focused on the conceptual question of identifying the features that make certain behaviours instances of manipulation, rather than on the moral question of why manipulation is wrong. Even more surprisingly, philosophers who have addressed the moral question have rejected the traditional view that manipulation is wrong because it undermines our efforts to exercise our practical agency and respond to our reasons for action (Buss, Gibert). In this paper, I offer a defence of the traditional view. In doing so, I vindicate a further idea that is routinely invoked in discussions of manipulation but whose articulation has proved elusive: The idea that one reason manipulation is wrong is that it involves using people as means.
Most leading philosophical accounts of discrimination theorize discrimination as a causal notion: roughly, an action discriminates on the basis of X (e.g., race, sex) if X causes (in the right way) the adverse outcome. This article explores the prospects for this causal account. Focusing my attention on the case of sex discrimination, I argue that struggles to settle the causal question regress to question-begging. This argument calls into question not just whether the causal account can handle sophisticated cases, which have recently been conceived of (by some) as discriminatory on the basis of sex, but even classic cases of sex discrimination. The negative argument in turn brings to light an alternative normative-causal approach to discrimination, which I sketch and suggest is promising indeed.
