Justice

The transportation system is essential for urban life – the spatial nature of our cities requires us to travel. Hence, we need to spend time in transit. However, time is a scarce resource. In transportation research, travel time savings are the key benefit of transportation improvements. Yet, “time savings” primarily function as a proxy for presumed societal benefits rather than reflect actual reductions in travel time. Moreover, time constraints are rarely considered in the transport justice literature. Based on the case (...) of gender differences in travel patterns and travel time, this paper argues that a lack of interest in time is partly due to accessibility being the established metric for transport justice. Nevertheless, temporal inequality should be a concern for urban justice. The answer to “justice of what” needs to include a temporal component. By connecting the literature on temporal justice with the literature on transport justice, this paper considers the foundations of a time-specific metric as well as its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

This thesis in philosophy consists of an introduction and five papers on three themes related to transport: valuations of time, the metric of transport justice, and future mobility solutions. The first paper analyses the properties of time as an economic resource taking into account literature on behaviour concerning time. The intent is to add to the understanding of the underlying assumption of transferability between time and money in the context of transportation. The second paper is on the metric of transport (...) justice. If we are concerned with distributive justice in the context of transportation, what type of good is being distributed? So far, most of the transport literature on transport justice takes accessibility to be the most appropriate metric. However, I argue that many operationalisations of accessibility are insufficient as metrics of justice. They are both too narrow and exclude relevant burdens of transportation. Additionally, accessibility can be achieved by other, non-travel-based means. I end by formulating tentative criteria for an alternative metric of transport justice. The third paper considers temporal justice in the context of transportation. Building on an argument against the claim of substitutability between time and money, I argue that temporal perspectives have been overlooked in the literature on transport justice. In part, this might be due to accessibility being the established metric of justice. Most common measures of accessibility do not capture temporal constraints and might consequently not capture temporal inequalities. Based on the case of gender differences in travel patterns and behaviour, I argue that an alternative account of the appropriate metric of transport justice is needed to capture temporal constraints and reflect gender inequalities sufficiently. The fourth paper argues that the diversity of possible mobility solutions based on self-driving vehicles has been somewhat overlooked in the current literature on the value of travel time. Thus, the complexity of valuing travel time for self-driving vehicles has not been fully addressed. The paper consists of a morphological analysis of the parameters that might impact the value of travel time for self-driving vehicles and a deeper analysis of five plausible self-driving vehicle mobility concepts. It is claimed that not all such concepts can be easily mapped into transport modes. It might be more appropriate to differentiate the value of travel based on travel characteristics. The fifth paper is a literature review of work on attitudes toward automation technology, specifically self-driving vehicles. In particular, I examine the narratives and values related to gender. Generally, women tend to be more sceptical of the prospect of automated vehicles. The review found that this tendency is often explained by women being more risk-averse and less tech-savvy. Moreover, the policy recommendations in the examined literature based focus on educational efforts. Such perspectives can downplay or neglect valid reasons why women are less enthusiastic. Moreover, needs related to women's specific travel patterns might not be considered in the design and planning process. In conclusion, more awareness in needed of the gender differences, needs and expectations to ensure that future transport solutions are designed with everyone in mind. (shrink)

This licentiate thesis consists of three essays which all concern the ethics of imprisonment and what constitutes an ethically defensible treatment of criminal offenders. Paper 1 defends the claim that prisoners have a right to privacy. I argue that the right to privacy is important because of its connection to moral agency. For that reasons is the protection of inmates’ right to privacy also warranted by different established philosophical theories about the justification of legal punishment. I discuss the practical implications (...) of this argument. Ultimately I argue the invasion of privacy should be minimized to the greatest extent possible without compromising other important values and rights to safety and security. In defending this position, I argue that respect for inmates’ privacy should be part of the objective of creating and upholding a secure environment to better effect in the long run. Paper 2 discusses whether the collateral harm of imprisonment to the close family members and children of prison inmates may give rise to special moral obligations towards them. Several collateral harms, including decreased psychological wellbeing, financial costs, loss of economic opportunities, and intrusion and control over their private lives, are identified. Two competing perspectives in moral philosophy are applied in order to assess whether the harms are permissible. The first is consequentialist and the second is deontological, and it is argued that both of them fails and therefore it is hard to defend the position that allowing for these harms would be morally permissible, even for the sake of the overall aims of incarceration. Instead, it is argued that these harms imply that imprisonment should only be used as a last resort. Where it is necessary, imprisonment should give rise to special moral obligations towards families of prisoners. Using the notion of residual obligation, these obligations are defended, categorized and clarified. Paper 3 evaluates electronic monitoring from an ethical perspective and discusses whether it could be a promising alternative to imprisonment as a criminal sanction for a series of criminal offenses. EM evaluated from an ethical perspective as six initial ethical challenges are addressed and discussed. It is argued that since EM is developing as a technology and a punitive means, it is urgent to discuss its ethical implications and incorporate moral values into its design and development. (shrink)

This dissertation tracks contemporary appeals to and uses of standpoint theory in an archive of popular late-20th-and-21st-century literary works, memoirs, museum exhibits, and public artworks that have been taken up as touchstone objects in contemporary conversations about interracial communication. Focusing on social media, blog, newspaper, and comments-section reactions to these works, I analyze the ways in which knowledge generated from creators’ standpoints is offered to audiences and the subsequent ways in which particular audiences respond to these invitations with attempts at (...) identification. I argue that responses to these cultural artifacts, specifically, and contemporary racial justice conversations, more generally, tend to rely on standpoint theory and on the evidence of lived experiences as a way to unearth marginalized experiences and make ethical appeals to their audiences. While speaking from one’s standpoint may provide an important way to explore and validate experiences long ignored by our American institutions, I contend that doing so can also inhibit the cross-racial dialogue that I view as central to any serious attempt at building antiracist consciousness and communities. In particular, I analyze Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket ; Kara Walker’s art installation, A Subtlety ; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric ; James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” ; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me ; and an interactive video game exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I highlight questions of identification and perspective taking, uses of a second-person “you” address, and objects that encourage imaginative role play—all of which invite audiences to imagine themselves in vastly different subject positions and, frequently, to center their own experiences in these explorations. Engaging with theories of identification and the resurgence of standpoint epistemology, I argue that textual and artistic strategies that encourage imaginative engagement with others unlike the self puts audiences in a valuable position to learn about others’ experiences. At the same time, however, these strategies constrain opportunities for dialogic engagement with others’ experiences when the experiences themselves are treated as unassailable truth rather than as entry points into a historico-cultural moment or conversation, and preventing engagement, as difference becomes sedimented as naturalized and unbridgeable. These standpoint testimonies also constrain opportunities for cross-racial dialogue when they encourage monolithic conceptions of identity that flatten differences among individuals within racial or intersectional identity-based groups. Ultimately, I hope to accomplish three goals: 1) to assess, with an eye toward affordances and limitations, extant, socially prominent ways of engaging with Black art, with particular attention to intercultural interactions; 2) to illustrate how these methods shape and are shaped by currently available political responses to injustice; and 3) to encourage more dialogic modes of interaction across difference. Taking seriously the cultural objects that call their audiences in and have thus become major touchstones in current racial debates, I seek to contribute to the fields of Rhetoric and Pedagogy, in addition to African American literary and cultural studies, by illuminating possibilities for imagining varied futures and models for anti-racist work and social change and by elucidating how art makes possible new lives, affinities, and communities. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to review some basic ethical concepts in their historical and substantive development, within the context of the environment and environmental knowledge. It also tries to answer the question whether there is a difference between traditional and environmental ethics. The comparative-historical method is used, which considers some classical ethical concepts and their interpretations related to the environment. The concepts of classical and modern scientists are also analyzed. The authors consider whether these concepts should be supplemented with (...) new content in this area or should be reformulated in terms of moral relevance not only for the human community, but also for all non-human inhabitants of the environment. The article explores issues about the origin of morality, as well as some ideas about the moral status of attitudes among primates. More important conclusions are that ethics and environmental knowledge must be developed in cooperation in order to explain and form moral consciousness, a new type of ethos that does not allow indifference to the environment in human interaction with it, and that moral considerations should contain not only prescriptions for due human behavior in human society, but also obligations to non-human inhabitants of nature or to the environment. (shrink)

Investment arbitration has experienced an exponential growth in the past years. Recently, there has been abundant discussion on how it influences matters of public policy, with strong criticism referring to its ability to restrain state regulatory capacity, specifically through the freezing of public authorities for fear of investment claims. Among these issues, a key consideration, yet one still under-explored, is how investment arbitration interacts with transitional justice. Considering that building a long-term and lasting peace is the overarching obligation of states (...) coming out of war, this field of study cannot be understated. This paper aims to study the relationship between investment arbitration and transitional justice. To do this, it analyzes how core principles of transitional justice relate to key features of investment arbitration. The analysis concludes that, while investment arbitration and peacebuilding are not fundamentally opposite fields, the characteristics of each system may result in contrast with the other. Further, if this tension is not addressed by public policy, investment arbitration may become an obstacle for the implementation of measures necessary to secure transitional justice for victims of armed conflict. (shrink)

The socio-political effects of the current pandemic crisis tend to reproduce and reinforce inequalities within societies and at the global level. Moreover, the ongoing situation has provided the occasion for increasing awareness on the risks associated with the current ecological crisis. This article presents and discusses the challenges that the pandemic crisis poses to theories of global justice, relying on Martha Nussbaum’s work on the frontiers of justice and expanding its scope to include a fourth frontier. Within the context of (...) growing inequalities in the individuals’ endowment of resources and opportunities and of stricter restrictions on freedoms, a liberal conception of global justice should focus on conceptualizing rights and duties of justice from a multidimensional perspective. The increase in inequalities in a global scenario characterised by vulnerability and interdependence requires comprehensive solutions, both redistributive and regenerative. (shrink)

Managers tasked with organizational change often face irreconcilable demands on how to enact justice—situations we call justice conundrums. Drawing on interviews held with managers before and after a planned large-scale change, we identify specific conundrums and illustrate how managers grapple with these through three prototypical paths. Among our participants, the paths increasingly diverged over time, culminating in distinct career decisions. Based on our findings, we develop an integrative process model that illustrates how managers grapple with justice conundrums. Our contributions are (...) threefold. First, we elucidate three types of justice conundrums that managers may encounter when enacting justice in the context of planned organizational change and show how managers handle them differently. Second, drawing on the motivated cognition and moral disengagement literature, we illustrate how cognitive mechanisms coalesce to allow managers to soothe their moral concerns when grappling with these conundrums. Third, we show how motivated justice intentions ensuing from specific justice motives, moral emotions, and circles of moral regard predict the types of justice conundrums managers face and the paths they take to grapple with them. (shrink)

The concept of buen vivir (“good living”) has become an emergent discourse of resistance for social, ecological, and indigenous movements in Latin America, especially in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Due to the rebirth of theories of decolonization and its political impact against extractive practices, buen vivir has attracted attention both from academic and from political domains. Although there are different and conflicting conceptions of buen vivir, three common theses can be identified: the rejection of an anthropocentric moral ontology, the abandonment (...) of an idea of a linear progress toward welfare through economic growth, and the defense of complementary and reciprocal relations between humans and the rest of nature. This chapter critically analyzes the contributions and challenges that this radical platform can make to three paradigmatic problems in the intergenerational literature: the non-identity problem, the epistemological problem of the uncertainty of future needs, and the tyranny of the contemporaries. The authors argue that a moderate and environmentalist version is the fittest conception of buen vivir to provide public and legitimate reasons for those intergenerational justice issues and, at the same time, a richer non-resourcist metric to assess them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Norway has a complex, even paradoxical, relationship to the United Nations Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It makes considerable financial contributions to the United Nations and has strongly supported the establishment of the sustainability agenda aimed at promoting global equity and mitigating the ecological and climate crises. Norway is also a prominent petroleum-producing nation. The Norwegian position is explored using an approach that emphasizes justice and education in the sustainability agenda. Three key texts are studied. The (...) first is the objectives clause in the Education Act, the second is an address by then prime minister Erna Solberg at the annual conference of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise, and the third are educational assignments published by the Norwegian Petroleum Museum addressing sustainability and climate change. What is decisive is how specific facets of justice are emphasized in ways that detach Norway from tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas involved. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I here explore how an ethics of rhythm can shed light on what promotes and inhibits recognition between people across our vulnerable lives, and the need for a renewal of the philosophy of pedagogy. I argue that philosophy itself has contributed to a certain oblivion regarding how we follow and create rhythmic societies, the need for a more profound and fine-tuned listening attitude as a philosophical-ethical marker, using among others Barthes concept of rhuthmos, Kierkegaards concept of repetition, Herbart’s concept (...) of pedagogical tact and Kristeva’s existential relationship. What forms of imposed rhythms of life can be said to cast light on new ways of living together today? I argue that rhythms affect, shape and set boundaries for interpersonal relationships. Moreover, that they serve as incentives for an ethic, or better; as views, perspectives and concepts to think with when describing the rhythm of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The academic discussion concerning justice in education tends to center around questions of equal educational opportunity and the distribution of educational resources. This paper responds to a special issue which collects different approaches to educational justice that move beyond the boundaries set by traditional, hegemonic perspectives in the field. I point to some important strands in which the different papers converge and outline how they attempt to produce a shift in the understanding of educational justice; how they bring into (...) view and touch upon ways of thinking through educational justice which have previously not received attention or been obscured by more conventional paradigms. Different papers do this in different ways, but there is a joint effort to self-critically turn philosophy onto itself as well as a common tendency towards what could be called a shift beyond discourse towards more worldly, materialistic, bodily and embodied notions of justice and injustice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Education appears to bear responsibility on the one hand to do justice to society’s need for reproduction and continuation, and on the other to do justice to the individual’s capacity for and need to express resistance, critique and political action. How we navigate this problem is tied to how we understand justice. ‘Plastic justice’ is the suggestion that questions concerning justice and education might find a materialist expression instead of the usual transcendental ideals of justice. In this perspective, ‘justice’ (...) appears not as an achievable ideal but as a philosophical void that allows us to identify and react to injustice. An example of this is the void that allows for social selection – in the form of admissions or exams – that must be kept open if we wish to avoid encouraging social conformism and reproduction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT With a specific example from Norway and inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, this article demonstrates how today’s educational rhetoric lacks the language and will to recognise a key pedagogical dimension in education: what happens when the normative ambitions of education and students meet. At best, teaching students life skills to mitigate their mental health issues is naive. Inspired by Ahmed, such an initiative might actually work against its purpose. At a time when educational outcomes are emphasised (...) in local and international political contexts, I argue that the task of philosophy of education should be 1) to reclaim the significance of the pedagogical dimension in education and 2) to philosophise on what negative emotions such as unhappiness require of education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The metaphor of ‘viral modernity’ denotes an era characterized by communal experiences of how viruses, be they in the shape of physical, virtual or symbolic forms, permeate and shape social and cultural life. To think educative justice in viral modernity thus require a radical move beyond the surfaces of conventional paradigms in order to reach at a deep-seated understanding of the phenomena of education and justice itself. Motivated by this ambition, I here present a Badiouan reading of educative justice (...) in relation to the aims and mission of philosophy of education. I start by briefly mapping out current educational philosophical paradigms and their ways of treating the issue of justice. Next, I contrast these orthodoxies to a Badiouan model. My overall ambition is to promote a philosophy of education that avoids philosophical doctrines, old and new, while simultaneously carrying a potential for unveiling the phenomenon of justice as educative truths-in-worlds. (shrink)

Humanity will face water scarcity as this century progresses. Water use grew twice as fast as the global human population last century, and an increasing number of regions around the world are facing, or will face, freshwater scarcity. Four billion people face water scarcity at least one month out of the year. Scarcity makes water valuable for privatizers and commodifiers as an investment vehicle; it emboldens the currency of commodification. I will argue for water justice as socioenvironmental justice. The injustices (...) that can and do attach to water are not reducible to merely distributional wrongs or injustices, they are moral and political harms as markers of a failing democracy; water injustice, then, is a structural harm. I build on the literature of power dynamics from Iris Marion Young and David Schlosberg and argue that water injustice is structural and involves mis- and malrecognition and participation; moreover, I introduce the argument that water justice is participatory, a method of development that walks in lockstep with reflexive and discursive democracy. (shrink)

Traditional notions of crime control often position the police against an individual, known or not yet known, who is responsible for the commission of a crime. However, with increasingly sophisticated technology, policing increasingly prioritizes the prevention of crime, making it necessary to ascertain who, or what class of persons, may be the next likely criminal before a crime can be committed, termed predictive policing. This causes a shift from individualized suspicion toward predictive profiling that may sway the expectations of a (...) police patrol. Classically, where a patrol officer forms reasonable suspicion prior to a stop, it is based upon his/her analysis of the situation taken as a whole in context. However, where a predictive profile is employed, information available to the officer accordingly adjusts his/her perception of context and affects the application of the reasonable suspicion standard. This article addresses the way in which new approaches to forming reasonable suspicion affect the due process protection of individuals’ fundamental rights. It argues that while an officer still operates with good faith discretion, using predictive profiling causes reasonable suspicion to be based on an augmented understanding of reality and as a result, due process guarantees are weakened. The rights to non-discrimination and the presumption of innocence are assessed and argued as illustrative of this weakening and shift in policing standards. The article ultimately argues that while predictive policing cannot be categorically labeled as inconsistent with criminal justice, changes as seemingly moderate as the manner in which discretion operates have larger effects on individuals’ rights. (shrink)

In their proof-of-concept, Meier and colleagues describe the purpose and programming decisions underpinning Medical Ethics Advisor, an automated decision support system used t...

Central to the social membership model of animal rights is the claim that relations with nonhuman animals should be reorganized such that domesticated animals are recognized as members of our shared societies. Though some elements of the membership model remain contested, the core of the membership model is that domesticated animals have a claim on, and a direct entitlement to, the benefits of cooperative relations. For many political theorists, however, distributive justice considerations apply only to a certain kind of cooperative (...) relationship. The community of justice recipients is thought to be limited by what Brian Berkey calls the Contribution/Capacity Basis of Entitlement. Accordingly, justice considerations apply to a scheme of cooperation and a conception of justice “entail[s] direct entitlements only for those who are contributors, or, alternatively, those who at least possess the capacities that are necessary to be capable of contributing to such a scheme”. This thesis – referred to as ‘contributionism’ – has typically been utilized to exclude nonhuman animals from justice considerations. The paper argues that contributionism is not fundamentally at odds with justice for domesticated animals, and conversely that contributionism remains a useful conceptual tool for explaining resource sharing with these nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception of normative (...) stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply. (shrink)

Transitional justice refers to the process of dealing with widespread wrongdoing characteristically committed during the course of conflict and/or repression. Examples of such processes include criminal trials, truth commissions, reparations, and memorials. Technology is altering the forms that widespread wrongdoing takes. Technology is also altering the form of processes of transitional justice themselves. This essay provides a map of these changes and their normative implications.

The United States juvenile justice system has primary oversight of youth who come into contact with legal authorities. This system is purposefully distinct from the adult system given the presumption of youths’ reduced culpability for delinquent behavior and increased potential for rehabilitation. Some juvenile court policies and practices are supportive of youth while others may drive youth further into the juvenile justice system. Today, we are at a point in which we can—and should—use information technology to accrue data to unpack (...) the impact of these policies and practices on and across youth. Moreover, technology-driven policies and practices such as electronic monitoring may be detrimental to the well-being of youth, whereas others such as video conferencing could be more widely used to benefit youth. While juvenile courts hold youth accountable for their behavior, courts also need to be accountable to youth by employing data-informed policies and practices that advance the health and well-being of youth. (shrink)

In this article, I critique two conceptions from the history of academic philosophy regarding academic philosophers as shamans, deriving more community-responsible criteria for any future versions. The first conception, drawing on Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism (1951), is a transcultural figure abstracted from concrete Siberian practitioners. The second, drawing on Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), balances Eliade’s excessive abstraction with Indigenous American philosophy’s emphasis on embodied materiality, but also overemphasizes genetic inheritance to the detriment of environmental embeddedness. I therefore conclude (...) that any aspiring philosophical shaman must ground their bodily-material transformative linguistic practices in the practices and environments of their own concrete communities, including the nonverbal languages of bodily comportment, fashion, and dance, in pursuit of social justice for all, including sovereignty, ecological justice, and well-being for Indigenous peoples worldwide. (shrink)

The Market Failures Approach (MFA) is one of the leading theories in contemporary business ethics. It generates a list of ethical obligations for the managers of private firms that states that they should not create or exploit market failures because doing so reduces the efficiency of the economy. Recently the MFA has been criticised by Abraham Singer on the basis that it unjustifiably does not assign private managers obligations based on egalitarian values. Singer proposes an extension to the MFA, the (...) Justice Failures Approach (JFA), in which managers have duties to alleviate political, social, and distributive inequalities in addition to having obligations to not exploit market failures. In this paper I describe the MFA and JFA and situate them relative to each other. I then highlight a threefold distinction between different types of obligations that can be given to private managers in order to argue that a hybrid theory of business ethics, which I call the MFA +, can be generated by arguing that managers have obligations based on efficiency and duties based on equality to the extent that these latter obligations do not lead to efficiency losses. This argument suggests a novel theoretical option in business ethics, elucidates the issues that are at stake between the MFA and the JFA, and clarifies the costs and benefits of each theory. (shrink)

The mission of justice for contracts seems to be solely one of gatekeeping. As long as the justice of the bargaining stage is secured and the parties’ agreement complies with a proper floor of legitimacy, contract law, on this conventional approach, must simply follow the parties’ preferences. Doctrines that govern contractual performance and breach by appealing to justice considerations are thus portrayed as either confused or misguided. The justice rhetoric either covers for other, notably economic, considerations or undermines contract law’s (...) liberal underpinnings. Against this common wisdom, this Article develops a theory of contractual justice, which is implicit in this significant body of doctrines. Contractual justice is a species of relational justice, and is thus informed by the most fundamental normative underpinnings of private law in a liberal polity, namely, the maxim of reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. Focusing on the justice of on-going contractual relationships, modern contract law properly solidifies a cooperative conception of contract performance, which targets a contract-specific form of relational injustice associated with the heightened interpersonal vulnerability to which sequential contractual performance gives rise. The task of this Article is threefold. It articulates and defends the normative commitment to contractual justice that is implicit in contract law’s rules of the game, epitomized by the duty of good faith and fair dealing. It further explains and justifies the legal form of these rules, being normative defaults, rather than either majoritarian defaults or mandatory rules. And finally, it demonstrates how the refinement of both their substance and their form can help direct the future development of these complex and currently somewhat disoriented set of doctrines and, more broadly, reclaim the central place of justice in the law of contract of a liberal legal order. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 530-545, June 2022.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

There are two conceptions of ‘inclusion’ in play in this debate. 1. The traditional conception in sport: How does sport provide inclusion/exclusion? Through eligibility criteria. 2. The social justice conception: trans people must be included in all social endeavours/institutions, one of these being sport. In the latter ‘inclusion’ facilitates affirmation and validation of their gender identity. The question is: should sport take on this ‘social justice’ task?

This chapter interrogates the intersections between wealth, violence, and justice by considering two very different cases: refugees who have had their wealth taken from them, and political activists who are considering using Robin-Hood-style tactics to protest economic injustice. Ordinarily, the involuntary loss of wealth that refugees suffer, while it is viewed as an injustice, is not considered a violent injustice. However, when the involuntary redistribution of wealth is brought up in the context of resolving long-standing economic injustices, opponents cry out (...) that such redistribution would be, not only unjust, but an act of violence. This raises an interesting question: how should we view the involuntary loss, or redistribution, of wealth? Disregarding for the moment whether such involuntary losses of wealth are justified or unjustified—which might well depend on the circumstances and context—it is worth considering whether they are instances of violence. If they are, then refugees have suffered more violence than we normally recognize. If they are not, then Robin-Hood-style tactics (absent the bows and arrows) may be allowed for those who wish to engage in non-violent resistance against economic injustice in all its forms. (shrink)

International human rights concepts and documents figure prominently within theories of global justice. Appeals to human rights often rely on theories and interpretations that rank human rights in relation to one another designating some as more important or more crucial than others such that they may or must be given priority. In this paper I argue that hierarchical ranking of human rights should be rejected by theorists of global justice because such ranking: (a) undermines the effectiveness with which human rights (...) operate as principled constraints on state actors; and (b) is inconsistent with the international legal framework and practice from which the human rights concepts and documents draw their rhetorical force. Instead theorists of global justice should accept the indivisibility principle, which states that all human rights are interrelated and interdependent and must be treated on the same footing and given the same emphasis. The attraction of hierarchical ordering rests on misguided concerns about the practicality of indivisibility that fail to properly distinguish between rights and claims and ignore important dimensions of human rights implementation and assessment. I argue that indivisibility is both pragmatically defensible, provides a better theoretical grounding for understanding complaints about violations, and offers a better framework for understanding the relationship between human rights and legitimacy than hierarchical ordering. (shrink)

Despite the recent consolidation of sentencing law and procedure, the fundamental values which underpin the policy and practice of sentencing in England and Wales have remained largely unchanged since the deserts-based model introduced by the Criminal Justice Act of 1991. It is argued that this paradigm is no longer appropriate and presents a significant impediment to reducing imprisonment and mainstreaming restorative forms of intervention within the criminal process. An alternative value-based approach is proposed to counter this trend, one that provides (...) greater structural flexibility and empowers sentencers to engage more effectively with the social impact of penal intervention. (shrink)

The current discussion on the relationship of epistemic justice to democracy focuses on its relationship to deliberative democracy. This article concerns the relationship of epistemic justice—specifically, testimonial justice which I call “epistemic fairness”—to aggregative democracy or democracy by voting. The aim of this article is to establish that in a good theory of democracy, epistemic fairness is one of the founding principles of the democratic institution of voting, that is, the principles by which the democratic institution of voting is organized. (...) Under an arguably plausible interpretation, the democratic institution of voting turns out to be committed to realizing epistemic fairness. If a theory of democracy implies that epistemic fairness is a founding principle of the democratic institution of voting, a number of implications follow with respect to the issues related to the practice of voting in actual democracies, such as the problem of gerrymandering or the fairness of the aggregation rule. (shrink)