In banning religious symbols for civil servants in a position of authority, Québec's laicity law disproportionately burdens religious minorities. Nevertheless, politicians seem to somehow avoid this problem, and the law is largely supported by the population. This insensibility to religious discrimination calls for an explanation. I argue that part of the explanation for this unequal treatment of religion in secular society lies in active religious ignorance. Drawing a parallel from how white ignorance functions to protect racial inequalities, I argue that (...) a kind of active ignorance in the religious domain – that I name post-Christendom ignorance – makes it difficult to comprehend alternative understandings of religious experience and allows the majority to deny its religious positionality. Applying this framework, I criticize Québec's laicity law for wrongfully relying on inadequate hermeneutical resources about religion. Further, the failure to see that targeting only religious symbols worn by individuals is discriminatory is the result of the epistemic vice of closed-mindedness. This article aims to show how religious persons in secular society can suffer hermeneutical wrongs because of their religious identity, and it aims to show that this injustice in the epistemic domain can help explain the unequal treatment of religious minorities while providing grounds for criticism. (shrink)

In banning religious symbols for civil servants in a position of authority, Québec's laicity law disproportionately burdens religious minorities. Nevertheless, politicians seem to somehow avoid this problem, and the law is largely supported by the population. This insensitivity to religious discrimination calls for an explanation. I argue that part of the explanation for this unequal treatment of religion in secular society lies in active religious ignorance. Drawing a parallel from how white ignorance functions to protect racial inequalities, I argue that (...) a kind of active ignorance in the religious domain – which I name post-Christendom ignorance – makes it difficult to comprehend alternative understandings of religious experience and allows the majority to deny its religious positionality. Applying this framework, I criticize Québec's laicity law for wrongfully relying on inadequate hermeneutical resources about religion. Further, the failure to see that targeting only religious symbols worn by individuals is discriminatory is the result of the epistemic vice of closed-mindedness. This article aims to show how religious persons in secular society can suffer hermeneutical wrongs because of their religious identity, and it aims to show that this injustice in the epistemic domain can help explain the unequal treatment of religious minorities while providing grounds for criticism. (shrink)

It is often acknowledged that public policies can constrain people's procreative opportunities, in some cases even infringing their procreative rights. However, a topic that is not often discussed is how the procreative choices of one generation can affect the procreative opportunities of later generations. In this article, we argue that the demographic fact that childbearing above the replacement fertility level is eventually unsustainable supports two constraints on universal procreation rights: a compossibility constraint and an egalitarian constraint. We explore the implications (...) of these two constraints and suggest that there are reasons to think of procreative opportunity as a finite resource that can be distributed more or less equally across generations. We also briefly discuss possible ways of meeting demands of intergenerational justice with respect to procreative opportunity. (shrink)

Having a child is one of the highest-carbon decisions made by affluent individuals. Does this uncomfortable fact mean they should limit biological family size? This salient question also forces attention to two key issues. One is just how demanding individual climate justice duties are. The other is the danger of ‘ivory tower’ reasoning by privileged philosophers. On some topics, it is imperative carefully to integrate philosophical discussion with sociological and psychological research. Assuming individual climate justice duties include cutting one's carbon (...) impact, the discussion goes as follows. Should affluent couples and individuals have no biological children, because of the carbon cost? Not unless emissions-cutting duties are extremely demanding, or we make dangerous, generalised socio-psychological assumptions. Is there any individual duty to consider carbon impact when determining family size? Yes, because individual emissions-cutting duties are more than trivially demanding. Should all duty-bearers ‘stop at’ some fixed maximum number of biological kids? Not unless that number is one and we are prepared to accept very demanding individual emissions-cutting duties and make problematic sociological assumptions. Finally, the article outlines three further individual duties following from the ‘uncomfortable fact’: to raise good climate citizens, become activists, and cut the family carbon footprint. (shrink)

When devising a plan of remedial action to address an ongoing injustice, it is desirable to possess an understanding of the key contributing factors and mechanisms that produce and sustain it. This is the domain of etiology of injustice. Etiology of injustice involves practices of causal selection that give explanatory priority to the operative causation of the injustice at issue. Operative causation refers to those processes and conditions that might be changed for the injustice to cease and to be sufficiently (...) prevented in the future. This article uses causal selection criteria to theorize the ways in which a remedial orientation toward the explanandum of injustice determines the parameters of explanatory relevance. (shrink)

There are many examples of persons who appear to be grateful to other people's benefactors. In at least some of these examples, such third-party gratitude also seems fitting. However, these observations conflict with a widespread assumption in the philosophical literature about gratitude: that only beneficiaries can be fittingly grateful to benefactors. In this article, I argue that third-party gratitude exists and can be fitting, and that the assumption is therefore mistaken. More specifically, I defend two claims: (i) that there exists (...) a kind of gratitude to benefactors that is experienced by third parties in their capacities as moral agents (‘moral gratitude’); and (ii) that what makes this kind of gratitude fitting is the fact that, in benefitting the beneficiaries, the benefactors are responding to values that we, as moral agents, each have reason to care about and to want to see promoted. (shrink)

Synthetic content, which has been produced by generative artificial intelligence, is beginning to spread through the public sphere. Increasingly, we find ourselves exposed to convincing ‘deepfakes’ and powerful chatbots in our online environments. How should we mitigate the emerging risks to individuals and society? This article argues that labelling synthetic content in public forums is an essential first step. While calls for labelling have already been growing in volume, no principled argument has yet been offered to justify this measure (which (...) inevitably comes with some additional costs). Rectifying that deficit, I conduct a close examination of our epistemic and expressive interests in identifying synthetic content as such. In so doing, I develop a cumulative case for social media platforms to enforce a labelling duty. I argue that this represents an important element of good platform governance, helping to shore up the integrity of our contemporary public discourse, which takes place increasingly online. (shrink)

The notion of uncommandability has been central to how we perceive our emotional lives, and particularly romantic love. According to this notion, while we can control how we treat people, we have little control over how we feel about them. The argument from uncommandability is often evoked as a way of sidestepping moral obligations regarding our romantic emotions. One challenge to uncommandability is the potential to manipulate our emotions through psychopharmaceuticals. Much of the debate on so-called ‘love drugs’ has concerned (...) the permissibility and worth of these interventions. By comparison, there has been less exploration of their implications for moral obligation and responsibility. How might the emergence of these interventions change what can be emotionally demanded of us? We ultimately suggest that it is necessary to view the complex morality of our emotional lives through different evaluative paradigms: one concerning moral duty and obligation, where we have no claim to each other's romantic love irrespective of its commandability, and the other concerning the appropriateness of our reactive attitudes, where we are at times justified in feeling morally injured by another person on account of their failure to love us, regardless of whether they had control in the matter. (shrink)

This article develops a theory of indirect discrimination by analyzing a series of lawsuits that challenged hospital relocations in the 1970s. In these cases, civil rights groups argued that the relocation of hospitals from cities to suburbs was a form of racial discrimination. Although these lawsuits failed, I aim to support the plaintiffs' arguments that the hospital relocations were discriminatory. Drawing on three recent theories – those of Benjamin Eidelson, Deborah Hellman, and Sophia Moreau – I develop an account of (...) indirect discrimination that is rooted in resource-specific equality rights such as those found in international human rights law. Building on this account, I argue that the human right to health equity can explain why the hospital relocations were discriminatory. (shrink)

In European countries (excluding the UK and Ireland), official statistics do not use racial or ethnic categories, but instead rely on proxies to collect data about discrimination. In the German microcensus, the proxy category adopted is ‘migration background’ (Migrationshintergrund): an individual has a ‘migration background’ when one or more of their parents does not have German citizenship by birth. We apply a coupled ethical-epistemic analysis to the ‘migration background’ category to illuminate how the epistemic issues contribute to ethical ones. Our (...) central claim is that these ethical-epistemic issues with the ‘migration background’ category are best analysed in terms of Charles Mills's ‘white ignorance’. Appealing to Annette Martín's structural account of white ignorance, we highlight the cyclical reinforcement of ignorance and racial injustice in the use of the ‘migration background’ variable. Colourblind eliminativism about race perpetuates the use of ‘migration background’, which sustains and intensifies racial injustices. (shrink)

The best-performing AI systems, such as deep neural networks, tend to be the ones that are most difficult to control and understand. For this reason, scholars worry that the use of AI would lead to so-called responsibility gaps, that is, situations in which no one is morally responsible for the harm caused by AI, because no one satisfies the so-called control condition and epistemic condition of moral responsibility. In this article, I acknowledge that there is a significant challenge around responsibility (...) and AI. Yet I don't think that this challenge is best captured in terms of a responsibility gap. Instead, I argue for the opposite view, namely that there is responsibility abundance, that is, a situation in which numerous agents are responsible for the harm caused by AI, and that the challenge comes from the difficulties of dealing with such abundance in practice. I conclude by arguing that reframing the challenge in this way offers distinct dialectic and theoretical advantages, promising to help overcome some obstacles in the current debate surrounding ‘responsibility gaps’. (shrink)

Political theorists frequently utilize the ‘firm–state analogy’ (FSA) to support the arguments for democratic governance in firms. This article presents the FSA as an analogy with both justificatory and epistemic functions. Its justificatory function provides valid justificatory strategies for workplace democracy, while its epistemic function offers models that shape the understanding of corporate power. In this article, four limitations of the justificatory function of the FSA are identified: (i) the problem of ambiguity, (ii) the boundary problem, (iii) the issue of (...) normative redundancy, and (iv) the universality problem. Furthermore, the article argues that the epistemic function of the FSA fails to adequately address some of the most concerning forms of corporate power wielded by large, particularly multinational, corporations in the realm of international trade. As a result, the FSA misses crucial reasons for the normative desirability of democracy in corporate governance. (shrink)

A common sentiment among anti-sex-robot scholars is the apprehension that sex robots will normalize and perpetuate sexual violence towards humans. In this new chapter within the feminist sex war, the authors of this article tend to agree with anti-sex-robot concerns and seek to further identify potential harms of sex robots. However, instead of characterizing the harm in terms of what the robots represent and symbolize, we are primarily interested in the internal state of the user and the type of relationship (...) that will emerge between human users and sex robots, which we argue is an unprecedented sexual relation. Unlike other comparable sex products and services, sex robots occupy a liminal space between being perceived as both a sexual property and agent, oscillating based on the preferences and convenience of the user. We argue that this oscillation that enables human–sex robot intimacy requires self-deception, which in turn entails individual moral responsibility. Thus, we articulate a novel virtue-based approach of examining human–robot intimacy that focuses on cultivating erotic flourishing. We conclude that people have a moral responsibility to exhibit self-awareness within the dynamics of their intimate relationship with sex robots and the (contradictory) beliefs required to maintain such intimacy. (shrink)

According to an influential account of standing, hypocritical blamers lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norm etc. which they invoke. Nevertheless, the commitment account has the wrong shape for it to explain why hypocrites lack standing to blame. Building on the lessons of that critique I propose a novel account of what undermines standing to blame – the comparative fairness account. This differs from the commitment account and the other prominent account of why (...) hypocrites lack standing to blame offered in the literature: the moral equality account. Finally, I observe that, intuitively, lack of commitment undermines standing to blame and that many hypocrites might lack standing for that reason also. Moreover, typically the hypocrite's failure to address their own faults is a feature in virtue of which, other things being equal, the hypocrite is less committed to the norm in question. These two observations provide the basis for an error theory of the commitment account's appeal, despite its inability to explain why, qua hypocritical blamer, one lacks standing to blame. (shrink)

Emotions are typically dual-faced: they involve both an evaluative and a practical aspect. What is more, an emotion's evaluative and practical aspects tend to exhibit a kind of fit. For example, Sakshi's fear of the bear involves apprehending the bear as a threat to something she cares about, i.e., her wellbeing. And it motivates her to act on behalf of this care: it motivates her to act in ways that protect her wellbeing. Both dimensions of Sakshi's fear are about her (...) wellbeing. Typically, characterizations of gratitude speak to both its evaluative and practical dimensions. Gratitude is described as a way of apprehending the significance of one's benefactor's kindness, and it is said to involve a disposition to thank one's benefactor and to return the kindness. In this article I show that this characterization is incomplete insofar as it leaves us without the resources needed to discern the link between gratitude's two dimensions. I argue that discerning the fit requires an account of gratitude's focus and goal. I urge that the beneficiary's communal relationship with her benefactor is gratitude's focus and that promoting this relationship is gratitude's goal. Both dimensions of a beneficiary's gratitude are about her communal relationship with her benefactor. (shrink)

National humiliation is increasingly being used as a way of explaining certain kinds of international conflict. In this article, I argue that while such explanations are presented on the back of plausible assumptions about emotion, such assumptions also make it unlikely that humiliation can play the myriad of explanatory roles attributed to it, for example, to explain the rise of Hitler, growing Chinese antagonism towards the West, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and so on. In response, I consider some other ways (...) humiliation may play a role in international conflict and argue that what are likely to be most relevant are not humiliating experiences, felt by individuals or groups, but rather humiliation narratives, which are often used as a discursive mechanism to justify conflict. This is important because it means a nation's willingness to engage in international conflict depends not on something which seems intractable (that is, the emotions felt by its citizens), but something more malleable: the narratives it accepts as frames for historical events. (shrink)

In their response to Persson and Savulescu's argument that we urgently need to pursue the moral enhancement of humankind given the risk posed by a ‘morally corrupt minority's potential to abuse cognitive enhancement’, Gordon and Ragonese offer a ‘practical proposal’ for a targeted form of cognitive enhancement whereby ‘as more sophisticated forms of cognitive enhancement become accessible, they should be made available in a carefully regulated way to’ scientific researchers invested in the production of new and improved moral enhancements. In (...) this article we raise some concerns with such a proposal, focusing specifically on the (potential) harms such an intervention may give rise to, for both the enhanced researchers and their unenhanced counterparts. We further suggest that recent changes in the nature of the academic environment – which already seem to be driving researchers to use cognitive enhancers – present a serious challenge to any proposal that encourages such use. (shrink)

Recent work in philosophy of technology has come to bear on the question of responsibility gaps. Some authors argue that the increase in the autonomous capabilities of decision-making systems makes it impossible to properly attribute responsibility for AI-based outcomes. In this article we argue that one important, and often neglected, feature of recent debates on responsibility gaps is how this debate maps on to old debates in responsibility theory. More specifically, we suggest that one of the key questions that is (...) still at issue is the significance of the reactive attitudes, and how these ought to feature in our theorizing about responsibility. We will therefore provide a new descriptive categorization of different perspectives with respect to responsibility gaps. Such reflection can provide analytical clarity about what is at stake between the various interlocutors in this debate. The main upshot of our account is the articulation of a way to frame this ‘new’ debate by drawing on the rich intellectual history of ‘old’ concepts. By regarding the question of responsibility gaps as being concerned with questions of metaphysical priority, we see that the problem of these gaps lies not in any advanced technology, but rather in how we think about responsibility. (shrink)

The Moral Equivalence Thesis claims that procreation in affluent countries and eco‐gluttony are morally on a par, and that both are impermissible. We argue that this ambiguates between two different theses, the Strict and the Lax. On the Strict Reading of the thesis, procreation and eco‐gluttony are both wrong for the same reasons, that is, because both involve individuals overstepping their carbon budget. We argue that this is false at least with regard to a certain number of children and a (...) range of the costs of children. By contrast, a Lax Reading of the thesis is, we think, defensible. On this reading, procreation and eco‐gluttony may both be wrong, but for different reasons and under different conditions. While eco‐gluttony is wrong across a range of ideal and non‐ideal conditions because it is a failure to live within one's fair carbon budget, having a child is only wrong, if it is wrong, under non‐ideal conditions where prospective parents have weighty reasons, or an obligation, to pick up the moral slack of others. (shrink)

One of the most provocative claims in current climate ethics is that we ought to have fewer children, because procreation brings new people into existence and thereby causes large amounts of additional greenhouse gas emissions. The public debate about procreation and climate change is frequently framed in terms of the question of whether people may still have any children at all. Yet in the academic debate it is a common position that, despite the large carbon impact of procreation, it is (...) still permissible to have one or two children per couple, if having children is needed for the parents' lives to go well. In this article, we propose a defence and a principled formulation of this procreative prerogative: agents are permitted to procreate if the goods that procreation provides are essential to their lives going well and cannot be replaced by other goods, nor be realized by lower‐emissions alternatives. This principle implies that procreative decisions require case‐by‐case assessment in which agents' self‐reflection, individual circumstances, and social context play a significant role. (shrink)

It is intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming a false belief. It is especially intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming the false belief that you are their friend. Despite these intuitions, this article argues that in a surprising number of cases, deceiving people into believing you are their friend is not only permitted, but required. The article uses this result to make some important revisions and suggestions for the emergent social rights literature: (i) it shows that social rights (...) are feasible in a wider range of cases than previously thought, and (ii) it casts doubt on whether grounding such rights on the impersonal value of genuine intimate relationships is their most fruitful grounding. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of responsibility‐sensitive justice for one set of intergenerational rights and duties. It focuses on the distinctive set of rights and duties, pertaining to procreation and parenting, that can be derived from Left Libertarianism's foundational entitlements. Broadly speaking, those implied rights and duties are such that all children's ability levels should be of equal value at the threshold of adulthood.

This article examines the contrasting conceptions of gratitude in Early Confucian and Western philosophy. It focuses on a key difference: the presence of the notion of ‘debts of gratitude’ in Western thought and its absence in Confucianism. We explore how this difference is rooted in contrasting ethical outlooks and values. Western philosophy often conceives of gratitude as a duty of reciprocation, furthering the values of social equality and individual autonomy. By contrast, Early Confucians viewed gratitude as proper acknowledgement that strengthens (...) social relationships that are part of an ongoing collective project, spanning generations. This view reflects the importance of values such as community, harmony, and ritual propriety in Confucianism. Unlike the Western context, in the Early Confucian social world, there was no role for ‘debts of gratitude’ to play. There were no Confucian values that ‘debts of gratitude’ would help to realize, or would be responsive to, in the way that debts of gratitude further the values of equality and independence in the West. We conclude by noting that some Western philosophers express ideas about gratitude in collaborative contexts that align with Confucian ideas, suggesting some shared elements between Confucian and Western ethical outlooks. (shrink)

The income gap between women and men expands with age, culminating in a gender pension gap in old age that is much larger than pay gaps earlier in life. In this article, I question two attempts to justify gender pension gaps. One insists that lower financial contribution justifies women's lower overall pensions. The second states that women must receive less monthly because they live longer. I argue that neither of these reasons is fair in a gender-unjust world. Rather than justifying (...) pension gaps, female longevity is an opportunity to promote gender justice: by subsidizing longer lives, old-age redistribution attenuates lifetime gender inequality. In the case of retirement pensions, the use of age to promote gender equality may be preferable to explicit gender differentiation. There is, then, a feminist case for old-age redistribution. (shrink)

Since the late 2000s trans pregnancy has received increasing public and academic attention, and stories of the ‘pregnant man’ have become a media staple. Existing research has critiqued such spectacularization and the supposed tension between maleness, masculinity, and pregnancy that underpins it. Extending that work, this article draws on interview data from an international study of trans reproductive practices and analyzes participants' experiences of being, and expecting themselves to be, perceived in public space not as spectacularly ‘pregnant men’, but as (...) fat men. As a starting point we take the experience of one participant whose heavily pregnant participation in a five-kilometer race prompted the question: ‘Why is the chubby guy running?’ Using Judith Butler's concept of the cultural intelligibility of gender, we ask why the question asked was not: ‘Why is the pregnant guy running?’ We further consider the degree to which pregnant trans people manage their unintelligibility within the matrix of pregnancy, fatness, and trans/gender and how this reveals the limits of gender intelligibility itself. (shrink)

I argue that there is no morally relevant difference, based solely on motivation for enjoyment, between enjoying simulated rape with a sexbot compared to other media. In defence of this claim, I distinguish between two types of enjoyment – enjoyment qua simulation and enjoyment qua substitution – and further claim that each type of enjoyment shares corresponding similarities with either idle or surrogate fantasies. Given this, the enjoyment of one's rape fantasy is, I contend, immoral if one enjoys qua substitution (...) one's surrogate fantasy about (for example) sexualized enslavement and rape, but not if one enjoys qua simulation one's idle fantasy about the same sexualized enslavement and rape. I therefore conclude that whether one's enjoyment is immoral depends on the motivation for the enjoyment and the type of fantasy one creates to procure it (where the motivation for enjoyment and fantasy share the same desire), and not the media used to facilitate one's fantasy and subsequent enjoyment. (shrink)

This article develops a fairness-based criticism of the UK’s policy of promoting free admissions at major museums. With a focus on geographic inequalities and per-capita museums spending, I argue that free admissions can be a surprisingly bad way of promoting cultural opportunities for disadvantaged groups. My criticism emphasises the fact that free admissions consume resources without necessarily providing targeted benefits to disadvantaged groups and addressing background inequalities. Given that museums vary in their location, visitor profile, and operating costs, this critique (...) does not apply to all museums. It applies to the largest and most popular museums in the most advantaged areas, which can expect to keep drawing significant numbers while charging. If we are aiming to prioritise the interests of less advantaged groups, we should be in favour of charging at London’s major museums, to finance “levelling up” across regions, and more direct access-promoting measures in targeted outreach, collaboration, and programming. (shrink)

A number of scholars and policy-makers have raised serious concerns about the impact of chatbots and generative artificial intelligence (AI) on the spread of political disinformation. An increasingly popular proposal to address this concern is to pass laws that, by requiring that artificially generated and artificially disseminated content be labeled as such, aim to ensure a degree of transparency in this rapidly transforming environment. This article argues that such laws are misguided, for two reasons. We first aim to show that (...) legally requiring the disclosure of the automated nature of bot accounts and AI-generated content is unlikely to succeed in improving the quality of political discussion on social media. This is because information that an account spreading or creating political information is a bot or a language model is itself politically relevant information, and people reason very poorly about such information. Second, we aim to show that the main motivation for these laws – the threat of coordinated disinformation campaigns (automated or not) – appears overstated. (shrink)