ABSTRACT: COVID-19 elicited a rapid emergence of new mutual aid networks in the US, but the practices of these networks are understudied. Using qualitative methods, we explored the empirical ethics guiding US-based mutual aid networks' activities, and assessed the alignment between principles and practices as networks mobilized to meet community needs during 2020–21. We conducted in-depth interviews with 15 mutual aid group organizers and supplemented these with secondary source materials on mutual aid activities and participant observation of mutual aid organizing (...) efforts. We analyzed participants' practices in relation to key mutual aid principles as defined in the literature: 1) solidarity not charity; 2) non-hierarchical organizational structures; 3) equity in decision-making; and 4) political engagement. Our data also yielded a fifth principle, "mutuality," essential to networks' approaches but distinct from anarchist conceptions of mutualism. While mutual aid networks were heavily invested in these ethical principles, they struggled to achieve them in practice. These findings underscore the importance of mutual aid praxis as an intersection between ethical principles and practices, and the challenges that contemporary, and often new, mutual aid networks responding to COVID-19 face in developing praxis during a period of prolonged crisis. We develop a theory-of-change model that illuminates both the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of mutual aid work in the context of structural inequities, and shows how communities can achieve justice-oriented mutual aid praxis in current and future crises. (shrink)

Effective altruism has a strategy problem. Overreliance on a strategy of donating to the most effective charities keeps us on the firefighter's treadmill, continually pursuing the next-highest quantifiable marginal gain. But on its own, this is politically shortsighted. Without any long-term framework within which these individual rescues fit together to bring about the greatest overall impact, we are almost certainly leaving a lot of value on the table. Thus, effective altruists' preferred means undercut their professed aims. Alongside the charity framework, (...) the more effective altruist ought to consider a mutual aid framework, which better acknowledges and honors the unavoidably political commitments of effective altruism to reimagine and remake the world. (shrink)

Effective Altruism is a popular social movement that encourages individuals to donate to organizations that effectively address humanity’s most severe poverty. However, because Effective Altruists are committed to doing the most good in the most effective ways, they often argue that it is wrong to help those nearest to you. In this paper, I target a major subset of Effective Altruists who consider it a moral obligation to do the most good possible. Call these Obligation-Oriented Effective Altruists (OOEAs), and their (...) movement Obligation-Oriented Effective Altruism (OOEA). I argue that insofar as this variety of OOEA seems to commit us to refrain from helping the people right in front of us, there is something intuitively wrong about it. In response, I introduce an alternative model that embraces partiality: Mutual Aid. Mutual Aid is a network of community members, usually from the same geographical region, who share a commitment to offer, receive, and exchange material goods, wealth, and social support. I recommend Mutual Aid as a liberatory model, which—through empathy, solidarity, and care—mobilizes community building and provides a catalyst for community advocacy. As such, we should resist the claims of OOEAs that partially distributing our funds to people or causes we care about is morally wrong or even less than ideal. We do not have a moral obligation to use our funds “effectively;” rather, we have a broader obligation to address human suffering, and Mutual Aid is one moral alternative for discharging this duty. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This study describes the results of a social analysis of mutual aid solidarity during Nigeria's #EndSARSprotests against Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) brutality in Nigeria. The results reveal that the protests achieved success with the assistance of mutual aid solidarity networks. Yet there is a dearth of literature exploring the reasons for this accomplishment. Nigeria is a country where everything done usually has a religious coloration and interpretation; however, the 2020 mutual aid solidarity in the #EndSARS protests proved otherwise. Using (...) in-depth interviews, data were elicited from 20 youths, including participants and observers during the #EndSARS mutual aid solidarity protests. Using a phenomenological approach, this study found that the mutual aid support group transcended traditional geopolitical, gender, and religious barriers, and youth and the elderly participated in the protest. Further results show that the 2020 #End-SARS mutual aid solidarity brought about an accountable and transparent civil society, including the financial disbanding of the Nigerian Police Force, the SARS unit responsible for extrajudicial killings. The findings also indicate that Nigerian politicians are the real problem, not religion. Recommendations are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021) by Sarah RichardsonQuill KuklaQuill Kukla, review of Sarah Richardson's The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021)I had been eagerly anticipating the release of Sarah Richardson's meticulously researched The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021) for several years, and I was not disappointed. A leading feminist scholar of the history and philosophy of (...) science, Richardson traces the scientific history of the idea that pregnant people's bodies control the future health, character, and well-being of their offspring. She also explores how this science is translated into social messaging and shaped by social ideology. Richardson delves into the details of the methodology, motivations, results, and communication of the science of maternal influences. She reveals a history of shaky results, contested methods, and socially loaded messaging, unified by a sustained interest in framing maternal bodies as sites of risk and responsibility for birth outcomes.A central narrative of the book is that the perceived location and mechanism through which pregnant bodies control fetal development keeps shifting around; over time, scientists have located this maternal influence in the uterine environment, the cytoplasm, the methylation of DNA, maternal nutrition, and even in the emotions, thoughts, and imagination of the mother, among other locations.1 Each time a version of the maternal influence hypothesis re-emerges, targeting a different bodily location and mechanism, it comes along with similar social messaging: pregnant people are distinctively responsible for the 'quality' of their children; their bodies are distinctive sites of risk, in need of social management; and their influence can be understood and controlled independent of the context in which they live. Given how many times this scientific hypothesis and its accompanying social messaging has died and been reborn, it is hard not to conclude, with Richardson, that background ideology compels us to keep searching for new stories that take this same form. The idea that pregnant people's bodies are understood as decontextualized and heightened sites of risk and responsibility for birth outcomes, in need of systematic discipline (both self-discipline and social discipline) in order to ensure their production of proper offspring, is one that has been explored [End Page e-1] in quite a bit of depth within feminist theory and reproductive ethics over the last thirty years. To name just a few, Barbara Duden's Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (1993), Deborah Lupton's "Risk and the Ontology of Pregnant Embodiment" (1999), Lisa Mitchell's Baby's First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (2001), and my own Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' Bodies (2005) are all works firmly within this tradition. What is new about Richardson's book is not the development and exploration of this cultural narrative and imaginary, but rather her rigorous and skillful analysis of the science that has grown out of and undergirded it. Richardson is a masterful writer, who makes scientific details comprehensible and fascinating. Her historical and epistemological analyses of exactly what shaped the science at each stage, what each scientific iteration did and didn't manage to show, and how these different scientific movements were translated into public messaging, is sharp and compelling. Richardson shows us the inner workings of how scientific programs build momentum; how scientists make methodological decisions; and how results feed into ongoing research programs. From this book, we also develop a rich sense of just how much uncertainty is baked into the science of human development, and how both scientific and public excitement about a given research program are mostly independent of the success and security of the science that comes out of it. The book traces 150 years of the history of the science of maternal influences, culminating in the current focus on epigenetics—which, like various past maternal influence theories, has ignited our broader social imagination. Epigenetics, roughly, is the study of molecular changes outside our DNA that control how genes express themselves. Environmental stimuli (such as stress) can cause changes in methylation, and thereby influence the expression of the genome: "Epigenetic markers that help determine whether a... (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In the last two decades it has become increasingly common to advocate for a complete ban on the sale of cigarettes. One reason in favor of such a ban is egalitarian: differences in the prevalence of smoking between socioeconomic groups go a long way in explaining health inequality, and a complete ban might be effective in reducing this inequality. However, a complete ban might also be objectionable on egalitarian grounds if issued with a discriminatory intent or if it is selectively (...) paternalistic. This article argues that a complete ban is likely to be guilty of both, especially when one of its aims is to reduce unequal rates of smoking between groups. A complete ban on the sale of cigarettes thus exhibits a curious feature: in aiming to reduce inequality it threatens to be inegalitarian. This is characteristic of a wider class of public health policies that deserves further attention by egalitarians. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The judgments of conscientious and informed experts play a central role in two elements of clinical equipoise. The first, and most widely discussed, element involves ensuring that no participant in a randomized trial is allocated to a level of treatment that everyone agrees is substandard. The second, and less often discussed, element involves ensuring that trials are likely to generate social value by producing the information necessary to resolve a clinically meaningful uncertainty or disagreement about the relative merits of a (...) set of interventions. The distribution of judgments in expert communities can take many forms, each with important implications for whether a trial satisfies one or both elements of clinical equipoise. In this article we use a graphical approach to represent three ways in which expert community uncertainty can vary: by spread, modality, and skew. Understanding these different distributions of expert judgment has three important implications: it helps to make operational the requirement of social value, it shows that some conditions for initiating studies to promote social value diverge from common assumptions about clinical equipoise, and it has important implications for how trials should be designed and monitored, and what patients should be told during informed consent. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Cities are struggling to balance the moral imperatives of sustainable development, with equity and social justice often ignored and negatively impacted by climate change mitigation and adaptation. Yet, the nature of these impacts on social justice has not been comprehensively investigated and little ethical guidance exists on how to better promote social justice in urban climate change planning practice. This article addresses the normative question: How should urban climate change planning advance social justice? It gathers empirical literature documenting the inclusivity (...) and equity impacts of urban climate change planning and thematically analyses that literature for dimensions of social justice drawn from philosophical and urban justice theory. Study findings demonstrate that four characteristics of climate change planning in cities—underlying neoliberal ideology, unequal treatment, green gentrification, and exclusion from decisionmaking—comprise, create, or worsen social injustices across six dimensions. These characteristics are often interconnected and inseparable. Where neoliberal ideology guides urban climate change planning, the other three characteristics frequently occur as well. The article concludes by arguing that, at a minimum, urban planners and climate planners have an obligation of justice to avoid undertaking climate change planning that exhibits any of the four characteristics and to address injustices generated where planning has such characteristics. It further suggests that planners' negative obligations likely extend beyond this because the literature review revealed gaps in existing empirical data on the equity impacts of urban climate change planning. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Autistic adults suffer from an alarmingly high and increasing unemployment rate. Many companies use pre-employment personality screening tests. These filters likely have disparate impacts on neurodivergent individuals, exacerbating this social problem. This situation gives rise to a bind. On the one hand, the tests disproportionately harm a vulnerable group in society. On the other, employers think that personality test scores are predictors of job performance and have a right to use personality traits in their decisions. It is difficult to say (...) whether these negative disparate impacts are a case of wrongful discrimination. Nevertheless, we will show that pre-employment personality tests prey on several features of autism in an unfair way, and for this reason, we suggest the contours of some regulation that we deem necessary. (shrink)