tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/moral-philosophy-17029/articlesMoral philosophy – The Conversation2023-11-30T17:21:27Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2189592023-11-30T17:21:27Z2023-11-30T17:21:27ZGaza Update: ceasefire holds for now, but array of armed Hamas allies could threaten this fragile truce<p>So far, the ceasefire between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas, originally set at four days and since extended twice as more hostages and prisoners are exchanged, remains in place. There have been concerns that isolated incidents of violence, including one in Jerusalem where three Israeli civilians were gunned down in an attack claimed by Hamas, might kickstart hostilities once again. But the tenuous pause in the fighting seems, by and large, to be holding.</p>
<p>As a result, aid continues to get into the war-torn Gaza Strip, and the exchange of Israeli hostages taken in the October 7 attacks for Palestinians, most of them women and children held in “administrative detention” in Israel, continues.</p>
<p>In the meantime, we have found out more about the horrors of October 7, including which groups joined Hamas in its killing and kidnapping spree. A BBC report has revealed that five separate armed militias were involved besides Hamas – and that Hamas had trained with up to ten other armed groups prior to the attacks.</p>
<p>Brian Phillips, an expert in international relations at the University of Essex, believes the number of armed groups operating in support of Hamas <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-hamass-web-of-allies-in-the-october-7-attacks-makes-ending-the-conflict-much-harder-for-israel-218861">increases the risk</a> of a breakdown in the ceasefire. Already since the Jerusalem shootings, Itamar Ben-Gvir – one of the more hawkish members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – has called for a military response, saying this incident proves he was right to oppose the ceasefire. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, just across the border in Lebanon are 60,000 Hezbollah fighters. There have been some clashes between Hezbollah and Israel’s military, but so far the “Party of God” has not become fully engaged in the current struggle. This, Phillips says, would be a significant escalation as, in addition to its military might, Hezbollah also wields considerable political muscle in Lebanon, so the conflict could quickly morph into a regional war.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-hamass-web-of-allies-in-the-october-7-attacks-makes-ending-the-conflict-much-harder-for-israel-218861">Gaza war: Hamas's web of allies in the October 7 attacks makes ending the conflict much harder for Israel</a>
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<p>But as long as talks continue, the killing will largely remain on hold – or at least, one must hope so. That the two sides are communicating at all is largely down to the mediation of the Qatari government. Qatar has set itself up as a centre for conflict resolution in recent years under the aegis of its emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. The country has hosted an array of peace deals in recent years, including the talks between the US and the Taliban which resulted in the US pull-out from Afghanistan in 2021. Qatar also played a role in ending hostilities between Hamas and Israel in 2012.</p>
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<p><em>Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/gaza-update-159?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=Gaza">Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox</a>.</em></p>
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<p>As Vassilis Fouskas, a professor of international politics and economics at the University of East London, <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-qatar-used-its-business-connections-to-become-a-leading-mediator-in-the-middle-east-218461">explains</a>, Al Thani is the only head of state to have visited Gaza since Hamas took over in 2007. His leadership has provided millions of dollars in aid support to Gaza, as well as allowing Hamas to open an office in Qatar’s capital, Doha. Fouskas writes that as well as the political clout this gives Qatar with Hamas, the small but extremely wealthy Gulf kingdom has also built strong business ties in the west, which gives it access to the US and – through them – to Israel.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-qatar-used-its-business-connections-to-become-a-leading-mediator-in-the-middle-east-218461">Gaza war: how Qatar used its business connections to become a leading mediator in the Middle East</a>
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<p>The extensions to the original four-day truce have been a blessed chance for aid agencies to funnel supplies to the Gazan population, who have been under virtual siege since October 7. But Sarah Schiffling of Hanken School of Economics and Chris Phelan of Edge Hill University, both experts in humanitarian aid management, believe that the amounts of food, fuel and medicine reaching the 2.2 million people in Gaza – most of whom have been displaced – will be <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-what-aid-agencies-can-hope-to-achieve-under-the-strict-limits-of-the-four-day-humanitarian-pause-218419">far from adequate</a>. </p>
<p>This was confirmed by the UN secretary general, Antonio Gutterez, who said on November 29: “[The aid] remains completely inadequate to meet the huge needs of more than 2 million people.” Schiffling and Phelan also believe the scale of the humanitarian disaster is such that once Israel resumes its assault, the situation could worsen rapidly.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-what-aid-agencies-can-hope-to-achieve-under-the-strict-limits-of-the-four-day-humanitarian-pause-218419">Gaza: what aid agencies can hope to achieve under the strict limits of the four-day humanitarian pause</a>
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<p>One of the big concerns for humanitarian agencies is that disease will end up being an even bigger killer in Gaza than Israel’s bombardment. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently highlighted that if Gaza’s water supplies and sanitation systems are not repaired very soon, there could be an enormous surge of gastrointestinal and infectious diseases among the local populations – including cholera.</p>
<p>Yara M. Asi, an assistant professor of global health management at the University of Central Florida, <a href="https://theconversation.com/gazas-next-tragedy-disease-risk-spreads-amid-overcrowded-shelters-dirty-water-and-breakdown-of-basic-sanitation-217516">writes that</a> the “easy spread of infectious disease in wartime conditions can be just as devastating as airstrikes to health and mortality – if not more so”. She believes that Gaza’s healthcare system, already virtually crippled before October 7, is fast becoming overwhelmed.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gazas-next-tragedy-disease-risk-spreads-amid-overcrowded-shelters-dirty-water-and-breakdown-of-basic-sanitation-217516">Gaza's next tragedy: Disease risk spreads amid overcrowded shelters, dirty water and breakdown of basic sanitation</a>
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<h2>Targets and tunnels</h2>
<p>Among the more contentious “military targets” have been several of Gaza’s hospitals which, under the rules of war, must be protected from attack. The only exception is when such medical premises are being used for military purposes, which – as we wrote here a fortnight ago – is what Israel has claimed about the al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, which it raided and searched on November 15. </p>
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<p>The IDF published a video showing a tunnel under the hospital which it claimed was evidence of a Hamas command-and-control facility being run from the premises. Jamie Pringle, a reader in forensic geoscience at Keele University, and Alastair Ruffell of Queen’s University Belfast, are both experts at underground forensic detection, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-investigators-would-go-about-finding-and-verifying-underground-military-complexes-218101">they explain</a> how they would go about searching a facility such as al-Shifa for underground facilities.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-investigators-would-go-about-finding-and-verifying-underground-military-complexes-218101">Gaza war: how investigators would go about finding and verifying underground military complexes</a>
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<p>Meanwhile, we’ve heard from Prime Minister Netanyahu that the IDF remains poised to resume its assault on Gaza – which, he says, will continue until they have rooted out and destroyed Hamas as a political force. So far, the IDF has reported 75 of its forces have been killed during the ground offensive, but James Horncastle – an expert in international relations from Simon Fraser University in Canada – believes that the more of Gaza Israel destroys, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/israels-ground-offensive-in-gaza-city-is-ignoring-the-past-lessons-of-urban-warfare-218471">more difficult its mission becomes</a>. As he observes: “Debris [created by the aerial bombardment] creates natural choke points and fortifications that the defender can use to control the movement of the aggressor.”</p>
<p>Horncastle explains that Hamas fighters will be intimately aware of the terrain on which they are fighting, and have been preparing for this offensive for years. And that Israel has so far only explored a fraction of the estimated 500km of tunnels under Gaza, which allowed Hamas fighters to shelter during the weeks of aerial bombardment that preceded this ground offensive.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/israels-ground-offensive-in-gaza-city-is-ignoring-the-past-lessons-of-urban-warfare-218471">Israel's ground offensive in Gaza City is ignoring the past lessons of urban warfare</a>
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<h2>Dissent on both sides</h2>
<p>As the IDF’s assault has gradually moved south through the Gaza Strip, driving before them hundreds of thousands of refugees desperate to find sanctuary from the violence, there have been reports that some Palestinians are openly expressing defiance of Hamas. Indeed, polling taken in the days before the October 7 attacks found that more than two-thirds of people in Gaza and the West Bank had either little or no confidence in Hamas.</p>
<p>Christoph Bluth, an expert in international relations at the University of Bradford, considers how <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-representative-is-hamas-of-ordinary-palestinians-218080">representative Hamas is</a> of ordinary Palestinians, noting that the most recent election in Gaza was in 2006 and that – given the average age of the population is about 18 – most people won’t have voted for them. Bluth adds that human rights organisations have recorded many instances of arbitrary detention, torture and punishment beatings of Gaza residents by the Hamas authorities, while Hamas also stands accused of harassing journalists who criticise its government.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-representative-is-hamas-of-ordinary-palestinians-218080">Gaza war: how representative is Hamas of ordinary Palestinians?</a>
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<p>On the other side of the border fence, Israeli journalists are coming under fire from the Netanyahu government for not toeing the official line. Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent left-leaning daily newspaper, has felt the wrath of the communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, who has suggested financial penalties be applied to the paper while accusing it of publishing “lying, defeatist propaganda” and “sabotaging Israel in wartime”. The proposal aims to cancel state subscriptions to the paper and “forbid the publication of official notices”.</p>
<p>Colleen Murrell, who has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC and ITN, among others – including a stint in Gaza – and is now a professor of journalism at Dublin City University, charts the way the Israeli authorities are trying to <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-israeli-government-has-haaretz-newspaper-in-its-sights-as-it-tightens-screws-on-media-freedom-218730">control the message</a>, using heavyhanded tactics first employed by the British during the Palestine Mandate before 1948.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-israeli-government-has-haaretz-newspaper-in-its-sights-as-it-tightens-screws-on-media-freedom-218730">Gaza war: Israeli government has Haaretz newspaper in its sights as it tightens screws on media freedom</a>
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<h2>Violence versus humanity</h2>
<p>Since October 7 there has been a dramatic uptick in the number of violent incidents in the West Bank, where there are reported to be more than 750,000 Israelis living in 290 illegal settlements. Since the Hamas attacks, the United Nations has recorded 281 settler attacks on Palestinians as of November 29.</p>
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<p>Tristan Dunning of the University of Queensland and Martin Kear from the University of Sydney – both experts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – <a href="https://theconversation.com/since-the-gaza-war-began-violence-against-palestinians-has-also-surged-in-the-west-bank-and-gone-virtually-unnoticed-218236">report that</a> the 250 deaths caused by this surge in settler violence include 55 children. It doesn’t help that the settlers are being openly encouraged by Israel’s interior minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who said earlier in the year: “We have to settle the land of Israel and at the same time need to launch a military campaign, blow up buildings, assassinate terrorists. Not one or two but dozens, hundreds or, if needed, thousands.” </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/since-the-gaza-war-began-violence-against-palestinians-has-also-surged-in-the-west-bank-and-gone-virtually-unnoticed-218236">Since the Gaza war began, violence against Palestinians has also surged in the West Bank – and gone virtually unnoticed</a>
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<p>Humanity seems to find it hard to heed Martin Luther King’s warning that “hate begets hate, violence begets violence”. Torbjörn Tännsjö, of Stockholm University, gives us a <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-a-better-understanding-of-the-violence-on-both-sides-might-give-us-a-chance-at-a-solution-216855">moral philsopher’s view</a> of the conflict, comparing Hamas’s savage attack on October 7 with the brutality of Israel’s response. He remains optimistic that humanity on both sides might prevail, while admitting that, at present, this appears to be a long shot.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-a-better-understanding-of-the-violence-on-both-sides-might-give-us-a-chance-at-a-solution-216855">Gaza war: a better understanding of the violence on both sides might give us a chance at a solution</a>
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<p><em>Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/gaza-update-159?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=Gaza">Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox</a>.</em></p>
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A selection of analysis from our coverage of the war in Gaza over the past fortnight.Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2168552023-11-30T11:08:09Z2023-11-30T11:08:09ZGaza war: a better understanding of the violence on both sides might give us a chance at a solution<p>Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 marked the beginning of a fresh round of conflict between Israel and Palestine. But it also raises the question of how we should assess Hamas’s terrible crime and whether and how it can be put into context compared with other war crimes committed by other parties. </p>
<p>Many people believe that we should not “relativise” it (or any other terrible terrorist action). But comparing horrific acts and putting then into context allows us both to understand them and to arrive at a reasonable ethical judgment. </p>
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<p>This seems to be the view also of the author and peace activist David Grossman, who made the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/50f33279-d637-426c-bb8b-3ce3965c14f3">following comparison</a>: “The occupation is a crime, but to shoot hundreds of civilians – children and parents, elderly and sick in cold blood – that is a worse crime. Even in the hierarchy of evil, there is a ‘ranking’.”</p>
<p>This is relativisation, but not one that is very helpful. To compare the terrorist act of Hamas with the occupation is to compare apples with oranges. </p>
<p>More valuable would be a comparison between the Hamas terrorist action (and violation of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/where-the-icc-stands-if-war-crimes-are-committed-on-either-side-of-the-israel-hamas-war-216093">laws of armed conflict</a>) and Israel’s killing of civilians in general and children in particular. Which crime is worse? Which crime ranks highest in the hierarchy of evil?</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/where-the-icc-stands-if-war-crimes-are-committed-on-either-side-of-the-israel-hamas-war-216093">Where the ICC stands if war crimes are committed on either side of the Israel-Hamas war</a>
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<h2>What the law says</h2>
<p>The assessment of Hamas’s crime is straightforward and simple. They targeted innocent people, killed or kidnapped them. Even if the Palestinians have a right to resistance against the occupiers (they enjoy what is called <em><a href="https://iep.utm.edu/justwar/#">jus ad bellum</a></em> – the right to make war) not all means are permitted. </p>
<p>Even defensive wars must be conducted in a proper way. It is never permissible to target civilians to defeat your enemy. That is part of what is called <em><a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/ihl-other-legal-regmies/jus-in-bello-jus-ad-bellum">jus in bello</a></em> (the law of war) which is binding for both those who attack and those who defend themselves.</p>
<p>What about Israel’s attacks on Gaza, then? Israel upholds an illegal occupation of Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territory and has put Gaza under siege – something <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14639947.2022.2080362#">forbidden</a> in international law since 1977. What’s more, their attacks on Gaza, where the explicit target is Hamas, cause casualties among civilians – not least among children. </p>
<p>According to humanitarian law, it is permitted to target military installations even if it means that some civilians are killed. But this must not be done if the number of civilian losses is disproportionate in relation to the military goal. </p>
<p>This line has arguably been transgressed already in the present Israeli war on Gaza. The casualties appear out of proportion. </p>
<p>The assessment of proportionality is not an exact science and few precedent cases exist. In the final analysis, it is a matter of judgment. </p>
<p>When the UN secretary general, António Guterres <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/even-war-has-rules-secretary-general-tells-security-council-demanding-all-parties-middle-east-uphold-international-humanitarian-law-unrestricted-aid-gaza">asserted</a>, “I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza,” it was clear that this was addressed partly to Israel (<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67215620">who protested</a>). It is easy to concur with his judgment, given the way the war has developed.</p>
<p>But is there not an important difference here? While Hamas has targeted civilians, Israel kills them without any intention to do so. The number of dead civilians is out of proportion, but their death is merely predictable – not intended. Does this not mean that Israel’s crime ranks lower in the hierarchy of evil?</p>
<p>This assessment is also too simplistic. When they go after Hamas knowing they will kill a <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-rule-of-proportionality-and-is-it-being-observed-in-the-israeli-siege-of-gaza-217321">disproportionate number of civilians</a>, it is appropriate to impute to them an indirect intent to kill these civilians. We may speak in legal terms of an intent rooted in a reckless indifference to human life.</p>
<h2>Moral judgments</h2>
<p>What is worse then, to kill civilians directly and intentionally in rage, or indirectly, from a distance, with reckless indifference to human life?</p>
<p>If we base our comparison on a concern for civilians in and around armed conflicts, it is appropriate to count the casualties. What kind of crime takes the largest toll? What can we learn from modern history?</p>
<p>For example, the US-led war in Indochina – where most of the killing was indirect and conducted from a distance out of reckless indifference to human life – set records in the killing of civilians since the second world war. The dead must be counted in the hundreds of thousands and the bombing campaign that killed them has been <a href="https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf">called a war crime</a>.</p>
<p>Certainly, there is considerable weight also on the other side of the argument, that intentional civilian deaths are worse. Just think of the genocide in Rwanda or the deliberate and murderous ethnic cleansing of the Balkans in the 1990s. </p>
<p>There are a lot of other examples. The massacres of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60820215">Rohingya Muslims</a> in Myanmar, the <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/11/germany-iraq-worlds-first-judgment-on-crime-of-genocide-against-the-yazidis/">Yazidis in Iraq</a>, the <a href="https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/darfur/genocide/#">Janjaweed massacres</a> in Darfur in the 2000s and again as part of the recent explosion of viollence in Sudan – recent history is replete with indiscriminate killing of civilians. </p>
<p>And yet, when the casualties are counted, it is perhaps safe to claim that indirect killing at a distance with a reckless indifference to human life is no better. Worse in one respect: it seems to be so easy to perpetrate.</p>
<p>What should Israel do if they cannot respect <em>jus in bello</em>? If only the alternative to never-ending war could be as simple and straightforward as one democratic state for everyone who lives within the territories currently controlled by Israel, where Jews, Muslims and Christians can live together. This may seem as a piece of wishful thinking during the height of armed conflict, but since it now appears to be the only realistic way of ending hostilities, there is hope for the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216855/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Torbjörn Tännsjö does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A philosopher weighs up the legal and moral arguments on both sides of the conflict.Torbjörn Tännsjö, Professor of Practical Philosophy, Stockholm UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2176702023-11-16T19:03:43Z2023-11-16T19:03:43ZFriday essay: Rai Gaita and the moral power of conversation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559244/original/file-20231114-26-7uv53k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C10%2C974%2C648&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Mark Baker/MUP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since the University of Melbourne took from us Rai Gaita’s <a href="https://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/s/1182/match/wide.aspx?sid=1182&gid=1&pgid=6278&content_id=4306">public lecture series</a> we have been going to Rai’s house in St Kilda to talk. Not regularly, life is too much for that, whenever we can though.</p>
<p>Few people in this world believe more in face-to-face conversations – in speaking with others not when you’ve done your thinking, but in order to think – than Rai. This is how The Wednesday Lectures, first at Australian Catholic University and then at Melbourne University, where we teach in criminology and creative writing respectively, came to be. This belief is a guiding presence in Rai Gaita’s latest book, a collection of his works, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/justice-and-hope-hardback">Justice and Hope</a>.</p>
<h2>i</h2>
<p><strong>Juliet</strong>: What I would call “the St Kilda conversations” between Maria, Rai and me weren’t trite. We started with some idea of documenting the thoughts or perhaps even methodology of Rai Gaita. We would take a few moments to adjust to arriving and to decide on tea or coffee but before these important decisions had been made the conversation had begun, about war, about justice, about pain, about grief – and one of us would reach for the phone and press record. No such thing as small talk. Everything and everyone is important.</p>
<p>Rai’s idea of the preciousness of every person appears in all his thinking, and in ours almost from the moment we arrive. Why talk of war at all if there is not something inherently wrong, morally if not legally, in the loss of the uniqueness of a person in war, even if that loss is of something in them when they kill?</p>
<p>Rai’s thinking in these conversations moves from Hannah Arendt to Simone Weil to Albert Camus and back to the ideas in the room. He is promiscuous like this. He values the preciousness of their arguments as he does ours. But there is no place for lazy thought. Having slid into some abstraction, I’d be pulled up – but what do you mean by that, he’d say? It was a painful relief. And sometimes I had no answer and I was grateful even to know that.</p>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: One day last November, nine months into Russia’s war against Ukraine, I came to Rai’s house wanting to talk about shame and denial. How is it families in Russia were telling relatives in Ukraine: we are not bombing you! you’ve been brainwashed! These photos? Staged. These ruins, air-raid alerts? They’re – if they’re real – your Ukro-Nazi forces bombing their own people, congratulations!</p>
<p>I had never known denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence to be so phantasmagorically total. <em>Mothers to their daughters!</em> I no longer understood how to think alone about this war.</p>
<p>Round that time I’d been delivering a final-week lecture in a capstone subject I coordinate, left my notes in the office, had to go off the cuff. “I’ve come to think of my mission as a teacher as helping students develop a capacity to bear shame” – these words fell out of me. </p>
<p>Could people be so afraid of bearing shame they’d do almost anything not to feel it? So we speak about shame. Rai says, “Shame is not just an emotion or an affect, it can be a form of understanding the moral reality you are caught up in.” We talk about how different forms of reality avoidance – insisting on absolutes (moral, political, historical) is one example – become forces in the lives of individuals, families, communities, nations.</p>
<p>Rai’s tough-minded conception of conversations sidesteps chat and debate alike. You speak not to say something and to hear something back, not to dazzle, be right or stake a claim, but to be held accountable to each other. A conversation is a pact. You are accountable not only for what you say but for the way what you say, and how you live your life, does or doesn’t square up. A conversation is also a precious opening. The light of another person’s presence turned towards you will almost always illuminate something you couldn’t see or find thinkable before.</p>
<h2>ii</h2>
<p><strong>Juliet</strong>: When I first met Rai I was sitting on the top floor at Melbourne Law School feeling the approach of a ferocious exhaustion, having flown from Connecticut, arriving that morning, late, delayed, rerouted, refuelled (barely) to deliver a paper at the Passions of International Law colloquium hosted by Gerry Simpson, Rai’s close friend. I can hardly read the words in front of me, I am trying to convey my feelings about months of watching hours of Holocaust testimony videos. My relationship – a feeling of confusion and a kind of irritation – to one testimonial in particular. I explain it psychoanalytically, trying not to fill the room with jargon, trying to remember that I felt something about this testimony, that I cared deeply about this woman’s experience … before the room starts spinning.</p>
<p>I look up as I read, and though everything’s a bit blurry there is the warmest gaze upon me. It’s Rai, sort of smiling, part care for me, part care for this woman I am using to explain my theories of trauma and imagination.</p>
<p>I think I’ve made a mess of it but all I care about is getting to bed. And then as I’m grasping in the break for the comfort of a piece of watermelon he approaches me and expresses his appreciation. He has heard what I said, how I both cared for this woman and felt unnerved by her melodramatic phrasing, and my own irritation. I say “yes of course, it’s hard not to care” but he doesn’t give me a way out. Nor does he pin me to my own rationales. He is curious. It is an academic manner, of sorts – I recognise it from a time before we thought we knew everything or felt we had to prove it to an audience. I’m fond of saying “I’m an academic, I know stuff about stuff”, Rai is fond of saying “let’s talk”.</p>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: In 2005 my then publisher asked Rai to launch <a href="https://www.mariatumarkin.com/traumascapes">Traumascapes</a>. My first book, first launch – I bought my nine-year-old a matching green vest and skirt, a friend played a real-life harp. Rai didn’t know me or my work. I never thought I could be a writer once my family left Ukraine in 1989 so this whole “debut author” period felt, still feels, unreal.</p>
<p>Rai came in. Holding my book. To have a thinker of this calibre take your work seriously is destabilising. Rai had a bunch of my lines underlined and some crossed out – he really read me. Also, he was using an actual pen in a book, wow, bad Rai.</p>
<p>The launch was my first encounter with Rai’s moral seriousness, which animates his idea of a conversation. It is like a lamp you expect to be shined in your face but instead it lights up the room and everyone in it. Illuminates you, the shaky little thing in the room’s centre.</p>
<h2>iii</h2>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: Rai Gaita has been seeking to create conditions in the public domain for people from different, sometimes antagonistic ecosystems of thought and belief to get into each other’s heads. Or – if the head image feels too ickily invasive (it’s mine, not Rai’s) – to pull their thoughts out like sock drawers (mine again) and look at what’s there and what’s stuffed at the very back.</p>
<p>Twice Rai invited me to give The Wednesday Lecture – on the royal commission into the institutionalised abuse of children, then some years later on feminism, and both nights I bitterly regretted saying yes and was finishing writing my talk with minutes (ten, five) to go. I never felt ready even though I had months to prepare. I felt rushed, pushed, whacked and then – adrenaline and self-loathing having peaked – I felt grateful. I was pinned down, called into accountability, made to face the world and myself. At the end, it was a relief.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Often these public conversations don’t work (sometimes they are disasters) and people walk away saying what the hell. But the goal of disarming each other through conversation strikes Juliet and me as necessary as water. That this was something our university pulled the plug on felt to us indecent. Decency is a Rai word. In Justice and Hope (2005), the title essay of the new collection, he writes about his father Romulus and Romulus’s friend Hora, the two most important influences on his life: “For them nothing mattered more than to live decently – and when I say nothing, I really mean nothing.” If you have read <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/romulus-my-father">Romulus, My Father</a> and <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/after-romulus">After Romulus</a> you feel this “I really mean nothing” go through your heart and into the shoulder blades. Perhaps you feel it anyway. “Decent” drops its dull, egalitarian overcoat and becomes all silk with sun and wind breathing through it.</p>
<p><strong>Juliet</strong>: The lecture series was an event, historic – the world of academia does not always allow for such conversations, conversations without outcomes or grant pathways and where difficult ideas and sometimes difficult people are able to speak. Rai offered and held this hospitality, and to do so, occasionally had to be a difficult person. Hospitality on Indigenous land is a problematic premise to start with and then it’s hard to know what conversations bear airing.</p>
<p>Rai encouraged presentations and conversations on international law, feminism, colonialism, racism. Hard topics. He never shied. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial was his last series, in 2019, “Sleepwalking Through Privilege and Oppression”. Starting with his own commentary on this, he then asked <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/another-day-in-the-colony">Professor Chelsea Watego</a>, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman, to speak to the theme, and she spoke powerfully and essentially on the importance of black nihilism, to counter his commentary.</p>
<p>When he responded, some in the audience called for him as a white man to leave the speaking to Professor Watego. An important call, a necessary call on Indigenous land when white people have what we can now describe as too much voice. But hospitality is everything to Rai and he remained at the podium, not to reassert his position but to hold the conversation with the audience. It is what I describe as standing accused: the most crucial task of white people on this land. And to walk away would have been disingenuous as the host of a series.</p>
<h2>iv</h2>
<p>We’ve been disagreeing – tangled in a conversation about Palestine and Israel; well to say disagreeing suggests it wasn’t a conversation, but it was, with differences, we shared our thoughts, listened, asked, and still disagreed. This is no skill we were born with. It comes from a belief that neither of us knew best or knew it all. It comes from time listening to and reading Rai.</p>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: Open letters have been flying like Shahed drones, detonating on impact. Shahed drones, manufactured in Iran and sold to Russia to pummel Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure, are called flying mopeds because of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLVK-QqEguw">the sound they make</a>. In Ukraine these drones invoke a particular fear. They travel slowly enough to be seen (one was allegedly taken out by a pickled tomatoes jar) and can hit only static not moving targets, such as people, with any precision. This imprecision (“moped” is also evocative of the Shahed’s lowly standing in weaponworld), their visibility, and their use in swarm attacks – multiple drones against a single target – have put nails under the skin of nervous systems across Ukraine. Because they’re cheap, these drones don’t run out. You see where I’m going here, words are cheap.</p>
<p>I know the sickening sound of drones is what Palestinians are hearing in Gaza when they don’t hear explosions.</p>
<p>Open letters are often, if not invariably, single-use, self-detonating pieces of public discourse. I’m not too cool for them and some are astounding documents of collective labour and thought. But I haven’t signed any. It’s not the denotations (I’ve argued repeatedly that for Ukraine being anti-war equals being pro-genocide) but broken glass and craters everywhere make public spaces incapable of not causing injuries and won’t make a toenail of difference to people whose lives can still be saved. I’ve seen so many open letters that don’t mention the October 7th dead, don’t mention Hamas’s hostages. I don’t want to sign up for enshrining the choice between dehumanising the other (which starts with not seeing their dead) and betraying who and what you stand for. Even at the worst of times and our times might be the worst yet, this choice is not a thing until we make it so.</p>
<p>In his 2017 essay <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-intelligentsia-in-the-age-of-trump/">The Intelligentsia in the Age of Trump</a>, Rai Gaita writes Trump has destroyed the “space in which Americans can seriously disagree” not merely by arsoning the idea of the political office and public institutions and letting loose demons of predominantly racialised bigotry and hatred but also he “eroded the conditions under which people can call their fellow citizens to seriousness: Come now! How can you say that?”</p>
<p>Juliet, I look around and oh shit. Saying <em>come on! how can you talk about Israel without mention of Iran (and – just slightly off camera – Russia, China, Qatar)? how can you use settler colonialism as your only frame to speak about the Middle East? how can you righteously retweet genocide apologists from other contexts (Syria, Ukraine)</em> will be pounced on as morally bankrupt bothsideism of the worst kind.</p>
<p>To speak of them alongside each other, the anguish experienced by people in Gaza and in Israel, and by Palestinian and Jewish diasporas, has become in the part of Australia that considers itself progressive an abject objectionable act, like “sending thoughts & prayers”, worse, like genocide apologism lite. To me, to speak of each without collapsing them both into a sentimental ahistorical mush, letting them be in a howling tension, letting them be in a shared space of thought and sight, is the only way we (settlers in Australia) can speak of this moment at all.</p>
<p>If shared public places – where a disinclination to dehumanise is not seen as cowardice or respectability politics, and where harm minimisation is a guiding principle – feel impossible right now, the question is what would it take for them not to be? If that feels unanswerable it still needs to be asked.</p>
<p>When the dead or captured on any side get in the way of the argument, the problem is with the argument. I am not talking about “condemning” this or that atrocity, that word’s gone for me, I am referring to an ethical compulsion not to erase.</p>
<p>Dead civilians killed by IDF and by Hamas are the mountains in front of us – can’t walk around them, can’t jump over them. To be clear: I don’t for a minute believe this injunction applies to people in Gaza or the West Bank and to Palestinian families across the world. It doesn’t apply to the Israelis and nationals of other countries whose lives Hamas has destroyed. Climbing those mountains (sliding down their sides) is the job for the rest.</p>
<p>Most Australians do not have families in Gaza, Israel or neighbouring countries of the Middle East. Whatever pain and despair many are feeling (it’s about impossible not to) the responsibility bestowed by Australia’s safety and distance is to keep holding spaces in which non-catastrophic futures are imaginable. This means practising bothness that is not bothsideism and alongsideness that is not equivocation. This means protecting the idea that public spaces should be free of hate. This means not leaving speaking about the co-existence of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism to our politicians and vice-chancellors with their “In Australia there is no place for …” In Australia, we’re seeing, there’s plenty of place for all of it and more. We can’t let the speaking be done in calcified idioms and grubby grabs – “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”, “Israel has the right to defend itself”.</p>
<p>I’m Jewish, first gen, from the former USSR. My history encompasses not only the Holocaust and the iron-clad denial well into the 1980s that it ever happened but also the Pale of Settlement, pogroms, gulags and Stalin’s own version of the Final Solution in which Jewish doctors were to be accused of a fabricated plot to poison government members on instructions from “Western imperialists and Zionists” (who else) as a prelude to mass deportations. When Stalin’s death in 1953 pulled the rug out from what many historians believe was a three-stage genocide plan, my mum and dad were 11 and 12. Jewish people in Australia speaking about their history right now are said to be weaponising (the weaponisation of weaponising makes my teeth hurt but OK) their trauma. But speaking about my history is the only way I can be properly – which is to say, to the ends of the earth – accountable for my words and their relationship to my life. To the dead of Gaza and Israel I have to add my family’s dead.</p>
<p>Where my family comes from, the word Zionism was only used with utmost cynicism. Soviet cartoons I grew up with depicted Jews as dogs, deadly snakes, as “Zionist cobweb spiders”; swastikas got fused with Stars of David. There is a pretty straight line from that cynicism to a recent Putin psy-ops in Dagestan where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/29/mob-storms-dagestan-airport-in-search-of-jewish-passengers-from-israel">crowds tried to storm a plane arriving from Tel-Aviv</a>. It works like this: first, let people know anti-Semitism is very much on the table then crack down on it while blaming Ukraine and the West for stoking “flames of ethnic divisions”, send a message to Moscow and St Petersburg elites to sit tight and count their blessings, arrest and send (as cannon fodder) to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine some of the Dagestanis caught in “disturbances”, and, in the meantime, invite a Hamas delegation to Moscow, speak rousingly of the need for Middle East peace, breathe as one with Iran.</p>
<p>It should matter that the same term with the same inflection is used by the mass murderer Bashar al-Assad, the mass murderer Ali Khamenei, the mass murderer Hassan Nasrallah, the mass murderer Vladimir Putin, the Hamas leadership as they promise a repeat of October 7th in perpetuity to refer to all Jews everywhere who get in their way. For me there is not enough soap in the world.</p>
<p>Thirty-plus years in Australia as a migrant-settler have taught me that the question <em>where I am from</em> must be bound with the question <em>where I am now, on whose lands</em>, if it is to keep its integrity. And since the answer is I’m on stolen, unceded lands, righteousness of any kind is inappropriate for me and it’s not my place to speak to the powerful ties between Palestinian and First Nation peoples in this country – a relationship with a long history of deeply held solidarity. I will register my pain at the way Jewish people in Australia, with the exception of a handful of vetted allies, or “good Jews”, have been shoved into the role of double colonisers, the worst people of all, and so Juliet I address myself to me and you and to other settlers like us.</p>
<p><strong>Juliet:</strong> I have signed so many of those open letters you speak of. I cannot sit still with my hands on a keyboard writing words that help me think, and feel and wonder, but rarely help me be of use to others. I am no activist because I can rarely come to a decision, not a clean one, with edges that allow me to move … somewhere. I never say “moving forward” as we now say in the corporate academy, as if there is always a next step and that step means progress. As I’ve seen it, that progress usually means stepping on someone as you step away from responsibility for the past. But these thoughts keep me quiet. I cannot not sign letters which transport sentiments, ideas and demands I believe in when someone else finds it possible to write, to act. </p>
<p>I believe in them, these words. Cheap. Small. And occasionally violent as they are. I believe in letters that push a university and a government to act on one of the violences of this time. One of the most horrifying violences of this time. Not the only one. But it is one they will not act on. The Australian government did not sign the United Nations resolution that called for a truce, that called for a ceasefire, that called for the slaughter of Palestinians at this time to stop. Yes, the genocide. The Australian government did not sign but it did offer support to the Israeli government and support and care for the victims of Hamas. I do not need to write a letter asking the government to back the Israeli government and assist with trying to save the hostages. It does that of its own volition.</p>
<p>You will notice I say Australian government, not Australia and not Australians, as I do not say Israel or Israelis. That is the true anti-Semitism, the conflation of all-as-one. We are not. They are not. You are not. Just as I shy from the “innocent victims” narrative I do not say there are even combatants in this war, as distinct from children. I have watched reels of ten-year-olds speaking with rage. At what point does innocence begin and end? Is the child who sees their family killed an innocent? Is innocence shed when they join the military a few years later? I would put this question to Israelis and to Palestinians, and to myself. What work does innocence do in this violent conflict? It is the cheapest of words. And yes, I would extend this to settler Australians. It is not the same. Nothing is the same. Analogies do not help us in a war of justifications.</p>
<p>What I know is inter-generational trauma can produce innocence and culpability alike. I know something of why the Israeli government is fuelled by fear, vengeance and aggression. I know some of the stories that mean the violence towards Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond is more of a plea saying “how can you do this to us after what we’ve been through?”</p>
<p>I imagine it is fuelled by generations who watched those before them stare out the window with clouded eyes and memories that can never be spoken. I know when I sat for six months watching Holocaust testimonies I was irrevocably changed in my understanding of the significance of Israel. After hours of stories of lost families, pain, humiliation, systematic destruction of whole communities, and tortured children, the need to claim a space that was their own sounded like commonsense.</p>
<p>I understood something of Zionism. And so I say now, with the small understandings I have, that this did not begin with October 7th and did not even begin with 1948 but perhaps with Kristallnacht or perhaps with the arrogance of the Allies who thought they could declare a nation-state over the top of another. That violence is one we know well in this land and on these nations.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Jewish shop damaged during Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1970-083-42,_Magdeburg,_zerst%C3%B6rtes_j%C3%BCdisches_Gesch%C3%A4ft.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To speak of Israel is not the same as speaking of the nation-state of Israel and this too is why I sign those letters that insist we need to be able to criticise law and policy and state practices that deny, that crush and now attempt to decimate peoples. I can understand some of the histories that have taken people there. I can explain but I cannot not fight against these practices with my small, cheap, literary pickle jars. Explanation is not justification. You cannot stretch a name across the lives of others and call it justice. That is colonialism. That is Australia. Explanation has no place on a land where others live. “Oh sorry did I step on your home, your life, the graves of your family, your future?” – this is colonialism and there is no explanation that justifies it. </p>
<p>If we’re to take moral seriousness seriously, in Rai Gaita’s terms, then I can only say that genocide is wrong. And that is what it is.</p>
<p>To say it is genocide diminishes nothing of the Holocaust. It is to use a name to make the world hear the extent of the violence, the devastation and the trans-generational impact: grief and trauma for generations. It is to demand action. Does the Israeli government <em>intend</em> to destroy a people? Well, there have been a lot of words to that effect, but I do not hold all people, or even all of the Israeli government, to the violence of some. There is resistance in all camps. </p>
<p>But if the question is about whether the name fits the act then I think that is a legal question and I am speaking of an experience more than a legal intent. Would it be better if the protests or the many open letters said “alleged genocide”, like we must say “alleged rape” when a woman is asking for her experience to be heard? The urgency is too great for such debates and abstractions. Or perhaps I would ask the Israeli government to stop the bombing while we have a such a legal debate, and allow time for food, water and medicine to be delivered.</p>
<p>I think some of the open letters try to open a dialogue where structures and law and policy are holding us back. These letters and the protests do not mention October 7th, which is to not mention the many dates. This was one. One horrible day that has extended into the lives of both communities. The hostages must be allowed to be free. But I use the word hostage advisedly, not legally, and not in the way the posters use it. I have learned through some of my own experiences with law and police that there are many forms of prison. </p>
<p>I wish October 7th could be mentioned and all those lives could be grieved without that grief taking the air from the history. It cannot. I think of Holocaust testimonies and the repetition and repetition of names. So important. Names going into the world as a pact so that the speaker and listener may share that reality. But we do not own names, we borrow them from history. And genocide is the worst of names, and the worst of worlds. This is my reason for signing letters, trying to make a space to breathe, a space for imagining the non-catastrophic futures you speak of, Maria.</p>
<p>Isn’t this what Rai means by justice – the opening of a space to think, to converse, to breathe? He quotes Camus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Justice and Hope" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/justice-and-hope-hardback">MUP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>You speak of the breaking of silence with the robotic buzz of drones and I find myself wishing for silence. Open letters add to the cacophony, it’s true. But they are also a wish to drown out the drones, bombs, screaming. I have little faith in a competition for sound but I have faith in that pickle jar you speak of.</p>
<p>I do not know if white people in this country should take these positions. But I am doing what I always believe is the thing to do. Stand accused. I learned it from Rai. And have watched him take positions I don’t always agree with, as he has commented of mine. White fragility has never been his weakness. He stands and keeps standing. And I know, when I saw you speak at his series once, that he held that stage for you, so you could speak, and I was grateful for it. As I am always grateful for your conversation and for Rai’s demand: let’s talk.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217670/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Both Juliet and Maria have an ongoing connection to Rai via their literary and academic lives.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Juliet Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bit by bit, the philosopher Rai Gaita showed Maria Tumarkin and Juliet Rogers the morally serious worth of face-to-face conversation.Maria Tumarkin, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of MelbourneJuliet Rogers, Associate Professor Criminology, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2051542023-06-08T10:27:04Z2023-06-08T10:27:04ZFive reasons Adam Smith remains Britain’s most important economist, 300 years on<p>June 5 2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, the 18th-century British economist widely hailed as the father of modern economics. </p>
<p>Born in Kirkcaldy, on the east coast of Scotland, Smith studied at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford (which he didn’t think highly of), before becoming a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He was a quiet, unassuming man, only travelling when he accompanied a student on a tour of Europe in the 1760s. He died in Edinburgh in 1790. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A historical plaque." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A plaque on Kirkcaldy High Street.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Kirkcaldy_High_Street_Adam_Smith_Plaque.png">James Eaton-Lee</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite living an uneventful life, Smith is considered a central figure in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-enlightenment-philosophers-would-have-made-of-donald-trump-and-the-state-of-american-democracy-56098">Scottish Enlightenment</a>. His book <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-myth-that-holds-adam-smiths-wealth-of-nations-together-35674">Wealth of Nations</a>, published in 1776, remains one of the most influential books ever written – second only to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as the <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/12/what-are-the-most-cited-publications-in-the-social-sciences-according-to-google-scholar/">most cited work of classical economics of all time</a>. </p>
<p>As my research <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/scottish-enlightenment-and-the-french-revolution/57C02044A2031C54E6D17DFC5F943CAB">shows</a>, Smith is much more than the “father of economics”. He was a <a href="https://www.libertyfund.org/books/essays-on-philosophical-subjects/">philosopher</a>, a <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/495243/pdf">historian</a>, and a <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/cultural-history-of-democracy-in-the-age-of-enlightenment-9781350272859/">political theorist</a>. His life work was dedicated to working out the moral, social and political consequences – both good and bad – of the emerging capitalist and industrial economy in late 18th-century Britain. Here are five reasons why he remains Britain’s most important economist. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A historical portrait painting of a man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Muir Portrait of Adam Smith, c 1800, artist unknown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portrait.jpg">Scottish National Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>1. He invented fundamental economic concepts</h2>
<p>Among the concepts Smith came up with – or helped to popularise – are productivity, free markets and the division of labour. His use of “<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-cute-dogs-help-us-understand-adam-smiths-invisible-hand-35673">the invisible hand</a>” to describe the unseen mechanisms that regulate the market economy remains a central metaphor in contemporary economic thinking. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, economists inspired by Smith, including David Ricardo, laid the foundations of economics as the discipline we know today, by formalising economic reasoning in mathematical language. Smith’s innovative discussion of the rules of supply and demand anticipated the economic model of <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-equilibrium-theory.asp">general equilibrium</a>. His theory of economic growth also inspired later economists such as John Maynard Keynes to develop the notion of gross domestic product. </p>
<h2>2. He has a cult following</h2>
<p>Smith was already famous in his lifetime, even before he published Wealth of Nations. As a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow between 1753 and 1763, his reputation attracted students from as far away as Russia. </p>
<p>However, in the 20th century, he became something of a hero for proponents of free markets. An influential thinktank founded in the 1970s, the <a href="https://www.adamsmith.org/">Adam Smith Institute</a> – dedicated to the pursuit of economic liberalism – bears his name. And as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher supposedly <a href="https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/07/26/rescuing-adam-smith-from-myth-and-misrepresentation">carried a copy</a> of Wealth of Nations in her handbag. </p>
<p>Smith is widely celebrated –- often by people who haven’t read all his works –- as a prophet of individualism and neoliberalism. People see him as the man who foresaw the rise of industrial capitalism and provided definitive arguments against the idea of government interference. This, however, is a caricature of his writings. </p>
<p>Wealth of Nations was not a celebration of individualism. Smith was all too aware of the dangers and drawbacks of unbridled capitalism. In fact, he argued that governmental intervention was needed to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/equalizing-hand-why-adam-smith-thought-the-market-should-produce-wealth-without-steep-inequality/5F88C6D86DD80C3420E85982D72FAF50">keep economic inequalities in check</a>. He also advocated breaking up monopolies, providing public works such as roads and bridges, and educating the middle classes. </p>
<h2>3. He was the first Scot ever to appear on an English banknote</h2>
<p>Between 2007 and 2020, Smith featured on <a href="https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/the-people-on-the-notes-adam-smith">English £20 banknotes</a>. He was a proud Scotsman, a Kirkaldy native who spent his formative years in Glasgow. </p>
<p>Following Scotland’s 1707 union with England, Glasgow was asserting its place as a wealthy city of merchants. The city was benefiting from access to Britain’s growing trade empire, and by the 1740s it had become the centre of a thriving trading network with North America and the Caribbean. </p>
<p>At the University of Glasgow, Smith taught the sons of wealthy sugar and tobacco merchants and slave-labour plantation owners. They dominated local politics, invested their money in shipping and new industrial development, and were rebuilding Glasgow into an imposing city of stone. </p>
<h2>4. He was a polymath</h2>
<p>In his Glasgow classes, Smith lectured on moral philosophy, a broad humanities subject, which in 18th-century Scotland included topics as varied as morals, politics, religion, economics, jurisprudence and history. </p>
<p>He reworked some of these university lectures into a successful book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Published in 1759, this made him a household name throughout Europe. </p>
<p>Today, the book is mostly remembered by <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/theory-of-moral-sentiments-adam-smith-wealth-of-nations-economics-11671662290">historians</a>. But Smith believed his main achievement was teaching young Scots how to live a good, ethical life. Toward the end of his life, he wrote to the principal of the University of Glasgow that his 13 years as a professor of moral philosophy had been “the happiest and most honourable period” of his life.</p>
<h2>5. His legacy is controversial</h2>
<p>Smith’s economic theories have inspired a long line of free-market economists, but they also influenced Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx admired Smith’s attempts to analyse the new modes of production that were emerging in early industrial Britain, as well as his innovative theory that wealth was related to labour. </p>
<p>Even today, Smith’s legacy is claimed both by neoliberals (who emphasise his defence of free trade) and by leftwingers (who emphasise his views on the pitfalls of capitalist economies). But Smith would have been puzzled by modern attempts to classify him as either of the right or the left. He was merely studying the changing world in which he lived: an early industrial society that was increasingly engaged in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/12634">colonialism and global trade</a>. It is time to reclaim Smith’s legacy from economists and to celebrate him as an astute observer of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78907/how-the-scots-invented-the-modern-world-by-arthur-herman/">Europe’s emerging modernity</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205154/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Plassart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Scottish economist dedicated his life’s work to understanding the consequences – moral, social and political – of capitalism. Both neoliberals and leftwingers claim his legacy.Anna Plassart, Senior Lecturer in History, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1965512023-02-16T13:26:21Z2023-02-16T13:26:21ZBad beliefs: Misinformation is factually wrong – but is it ethically wrong, too?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509857/original/file-20230213-14-psr9a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=32%2C0%2C3606%2C2143&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Which is it?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/fake-news-illustration-fake-fact-dice-concept-royalty-free-image/1281315760?phrase=misinformation&adppopup=true">Anton Melnyk/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The impact of <a href="https://theconversation.com/misinformation-disinformation-and-hoaxes-whats-the-difference-158491">disinformation and misinformation</a> has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of <a href="https://theconversation.com/7-ways-to-avoid-becoming-a-misinformation-superspreader-157099">social media</a> has given “alternative facts” an influence previously not possible.</p>
<p>Bad information isn’t just a practical problem – it’s a philosophical one, too. For one thing, it’s about epistemology, the <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/epistemo/">branch of philosophy</a> that concerns itself with knowledge: how to discern truth, and what it means to “know” something, in the first place.</p>
<p>But what about ethics? People often think about responsibility in terms of actions and their consequences. We seldom discuss whether people are ethically accountable for not just what they do, but what they believe – and how they consume, analyze or ignore information to arrive at their beliefs.</p>
<p>So when someone embraces the idea that mankind has never touched the Moon, or that a mass shooting was a hoax, are they not just incorrect, but ethically wrong?</p>
<h2>Know the good, do the good</h2>
<p>Some thinkers have argued the answer is yes – arguments I’ve studied in <a href="https://www.rit.edu/directory/lgtghs-lawrence-torcello">my own work</a> as an ethicist. </p>
<p>Even back in the 5th century B.C., <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-socrates-and-the-life-worth-living-189312">Socrates</a> linked epistemology and ethics implicitly. Socrates is mostly known through his students’ writings, such as Plato’s “<a href="https://archive.org/details/allen-bloom-the-republic">Republic</a>,” in which Plato depicts Socrates’ endeavors to uncover the nature of justice and goodness. One of the ideas attributed to Socrates is often summarized with the adage that “to know the good is to do the good.”</p>
<p>The idea, in part, is that everyone seeks to do what they think is best – so no one errs intentionally. To err ethically, in this view, is the result of a mistaken belief about what the good is, rather than an intent to act unjustly.</p>
<p>More recently, in the 19th century, British mathematician and philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Kingdon-Clifford">W.K. Clifford</a> linked the process of belief formation with ethics. In his 1877 essay “<a href="https://people.brandeis.edu/%7Eteuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf">The Ethics of Belief</a>,” Clifford made the forceful ethical claim that it is wrong – always, everywhere and for everyone – to believe something without sufficient evidence. </p>
<p>In his view, we all have an ethical duty to test our beliefs, to check our sources and to place more weight in scientific evidence than anecdotal hearsay. In short, we have a duty to cultivate what today might be called “epistemic humility”: the awareness that we ourselves can hold incorrect beliefs, and to act accordingly.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A black and white sketch of a man with a long beard above the handwritten words 'Yours most truly, W.K. Clifford'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509859/original/file-20230213-24-bulyzv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Clifford was a mathematician as well as a philosopher.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clifford_William_Kingdon.jpg">Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S./Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As <a href="https://www.rit.edu/directory/lgtghs-lawrence-torcello">a philosopher</a> interested in disinformation and its relationship to ethics and public discourse, I think there is a lot to be gained from his essay. In <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cHLvEG0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">my own research</a>, I have argued that each us has a responsibility to be mindful of how we form our beliefs, insofar as we are fellow citizens with a common stake in our larger society.</p>
<h2>Setting sail</h2>
<p>Clifford begins <a href="https://people.brandeis.edu/%7Eteuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf">his essay</a> with the example of a ship owner who has chartered his vessel to a group of emigrants leaving Europe for the Americas. The owner has reason to doubt the boat is in a seaworthy-enough condition to cross the Atlantic, and considers having the boat thoroughly overhauled to make sure it is safe. </p>
<p>In the end, though, he convinces himself otherwise, suppressing and rationalizing away any doubts. He wishes the passengers well with a light heart. When the ship goes down midsea, and the ship’s passengers with it, he quietly collects the insurance. </p>
<p>Most people would probably say the ship owner was at least somewhat ethically to blame. After all, he neglected his due diligence to make sure the ship was sound before its voyage. </p>
<p>What if the ship had been fit for voyage and made the trip safely? It would be no credit to the owner, Clifford argues, because he had no right to believe it was safe: He’d chosen not to learn whether it was seaworthy.</p>
<p>In other words, it’s not only the owner’s actions – or lack of action – that have ethical implications. His beliefs do, too. </p>
<p>In this example it is easy to see how belief guides actions. Part of Clifford’s larger point, however, is that a person’s beliefs always hold the potential to affect others and their actions.</p>
<h2>No man – or idea – is an island</h2>
<p>There are two premises that can be found in Clifford’s essay. </p>
<p>The first is that each belief creates the cognitive conditions for related beliefs to follow. In other words, once you hold one belief, it becomes easier to believe in similar ideas.</p>
<p>This is borne out in contemporary <a href="https://www.sdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/research/gateway-belief-model">cognitive science research</a>. For example, a number of false <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612457686">conspiratorial beliefs</a> – like the belief that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings – are found to correspond with the likelihood of a person falsely believing that climate change is a hoax. </p>
<p>Clifford’s second premise is that no human beings are so isolated that their beliefs won’t at some point influence other people. </p>
<p>People do not arrive at their beliefs in a vacuum. The influence of family, friends, social circles, media and political leaders on others’ views is well documented. Studies show that mere <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612451018">exposure to misinformation</a> can have a lasting cognitive impact on how we interpret and remember events, even after the information has been corrected. In other words, once accepted, misinformation creates a bias that resists revision.</p>
<p>Taking these points together, Clifford argues that it is always wrong – not just factually, but ethically – to believe something on insufficient evidence. This point does not assume that each person always has the resources to develop an informed belief on each topic. He argues it is acceptable to defer to experts if they exist, or withhold judgment on matters where one has no sound grounding for an informed belief.</p>
<p>That said, as Clifford suggests in his essay, theft is still harmful, even if the thief has never been exposed to the lesson that it is wrong.</p>
<h2>An ounce of prevention</h2>
<p>Arguing that people are ethically responsible for nonevidential beliefs doesn’t necessarily mean they are blameworthy. As I have argued in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12179">other work</a>, Clifford’s premises show the morally relevant nature of belief formation. It is enough to suggest that developing and nurturing critical thinking is an ethical responsibility, without denouncing every person who holds a belief that can’t be supported as inherently immoral.</p>
<p>Ethics is often talked about as if it were merely a matter of identifying and chastising bad behaviors. Yet, as far back as Plato and Socrates, ethics has been about offering guidance for a life well lived in community with others. </p>
<p>Likewise, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/#:%7E:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cethics%20of%20belief%E2%80%9D%20refers,maintenance%2C%20and%20belief%2Drelinquishment.">the ethics of belief</a> can serve as a reminder of how important it is, for other people’s sakes, to develop good habits of inquiry. Learning to identify fallacious arguments can be a kind of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175799">cognitive inoculation against misinformation</a>. </p>
<p>That might mean renewing educational institutions’ investment in disciplines that, like philosophy, have historically taught students how to think critically and communicate clearly. Modern society tends to look for technological mechanisms to guard us against misinformation, but the best solution might still be a solid education with generous exposure to the liberal arts – and ensuring all citizens have access to it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196551/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lawrence Torcello does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A philosopher unpacks the ‘ethics of belief’ for an age awash in bad information.Lawrence Torcello, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1861452022-07-01T13:54:45Z2022-07-01T13:54:45ZRoe v Wade: a philosopher on the true meaning of ‘my body, my choice’<p>The overturning of Roe v Wade harms all women and all who can get pregnant around the world by making their body-ownership merely conditional. This undermines their equality with others.</p>
<p>Many people are reeling from the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, so that states may now make it illegal to obtain or perform an abortion. For many of us, even if we do not live in the US, this feels like a personal blow. I use <a href="https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/457650/">my work in moral philosophy</a> to explain this feeling. If we feel personally affected it is because we are personally affected. The ruling diminishes the self-ownership of all women (even if they cannot get pregnant) and all those who can get pregnant, wherever they live.</p>
<p>The decision is likely to leave <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-supreme-court-roe-v-wade-abortion-access/">33 million people</a> in the US without access to abortion. These are the people most directly affected by the ruling. Evidence shows that being denied an abortion <a href="https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study">harms a person’s health, finances and family life</a>. Those in the US who are forced to continue pregnancy may lose their dreams, or even their <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2020/maternal-mortality-rates-2020.htm#:%7E:text=In%202020%2C%20861%20women%20were,20.1%20in%202019%20(Table).">lives</a>. </p>
<p>But the effects of the US ruling are global. Anyone who can get pregnant now knows that they cannot travel or move to the US and be recognised as an equal with equal rights. The same is not true for our male compatriots.</p>
<p>Of course, the US is not the only place where access to abortion is <a href="https://theconversation.com/roe-v-wade-overturned-what-abortion-access-and-reproductive-rights-look-like-around-the-world-184013">restricted</a> so the development in the US amounts to an additional blow to equality, rather than a loss of what had been perfect equality. But the size and influence of the US make this additional blow very significant.</p>
<h2>What is body ownership and why does it matter?</h2>
<p>You own your body when you have the authority to make decisions about what is done to it and how it is used on the basis of your own interests and desires. </p>
<p>Body ownership is a fundamental part of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/moral-standing">moral standing</a> for <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683642.001.0001/acprof-9780199683642-chapter-9">humans</a>. It is through my body that I act on the world: when I bake a cake, write a book or build a house, I use my body. It is through my body that the world acts on me. When I am struck by the beauty of a sunrise, enjoy a cool breeze, find myself convinced by an argument, these effects on me need to go through my body. How my body is, makes up a major part of how I am: if my body is hurt, I am hurt. Body ownership is needed to respect the unique relationship between me and my body. </p>
<p>Body ownership is needed for a valuable kind of agency that I call full-fledged agency – the freedom to select one’s own ends and adopt a settled course of action in line with those ends. Maybe I value helping the sick and want to become a doctor. This requires me to commit to study for many years. I can only do this if I have at least some authority to decide what happens to my body.</p>
<p>None of this means that you are never required to use your body for others: it’s pretty uncontroversial that I am required to call an ambulance if the person next to me has a heart attack and this does not undermine self-ownership. However, for me to genuinely own my body, there must be limits on these requirements. I must have a say in how my body is used for the benefit of others. </p>
<p>Lack of access to abortion can undermine your body ownership even if you never actually need an abortion. If you can get pregnant but access to abortion is limited, then you only get to decide what happens to your body so long as you are not pregnant. You are not entirely free to decide on the actions needed to achieve your goals.</p>
<p>Indeed, I believe legal restrictions on abortion undermine body ownership for any woman, even if she cannot get pregnant and even if she never plans to travel to the US. Her control over her body still depends on the ability or inability to get pregnant and on where she is in the world. A woman’s right to control her body should not rest on such accidents.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004238">Philosopher T.M. Scanlon</a> discusses a “friend” who would steal a kidney for you if you needed one. Scanlon argues that this person is not a true friend to you, because of what his view must be of your right to your own body parts: “He wouldn’t steal them [from you], but that is only because he happens to like you.” </p>
<p>We need our friends to recognise that we have rights to our body parts because we are people, not just because they happen to like us. As a woman, I need recognition that my body belongs to me because I am a person, not merely because I happen not to be able to get pregnant or happen not to need to go to the US.</p>
<p>So all women and all those who can get pregnant are personally affected by the overturning of Roe v Wade – and all threats to abortion access. Recognition of why this is might help us understand otherwise puzzling feelings, both in ourselves and others. It might also help us to work together to <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-you-can-get-involved-in-fighting-for-womens-reproductive-rights-185559">defend reproductive rights</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186145/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fiona Woollard held a Non-Residential Fellowship in Philosophy of Transformative Experience at the Experience Project (September 2016-February 2017), funded by the Templeton Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also received funding from the Mind Association, the ESRC, the AHRC, and been on a project funded by the European Research Council.</span></em></p>The concept of body ownership shows how the Supreme Court’s decision affects every woman, whether they can get pregnant or not.Fiona Woollard, Professor of Philosophy, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1842892022-06-09T18:31:09Z2022-06-09T18:31:09ZBlaming ‘evil’ for mass violence isn’t as simple as it seems – a philosopher unpacks the paradox in using the word<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467836/original/file-20220608-23-ce0o76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C0%2C3826%2C2560&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A visitor pays respects at a memorial created outside Robb Elementary School to honor the victims killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/TexasSchoolShooting/8cd761ddf20a4f8e9bfb95c202c9ff96/photo?Query=uvalde&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1049&currentItemNo=244">AP Photo/Eric Gay</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The word “evil” circulates widely in the wake of terrible public violence. The May 24, 2022, massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, is a case in point.</p>
<p>Texas state safety official Christopher Olivarez spoke of “<a href="https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-44a7cfb990feaa6ffe482483df6e4683">the complete evil of the shooter</a>.” Others expressed their resolve with the same word. “Evil will not win,” the Rev. Tony Grubin <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/26/evil-will-not-win-sorrow-and-disbelief-as-uvalde-mourns-its-children">told the crowd</a> at a vigil.</p>
<p>Days later, at the National Rifle Association’s convention in Texas, CEO Wayne LaPierre acknowledged the Uvalde victims before <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nra-convention-kicks-off-texas-days-elementary-school/story?id=84996347">arguing against gun control legislation</a>. His reasoning pivoted on the concept of evil: “If we as a nation were capable of legislating evil out of the hearts and minds of criminals who commit these heinous acts, we would have done it long ago.” </p>
<p>Evil is one of the most complex and paradoxical words in the English language. It can galvanize collective action but also lead to collective paralysis, as if the presence of evil can’t be helped. As <a href="https://espringer.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/">a philosopher studying moral concepts</a> and their role in communication, I find it essential to scrutinize this word. </p>
<h2>The evolution of ‘evil’</h2>
<p>Evil wasn’t always paradoxical. In <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/evil">Old English</a> it was simply the common word for bad – for any kind of misfortune, illness, incompetence or unhappy result. This meaning lingers in phrases such as “choosing the lesser of two evils.” </p>
<p>Starting around 1300, <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/bad">the word bad</a> gradually emerged as the familiar opposite of good. Yet even while bad was becoming common, people continued to encounter the word evil in older written works, and speech influenced by these works. Translations of the Bible and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-h/16328-h.htm">Anglo-Saxon classic literature</a> surely shaped how the concept of evil came to seem larger than life, and spiritually loaded. Some things seem too bad for the word bad. But what, exactly, does evil mean?</p>
<p>Many people would answer that they <a href="http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-files/obscenity-case-files-jacobellis-v-ohio-i-know-it-when-i-see-it/">know evil when they see it</a> – or when they feel it. If there’s any good occasion for using the word, surely a planned massacre of vulnerable children seems an uncontroversial case. Still, this commonsense approach doesn’t shed much light on how the idea of evil influences public attitudes.</p>
<p>One philosophical approach – <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/pragmati/#:%7E:text=Pragmatism%20is%20a%20philosophical%20movement,ideas%20are%20to%20be%20rejected.">pragmatism</a> – may be helpful here, since it focuses on how words do things, rather than on how they should be defined. People who use the word evil are doing something: sending a clear signal about their own attitude. They are not interested in excuses, justifications or coming to some kind of shared understanding. In this pragmatic sense, the word evil has something in common with guns: It’s an extreme tool, and users require utter confidence in their own judgment. When the word evil is summoned to the scene, curiosity and complexity go quiet. It’s the high noon of a moral standoff.</p>
<p>As with reaching for guns, however, resorting to the word evil can backfire. This is because there are two deep tensions embedded in the concept. </p>
<h2>Inner or outer?</h2>
<p>First, there’s still some confusion about whether to locate evil out in the world, or within the human heart. In its archaic sense, evil could include entirely natural causes of great suffering. The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755 is an infamous example. Tens of thousands of people died agonizing deaths, and thinkers throughout Europe <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-god-good-in-the-shadow-of-mass-disaster-great-minds-have-argued-the-toss-137078">debated how a good God could allow such terrible things</a>. The French philosopher Voltaire concluded, “<a href="http://courses.washington.edu/hsteu302/Voltaire%20Lisbon%20Earthquake.html">evil stalks the land</a>.”</p>
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<img alt="A black and white illustration shows a tsunami wave crashing over an oceanside city." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467837/original/file-20220608-10364-9yz87j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">An 18th-century engraving depicts the destruction of Lisbon, Portugal, by an earthquake and tidal wave in 1755.</span>
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<p>At the opposite extreme, many Christian thinkers – and some classical Greek and Roman ones – treat evil as entirely distinct from worldly events. The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, defines evil as an inner moral failure, which might lurk behind even the most acceptable-looking acts. Given his faith that innocent victims would go to heaven, Kant did not focus moral concern on the fact that their lives were made shorter. Rather, <a href="https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300128154">he argued</a> murder was terrible because it was the expression of a morally forbidden choice.</p>
<p>Most people today would reject both of these simple views and focus instead on the connection of inner and outer, where human choices result in real-world atrocities.</p>
<p>Yet the purely inner view casts new light on LaPierre’s argument, that legislation is powerless to prevent evil. If evil were strictly an interior, spiritual problem, then it could be effectively tackled only at its source. Preventing that evil from erupting into public view would be like masking the symptoms of a disease rather than treating its cause.</p>
<h2>The paradox of blame</h2>
<p>There is a second major tension embedded in how the word evil works: evil both does and does not call for blame.</p>
<p>On one hand, evil seems inherently and profoundly blameworthy; evildoers are assumed to be responsible for their evil. It’s constructive to blame people, however, when <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/communicating-moral-concern">blame helps to hold them responsible</a>. Unfortunately, that important role is undermined when the target of blame is “evil.”</p>
<p>Philosopher <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/phil/faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1023035">Gary Watson</a> helps illuminate this paradox in his essay “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272273.001.0001">Responsibility and the Limits of Evil</a>.” Blame involves attempting to hold people responsible as members of a shared “moral community” – a network of social relations in which people share basic norms and push one another to repair moral expectations after they are violated. Taking responsibility, in Watson’s view, involves a kind of competence, an ability to work with others in community.</p>
<p>Evil, however, implies being beyond redemption, “beyond the pale” of this community. Calling someone evil signals a total lack of hope that they could take up the responsibility being assigned to them. And some people do seem to lack the social bonds, skills and attitudes required for responsibility. Examining the life story of a notorious school shooter, Watson reveals how his potential for belonging to a moral community had been brutally dismantled by chaotic abuse throughout his formative years. </p>
<p>If evil implies such a complete absence of the skills and attitudes required for moral responsibility, then calling people evil – while still holding them morally responsible – is paradoxical. </p>
<p>Compare this with <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/332273/zero-by-charles-seife/">the paradoxical power of the number zero</a> – a quantity that is the absence of quantity. Zero is a powerful concept, but it requires a warning label: “Steer clear of dividing by this number; if you do, your equations are ruined!”</p>
<p>The English word evil is powerful, no doubt. Yet the power of the concept turns out to be driven by turbulence below the surface. Laying blame on evil can bring this turbulence to the surface in surprising ways.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184289/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elise Springer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The word ‘evil’ sends a clear message – or does it? There are deep tensions in what the word means, and what it can accomplish.Elise Springer, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1712952021-11-11T00:39:13Z2021-11-11T00:39:13ZBig-business greenwash or a climate saviour? Carbon offsets raise tricky moral questions<p>Massive protests unfolded in Glasgow outside the United Nations climate summit <a href="https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/11/net-zero-is-not-zero-carbon-offsetting-focus-at-cop26-under-criticism/">last week</a>, with some activists <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/cop26/cop26-indigenous-carbon-protests-video-v417423df">denouncing</a> a proposal to expand the use of a controversial climate action measure to meet net-zero targets: carbon offsetting.</p>
<p>Offsetting <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-stabilise-the-climate-without-carbon-offsets-so-how-do-we-make-them-work-169355">refers to</a> reducing emissions or removing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere in one place to balance emissions made in another. So far, more than 130 countries have committed to the net zero by 2050 goal, but none is proposing to be completely emissions free by that date – all are relying on forms of offsetting. </p>
<p>The use of offsets in meeting climate obligations has been <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/50429/offsets-taskforce-hit-protests-cop26/">rejected by climate activists</a> as a “scam”. Swedish climate campaigner <a href="https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1455904676227002375?s=20">Greta Thunberg</a>, joining the protesters, claimed relying on buying offsets to cut emissions would give polluters “a free pass to keep polluting”.</p>
<p>Others, however, argue offsetting has a legitimate role to play in our transition to a low-carbon future. A <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/report/towards-net-zero-practical-policies-to-offset-carbon-emissions/">recent report</a> by Australia’s Grattan Institute, for example, claimed that done <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-stabilise-the-climate-without-carbon-offsets-so-how-do-we-make-them-work-169355">with integrity</a>, carbon offsets will be crucial to reaching net zero in sectors such as agriculture and aviation, for which full elimination of emissions is infeasible.</p>
<p>So who’s in the right? We think the answer depends on the kind of offsetting that is being employed. Some forms of offsetting can be a legitimate way of helping to reach net zero, while others are morally dubious.</p>
<h2>Climate change as a moral issue</h2>
<p>The debate over offsetting is part of a key agenda item for COP26 – establishing the rules for global carbon trading, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-cop26-climate-summit-continues-attention-turns-to-carbon-markets/">known as Article 6</a> of the Paris Agreement. The trading scheme will allow countries to purchase emissions reductions from overseas to count towards their own climate action.</p>
<p>To examine carbon offsetting in a moral context, we should first remember what makes our contributions to CO₂ emissions morally problematic.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Greta Thunberg rallies climate activists in Glasgow.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The emissions from human activity increase the risks of <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar3/wg2/chapter-1-overview-of-impacts-adaptation-and-vulnerability-to-climate-change/">climate change-related harms</a> such as dangerous weather events – storms, fires, floods, heatwaves, and droughts – and the prevalence of serious diseases and malnutrition. </p>
<p>The more we humans emit, the more we contribute to global warming, and the greater the risks of harm to the most vulnerable people. Climate change is a moral issue because of the question this invites on behalf of those people:</p>
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<p>Why are you adding to global warming, when it risks harming us severely?</p>
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<p>Not having a good answer to that question is what makes our contribution to climate change seriously wrong.</p>
<h2>The two ways to offset emissions</h2>
<p>The moral case in favour of offsetting is it gives us an answer to that question. If we can match our emissions with a corresponding amount of offsetting, then can’t we say we’re making no net addition to global warming, and therefore imposing no risk of harm on anyone?</p>
<p>Well, that depends on what kind of offsetting we’re doing. Offsetting comes in two forms, which are morally quite different. </p>
<p>The first kind of offsetting involves removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. Planting trees or other vegetation is one way of doing this, provided the CO₂ that’s removed does not then re-enter the atmosphere later, for example as a result of deforestation. </p>
<p>Another way would be through the development of <a href="https://eciu.net/analysis/briefings/net-zero/negative-emissions-why-what-how">negative emissions technologies</a>, which envisage ways to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it permanently. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1457675051650715652"}"></div></p>
<p>The second form is offsetting by paying for emissions reduction. This involves ensuring someone else puts less CO₂ into the atmosphere than they otherwise would have. For example, one company might pay another company to reduce its emissions, with the first claiming this reduction as an offset against its own emissions. </p>
<p>Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator issues <a href="http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/OSR/ANREU/types-of-emissions-units/australian-carbon-credit-units">Australian Carbon Credit Units</a> for “eligible offsets projects”. These include for projects of offsetting by emissions reduction. </p>
<p>The regulator certifies that a company, for example, installing more efficient technology “deliver abatement that is additional to what would occur in the absence of the project”. Another company whose activities send CO₂ into the atmosphere, such as a coal-fired power station, can then buy these credits to offset its emissions. </p>
<h2>So what’s the problem?</h2>
<p>There is a crucial difference between these <a href="https://www.offsetguide.org/understanding-carbon-offsets/what-is-a-carbon-offset/">two forms of offsetting</a>. When you offset in the first way – taking as much CO₂ out of the atmosphere as you put in – you can indeed say you’re not adding to global warming. </p>
<p>That’s not to say even this form of offsetting is problem-free. It’s crucial such offsets are properly validated and are part of a transition plan to cleaner energy generation compatible with everyone reaching net zero together. Tree-planting cannot be a complete solution, because we could simply <a href="https://theconversation.com/there-arent-enough-trees-in-the-world-to-offset-societys-carbon-emissions-and-there-never-will-be-158181">run out of places</a> to plant them.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1455904864668733445"}"></div></p>
<p>But when you offset in the second way, you cannot say you’re not adding to global warming at all. What you’re doing is paying someone else not to add to global warming, while adding to it yourself. </p>
<p>The difference between the two forms of offsetting is like the difference between a mining company releasing mercury into the groundwater while simultaneously cleaning the water to restore the mercury concentration to safe levels, and a mining company paying another not to release mercury into the groundwater and then doing so itself. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-stabilise-the-climate-without-carbon-offsets-so-how-do-we-make-them-work-169355">We can't stabilise the climate without carbon offsets – so how do we make them work?</a>
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<p>The first can be a legitimate way of negating the risk you impose. The second is a way of imposing risk in someone else’s stead. </p>
<p>Let’s use a few simple analogies to illustrate this further. In morality and law, we cannot justify injuring someone by claiming we had previously paid someone who was about to injure that same person not to do so. </p>
<p>The same is true when it comes to the imposition of risk. If I take a high speed joyride through a heavily populated area, I cannot claim I pose no risk on people nearby simply because I had earlier paid my neighbour not to take a joyride along the same route. </p>
<p>Had I not induced my neighbour not to take the joyride, he would’ve had to answer for the risk he imposed. When I do so in his place, I am the one who must answer for that risk.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/take-heart-at-whats-unfolded-at-cop26-in-glasgow-the-world-can-still-hold-global-heating-to-1-5-171488">Take heart at what’s unfolded at COP26 in Glasgow – the world can still hold global heating to 1.5℃</a>
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<p>In our desperate attempt to stop the world warming beyond the internationally agreed limit of 1.5°C, we need to encourage whatever reduces the climate impacts of human activity. If selling carbon credits is an effective way to achieve this, we should do it, creating incentives for emissions reductions as well as emissions removals.</p>
<p>What we cannot do is claim that inducing others to reduce emissions gives us a moral license to emit in their place.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171295/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christian Barry receives funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Garrett Cullity receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>We cannot claim that inducing others to reduce emissions gives us a moral license to emit in their place.Christian Barry, Professor of Philosophy at the ANU, Australian National UniversityGarrett Cullity, Professor, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1709372021-11-01T10:45:15Z2021-11-01T10:45:15ZShould you stop wearing a mask just because the law gives you permission to do so?<p>On December 1 1955, in Alabama, Rosa Parks <a href="http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/modern/jb_modern_parks_1.html">broke the law</a>. But Parks was no ordinary criminal trying to take advantage of others. She merely refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and was arrested for this reason alone. Parks is a hero because she stood up, or rather sat down, for the rights of black people.</p>
<p>Among other things, Parks taught us that we shouldn’t take the law too seriously, since a legal prohibition does not always imply a moral prohibition. In fact, there can be cases where we should actually do what the law forbids.</p>
<p>But we can extend Parks’ lesson and add another scenario where we shouldn’t take the law too seriously. Just as legal prohibitions (such as not to occupy seats reserved for white people) do not always determine what we should do, legal permissions, or rights, cannot determine what we should morally do either.</p>
<p>Consider the UK government, which now permits its citizens to <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own">visit public places without wearing masks</a>, despite <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/">surging COVID infection rates</a>. Does that permission mean that people in England now have good reasons to abandon their masks?</p>
<p>I think not. Just as Parks was not morally prohibited to do what she was legally prohibited to do, people are not always morally permitted to do what they are now legally permitted to do.</p>
<p>“Having” a right and “doing” right are quite different things.</p>
<p>Often, the law’s permissions are unable to give us good reasons for doing things because the law is a very blunt instrument. It creates only broad rules and is unable to be sensitive to the specifics of individual situations. The law cannot be precise enough to account for all aspects of our individual and fast-changing environments. Even if the permission granted by the UK government on “freedom day” in July was good overall, people should still think carefully about whether they need to go, at least sometimes, beyond the call of their (legal) duty.</p>
<h2>Common sense</h2>
<p>By way of illustration, suppose you are on a crowded train. Some of the passengers will be especially vulnerable to COVID, but it may be very hard to see who is. We cannot see whether a person has a chronic illness, such as diabetes, or is not vaccinated, or would suffer a severe infection for other reasons. Wearing a mask in situations like these could save lives without causing any significant discomfort to ourselves, and this should give us very good reasons to wear them.</p>
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<img alt="Portrait of Immanuel Kant" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429553/original/file-20211101-13-kgzdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">German philosopher Immanuel Kant wanted people to think for themselves.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=897016">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>To get through the pandemic, we need to apply common sense and sometimes not exercise our legal rights. If we think that referring to our legal rights can settle the matter, we succumb to rules that were not designed to guide us fully in the first place. We become gullible. We may fail morally. And, most importantly, we might even fall back behind Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment maxim of <em>sapere aude</em>, the moral and political imperative to think for ourselves.</p>
<p>But to think “for” ourselves does not mean to think just “of” ourselves. We need to look out for each other, show solidarity and make a contribution to overcoming the pandemic. Governments alone cannot solve this crisis.</p>
<p>For this reason, it is now a civic virtue not to take the law, or your government, too seriously, in the sense that neither law nor government can provide the final word on what we should do in the specific and constantly changing contexts of our private and professional lives. Sometimes, we are morally required to go beyond the call of our legal duties.</p>
<p>So, let’s step away from merely considering what we have “a” right to do and start thinking about what it would “be” right to do.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170937/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maximilian Kiener receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust. Maximilian is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford.</span></em></p>A moral philosopher looks at the difference between “having” a right and “doing” right.Maximilian Kiener, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1658462021-08-13T09:33:34Z2021-08-13T09:33:34ZShould we tell stories of vaccine sceptics who have died of COVID?<p>As vaccine uptake <a href="https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations">starts to wane</a>, stories have began to emerge of people who refused the jab ending up in intensive care, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/26/covid-patients-tell-of-regrets-over-refusing-jab-vaccine-intensive-care">ruing not having had the vaccine</a>, and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/covid-vaccine-hesitant-john-eyers-dies-b1896650.html">subsequently dying</a>. These cautionary tales are certainly attention-grabbing, but is it right to publish or broadcast them?</p>
<p>If human morality depended only on totting up costs and benefits, our moral lives would be simple matters of accounting. On the plus side, if the vaccine saves lives, any cautionary tale to persuade the unpersuaded has to be good – doesn’t it? On the minus side, perhaps cautionary tales don’t always work. And what about the effects on bereaved families if a loved one is heartlessly portrayed as a victim of their own folly? </p>
<p>According to a philosophical view called <a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-consequentialism/#:%7E:text=Consequentialism%20is%20a%20theory%20that,of%20this%20theory%20is%20Utilitarianism.">consequentialism</a> – which proposes that what is morally right is whatever makes the world best in the future – we should “do the sums” as best we can and check that the benefits outweigh the costs. But consequences, whether good or bad, are only part of our complex moral psychology, as shown by a long history of experiments, especially the famous <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/footpo-2.pdf">trolley problems</a>. A runaway trolley is hurtling down a railway line towards a crowd of people who will face certain death. There is a switch that will flip the trolley into a siding, saving the crowd but hitting and killing a single person. Should you flip the switch and divert the trolley?</p>
<p>A cost-benefit story is clear: flip the switch! But in experiments, many people refuse to flip the switch. Doing nothing means the whole crowd will die. But perhaps doing nothing isn’t killing, just allowing a tragic sequence of events to unfold. </p>
<p>Flipping the switch becomes very much less popular in a clever variant where the runaway trolley can only be stopped by pushing an innocent and heavy bystander, who happens to be standing on a footbridge, into the path of the oncoming trolley (imagine you are too light to stop the trolley by diving over the parapet yourself). Few people want to push an innocent person to their death, even if it saves many. And surely even those who judge this is morally right feel conflicted and uncertain. </p>
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<p>So our moral queasiness about reporting the deaths of vaccine sceptics won’t go away just by showing that the ends justify the means. But what exactly is the missing moral ingredient that makes us so uncomfortable? </p>
<p>Moral psychology researchers often assume our morality is governed by <a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/files/psych/files/beyond-point-and-shoot-morality.pdf?m=1441302794">two forces</a>. One is a slow, rational process that tots up costs and benefits. The other is a fast emotional process that cares mainly about obeying moral rules (“killing is wrong!”). This way of putting things gives the impression that it is the rational system that we should be listening to. </p>
<p>The emotional system, with its blind desire to follow the rules, is pulling us away from the “right” action. From this standpoint, moral discomfort should be recognised, but put aside. If publicising the deaths of vaccine sceptics helps save others, we should do it, whether we feel queasy or not. </p>
<h2>Contract-based approach</h2>
<p>But there is a third philosophical tradition in ethics that psychologists have only recently started to consider. This puts matters in a very different light and helps us understand moral dilemmas in a new, but insightful, way. </p>
<p>According to <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198249926.001.0001/acprof-9780198249924">contract-based approaches</a> to ethics, people care not only about consequences and rules, but <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004238">agreement</a>. Roughly, something is morally OK <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31506123/">if people agree to it</a> – or would agree to it, if we had time to ask them.</p>
<p>This viewpoint helps explains why we are morally conflicted by flipping the switch: the hapless person on the siding would surely not agree to be killed. By contrast, we don’t need to get anyone’s agreement for doing nothing. Doing nothing is just the default option. </p>
<p>And consider the person on the footbridge. They surely, in our imagination, will protest even more vigorously against the terrifying prospect of being pushed to their death. And hence this feels even less morally acceptable. </p>
<p>From a contract-based view of moral psychology, the crucial question is: would the tragic victims of COVID have agreed to their case being reported? What about their families? And would they have approved the tone and storyline? </p>
<p>In some reported cases, people close to death, or their families, have asked for their stories to be broadcast to warn others. These cases feel morally fine, as the contract-based view would suggest. In other cases, though, such permission has neither been sought nor granted. Here, our queasiness is greatest, especially where people are portrayed, however subtly, as foolishly endangering their own lives. No one would agree to the printing of a story spun like that. </p>
<p>And there is yet another element. Our moral psychology cares, too, about whether people – and especially ourselves – are virtuous. Yet schadenfreude – the delight in the misfortune of others – is surely a vice: better to be kind and compassionate. So publicising, and being riveted by, the tragic deaths of vaccine sceptics invites us to indulge this vice, and we feel morally uncomfortable in doing so. </p>
<p>Our mixed feelings about reporting the deaths of vaccine sceptics reflect the complexity of our moral selves – consequences, rules, agreements and virtues can pull us in different directions. There is no one source of moral intuition but many, each with deep psychological roots. </p>
<p>So when is reporting justified, and when is it not? Moral psychology can only help us understand why people have different opinions and why many of us feel conflicted. Resolving these conflicts isn’t a job for psychology. It is a task for democratic societies and each individual conscience.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165846/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Chater receives funding from the ESRC. He is member of the UK's Committee on Climate Change and co-founder of Decision Technology, a research consultancy. </span></em></p>The news is full of stories of people who refused the jab who died of COVID.Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1643672021-07-16T10:40:25Z2021-07-16T10:40:25ZCOVID: should you ditch your mask once restrictions are lifted? A philosopher’s view<p>Most COVID-19 legal restrictions in England <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52530518">end on July 19</a>. To celebrate, will you punch a stranger in the face? Probably not. And you certainly shouldn’t. Will you wear a mask on the bus after what the government has called “freedom day”? (If you live in London, where masks remain compulsory on public transport, the answer is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/13/masks-will-be-needed-on-london-tube-buses-and-trains-tfl-to-confirm">clearly “yes”</a>.) Not wearing a mask looks a lot like punching the stranger – you risk harming innocent people. But lots of people who would never dream of punching strangers are seemingly <a href="https://www.itv.com/news/2021-07-03/mask-wearing-and-social-distancing-to-end-on-july-19--reports">planning to throw away their face masks</a>. </p>
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<p>Why would it be wrong to punch strangers? One answer is that it would be against the law. That’s true, but it’s not the key issue. Even if the government forgot to legislate against assault, most of us think it would still be morally wrong. Regardless of the law, we all have a moral obligation not to impose unnecessary harm on non-consenting others. Is there a way not wearing face masks could be justified?</p>
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<p>One way is to point to questions of knowledge or blame. Someone who goes around punching strangers displays a callous disregard for other people. By contrast, an asymptomatic coronavirus carrier doesn’t seem like a bad person. Rather, she’s just unlucky. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, this response <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-responsibility/">misses the point</a>. When I cycle my bike, I don’t intend to harm pedestrians. If I hit someone, it would be a tragic accident, not intentional. Still, I should take precautions on the road. </p>
<p>A second possible difference concerns risk. You might think that punching someone will definitely harm them, but not wearing a mask only risks harm. </p>
<p>However, that’s too quick. After all, the person you punch might be congenitally <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170426-the-people-who-never-feel-any-pain">immune to pain</a>. Still, you shouldn’t take the risk.</p>
<p>More tempting is to say the difference is about the size of the risks. It doesn’t make sense to try to eliminate every risk - otherwise, such everyday activities as cycling my bike would be wrong simply because I might hit someone. </p>
<p>So, you might think that while we have an obligation to avoid imposing high risks of harm, we don’t have an obligation to avoid imposing low risks. Punching strangers imposes a very high risk of serious harm. By contrast, the chance you are an asymptomatic carrier and that you transmit and that transmission causes serious harm is extremely low. </p>
<p>It’s true that we can’t reduce every risk. But it’s not obvious that the size of the risk is all that matters. The precaution of wearing a face mask is relatively low-cost. It might be annoying, but nothing compared to dying of COVID. Also, even if the risks you impose are low, if enough people impose a low risk, <a href="https://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/blog/2021/06/08/how-should-artificial-agents-make-risky-choices-on-our-behalf/">the result can be a lot of harm</a>. It’s not clear that “low risk” always equals “OK”.</p>
<p>The third possible difference concerns consent. Consent functions a bit like a magical power, <a href="https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/the-moral-magic-of-consent-3">making the morally impermissible permissible</a>. It would be wrong for me to punch a stranger on the street, but it’s fine for Tyson Fury to punch an opponent who has consented to a prize fight. </p>
<h2>Consensual or non-consensual?</h2>
<p>When people walk around the streets, they don’t expect to be punched – any resulting harm is non-consensual. By contrast, you might think, when people get on the bus, they know they might be exposed to all sorts of microbes, so any harm is consensual. </p>
<p>The notion of consent also provides a neat explanation of why some risky activities, such as riding my bike, are permissible. We assume that everyone would agree to a system that allows for everyone to ride bikes, even if it imposes a risk of accidents, because we all <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/papa.12042">stand to gain from that system</a>. The issue isn’t the size of the risk, but what we agree to.</p>
<p>Still, can we assume that everyone else on the bus does consent to being exposed to our viruses? After all, many people have no real choice but to catch the bus if they want to get to work or school. They may feel they have no option. </p>
<p>So, is catching a bus without a mask on closer to riding a bike or punching a stranger? These are the kinds of question we all need to be asking ourselves if we care about acting morally, whatever the law says.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164367/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen John receives funding from the British Academy for a project on "Rethinking the Ethics of Vaccination". </span></em></p>A philosopher of public health ponders whether taking your mask off on July 19 is like punching someone in the face or like riding a bike.Stephen John, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Public Health, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1262822020-07-09T19:59:15Z2020-07-09T19:59:15ZLarge-scale facial recognition is incompatible with a free society<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346762/original/file-20200710-87067-1g5fm9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5590%2C3690&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the US, tireless <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/12/1003482/amazon-stopped-selling-police-face-recognition-fight/">opposition</a> to state use of facial recognition algorithms has recently won some victories. </p>
<p>Some progressive cities have <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/17/tech/cities-ban-facial-recognition/index.html">banned</a> some uses of the technology. <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/08/ibm-ends-all-facial-recognition-work-as-ceo-calls-out-bias-and-inequality/">Three</a> <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/10/george-floyd-protests-amazon-police-use-facial-recognition/5338536002/">tech</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/11/microsoft-facial-recognition/">companies</a> have pulled facial recognition products from the market. <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/25/tech/facial-recognition-legislation-markey/index.html">Democrats have advanced a bill</a> for a moratorium on facial recognition. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a leading computer science organisation, <a href="https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/public-policy/ustpc-facial-recognition-tech-statement.pdf">has also come out against the technology</a>. </p>
<p>Outside the US, however, the tide is heading in the other direction. China is deploying <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html">facial recognition on a vast scale</a> in its social credit experiments, policing, and suppressing the Uighur population. It is also exporting facial recognition technology (and norms) to partner countries in the <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/belt-and-road-means-big-data-facial-recognition-too">Belt and Road initiative</a>. The UK High Court ruled its use by South Wales Police <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-49565287">lawful</a> last September (though the decision is being appealed).</p>
<p>Here in Australia, despite <a href="https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/media-releases/commission-calls-accountable-ai">pushback from the Human Rights Commission</a>, the trend is also towards greater use. The government proposed an ambitious plan for a <a href="https://www.itnews.com.au/news/three-states-complete-national-face-matching-database-upload-535352">national face database</a> (including wacky trial balloons about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/world/australia/pornography-facial-recognition.html">age-verification on porn sites</a>). Some local councils are <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-17/facial-surveillance-slowly-being-trialled-around-the-country/12308282">adding facial recognition</a> into their existing surveillance systems. Police officers have <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-04-14/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-tech-australian-federal-police/12146894">tried out the dystopian services of Clearview AI</a>. </p>
<p>Should Australia be using this technology? To decide, we need to answer fundamental questions about the kind of people, and the kind of society, we want to be.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-regulating-facial-recognition-technology-is-so-problematic-and-necessary-107284">Why regulating facial recognition technology is so problematic - and necessary</a>
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<h2>From facial recognition to face surveillance</h2>
<p>Facial recognition has <a href="https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5e027ca188c99e3515b404b7/5ed1002058516c11edc66a14_FRTsPrimerMay2020.pdf">many uses</a>. </p>
<p>It can verify individual identity by comparing a target image with data held on file to confirm a match – this is “one-to-one” facial recognition. It can also compare a target image with a database of subjects of interest. That’s “one-to-many”. The most ambitious form is “all-to-all” matching. This would mean matching every image to a comprehensive database of every person in a given polity. </p>
<p>Each approach can be carried out asynchronously (on demand, after images are captured) or in real time. And they can be applied to separate (disaggregated) data streams, or used to bring together massive surveillance datasets. </p>
<p>Facial recognition occurring at one end of each of these scales – one-to-one, asynchronous, disaggregated – has well-documented benefits. One-to-one real-time facial recognition can be convenient and relatively safe, like unlocking your phone, or proving your identity at an automated passport barrier. Asynchronous disaggregated one-to-many facial recognition can be useful for law enforcement – analysing CCTV footage to identify a suspect, for example, or finding victims and perpetrators in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/business/clearview-facial-recognition-child-sexual-abuse.html">child abuse videos</a>.</p>
<p>However, facial recognition at the other end of these scales – one-to-many or all-to-all, real-time, integrated – amounts to face surveillance, which has less obvious benefits. Several police forces in the UK have trialled real-time one-to-many facial recognition to seek persons of interest, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f4779de6-b1e0-11e9-bec9-fdcab53d6959">with mixed results</a>. The benefits of integrated real-time all-to-all face surveillance in China are yet to be seen.</p>
<p>And while the benefits of face surveillance are dubious, it risks fundamentally changing the kind of society we live in.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346488/original/file-20200709-87071-4dqoia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Real-time facial recognition applied to crowds amounts to face surveillance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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<h2>Face surveillance often goes wrong, but it’s bad even when it works</h2>
<p>Most facial recognition algorithms are accurate with head-on, well-lit portraits, but underperform with “faces in the wild”. They are also <a href="https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/x/2019/01/24/AIES-19_paper_223.pdf">worse at identifying black faces</a>, and <a href="http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf">especially the faces of black women</a>. </p>
<p>The errors tend to be false positives – making incorrect matches, rather than missing correct ones. If face surveillance were used to dole out cash prizes, this would be fine. But a match is almost always used to target interventions (such as arrests) that harm those identified.</p>
<p>More false positives for minority populations means they bear the costs of face surveillance, while any benefits are likely to accrue to majority populations. So using these systems will <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-is-face-recognition-surveillance-technology-racist/">amplify the structural injustices</a> of the societies that produce them.</p>
<p>Even when it works, face surveillance is still harmful. Knowing where people are and what they are doing enables you to predict and control their behaviour.</p>
<p>You might believe the Australian government wouldn’t use this power against us, but the very fact they have it makes us less free. Freedom isn’t only about making it <em>unlikely</em> others will interfere with you. It’s about making it <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/on-the-peoples-terms/219DF8F7F166B305318CD9D51FAC45DE">impossible</a> for them to do so. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-police-are-using-the-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-system-with-no-accountability-132667">Australian police are using the Clearview AI facial recognition system with no accountability</a>
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<h2>Face surveillance is intrinsically wrong</h2>
<p>Face surveillance relies on the idea that others are entitled to extract biometric data from you without your consent when you are in public. </p>
<p>This is false. We have a right to control our own biometric data. This is what is called an underived right, like the right to control your own body.</p>
<p>Of course, rights have limits. You can lose the protection of a right – someone who robs a servo may lose their right to anonymity – or the right may be overridden, if necessary, for a good enough cause.</p>
<p>But the great majority of us have committed no crime that would make us lose the right to control our biometric data. And the possible benefits of using face surveillance on any particular occasion must be discounted by their probability of occurring. Certain rights violations are unlikely to be overridden by hypothetical benefits.</p>
<p><a href="https://openreview.net/forum?id=s-e2zaAlG3I">Many prominent algorithms</a> used for face surveillance were also developed in morally compromised ways. They used datasets containing images used without permission of the rightful owners, as well as harmful images and deeply objectionable labels.</p>
<h2>Arguments for face surveillance don’t hold up</h2>
<p>There will of course be counterarguments, but none of them hold up.</p>
<p><em>You’ve already given up your privacy to Apple or Google – why begrudge police the same kind of information?</em> Just because we have sleepwalked into a surveillance society doesn’t mean we should refuse to wake up. </p>
<p><em>Human surveillance is more biased and error-prone than algorithmic surveillance.</em> Human surveillance is indeed morally problematic. Vast networks of CCTV cameras already compromise our civil liberties. Weaponizing them with software that enables people to be tracked across multiple sites only makes them worse. </p>
<p><em>We can always keep a human in the loop.</em> False positive rates can be reduced by human oversight, but human oversight of automated systems is itself <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8">flawed</a> and <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/algorithms-should-have-made-courts-more-fair-what-went-wrong/">biased</a>, and this doesn’t address the other objections against face surveillance. </p>
<p><em>Technology is neither good nor bad in itself; it’s just a tool that can be used for good or bad ends.</em> Every tool makes <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-artifacts-afford">some things easier and some things harder</a>. Facial recognition makes it easier to oppress vulnerable populations and violate everyone’s basic rights.</p>
<h2>It’s time for a moratorium</h2>
<p>Face surveillance is based on morally compromised research, violates our rights, is harmful, and exacerbates structural injustice, both when it works and when it fails. Its adoption harms individuals, and makes our society as a whole more unjust, and less free. </p>
<p>A moratorium on its use in Australia is the least we should demand.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126282/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Face surveillance makes it easier to oppress vulnerable populations and violate everyone’s basic rights. It’s time for a moratorium.Seth Lazar, Professor, Australian National UniversityClaire Benn, Research Fellow, Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge, Australian National UniversityMario Günther, Research Fellow, Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1380882020-05-07T17:00:16Z2020-05-07T17:00:16ZDid Neil Ferguson really do wrong in breaking the coronavirus lockdown?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333408/original/file-20200507-49558-13jy7pe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:180515_ferguson_neil_sph_020.jpg">Thomas Angus, Imperial College London/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If anyone is an expert on when it might be OK to breach lockdown regulations, it’s one of the country’s leading epidemiologists. But after <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/05/uk-coronavirus-adviser-prof-neil-ferguson-resigns-after-breaking-lockdown-rules">breaking the rules</a>, Neil Ferguson felt the need to step down from his position as a government adviser.</p>
<p>Twice during lockdown, Ferguson allowed a woman he is said to be in a relationship with to visit him. This was despite the UK government, who he was advising on COVID-19, forbidding people from visiting friends and family they don’t live with.</p>
<p>Does his expertise mean we should judge his indiscretions lightly? No. The lockdown strategy requires us all to act as if we are stupid, as if we cannot make judgements about what is safe or unsafe on the basis of the evidence. That applies as much to Ferguson as to you or me.</p>
<p>Ferguson was hypocritical. But hypocrisy is rather a boring vice – all it means is that there was a gap between his words and his actions. So, which were wrong: his words about the importance of lockdown, or his actions of breaking those measures? </p>
<h2>The unfairness of free riding</h2>
<p>It might seem obvious that the problem was his actions. By now, we all know why we should stay at home: to protect the NHS and save lives. But if everyone is staying home except one or two of us, the NHS will probably be protected whatever we do. What’s wrong with a few small violations?</p>
<p>Philosophers, economists and social scientists have thought about <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/">similar problems</a>. Here’s one standard example. Imagine you see everyone else buy a ticket as they board the bus. Enough tickets have been bought that the bus will run, even if you don’t buy one. So, you sneak on. Everyone else still gets to their destination, but something about your actions seems worrying. </p>
<p>Most analyses of these free-riding cases centre around ideas of fairness. In free riding, we receive a benefit from some socially coordinated activity but refuse to contribute ourselves. These refusals have an odd character. The activity can carry on generating benefits even if some people don’t cooperate, but not if everyone stopped cooperating. The bus will run even if you don’t buy a ticket, but not if no one did. If we free ride, we rely on everyone else to do their share while not doing our own. That’s <a href="https://politics.virginia.edu/georgeklosko/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2016/03/presumptive-benefit.pdf">unfair</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333416/original/file-20200507-49573-tkos56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Just because you can sneak on, doesn’t mean you should.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:People_Getting_on_MBTA_Bus_57.jpg">Miles, the MBTA Guy/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Notions of free riding are central to many real-world debates. They are certainly relevant to the question of vaccination: if I know that everyone else has received a vaccine to protect against a disease, then why bother getting vaccinated myself? <a href="https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/what-herd-immunity">Herd immunity</a> will protect me and everyone else. </p>
<p>The short answer is that while you don’t need to be vaccinated to be protected, you do have an ethical obligation to maintain this <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267229/">public good</a>. </p>
<p>This notion also helps us understand small violations of lockdown rules. Given that everyone else is in lockdown, two people meeting up is extremely unlikely to cause harm. However, the meet-up is safe only because everyone else is in lockdown. If everyone did it, meeting up wouldn’t be safe. The problem isn’t that meeting up is risky, but that it’s unfair. </p>
<h2>Why it’s time to act stupid</h2>
<p>But there’s a twist. Free riding involves a “What if everyone did it?” question, and a lot depends on the “it”. </p>
<p>We know that Ferguson himself <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-politics-52553229">has already had COVID-19</a>, and so was <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-long-are-you-infectious-when-you-have-coronavirus-135295">unlikely to be infectious</a>. Perhaps lots of people in Ferguson’s position could have meet-ups while continuing to protect the NHS and save lives. What would be wrong with adopting a more nuanced attitude towards lockdown measures – allowing people to judge for themselves how risky their behaviour is?</p>
<p>Here’s an obvious answer: people are often bad at <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/">estimating risks</a>. </p>
<p>These problems are even worse in our current situation. It is hard to judge whether you have had <a href="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu">COVID-19 or seasonal flu</a>, and judgements about safety depend on <a href="https://kingsphilosophy.com/2020/04/06/a-laypersons-guide-to-epidemiological-modelling-prof-alexander-bird/">complex medical and mathematical considerations</a>. Most of us are unqualified to decide that we are safe to stand closer than two metres apart.</p>
<p>Still, not everyone is equally bad at such calculations. For example, maybe prominent epidemiological modellers such as Ferguson are well situated to judge when it’s OK to break the rules. Why not give some people a pass? </p>
<p>The answer to this question takes us back to fairness. Normally, we enjoy what philosophers call <a href="http://www.investigacoesfilosoficas.com/wp-content/uploads/04-Zagzebski-2013-Intellectual-Autonomy.pdf">“intellectual autonomy”</a>; we are free to exercise our own judgement in forming our beliefs. One of the costs of lockdown is giving up some of this autonomy. We have to follow the rules, even if we feel certain they don’t apply to us. </p>
<p>Consider someone who, against this backdrop, makes their own judgements about what behaviours are risky. They are exercising their own intellectual autonomy on the basis that other people aren’t doing the same. That’s unfair in much the same way as taking the bus without buying a ticket. And just as not buying a ticket is unfair even when the bus will run anyway, this exercise of your intellectual autonomy can be unfair even when you’re likely to be <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/JOHETA-2">right</a>.</p>
<p>Beyond the tawdry tabloid headlines and cries of hypocrisy, Ferguson’s indiscretions reveal a deeper, stranger truth. Sometimes, fairness can demand that we act stupid, even when we’re not.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138088/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen John does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lockdown requires that we all act as if we know nothing, even if we are world experts on disease transmission.Stephen John, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Public Health, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1297862020-02-06T19:03:27Z2020-02-06T19:03:27ZFriday essay: Hail Hydra - on comics, ethics and politics<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313622/original/file-20200205-20026-109ekkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=93%2C0%2C1675%2C885&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154796/mediaviewer/rm1606914561">IMDB</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Do you trust me?” An earnest question.</p>
<p>“I do.” An earnest answer.</p>
<p>And then that ancient, global gesture of earnest intimacy: a handshake.</p>
<p>For many, this is <em>the</em> moment from the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154796/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Avengers: Endgame</a> movie: Captain America and Iron Man putting aside their conflict for the common good. Tony Stark asks, Steve Rogers answers – and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is made whole. </p>
<p>After three years of conveniently aggressive animosity, these Avengers are once again allies. Instead of punching or shooting at each other, the two superheroes look into one another’s eyes — and touch.</p>
<p>I confess that, for all my weary cynicism, I was moved as I watched this scene. Both times I watched it. And again, as my children and I saw it together. But why?</p>
<p>There is spectacle, of course. The protagonists must sprint faster than cars, punch through walls, swing off buildings, shoot rockets from their shoulders. There must be explosions and cosmic ripples and glowing pulses and beings turning to dust and so on. The studios cannot make back their production and advertising costs – perhaps more than half a billion US dollars (A$746 million) in this case – with a quiet seminar on Aristotle or Confucius.</p>
<p>Still, the digital marvels are not enough to move me or to keep me returning for the next episode, in perpetuity. For the franchise to profit as it does, the violence has to mean something more.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C5%2C1713%2C726&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C5%2C1713%2C726&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=252&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=252&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=252&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313618/original/file-20200205-41485-1daedlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">So much earnest. Iron Man and Captain America shake on it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154796/mediaviewer/rm508531201">IMDB</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The comic politic</h2>
<p>Perhaps politics? There are certainly political ideas in the Marvel films. Witness state surveillance in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843866/">Captain America: The Winter Soldier</a>, white colonialism in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825683/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Black Panther</a>, asylum seekers in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154664/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Captain Marvel</a>.</p>
<p>And there are countless comic book precedents for this. In <a href="https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/7849/captain_america_comics_1941_1">Captain America Comics #1</a>, published in 1941, the superhero socked Hitler in the mouth. Almost 30 years later, in <a href="https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/7503/captain_america_1968_122">Captain America #122</a>, he was hesitantly praising hippie peace protesters: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve spent a lifetime defending the flag and the law. Perhaps I should have battled less and questioned more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moving from the texts to their broader contexts, it is also political that some were recently angry at Marvel films with more diverse casts and crews. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313620/original/file-20200205-20022-19ogvwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Captain America Comics #1.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/7849/captain_america_comics_1941_1">Marvel</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, for example, reported a pre-emptive spike in “non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling” from fans unhappy about Captain Marvel. Similar campaigns were attempted against Black Panther. These were the first Marvel movies featuring female and black solo heroes. Captain Marvel was also co-written and co-directed by women, while Black Panther was written and directed by African-American men. </p>
<p>“It’s not difficult to see the common thread,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/8/18254584/captain-marvel-boycott-controversy">writes</a> Alex Abad-Santos for Vox, “that superhero and other franchise movies with woman [sic] and people of colour as protagonists are regularly met by toxic trolling online.” As in Australia and the UK, many white men are furious at small but noticeable challenges to their power.</p>
<p>In short: yes, there are politics in and behind Marvel’s tales.</p>
<p>Still, the logic of superhero stories is rarely political, strictly speaking. Politics is about the organisation of society: who we are; who our enemies are; who rules whom; who controls what institutions or resources. Businesses like Marvel are interested in characters thumping or blasting other characters, often while looking beautiful. These fistfights or firefights can symbolise broader and deeper issues – but the symbols are used for close-up entertainment rather than wide-shot social and economic analysis. Captain America summed up this cinematic approach with his own ethos in Captain America: Civil War:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My faith’s in people, I guess. Individuals. And I’m happy to say that, for the most part, they haven’t let me down. Which is why I can’t let them down either.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Put another way: the studio’s writers have “faith” in individuals too, and these individuals have yet to let their accountants down.</p>
<p>Alongside this individualism is conservatism. For all their speeches about freedom and justice, these heroes almost always end up punching their way back to the global status quo. They steadfastly avoid what Greek-born French philosopher <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40548695?seq=1">Cornelius Castoriadis</a> called the “political imaginary”: our power to invent new collective identities and institutions. For Castoriadis, the point is not simply to follow certain laws or parliamentary procedures, the point is to interrogate and reimagine the basic cultural assumptions beneath these. There is very little of this in the Marvel universe, especially the films. As pop culture scholar Noah Berlatsky <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18168909/2018-superhero-movies-marvel-dc-black-panther-infinity-war-aquaman">riffed</a> in an essay for The Verge in early 2019: “Great power is used to protect the world, not revolutionise it”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313628/original/file-20200205-149747-nwj80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spider-Man looking typically heroic, a key virtue in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marvel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Setting high standards</h2>
<p>For these reasons and more, the Marvel films are more comfortable with individualistic ethics than with politics proper. Rather than explaining and exploring our collectives, they tend to highlight people’s virtues and vices. As philosopher Mark D. White argues in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtues-Captain-America-Modern-Day-Character/dp/1118619269">The Virtues of Captain America</a>, characters such as Steve Rogers offer audiences “moral exemplars”. These might be fictional rather than lived, but they are still portrayed with subtlety, and with surprising fidelity to everyday ambiguity.</p>
<p>This does not mean the superheroes are all perfect Aristotelians. They are rightly flawed characters and – perhaps more importantly – typically very American. “If Aristotle could somehow have imagined the Captain’s mission of giving everyone freedom to live as they choose,” philosopher John Gray <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/117241/captain-americas-moral-philosophy">observed</a> in The New Republic in April 2014, “he would undoubtedly have reacted with incredulous contempt”. We turn to Marvel to see virtues dramatised, not exemplified.</p>
<p>The most obvious virtue, common to almost all cinematic heroes, is bravery. In <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458339/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Captain America: The First Avenger</a>, a spindly Steve Rogers demonstrates this by jumping onto a grenade to save burly but cowardly soldiers. </p>
<p>Perseverance is another: witness the same hero in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498820/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Captain America: Civil War</a> preventing a helicopter taking off simply by holding it. This involves no serious thought or complex negotiations or planning. Captain America simply has to strain and groan and suffer until the job is done.</p>
<p>Alongside these and other classical virtues is the excellence suggested by that handshake between Captain America and Iron Man: trustworthiness.</p>
<p>Trustworthiness is not itself a single virtue, but rather several excellences working together: goodwill, honesty, constancy and the competency to achieve what is promised.</p>
<p>Someone trustworthy can be counted upon to help another who needs it – even if this “help” is being silent or staying still. They do this not only because they can help, but also because they know they ought to. This ought arises from an ethical readiness rather than from selfishness or friendliness. This is the difference between someone trustworthy and someone merely reliable. The greediest and/or sneakiest can be relied on if they’re paid or scared. The truly trustworthy help us not only because their help is necessary, but also because it is in their moral power to do so. They recognise that we are all fundamentally needy, and require others to achieve worthwhile things. “We are finite dependent social beings,” philosopher Karen Jones <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667838?seq=1">writes</a> in Trustworthiness, her 2012 article for Ethics:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We want there to be others who will be responsive to our counting on them so that we can extend the efficacy of our agency.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, to trust someone is to have an idea of their character: to believe that they are able and willing to assist us, because we need assistance. And part of being trustworthy, in turn, is showing others that they can trust us; that we can be relied on – if not right now, then when it counts. There is a mirroring of minds here. Each of us needs the ability to imagine the other’s state of mind – and to imagine the other imagining us.</p>
<p>Importantly, we can be wrong about trustworthiness, and this is one of trust’s defining characteristics: we are taking a risk when we exercise it. Put another way, trust is a profoundly mortal achievement. Omnipotent and omniscient gods need no trust between them, since they are never helpless, and always know the souls of others.</p>
<h2>To err is human</h2>
<p>There are few true divinities like this in the Marvel universe, since all-powerful and all-knowing beings make for dull drama. Even Galactus, the fabulously purple planet eater who first appeared in <a href="https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/13253/fantastic_four_1961_48">Fantastic Four #48</a>, has need of minions and allies.</p>
<p>Our earnest handshaker, Captain America, is also the trusted Marvel persona. Well-meaning, sincere, forthright and somewhat transparent in his moral simplicity, Steve Rogers can be counted upon when it matters. This is perhaps his defining characteristic: whatever happens, he will be there for his friends, allies and the world.</p>
<p>This is why Tony Stark’s sickbed rejection of Captain America in Avengers: Endgame is so powerful. Haggard and slurring his words on tottering legs, Tony returns from being stranded in space to accuse Rogers of failing him personally. “I got nothing for you, Cap,” he says. “No clues, no strategies, no options. Zero, zip, nada. No trust, liar.”</p>
<p>The point of this is not that Iron Man is correct or that Captain America is a capricious and deceptive man-child in a flag suit; the point is that Tony is beaten and weak and a little mad, and this is why he doubts his comrade’s integrity. As soon as the entrepreneur is well again, his trust in Steve Rogers returns. Iron Man thinks the great American hero is simple, naive and smug – but always worthy of trust.</p>
<p>This dramatisation of trust continues throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Should Captain America trust Thor’s brother, Loki? (Probably not.) Should he trust Bucky Barnes, though his old partner has become a brainwashed cyborg assassin? (Yes.) Should he trust former spy Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow? (Yes.) Should anyone trust Nick Fury? (No. The spymaster is reliable, but not trustworthy.)</p>
<p>As these examples suggest, Captain America is not only trustworthy, but is also trusting in return. He is not afraid to ask for help, and thereby to demonstrate that someone is more trustworthy than they seem – even to themselves. As Karen Jones phrases it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes displaying trust is sufficient to elicit trustworthiness as we respond to the call to be moved by the other’s dependency.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Steve Rogers is the personification of hopeful trust: he allows characters to believe in mutual, mature goodwill.</p>
<p>Likewise for the comics. What distinguishes Captain America from other super-soldiers is that this often lonely professional hero is surprisingly vulnerable. He might be quaint and a bit staid, but he will risk his life for trust. In Mark Millar’s Civil War, Steve Rogers ends his fight with Iron Man by turning himself in. “We’re not fighting for the people any more,” he says, weeping. “We’re just fighting.” Knowing the dangers, he allows himself to be handcuffed, jailed and put on trial by the authorities. If he is suspicious of institutions, he believes in good individuals. Captain America is then shot on the steps of the New York federal courthouse: his trust in his fellow citizens leaves him bleeding.</p>
<p>And this is only one storyline in one superhero series – Marvel has the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/marvel-cover-story">rights</a> to some 7,000 characters. Almost all of their storylines involve trust and its betrayal.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/izxgf6RU98Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A dedicated fan exploration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Lessons for young players</h2>
<p>Because of these ethical dramas, I am comfortable with my children watching Marvel films. (I say “comfortable” as if I’m a serious and aloof philosopher, and not a grown man with his own Punisher action figure.) While their political message is often a soufflé of puffy fascism inside a liberal crust, their moral drama is instructive. Over the dinner or café table, I have asked our kids about Iron Man’s instrumental rationality, Captain America’s dogmatism, Thanos’s Malthusianism, Captain Marvel’s glorified militarism.</p>
<p>As a public philosopher, I have taken these kinds of puzzles into schools. The pupils might not be familiar with Aristotle’s theory of the virtues, but from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2250912/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Spider-Man: Homecoming</a>, they are familiar enough with Flash Thompson, Iron Man and Spider-Man to recognise the philosopher’s tripartite scheme of courage, bravery and foolhardiness.</p>
<p>And trust has been a large part of these conversations. Trust is especially fraught for children. Kids are more powerless than adults and require more help to realise their needs. They are also more vulnerable to trickery and coercion, so they often trust the wrong people – those who suggest they can be counted on, but who are actually capricious or malicious. Children need to tell the difference between Thor’s well-meaning bluster and Loki’s smiling malice in Thor; between Talos’s evasions and Yon-Rogg’s manipulations in Captain Marvel; between Iron Man the altruistic amateur soldier in Iron Man and Iron Man the manic narcissistic technocrat in Captain America: Civil War.</p>
<p>This answers one of the questions of parenthood: with what or whom can I leave my children alone? Our kids can watch Marvel films whenever they like. These movies might be glib, cynical or boring – but as moral dramas, they are benign.</p>
<p>But do I trust Marvel? Shit, no. (Apologies to Captain America for the “language”.)</p>
<p>To begin, the company is constantly trying to sell me and my children stuff. Picture the ultimate Marvel brand manager’s fantasy: me driving to the supermarket in my Avengers: Endgame product-placement Audi, wearing my Avengers tie and cologne. The kids munch on their Spider-Man fruit snacks, and sip on their Spider-Man water bottles – all purchased with my Marvel Mastercard. At home, I cook snacks in my Avengers waffle maker, then we all watch Spider-Man: Homecoming before sleeping under our Guardians of the Galaxy bed linen.</p>
<p>The important thing, for Marvel, is to make sure that each product continually advertises another Marvel product. In this corporate universe, films spruik merchandise that spruiks television shows that spruik tie-ins, and so on.</p>
<p>Marvel’s industrial relations record is also worrying. They are now owned by Disney, hardly a corporate superhero. While profits have risen, wages at Disneyland have actually fallen in real terms. According to a Los Angeles Times <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-disneyland-study-20180228-story.html">story</a> from 2018, a survey of the Anaheim theme park’s workers found that “three-quarters say they can’t afford basic expenses every month”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313625/original/file-20200205-20022-682tzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marvel at the array of action figures.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kuala-lumpur-malaysia-june-22-fictional-1626605533">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As Sean Howe details in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13623814-marvel-comics">Marvel Comics: The Untold Story</a>, Marvel comics itself was also notorious for exploiting freelancers. Despite their works selling millions of copies, authors and illustrators were paid page rates and nothing more. The vast Marvel Cinematic Universe was built by low-waged, precarious labour. Put simply: it is naive to believe a superhero business is anything other than a business. There are certainly more exploitative firms in the world, but this does nothing to make Marvel trustworthy.</p>
<p>In fact, nothing can make Marvel trustworthy. Not because it is evil, but because it is a corporation, and the notion of “trust” does not apply. Corporations are often treated as individuals in law, but they are not individuals as we are. They can be governed more or less ethically; can work for or against the common good; can be regulated to minimise harm or deregulated to maximise profit. They can, in other words, be guided or coerced politically. But they are not ethical persons, with whom we can develop trustworthy relationships.</p>
<p>Think of how it feels to pledge yourself to someone; to show that you understand that they are in need of help, and what this means as a finite dependent social being; to demonstrate – or hope to – that you are helping because help is simply necessary, and not because of anger, fear or greed. A corporation cannot think of how this feels, because it is not able to think of someone at all. It lacks what philosophers call a theory of mind: the ability to imagine the mental states of others, and to imagine them imagining us. There can be no mirroring of minds here, because a corporation is neither conscious of itself, nor conscious of anyone else. It is not an immature or immoral person. It is not a person at all – and it is a “category mistake” to think otherwise, as philosopher Matthew Lambert observes. Put another way: Marvel will never respond to Captain America the way I have – it cares nothing whatsoever for his moral ideals, because it has literally no conception whatsoever of morality itself.</p>
<h2>The story of us</h2>
<p>As I suggested earlier, I grant that Marvel’s stories might be discussed ethically and politically. In fact, this kind of conversation is required by Castoriadis’s “political imaginary”. As a community, our revised conceptions of “us” cannot be legislated by representatives, nor outsourced to experts – they must arise from our negotiations. And they involve not only formal politics, but also art. As Castoriadis <a href="https://www.pdcnet.org/scholarpdf/show?id=gfpj_1983_0009_0002_0079_0115&pdfname=gfpj_1983_0009_0002_0079_0115.pdf&file_type=pdf">argues</a> in The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy, tragedy enabled the Athenians to witness and debate their own partial values and ideals; to confront the ambiguous and fickle nature of political action. </p>
<p>Sophocles’s <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html">Antigone</a>, for example, revealed that “nothing can guarantee a priori the correctness of action – not even reason”. There is a similar mood to Marvel’s Civil War stories: the violent confrontation of good against good, in which pious duty or technocratic certainty are equally destructive. This is hardly Antigone, but it is occasionally poignant, and certainly stirring.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313619/original/file-20200205-41503-7486pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Daredevil #232.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/8221/daredevil_1964_232">Marvel</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Superheroes also provide familiar ideals for us to seek. And there is an Athenian precedent for this, too – though by no means democratic. Plato’s utopia in The Republic was modelled after Socrates’s beautiful soul, and the Marvel superheroes offer similar existential symbols. They are political and moral forces, encapsulated in selves. Captain America alone can be a potent sign of freedom or fascistic tyranny, of rebellion or nationalistic obedience, of solitary obsession or charismatic esprit de corps. We can explore rage in Wolverine, the trauma of marginalisation in X-Men, seductive nihilism in the Punisher, faith in Daredevil and so on. While these stories typically lack genuinely political thought, they can offer emblems of personal striving, and provide memorable celebrations or warnings.</p>
<p>One such warning is offered by the criminal Kingpin in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s <a href="https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/8221/daredevil_1964_232">Daredevil #232</a>. As he manipulates a crazed super-soldier, Nuke, into attacking his enemies, the Kingpin reveals the very ordinary reasons for violence: profit. While his greed is gussied up in the star-spangled banner for Nuke’s sake, this is about business. Hindered by regulation, Kingpin must break the law. “I am not a villain, my son. I am a corporation.” There will be no reform, no rehabilitation. This is who the Kingpin is, and always will be.</p>
<p>While simplistic, this message resonates with me. For all the earnest speeches and handshakes, Marvel the business will never gain my trust. But it will also never betray me. More likely it will just disappoint me, until I am too exhausted or exasperated for disappointment. Either way, I ought to look elsewhere for the virtues advertised in the Avengers films.</p>
<p>I leave my kids with Marvel not because I trust the corporation, but because I trust my children.</p>
<p><em>This piece is republished with permission from <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/editions/matters-of-trust/">GriffithReview67: Matters of Trust</a> (Text), ed Ashley Hay</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129786/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Damon Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Marvel Cinematic Universe brings the virtues and politics of the comic world - indeed the Ancient Greek world - to life. But trusting the message doesn’t mean I trust the corporation behind it.Damon Young, Associate, School of Philosophy, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1305612020-01-31T16:32:50Z2020-01-31T16:32:50ZA world of heroes and villains: why we should challenge children’s simplistic moral beliefs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313042/original/file-20200131-41485-yisyan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It won't hurt them to know that superheroes are capable of doing wrong too.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rawpixel.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The protagonist of the decorum-defying but wildly entertaining new film, <a href="https://theconversation.com/jojo-rabbit-hitler-humour-and-a-childs-eye-view-of-war-make-for-dark-satire-128622">Jojo Rabbit</a>, sees the world in black and white. The film is set in Nazi Germany and ten-year-old Jojo is a fiercely committed member of the Hitler Youth. For him, Aryans are good and Jews are bad. </p>
<p>His mother, Rosie, who is working with the resistance and hiding a Jewish teenager in the attic, does nothing to encourage her son’s abhorrent worldview, but nor can she risk openly contradicting him. She lavishes affection on Jojo, urges him to have fun and climb trees and tells him that love “is the strongest thing in the world”.</p>
<p>The circumstances in which Rosie and Jojo find themselves are, mercifully, unusual. Whatever challenges most of us face in trying to support the moral development of our children, we do not have to contend with the effects of Nazi indoctrination, and we do not risk our lives in trying to undo them. Still, there is an analogue of Rosie’s dilemma that is faced by more or less every parent: at what age, and how directly, should we steer our children away from the simplistic idea that people are either good or bad, virtuous or vicious, on the side of the angels or in league with the devil?</p>
<p>It takes a particularly perverse form of upbringing to connect the categories of good and bad with categories of race or ethnicity. But the basic division of people into heroes and villains is hard to get away from. It is <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275220548_Children's_Evaluations_of_Villains_in_Children's_the_Heroes_and_Literature">embedded in fairytales and storybooks</a>, myths and legends, religious narratives and moral allegories, crime novels and superhero films. Children everywhere learn that there is an ongoing struggle between good people and bad, that justice is done when the bad get their comeuppance and the good live happily ever after.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306029/original/file-20191210-95135-1dj8t5t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scarlett Johansson tries to counter Nazi brainwashing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Twentieth Century Fox</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is no doubt that this picture of the world is a gross distortion. But what are we to do when our children espouse it? Should we, like Rosie, let them know they are loved and send them outside to climb trees, perhaps on the assumption that moral development takes care of itself? Or should we confront them with facts that contradict and complicate their picture, with the moral failings of their heroes and the kindly acts of their villains? </p>
<p>And if we choose the latter course, do we not risk undermining their moral confidence, turning the vivid blacks and whites of their moral landscape into barely distinguishable shades of grey? Might we be replacing little <a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-moral-absolutism/">moral absolutists</a> with middle-sized <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/">moral relativists</a>?</p>
<h2>What parents should do</h2>
<p>As I argue in my <a href="https://www.routledge.com/A-Theory-of-Moral-Education-1st-Edition/Hand/p/book/9781138898547">recent book</a> about moral education, there are good answers to these questions. Moral development does not take care of itself: parents have an obligation to guide their children’s moral thinking, respond to their questions and correct their misconceptions. (Love and tree-climbing are important too, of course, but they are not substitutes for moral education.) </p>
<p>We should not hesitate to discourage in children the idea that people are either good or bad, and we should deliberately draw their attention to facts that confound it. Nor is there some age threshold or developmental milestone children must reach before we can safely do this. The moment children start making moral evaluations of people is the moment we can start challenging them.</p>
<p>The reason we can and should do this is that the proper objects of moral evaluation are actions, not people. It is bad to harm, steal, cheat and lie; it is good to keep promises, treat people fairly and help those in need. Membership of a moral community involves upholding some basic standards of conduct and standing ready to condemn violations of those standards. It does not involve assessing the state of people’s souls. </p>
<p>Among the first of many <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-teach-children-morals-87960">moral lessons children need to learn</a> is that everyone is capable of both good deeds and bad. Morality is needed to keep all of us on the right track. The supposition that some people can do no wrong and others can do no right is not just false: it deprives morality of its very point.</p>
<p>So we do not risk undermining our children’s confidence or turning them into relativists when we counter their division of people into sinners and saints. We just redirect their moral attention from people to actions. We help them to see that it is the things people do that are subject to moral evaluation, not the people themselves. </p>
<p>Of course, evaluating actions is not always straightforward. In the course of moral life, we are bound to encounter some painful moral dilemmas and difficult borderline cases. If I can help someone in need by telling a lie, should I do it? If I borrow a book and neglect to return it, have I stolen it? Difficulties of this kind are unavoidable. But they are rarer than people think, and they do not cast doubt on the wrongness of deception and theft.</p>
<p>Here, again, there is no need to protect our children from the truth. We need not pretend that moral rules are without exception, or deny that what they require is occasionally unclear, as long as we give due emphasis to their authority and indispensability as anchors of social life.</p>
<p>Rosie’s dreadful circumstances make it more or less impossible for her to correct her son’s simplistic moral worldview. The rest of us have no such excuse.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130561/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Hand does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We should not hesitate to discourage in children the idea that people are either good or bad.Michael Hand, Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1230982019-09-11T20:07:13Z2019-09-11T20:07:13ZHow philosophy 101 could help break the deadlock over drug testing job seekers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291875/original/file-20190911-190012-10y0t3c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1000%2C672&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Proponents and critics of drug testing welfare recipients are repeating the same arguments. Here's how to break the deadlock.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/thumbs-down-yes-no-concept-477959560?src=hEcJtdyt3i4lVuN29VAxTg-1-3">from www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The proposal to drug test welfare recipients keeps on bouncing back. The most recent attempt, <a href="https://www.anneruston.com.au/media_release_drug_testing_trials_to_help_welfare_recipients_become_job_ready">announced last week</a>, is now the third proposal since 2017. </p>
<p>But the tenacity with which the government is pursuing this agenda reflects, not necessarily a fixed policy position, but rather a moral stance. And this moral stance conflicts with that of the proposals’ critics.</p>
<p>Are we doomed to countless repeats of the same policy proposal? Or, as the <a href="https://www.aspc.unsw.edu.au/">Australian Social Policy Conference</a> heard in Sydney this week, can we use philosophical arguments to help break the deadlock?</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Why are we seeing a similar policy proposal again, the third in recent years?.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What’s proposed?</h2>
<p>These proposals are examples of <a href="https://www.crcpress.com/Welfare-Conditionality/Watts-Fitzpatrick/p/book/9781138119918">welfare conditionality</a>. In other words, welfare participants need to meet certain conditions or behave in certain ways to receive their payments.</p>
<p>Drug testing welfare recipients was originally <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_LEGislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r5927">proposed in 2017</a>, failed to get support, then proposed again in 2018 and stalled in the Senate.</p>
<p>This third attempt <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/09/scott-morrison-says-he-is-puzzled-by-opposition-to-welfare-drug-testing">has only very minor changes</a> from the original two versions: additional testing for heroin and cocaine, and the removal of the requirement for welfare recipients to pay for positive test results.</p>
<p>These changes are part of the proposal to randomly drug test 5,000 new recipients of Newstart and Youth Allowance at three sites in NSW, Qld and WA. A positive drug test would lead to 24 months of income management. </p>
<p>Another positive test would lead to a medical assessment, and where indicated, rehabilitation, counselling or ongoing drug tests.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/income-management-doesnt-work-so-lets-look-at-what-does-34792">Income management doesn't work, so let's look at what does</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The ‘pro testing’ philosophy</h2>
<p>Three moral positions sit behind the proposal to drug test welfare recipients: contractualism, paternalism and communitarianism.</p>
<p><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/">Contractualism</a> says the relationship between citizens and the state should be based on reciprocal agreement, with mutual obligations. In other words, people who receive income support should be subject to conditions.</p>
<p><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paternalism/">Paternalism</a> enables those conditions to be ones where someone is protected from the consequences of their own poor decision-making (such as taking an illicit drug).</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-dont-need-no-moral-education-five-things-you-should-learn-about-ethics-30793">We don’t need no (moral) education? Five things you should learn about ethics</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>And this is morally justifiable in the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/">communitarian</a> sense of the importance of community solidarity and social cohesion. In other words, the collective good — however this may be defined but in this particular case the integrity of the social security system — is greater than any individual freedoms or rights to privacy, such as drug-taking. This communitarianism position does seem at odds with the government’s approach to individualism and freedoms in other areas. </p>
<p>This <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/ca60e75d-8c6e-44a5-9c6a-b48e89bff4f1/&sid=0209">typical example</a>, from the National Party’s Mark Coulton in 2018, reflects policy debate using paternalism, mutual obligation and communitarianism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The community has the right to expect that taxpayer funded welfare payments are not being used to fund drug addiction.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Combining these three positions appears to give the proposal to drug test welfare recipients an unassailable moral foundation.</p>
<h2>What do the critics say?</h2>
<p>Critics of the proposals have outlined their concerns about drug testing welfare recipients <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/DrugTestingTrial/Submissions">in Senate submissions</a>, and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cashless-welfare-card-trial-not-working-drug-and-alcohol-centre-says-20190910-p52pv5.html">in the media</a>.</p>
<p>Concerns have included the <a href="https://theconversation.com/drugs-dont-affect-job-seeking-so-lets-offer-users-help-rather-than-take-away-their-payments-123096">lack of evidence</a> supporting a relationship between drug use and employment, <a href="https://www.jsad.com/doi/full/10.15288/jsads.2019.s18.42">not enough</a> drug treatment programs, <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/minister-under-pressure-to-reveal-drug-test-costs/news-story/27d52249c0eac5b4ecd0b6142ef56450">the costs</a> associated with the proposal, and the view that it is <a href="https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/drug-testing-will-stigmatise-welfare-recipients,-s">punitive and discriminatory</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/drugs-dont-affect-job-seeking-so-lets-offer-users-help-rather-than-take-away-their-payments-123096">Drugs don't affect job seeking, so let's offer users help rather than take away their payments</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The critics’ philosophy</h2>
<p>While proponents of drug testing welfare recipients argue from the moral positions of contractualism, paternalism and communitarianism, critics come from a different philosophical standpoint. </p>
<p>Their arguments are largely focused on <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-evidence-for-or-against-drug-testing-welfare-recipients-it-depends-on-the-result-were-after-83641">using evidence</a> to argue the potential harms to testing outweigh the benefits. Philosophically speaking, this would be a <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/">consequentialist</a>, <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/">utilitarian</a> moral position. </p>
<p>Opponents <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/DrugTestingTrial/Submissions">also argue</a> (for example, see submission 28) the proposal infringes human rights, which all Australians have a right to receive. This includes the right to social security, privacy, an adequate standard of living, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/drug-testing-welfare-recipients-raises-questions-about-data-profiling-and-discrimination-77471">Drug testing welfare recipients raises questions about data profiling and discrimination</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This can be seen in comments such as <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/ca60e75d-8c6e-44a5-9c6a-b48e89bff4f1/&sid=0209">the following</a> from the Greens’ Adam Bandt, also from 2018: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You don’t lift people out of poverty by taking away their rights.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And the following from <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/DrugTestingTrial/Submissions">Senate submissions</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no evidence drug testing of welfare recipients either improves employment outcomes or reduces harms associated with drug taking. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>How could we shift the debate?</h2>
<p>The proponents and the opponents effectively slide past each other given these fundamentally different moral positions. For example, no matter how much empirical data shows the harms outweigh the benefits (utilitarianism), the contractualism view does not see this as relevant.</p>
<p>It seems proposals to drug test welfare recipients may be here to stay unless there is a shift in the moral frames.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/history-not-harm-dictates-why-some-drugs-are-legal-and-others-arent-110564">History, not harm, dictates why some drugs are legal and others aren't</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This may mean the critics need to mount effective arguments against paternalism, contractualism and communitarianism.</p>
<p>For example, for paternalism to be ethical, we need to show it can be justified and can actually help someone. This is highly questionable with the drug testing proposal.</p>
<p>We can also argue whether the conditions for contractualism are met. Contractualism is built on the premise of fair <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/reciprocity">reciprocity</a> by both parties (both parties are entering into the “mutual obligation” contract as equals). Given the structural inequality experienced by people with drug problems (such as unequal access to education or health services) the conditions for fair reciprocity may not be met.</p>
<p>If critics are willing to tackle the moral underpinnings of the recent proposals, we may be able to speak to policy makers in a language (and philosophy) they understand. This is essential if we are to block this unjust and discriminatory policy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/123098/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Ritter receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and conducts commissioned research regarding drug treatment for federal and state governments. </span></em></p>We need to look at what’s behind arguments for and against drug testing welfare recipients to avoid repeating the same debate, over and over.Alison Ritter, Professor & Specialist in Drug Policy, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1118512019-02-14T15:16:51Z2019-02-14T15:16:51ZSchool climate strikes: why adults no longer have the right to object to their children taking radical action<p>A worldwide wave of school climate strikes, begun by the remarkable <a href="https://youtu.be/VFkQSGyeCWg">Greta Thunberg</a>, has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/08/global-school-strikes-over-climate-change-head-to-the-uk?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">reached the UK</a>. Some critics claim these activist-pupils are simply <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/10/headteachers-back-pupil-strike-will-see-thousands-schoolchildren/">playing truant</a>, but I disagree. Speaking as both a climate campaigner and an <a href="https://people.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/r-read/info?type=researchinterests">academic philosopher</a>, I believe school walkouts are morally and politically justifiable.</p>
<p>Philosophy can help us tackle the question of whether direct action is warranted via the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/">theory of civil disobedience</a>. This states that, in a democratic society, one is justified in disobeying the law only when other alternatives have been exhausted, and the injustice being protested against is grave.</p>
<p>In the case of the climate school strikes, it is without question that the injustice – the threat – is grave. There is none graver facing us.</p>
<p>It appears reasonable to claim furthermore that other alternatives have indeed been exhausted. After all, people have been trying to wake governments up to the climate threat for decades now, and we are still as a society way off the pace set out even by a conservative organisation such as the IPCC.</p>
<p>But if that claim was strongly contested, and it was suggested that climate activism should continue to focus on conventional electoral politics, then attention might revert to the assumed premise that society is democratic. Do people in Britain and elsewhere really live in “democracies”, given (for instance) the vastly greater power of the rich, and of owners of media, to influence elections, compared to everyone else? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A school strike in Melbourne, Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/160136040@N02/32239704098/in/album-72157702588105781/">Julian Meehan / School Strike</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I don’t want to adjudicate whether we really live in a democracy. But what of course makes this a particularly salient question for school strikes is the simple fact that in any case <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-dont-teenagers-have-a-greater-say-in-their-future-111327">children have no voice in this democratic system</a>. And yet the climate crisis and the perhaps equally catastrophic <a href="https://theconversation.com/capitalism-is-killing-the-worlds-wildlife-populations-not-humanity-106125">biodiversity crisis</a> will affect children much more than adults. </p>
<p>Our “democratic” system seems to have a built in present-centricness, and a weakness in relation to issues of long-term significance, that seriously undermines its claims to democratic legitimacy. Thus philosophers have sometimes argued, beginning with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2012/jan/04/climate-politics-future-generation-justice?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">Edmund Burke</a> in the 18th century, that to make the system truly democratic we would need to somehow include – and give real power to – the voices of the past and the future in that system. Most especially, for they are at risk of suffering the worst: the voices of children and indeed of unborn future generations.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-dont-teenagers-have-a-greater-say-in-their-future-111327">Why don't teenagers have a greater say in their future?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>So, a forceful argument could be made that it must be legitimate for children to take part in climate actions, for they do not even have recourse to the democratic channels (such as they are) that adults take for granted. This is especially true once we add that it seems reasonable for children to object to schooling that may well be rendered irrelevant by a climate-induced catastrophe. For example, much of the way that <a href="https://theconversation.com/building-a-new-economics-for-the-occupy-generation-32354">economics</a>, business studies and IT are taught presupposes a world that will probably soon cease to exist.</p>
<h2>Adults have failed</h2>
<p>If you are convinced by this, then all well and good. However, at this point, I want to pull the rug slightly from under the argument that I’ve made so far. I put it to you that, if you are an adult, as I am, then your view in any case is somewhat beside the point. </p>
<p>For the brutal fact is that, try hard though some of us have done, we adults have <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=uzCxFPzdO0Y">categorically failed our children</a>. This is a grievous wrong, perhaps the worst thing that mammals, primates, such as ourselves, can do: to have let down those who we claim to love more than life itself. We have set our children on a path to a “future” in which <a href="http://www.truthandpower.com/rupert-read-some-thoughts-on-civilisational-succession/">society as we know it may have collapsed</a>. And even if we accomplish an unprecedented societal transformation over the next decade, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882">massive time-lags</a> built into the climate system mean things will still get worse for a long time to come.</p>
<p>And so on this occasion we adults ought to humbly realise that it is no longer for us to tell our children what to do. We ought rather to take up the role of supporting them in their uprising, asking how we can help them in their struggle for survival. They are inspiring us, now.</p>
<p>The ultimate reason why we should support these school strikes, as I and hundreds of other UK academics <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/13/school-climate-strike-childrens-brave-stand-has-our-support?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">have just declared we will do</a>, is that, through our inaction that has led the world they will inherit to this pretty pass, we adults have forfeited the moral right to do anything else.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/imagine-newsletter-researchers-think-of-a-world-with-climate-action-113443?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=Imagineheader1111851">Click here to subscribe to our climate action newsletter. Climate change is inevitable. Our response to it isn’t.</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111851/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rupert Read is affiliated with Extinction Rebellion.</span></em></p>Climate change will hit young people hardest, yet they cannot access the democratic processes that adults take for granted.Rupert Read, Reader in Philosophy, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1054392018-11-21T13:58:04Z2018-11-21T13:58:04ZPrescribing social activities to lonely people prompts ethical questions for GPs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246645/original/file-20181121-161612-1aynd67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Starting new conversations. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/woman-striped-red-white-shirt-working-431933083?src=GRvTAKqFyLmw0DkPJnipAA-1-5">Belushi/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>GPs in England will now be able to prescribe social activities to their patients, such as dance classes, art groups, walking clubs and volunteer work, as part of the government’s ground-breaking new <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-connected-society-a-strategy-for-tackling-loneliness">loneliness strategy</a>. This social prescription initiative funded by the NHS, which has been piloted in <a href="https://www4.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/sites/shu.ac.uk/files/eval-doncaster-social-prescribing-service.pdf">South Yorkshire</a> and elsewhere and is now used by approximately 25% of GPs, will expand nationwide by 2023. Although there is no fixed model for social prescriptions, GPs will typically refer patients to intermediaries known as “link workers” who will facilitate access to local social activities as well as community-based therapeutic services and practical support. </p>
<p>This initiative, endorsed by the <a href="http://www.rcgp.org.uk/about-us/news/2018/may/national-campaign-needed-to-tackle-loneliness-epidemic-says-rcgp.aspx">Royal College of General Practitioners</a>, is certainly eye-catching. But is it ethical?
As moral philosophers, we ask not just whether the consequences of an initiative are acceptable, but also whether the initiative respects and honours people as people.</p>
<p>One danger is that social prescriptions are dismissive and paternalistic toward people. Being given a social prescription might feel like being prescribed broccoli on the NHS. It might seem to trivialise the pain of loneliness as something easily solved with some chat, the social equivalent of eating more greens. If a GP gives someone a social prescription, he might leave her office feeling more disheartened and incompetent than when he walked in. </p>
<p>Yet, having a doctor not just advise, but prescribe regular social activity could also be a powerful motivator. According to social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, people who endure chronic acute loneliness <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=039307031X">have to combat the withdrawal and passivity</a> that come with feeling threatened. They need a safe place to test out the uplifting sensations that come from simple moments of social connection. With a prescription in hand, they might be better able to <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/connections/200812/easing-your-way-out-loneliness">take the baby steps necessary to reintegrate.</a></p>
<h2>The stigma of loneliness</h2>
<p>It’s also possible that by medicalising basic needs for positive social contact, social prescriptions risk heightening the stigma of loneliness.</p>
<p>Yet, we believe a medical solution offers some advantages. It normalises the fact that some people need help integrating, just as some people need medicine to treat ordinary ailments. A medical response lessens the impression that loneliness is a person’s own fault, and so can help to reduce its stigma. </p>
<p>What might reduce the stigma more, however, is a flagship policy that expands people’s opportunities to be meaningful social contributors. </p>
<p>The fact that the new loneliness strategy lacks such a policy is striking. As economist-cum-happiness-czar Richard Layard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVm21f7Sdes">points out</a>, a critical element in getting out of loneliness is feeling useful to others. It’s vital that connections involve contributing to others’ well-being, and that the government invest in strategies that can foster that sense of supportive purpose. </p>
<p>The government could expand people’s opportunities to serve each other, for example by creating incentives for people to participate in community volunteer work or piloting mandatory community service. It could also work with the RSPCA to invest in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24047314">re-homing more companion animals</a>, or offer incentives to engage in family socialising by subsidising holidays with extended family members. Policies could also ensure that non-standard working hours don’t deny families <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=1400883687">shared free-time</a>, and provide incentives for people to <a href="https://www.ageuk.org.uk/our-impact/programmes/homeshare/">live with others</a> rather than on their own. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246647/original/file-20181121-161630-z8a3w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Loneliness: a different kind of prescription.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/confirm/530654728?src=ulEJfnIubczkjqwh6N1SVQ-1-31&size=medium_jpg">Igorstevanovic/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Long-term bonds</h2>
<p>Given that chronic loneliness is correlated with many health risks including depression, alcoholism, reduced immunity, suicidal thoughts, and even early <a href="https://www.ahsw.org.uk/userfiles/Research/Perspectives%20on%20Psychological%20Science-2015-Holt-Lunstad-227-37.pdf">death</a>, a person who is prescribed social activity will be quite vulnerable. Yet, despite that, they will be instructed to go into a foreign setting with strangers. So, social prescriptions do come with risks: that other people won’t be kind and won’t provide a safe space to experiment in socialising. It will be key for GPs, link workers and community groups to manage such risks. </p>
<p>Even if social prescriptions are not unduly risky, they would be ill-advised and self-defeating if they corrupted the social bonds people could make through new activities. Some philosophers would question how <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2025782?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">sincere</a> someone’s socialising can be if they are there on their doctors’ orders. But, a doctor’s referral need not have this compromising effect. Children must go to school, but that doesn’t corrupt the friendships they make there. We can be sincere in our social overtures even when a different motivation got us through the door. </p>
<p>It’s the end game that matters most. With a course of antibiotics, we aim to recover and stop taking the medicine. When it comes to social connections, however, we have deep interests in ensuring our bonds persist. If all goes well, a social prescription will continue indefinitely. This means that the providers of the dance classes, art groups, or walking clubs must have the resources to ensure people can continue their prescribed social activities after their NHS allocation runs out. </p>
<p>The new loneliness strategy is the beginning of a process. The government deserves applause for appointing the world’s first loneliness minister, Tracey Crouch, to take seriously the late MP Jo Cox’s crusade to uncover the hidden tragedy of widespread loneliness in the UK. It also deserves credit for tackling loneliness through cross-government proposals that are necessarily tentative and open to review, as more evidence emerges on the causes and remedies of loneliness. </p>
<p>For now, although we have raised legitimate concerns about the expansion of social prescription, we do not think they are unethical.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105439/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kimberley Brownlee receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Independent Social Research Foundation, and learned societies. She volunteers for the charity Contact the Elderly. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Jenkins receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust as part of his postdoctoral work. He is also a member of and volunteer for the Labour Party.</span></em></p>As part of a new strategy to combat loneliness GPs will be able to prescribe social activities. But is this ethical?Kimberley Brownlee, Professor of Philosophy, University of WarwickDavid Jenkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/958092018-07-27T08:44:51Z2018-07-27T08:44:51ZHow a moral philosopher justifies his carbon footprint<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217750/original/file-20180504-166893-bxlb2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C250%2C7276%2C3681&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mongkolchon Akesin / shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I recently flew to Florida to visit family. My round-trip economy seat emitted roughly two tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to one <a href="https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx">carbon offsetting website</a>. By contrast, the average person in Britain is responsible for roughly seven tonnes for the entire year, already quite high by global standards.</p>
<p>This makes me a climate change villain. Dumping such huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere seems clearly morally wrong, because of the harm this will cause others. But carbon offsets let me fly with a clear conscience – for now.</p>
<p>When I buy an offset, carbon emissions are reduced elsewhere, cancelling out those from my flight. It might involve planting or preserving trees, or installing cheap and efficient stoves. Offsetting my Florida trip cost £13 – a couple of drinks in the departures lounge.</p>
<p>Convenient. But perhaps too easy? Offsetting clearly raises the scientific question of whether a purchase will really <a href="http://ghginstitute.org/2012/01/25/how-do-you-explain-additionality/">reduce global carbon emissions</a>. This is difficult and controversial stuff, better suited to <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/carbon-offsets-347">climate scientists and economists</a>.</p>
<p>Philosophers, by contrast, deal in hypotheticals. So let’s assume that offsetting “works” and it cancels out my flight emissions. Does that make the flight morally OK?</p>
<h2>Offsetting and consequentialism</h2>
<p>Many people remain suspicious. The writer and environmentalist George Monbiot famously compared carbon offsetting to the sale of medieval Catholic indulgences, where the rich could <a href="http://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/19/selling-indulgences/">buy themselves out of sin</a>. Monbiot writes that from sellers of offsets, “you can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220477/original/file-20180525-51141-1s9fwvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Worth flying for?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EduardSV/Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>But I think he is wrong. In moral philosophy, so-called “consequentialist” theories say that when it comes to the rightness or wrongness of some action, the consequences are all that matter. If any ethical theory vindicates offsetting, it is this.</p>
<p>Consequentialism has problems as a general moral theory. For example, it might license horribly unjust actions now, such as killing one innocent person because their organs will <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/#ConWhaRigRelRul">save the lives of five seriously ill people</a>. Consequentialism cares only about the “total”, which seems wrong in the case of human lives: five saved lives don’t normally outweigh one murder. </p>
<p>Those who benefit from the offset might not be the same people harmed by the flight, but when it comes to climate, we should care (at least a bit) about the <a href="https://unfccc.int/files/methods_and_science/research_and_systematic_observation/application/pdf/14_allen_cumulative_carbon_emissions.pdf">total amount of carbon in the air</a>. So a focus on total emissions does seem at least partly correct about the environment.</p>
<h2>How much do we care, and does that matter?</h2>
<p>Another ethical worry is that offsets are only cheap because few people buy them.</p>
<p>For instance, one cheap method of offsetting is to replace inefficient stoves in the developing world. This saves lots of carbon for little money. However these savings can’t go on forever, and when eventually the last stove is replaced, the schemes will get more expensive. In the philosophical jargon, cheap offsetting depends on “partial compliance”. But this is not always a problem: it’s not a moral problem for voting that if everybody voted, the queue at the polling station would be longer.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222833/original/file-20180612-112631-1dphcp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Hussein D'Oto, an artisan potter making a ‘clean cookstove’ in Tanzania. These stoves use less wood or charcoal for fuel, reducing overall emissions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dfid/21552621782/">DFID</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Rising prices lead to a second worry. As philosopher Kai Spiekermann <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/50915/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Spiekermann%2C%20K_Buying%20low_Spiekermann_Buying%20low_2015.pdf">has noted</a>, the robustness of the motivation to offset is a little dubious. Maybe I’ll pay the £13 now, but what about £200? What if I can’t afford that – will I really give up flying altogether?</p>
<p>I’m not sure. But I think this problem is irrelevant to my Florida flights. If offset prices go up, and in a decade I fly without offsetting, then that will be morally wrong. Perhaps it will also show that my motivation this year wasn’t very robust.</p>
<p>But it won’t show that this year’s flight-and-offset package was wrong. By analogy: suppose that you stop giving to charity when the economy crashes. This might show that your donations during the good times were not backed by very robust moral motivation – you only helped when it didn’t sting too much. That’s not great. But it doesn’t mean that your donations during the good times were morally wrong.</p>
<h2>Offset upset</h2>
<p>Wouldn’t it be better if we all give up flying because of climate change, rather than fly and offset? Even defenders of offsetting often say this. But flying brings real benefits, even if only to a fraction of humanity. If we can get those benefits without harming the environment, then that’s a good consequence, which counts for something morally.</p>
<p>Even thinking about offsetting can be beneficial. Spend some time with a <a href="https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx">carbon offset calculator</a>, and you will likely face some uncomfortable truths.</p>
<p>Rich people (in global terms) like travel, and one such truth is that there’s no carbon-friendly way to cross the ocean. Last year, my family took the boat from Southampton to New York for a close friend’s wedding, partly for climate reasons, and partly to avoid a flight with a toddler. We were dismayed to learn that the cruise ship was probably <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/20/cruises.green">worse for the environment</a> than flying would have been.</p>
<p>As with tipping in American restaurants, a good slogan might be: “If you can’t afford the offset, then you can’t afford the flight.” But many people who oppose tipping on moral grounds don’t stop dining out. They just stop tipping, which is the worst of both worlds.</p>
<p>Don’t be like that. So assuming, as I have been, that offsetting does work, stop worrying about the climate impacts of flying, if you can afford to offset – and actually do so.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95809/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luke Elson receives funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 programme as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow.</span></em></p>Carbon offsets are a perfectly legitimate way to fight climate change (if they work).Luke Elson, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1005462018-07-26T09:05:29Z2018-07-26T09:05:29ZElin Ersson: plane protestor’s brave solo stand for human rights proves the power of action<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229286/original/file-20180725-194131-1qme2dl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Facebook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Now, perhaps more than ever, the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/burke_edmund.shtml">Edmund Burke</a> seems clearly to have been right when he said that the forces of evil will triumph, if good women and men do nothing. The recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/25/swedish-plane-protester-elin-ersson-interview-afghanistan">dramatic protest</a> by Swedish student Elin Ersson, who delayed a flight in a bid to prevent an Afghan man from being deported to a perilous future in the country he had fled, is an excellent illustration of how to act responsibly – and shows us why there is no excuse for passivity.</p>
<p>When challenged by a fellow passenger who told her to not to delay the flight she replied: “It is not right to send people to hell … What is more important? A life or your time?”</p>
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<p>Ersson is a student activist from Gothenburg University. On July 24 she managed to postpone an Afghan asylum seeker being deported back to the perils of his home country. With the help of some student colleagues she bought a ticket for a flight from Sweden to Turkey. She knew an Afghan asylum seeker would be on the plane, about to be deported. </p>
<p>She also knew that the Swedish elections in September will be fought chiefly on <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-election/anti-immigration-sweden-democrats-poll-record-high-ahead-of-september-election-idUSKCN1IO0TA">immigration and asylum</a>. Hence, she was aware that the Swedish Migration Board’s decision that <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/10/the-death-of-the-most-generous-nation-on-earth-sweden-syria-refugee-europe/">Afghanistan is a safe country</a> for potential deportees could have been influenced politically. </p>
<p>She staged a protest by refusing to take her seat on her flight from Gothenburg airport to Turkey preventing the plane from taking off. She live-streamed her protest – mainly in the “selfie” mode, to avoid capturing images of anybody who may not be happy to be filmed. She knew the pilot had the power to decide not to take off until the Afghan asylum seeker was removed from the plane. </p>
<p>She knew flight attendants were likely to be sympathetic – they helped her retrieve her phone from an angry passenger who at one point had stolen it from her. She kept calm throughout even when fighting back her tears. And she was successful – the Afghan asylum seeker was escorted off the flight. And, just as importantly, her video received more than half a million hits within 24 hours – highlighting her cause to the world.</p>
<h2>Do the right thing</h2>
<p>It’s usually easier to realise something is wrong than to know what the right thing to do is. An important distinction is often drawn in ethics between a justified action and a person being justified in performing an action. A justified action is right, since it is an action supported by good and sufficient reasons. But a person who is justified in acting does not always know the right thing to do. </p>
<p>We may have done our best to make sure we do the right thing. But in some cases we can do nothing to prevent, say, getting the wrong information and misjudging a situation. So it follows that we cannot guarantee that the action we perform is the right thing to do. But by preparing carefully and making an intelligent choice of action we can make it much more likely that we make the right choice of action. This is what it means to act responsibly – and acting responsibly is crucial, especially when it is a matter of protesting against current laws or policies.</p>
<h2>If not me, who? If not now, when?</h2>
<p>One excuse which is often used in support of doing nothing to prevent evil is that others may be in a better position to act. But as moral agents we are all free and responsible. The French philosopher of freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism that we are “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm">condemned to be free</a>”.</p>
<p>Circumstances cannot deprive us of our freedom – we are responsible for our actions and for the world. So it follows that if I know something is wrong that I can put right, then I should act. Especially when the wrong concerns a law or policy currently in force, being a citizen of that particular state is in most cases a sufficient qualification for appropriate agency.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Jean-Paul Sartre with his partner Simone de Beauvoir and Che Guevara in 1960.</span>
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<p>Another excuse often given for not acting is that it is not the right moment. But as free agents who know something is wrong – and know how it can be made right – we should have sufficient motivation to act now. As the German philosopher <a href="http://www.philosophers.co.uk/immanuel-kant.html">Immanuel Kant</a> argued, the thought that a particular action is the right thing to do should be strong enough to overcome contrary motivations, such as laziness and conformism. We have all it takes to act – so no further delay is needed. In short, if we know something is wrong and we can make it right, then we should act now – why wait?</p>
<h2>Courageous and intelligent</h2>
<p>Ersson would have had various excuses not to stage her dramatic protest or to postpone it, or to abandon it at any point. Her courageous act is a very good illustration of what it means to overcome weakness of will and conformism, and to assert freedom and active citizenship. </p>
<p>But, apart from courage, her actions also reflect careful planning – probably with the help of other student activists – and an intelligent choice of the form of protest. These were crucial elements in this case. She chose something that she could carry out on her own which was likely to have consequences sufficiently significant to require a response from the authorities. She also kept calm throughout her protest.</p>
<p>Her relatively small act of rebellion not only bought some time for the asylum seeker but also cast light on <a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20180626/in-depth-the-shifting-sands-of-swedens-immigration-debate">Sweden’s tough immigration policies</a> and politically charged context, making more than half a million people aware of the relevant issues. It shows us not only that acting carefully and intelligently is part of what it means to be a responsible moral agent, but, at the same time, that there is no excuse for passivity and procrastination.</p>
<p>Always act responsibly – but remember the words of first-century Jewish sage <a href="http://www.aish.com/sp/pg/48893292.html">Hillel the Elder</a>: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sorin Baiasu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The young activist acted morally and intelligently when staging her protest against the deportation of asylum seekers from Sweden.Sorin Baiasu, Professor of Philosophy, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/940942018-04-19T03:42:25Z2018-04-19T03:42:25ZWe cannot rely morally on ‘deterrence’ to justify our harsh refugee policies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212764/original/file-20180401-189816-rtnwah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Offshore detainees suffer deliberately inflicted harm from their incarceration.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Eoin Blackwell</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When debate about refugees ascends from slogan swapping (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jun/14/tony-abbott-sticks-to-stop-the-boats-in-face-of-claims-people-smugglers-paid">“stop the boats”</a>, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/thousands-rally-in-melbourne-in-support-of-manus-island-asylum-seekers-20171104-gzevx0.html">“bring them here”</a>) to specific reasoning, there seems only one argument worth considering for the ignominious detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru and the refusal to ever settle any in Australia.</p>
<p>That argument, advanced by both the government and the opposition (occasionally in a less strident form), stems from deterrence. It’s worth considering the argument even as a handful of these detainees are resettled <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/04/dozens-of-refugees-leave-nauru-for-resettlement-in-us">in the US</a> or possibly other distant and politically ambiguous destinations.</p>
<p>Deterrence involves an action or policy designed to instil fear of the consequences of committing some other action. But there are considerations relevant to the assessment of deterrent measures, especially when those measures inflict pain, damage or harm on some to deter others.</p>
<p>One is the measures’ likely success. Another is their independent moral acceptability. </p>
<p>Another concern is the acceptability of the purpose for which deterrence is employed – that is to say, why is it good to stop the boats? This opens up too many questions to be dealt with here, so assume (what would otherwise be questioned) that the purpose is a good one – for example, stopping deaths at sea. It will rather be the morality of the means (deterrence) that will concern me.</p>
<p>First, the harm issue. It is clear the offshore detainees suffer deliberately inflicted harm from their incarceration. This is so even if we manage to suspend judgement on how extreme that harm is – something made <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/NauruandManusRPCs/%7E/media/Committees/legcon_ctte/NauruandManusRPCs/report.pdf">even more difficult</a> by a variety of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/27/dutton-should-prioritise-refugees-on-nauru-not-white-south-africans-unhcr-says">dramatic and credible testimonies</a>.</p>
<p>Even if detainees are not humiliated, beaten, raped, murdered, or had their health and education gravely neglected, they are effectively and indefinitely imprisoned and often separated from family and friends. This last is usually a profound human harm though less immediately palpable than some others.</p>
<p>As for success, there is room for debate since the associated policy of <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-legality-of-turning-or-towing-back-asylum-boats-16201">turning back the boats</a> is already sufficient to deter future boat people and smugglers, or at least stop them landing here. If so, the infliction of serious harm on the refugees through indefinite detention is unnecessary and hence immoral.</p>
<p>In any case, even granting the success of extreme incarceration, there remains the fact that the efficiency of the policy to the desired deterrence outcomes does not justify “whatever it takes”. It may be that the most morally monstrous actions might work as deterrents but be unacceptable morally even to the most casual conscience.</p>
<p>Consider the suggestion we should have deterred further refugees from embarking for Australia by taking a selected group of mothers and children from the earlier arrivals by sea and publicly executing them. </p>
<p>This has the merit of almost certain success and avoiding the <a href="https://theconversation.com/penny-wise-pound-foolish-how-to-really-save-money-on-refugees-27270">extravagant financial cost</a> of offshore detention. But I believe this measure, whatever its success, would strike most Australians as morally repellent.</p>
<p>One reason for the dubious nature of severe deterrent measures is that the morality of deterrence is most at home when those harmed to deter others are guilty of some crime or offence themselves and when the harm is proportional to the offence. This is precisely how deterrence is offered as a (partial) defence of the legal imprisonment of offenders, or more dubiously of capital punishment.</p>
<p>Certain forms of guilt can lead to deprivation of rights, such as imprisonment, and this in turn allows that deprivation to function as a deterrent to others. But asylum seekers are not guilty of any legal or serious moral offence – merely, at most, of irregularity in entering the country.</p>
<p>In any case, execution would be disproportionate to such irregularity, especially when that irregularity is legitimised by international law.</p>
<p>Nor is the situation much changed if, instead of killing them, we had them publicly tortured.</p>
<p>Perhaps, aside from waterboarding or electric shocks, we might try more subtle tortures like separating parent from child, inducing despair by isolating refugees in demeaning conditions on remote islands with no hope of anything like a normal life, and ensuring inadequate access to life-saving medical treatment or educational improvement. And instead of a selected few, we could do it to a large number of those who had arrived seeking refuge from disaster.</p>
<p>We could endeavour to make this policy secretive but just public enough to make deterrence work, while softening the effect of any moral outrage at home by rejecting our responsibility and shifting it to the governmental authorities on those islands and a variety of largely unaccountable private security companies.</p>
<p>Again, this is morally repellent and impossible to justify ethically. But that’s more or less what Australia has been and is doing on Manus Island and Nauru. And that is not a morally permissible resort to deterrence.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94094/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Coady does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The most morally monstrous actions might work as deterrents but be unacceptable morally even to the most casual conscience.Tony Coady, Professor of Philosophy, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/916602018-03-13T22:57:05Z2018-03-13T22:57:05ZWe need to become global citizens to rebuild trust in our globalised world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209225/original/file-20180307-146700-7s9nbx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Our great moral challenge is to cultivate the habits of a critical, yet compassionate, global citizen.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the third article in a series in which philosophers discuss the greatest moral challenge of our time, and how we should address it. Read the first article <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-its-how-we-think-about-morality-itself-92101">here</a> and the second <a href="https://theconversation.com/looking-for-truth-in-the-facebook-age-seek-out-views-you-arent-going-to-like-91659">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>The erosion of trust in a civil society is one of the greatest moral challenges facing the world today. </p>
<p>Democratic societies are anxious. Leaders, and the general public, are worried about extremism, terrorism and radicalisation. Educators and experts are rightly concerned about those who perpetuate approaches that resemble indoctrination. Such threats are making us less trusting of others, particularly of those we see as somehow <em>different</em> from ourselves. </p>
<p>A remedy may be found in educating people to be “<a href="https://www.oxfam.org.uk/education/who-we-are/what-is-global-citizenship">global citizens</a>”, who are not just caring, but are also critically engaged with ideas, beliefs and attitudes exhibited across the world. These global citizens can help to rebuild the lost trust in civil society in an increasingly diverse and globalised world.</p>
<h2>The good life</h2>
<p>In order to live among others in a harmonious manner, we must recognise that others wish to live a good life, much like ourselves. As Tim Dean <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-its-how-we-think-about-morality-itself-92101">points out</a>, the “good life” looks different for different people at different times. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to the good life. </p>
<p>The expression of diversity is an important component of a world that celebrates liberty. Yet such freedom must be coupled with respect and care if we are to have any hope of promoting ethical decision-making on a local, national or international level. We must think of ourselves as alike even amidst our diversity.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-its-how-we-think-about-morality-itself-92101">The greatest moral challenge of our time? It's how we think about morality itself</a>
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<p>As individuals who live in communities, we must co-operate in order to achieve our goals, whether they be small or large. A life is shaped by our interaction (or lack thereof) with others: family, friends, colleagues and strangers. </p>
<p>We crave and seek out connection and a sense of belonging. With the technological tools available to us, we may now connect at any minute of any day with people we have never met in places we have never been. </p>
<h2>The importance of trust</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/can-we-do-without-trust/9236918">Trust</a> is one of the most important pro-social attitudes we have. Philosophers such as <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674587168&content=toc">Annette Baier</a> and <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/03/08/4632445.htm">Martha Nussbaum</a> have written about the vulnerability as well as the necessity of trust.</p>
<p>If we don’t trust others or treat one another with respect and compassion, our interactions can be unsettling, sources of anxiety or even fear. Yet, if we approach others as friends – as more or less <em>like me</em> – a reciprocal and mutual goodwill is shared and is conducive to pleasant interactions and life-affirming experiences. </p>
<p>Granted, blind trust is as dangerous as blind faith. Trust, and compassion, must be accompanied by an appropriately engaged critical mind. But we must not go so far as to think that trust and care are unreasonable just because the world is a <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/the-social-contract-in-an-age-of-terror:-who-can-you-trust/7946638">scary place</a>. </p>
<p>As I have <a href="https://theconversation.com/on-trusting-is-it-na-ve-or-wise-to-trust-43456">previously written</a>, empirical studies conducted in the United States demonstrated that people think the world is a less trustworthy place than previous generations. However, proportionally, crime has not increased. What has increased is the number of crimes reported in the broadcast news and the amount of news we consume.</p>
<p>Reading too many sensationalised news stories may lead us to perceive the world as an unhappy, unfriendly place in which people are not to be trusted. Yet if this really were the case, it would be very difficult to go about our daily lives. Our perception matters, and how we see others and how we are seen shapes our experiences in the world.</p>
<h2>Global citizens</h2>
<p>The global citizen is someone who recognises others as more alike than different from themselves, even while taking seriously individual, social, cultural and political differences. </p>
<p>Global citizens come together and unite in the recognition that we should all care about planet Earth and that all people have a shared interest in living well. </p>
<p>Caring about others we have never met and who may seem very different from ourselves can be a challenge, particularly in a climate of fear. Yet there are some well-known voices calling for such a compassionate and inclusive attitude to be adopted. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/looking-for-truth-in-the-facebook-age-seek-out-views-you-arent-going-to-like-91659">Looking for truth in the Facebook age? Seek out views you aren't going to 'like'</a>
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<p>Peter Singer defends the concept of “<a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300103052/one-world">one world</a>” and Kwame Anthony Appiah supplements this idea with his writings on <a href="http://www.ethics.org.au/on-ethics/blog/may-2017/kwame-anthony-appiah-global-citizenship-honour">cosmopolitanism</a>. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1202&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1202&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209255/original/file-20180307-146645-1hg1q9p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1202&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Philosopher Martha Nussbaum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nussbaum_Martha2.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Martha Nussbaum highlights the importance of cultivating our “<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674065901&content=toc">inner eyes</a>” and being able to “see the world from the perspective of minority experience” as a way of overcoming fear and intolerance.</p>
<p>In her bestselling <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/nologo/naomiklein/9780312429270/">No Logo</a>, Naomi Klein notes that, “with globalisation, there needs to be some common standards”. </p>
<p>All argue in support of the notion of the global citizen.</p>
<p>In a pragmatic sense, global citizens will support policies that extend aid beyond national borders and cultivate respectful and reciprocal relationships with others regardless of geographical distance, gender, religion or race.</p>
<p>Global citizens are compassionate even while being critically engaged in a search for truth and wisdom. They make use of technology (social media, blogs and wikis) to further their understanding as well as their causes. They have the skills required to be creative and adapt to the rapidly changing global market. </p>
<p>Granted, all of this may not be easy to achieve. There are certainly educational aims that must be considered if we are to cultivate the habits of a compassionate, yet critical, global citizen. Yet I, for one, believe these <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Media-and-Moral-Education-A-Philosophy-of-Critical-Engagement/DOlimpio/p/book/9781138291423">educational goals</a> are worth striving for. </p>
<p>The great moral challenge is to find a way to live together ethically as global citizens, and celebrate the connectedness of our technological world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91660/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura D'Olimpio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In order to to combat the decline of trust in civil society, we need to cultivate global citizens who are able to thrive in an increasingly diverse and globalised world.Laura D'Olimpio, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/916592018-03-12T23:27:53Z2018-03-12T23:27:53ZLooking for truth in the Facebook age? Seek out views you aren’t going to ‘like’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209271/original/file-20180307-146666-1ytixob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Facebook's algorithm is based on pleasing rather than challenging users.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/bangkok-thailand-october-14-2015-man-328031672?src=W5WRNYoz1elIwriNydDxSQ-1-16">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the second article in a series in which philosophers discuss the greatest moral challenge of our time, and how we should address it. Read the first article <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-its-how-we-think-about-morality-itself-92101">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>“Post-truth” was the Oxford English Dictionary “<a href="https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016">word of the year</a>” for 2016. As we move into 2018, let’s hope the hype surrounding this term gives way to more measured assessments. The term has all the uses and disadvantages of the hyperbole it represents.</p>
<p>On one hand, it draws attention to the profound challenges facing today’s news media and liberal democracies. On the other, it makes it seem like we have entered into a new dystopian world where politicians no longer want or need to tell the truth, and the media is so awash with “fake news” that citizens cannot trust it.</p>
<p>Yet this won’t do. It is easy to imagine that Australia’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, wishes that the media no longer had the will or wherewithal to report the truth. When Steve Bannon called the mainstream media the new “<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/donald-trump-steve-bannon-media-opposition-party-234280">opposition party</a>”, it is clear that he <em>wanted</em> it to be true.</p>
<p>Yet CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times are still trading. It is Bannon who has fallen from power. In Australia, too, media outlets continue to express biases and all the shortcomings that beset the mortal frame. Yet trying and failing to tell the whole truth, and nothing but, is a very different thing from disregarding truth altogether.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-its-how-we-think-about-morality-itself-92101">The greatest moral challenge of our time? It's how we think about morality itself</a>
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<p>Traditional news services now face <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-socialmedia/two-thirds-of-american-adults-get-news-from-social-media-survey-idUSKCN1BJ2A8">unprecedented competition</a> in the age of the internet and social media. The need to attract large numbers of clicks favours sensationalism over serious research and partisanship over patient reportage.</p>
<p>Yet none of this makes truth-telling impossible. That is a claim which favours people who want to truck in half-truths and misrepresentations, and excuse themselves by saying that everyone else does it. Trump is a big fan of throwing around the term “fake news”. So is Vladimir Putin.</p>
<p>Nor do such challenges remove the vital role of truth-telling in sustaining open societies. On the contrary, citizens need to be able to “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/news/national/democrat-who-worked-to-keep-the-bastards-honest/2006/08/29/1156816899990.html">keep the bastards honest</a>” more than ever, especially when they take to donning saviour’s clothing. Speaking truth to power is the great moral challenge of our time.</p>
<h2>What’s Francis Bacon to Facebook?</h2>
<p>At the beginning of modern scientific culture, philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/">Francis Bacon</a> made a series of observations about how our minds work. They remain as relevant as ever in this apparent age of post-truth. For example:</p>
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<p>The human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted that distort and disfigure the truth.</p>
<p>When any proposition has been once laid down (our mind) forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation.“ </p>
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<p>By contrast, we have a tough time accepting anything we don’t, well, "like”:</p>
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<p>and although the most cogent and abundant evidences may exist to the contrary, yet we either do not observe or despise them, … sometimes with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of our own first conclusions. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/209272/original/file-20180307-146675-pgpwkh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Francis Bacon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francis_Bacon,_Viscount_St_Alban_from_NPG_(2).jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>In short: “people always believe more readily that which they prefer to be true”, rather than what happens to be true.</p>
<p>When it comes to prescribing his “new instrument” for inquiry, Bacon coaches his readers in how and where to actively seek out things that elude, challenge, upset or reframe their established beliefs.</p>
<p>So you can see what Francis Bacon is to Facebook. </p>
<p>Facebook generates your feed based on your past likes. Its business model figures you’ll be more likely to stay on the platform by being fed items that please rather than oppose or challenge you.</p>
<p>In other words, social media weaponises the “<a href="http://www.sirbacon.org/links/4idols.htm">idols of the human mind</a>”, which Bacon said prevent people from finding the truth. A Baconian Facebook would select your news items based on what you are likely to disagree with rather than playing to your prejudices. </p>
<p>Liberals and leftists would be made to “friend” devoted readers of Breitbart. They in turn would be fed the New York Times and the Washington Post. And perhaps the accelerating <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/17/our-politics-is-polarized-on-more-issues-than-ever-before/">uncivil polarisation</a> of public life would actually slow. </p>
<h2>What’s Spinoza to sharing?</h2>
<p>Shortly after Bacon, another modern giant, <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoza">Benedict de Spinoza</a>, also distinguished the ways we follow the prejudices and “likes” of our tribes from how he believed people should seek the truth.</p>
<p>We are social creatures, Spinoza observed. His <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#Ethi">Ethics</a> deftly analyses the way our emotions and opinions “love company”. We very often do or believe things simply because others around us do. Moreover, “everyone endeavours, as far as possible, to cause others to love what he himself loves, and to hate what he himself hates”. </p>
<p>Share that.</p>
<p>Indeed, fuelled by this echoing and mirroring of our passionate beliefs, we readily jump to generalisations about whole groups, based only on whether we like or dislike some individuals:</p>
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<p>If a man has been affected pleasurably or painfully by anyone, of a class or nation different from his own, and if the pleasure or pain has been accompanied by the idea of the said stranger as cause … the man will feel love or hatred, not only to the individual stranger, but also to the whole class or nation whereto he belongs.</p>
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<p>Today’s social media feeds upon these characteristics, fuelling tribalism and incivility. But Spinoza agrees with Bacon that the only way to halt the hatred is to cultivate people’s awareness of their own tendencies to select, simplify and screen information.</p>
<p>We are not post-truth. But it is up to citizens to be alert to lies and distortions. And it’s up to our educational institutions to keep alive the many resources in our tradition which can prevent hyperbole from becoming fact.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works at Deakin University, and in 2017, received ARC (Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions) money for research on Francis Bacon and the Emotions.</span></em></p>We are not yet “post-truth”, but truth-telling remains vital in sustaining open and democratic societies.Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/906782018-01-25T16:03:46Z2018-01-25T16:03:46ZPresidents Club dinner: why good deeds never justify bad actions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203405/original/file-20180125-107940-4x6v2a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">via shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Imagine that on route to work, you notice a child falling into a pond and drowning. Of course, you jump into the pond, pull out the child and save a life. Afterwards, you feel quite good about yourself. </p>
<p>Later that day, you go to a cafe, and while chatting with the waitress about what cake she’d recommend, you mention your heroic deed. Are you now justified to grope her or to expose your genitals?</p>
<p>This may sound absurd. However, assuming that their <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/24/the-charities-rejecting-presidents-club-donations-over-scandal">donations to children’s charities</a> actually saved lives, that was the question some of the attendees of the Presidents Club Charity Dinner faced. Thanks to undercover reporting from the FT, it’s emerged that some of them <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/075d679e-0033-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5">decided to sexually harass the hostesses.</a>.</p>
<p>How could anyone think that this horrifying behaviour is justified just because they did something good before – such as give money to charity? To explain the thinking behind the incident, it’s helpful to look at the Presidents Club through the lens of moral philosophy. It offers lessons on how not to behave like this.</p>
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<h2>Utilitarianism</h2>
<p>Let’s pretend that we are participants of that fundraiser, trying to find a moral justification for our decision to do badly. In our search, we could turn to our good deeds. We saved lives by bidding at the charity auction, so wouldn’t the good we did outweigh the bad? </p>
<p>The theory classically associated with this thinking is <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill2.htm">utilitarianism</a>, which asks you to act to promote the most happiness for the greatest number of people. Sometimes, this requires you to do something bad to bring about the greatest good. For example, you may need to lie to a racist mob about the location of your black neighbours to save their lives. </p>
<p>But this wouldn’t apply for the charity gala. In the case of the racist mob, lying is necessary to save your neighbours. Without the bad act, you wouldn’t be able to do the good deed. But whether you grope the waitress or not is absolutely independent from you saving a life. Both actions could happen without the other – you don’t need to grope anyone to donate. </p>
<p>So, utilitarianism doesn’t provide us with a justification, but rather teaches us our first lesson: do not group actions together that can be evaluated independently.</p>
<h2>Offsetting and just deserts</h2>
<p>Maybe you think that your good deed balances out your bad behaviour. This is an idea called “<a href="http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/01/moral-offsetting/">moral offsetting</a>”, where you do something good to offset the harms you did. So, if you give to children’s hospitals, does that offset harassment? </p>
<p>It doesn’t. Moral offsetting shouldn’t be understood as buying licences for behaving badly. Normally, offsetting is applied to bad behaviour that has already happened. In this case, the good deed happened first, and who would want to “offset” a virtuous donation?</p>
<p><a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/desert/">Desert theories</a> are also applicable. The idea here is that because you did one action, you deserve some kind of payoff – you get your just deserts. For example, because you worked and studied hard, you deserve a good mark in your exam. </p>
<p>This could explain the behaviour at the fundraiser: some rich people donate their money to children’s hospitals and therefore think that they deserve some kind of payoff – here provided by the organiser in the form of lightly dressed young women. It looks likely that some of the men at the dinner felt entitled to treat the hostesses as a reward for their altruistic donations. </p>
<p>However, desert theories normally don’t allow for a bad action as a payoff: your good deed should entitle you to some appreciation, but doesn’t licence you to hurt others. </p>
<p>To wrong others is not valuable, and therefore desert theory cannot justify bad actions based on good deeds. So here’s a second lesson: expecting a reward for your altruistic behaviour undermines the altruistic nature of your action. If you donate and expect some form of appreciation, you don’t give for altruistic reasons – you act out of self interest. </p>
<p>But desert theory is still helpful for us to understand why some of the men at the fundraising dinner may have felt entitled to behave badly. Because some felt they deserved a reward, they lowered the standards for their own behaviour to the point of groping. This mechanism is called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=90&v=AU6bWz0RC6M">moral licensing</a>. </p>
<h2>Asking the wrong question</h2>
<p>A possible reason why some people engage in such thinking, even if it leads them to obviously wrong behaviour, is because thinking about morality is hard. Our brains are lazy, and because hard questions require cognitive effort, we often replace them with an easier question. </p>
<p>The psychologist Daniel Kahnemann describes this as <a href="https://thinkproductive.co.uk/decision-thinking-substitution-bias/">substitution bias</a>: the question how much you should donate against global poverty is hard, for example. It’s easier to replace it with the question of how you feel when you think about starving children and then give according to how you feel.</p>
<p>Whether an act is right or wrong is a hard question. People will often substitute this question with whether they feel entitled to do it. Because some of the men at the fundraiser didn’t want to think about the wrongness of groping, they may have substituted it with a feeling of entitlement. And here is a final lesson: if you feel entitled to do something, that doesn’t mean that it’s right to do it. You may be answering the wrong question. </p>
<p>So, a good deed does not justify a bad act. And of course, it’s absolutely not okay to grope women because you donated large sums of money to charity. To help avoid this way of thinking in the future, we should not group together independent actions, nor expect rewards for altruistic deeds. And we should remember what questions to ask ourselves – and think harder about right and wrong.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90678/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anh Quan Nguyen receives funding from the Heinrich-Böll Foundation. He is also affiliated with "Projekt Denkende Gesellschaft e.V." , a Germany-based non-profit bipartisan organisation combating voters disenfranchisement. </span></em></p>The harassment at the Presidents Club Charity Dinner was horrible. Here are three lessons from moral philosophy on how to avoid it happening again.Quan Nguyen, PhD Candidate, University of St AndrewsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/889092017-12-14T13:47:57Z2017-12-14T13:47:57ZLab-grown meat could let humanity ignore a serious moral failing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199012/original/file-20171213-27588-1tdgdf6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">nevodka / shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Lab-grown meat is being hailed as the solution to the factory farming of animals. The downside of factory farming for the cows, chickens and pigs themselves is obvious enough. But it is also bad for human health, given the amount of antibiotics pumped into the animals, as well as for the environment, given the resources required to provide us with industrial quantities of meat.</p>
<p>By contrast, lab-grown meat need have none of these costs. Once the technology is perfected it will be indistinguishable in taste and texture from real meat, and will be cheaper to produce and purchase.</p>
<p>There is, however, a major problem with lab-grown meat: a moral problem.</p>
<p>Factory farming causes billions of animals to live and die in great pain each year. Our response has been almost total indifference and inaction and, despite the rise of vegetarianism and veganism in some quarters, more animals are killed today for food than ever before. This does not reflect well on us, morally speaking, and <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-moral-complexities-of-eating-meat-9780199353903?cc=us&lang=en&">history will not remember us kindly</a>. </p>
<p>The moral problem stems from the fact that we will likely switch over to lab-grown meat because it is cheap, or thanks to its benefits for human health or the environment. That is, we will do it for our own sake and not for the sake of animals. </p>
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<span class="caption">Around 100,000 chickens have been killed since you started reading this article.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MENATU / shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>You might be wondering why this is a problem – providing that the harm to animals comes to an end, what does it matter why we do it, or how this reflects upon us, morally speaking?</p>
<p>Some philosophers (for example, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/">Kantians</a>) do think that there is something important about acting for moral reasons, independently of whether there are any bad consequences of our not doing so. Whether or not these philosophers are right, I want to point out a different kind of reason to do the right thing in this sort of case: one having to do with consequences.</p>
<p>If we switch over to lab-grown meat just for our own sake, and not for the sake of animals, then the morally dubious part of us that is responsible for our inaction on factory farming will remain intact. If this part of us has other bad consequences, then we might have lost a valuable opportunity to confront it and avoid those outcomes.</p>
<p>Identifying the exact part of our moral makeup that allows us to shrug at factory farmed animals is tricky. One dimension of the answer is a lack of interest or curiosity in the condition of these other beings, or perhaps an obtuseness as to what it is really like to be an animal. Another is a complacency or foolish deference to, or trust of, those who are culturally in charge, a preparedness to silence or turn away from qualms one might have, or to blindly repeat poorly thought out justifications offered to us by our cultural leaders.</p>
<p>We can then consider the other bad consequences these traits of ours might have. There are many. Some are micro, having to do with, say, our everyday relations or interactions with each other. The deepest and richest human relationships require a curiosity about what others are like, and a willingness to listen and understand. And the very best parts of human culture – great art, great literature, and so on – will not be fully accessible to someone who is so insular.</p>
<p>Other consequences are macro, having to do with how we are likely to respond to other major moral crises. People who are indifferent, thoughtless, complacent, lacking in curiosity, prepared to silence or turn away from qualms, blindly follow orders, and so on, may be more likely to ignore other groups who are in great need. Such people may also be more vulnerable to manipulation by morally unscrupulous leaders. In some circumstances, they could even be seduced by fascism.</p>
<h2>Moral crises can’t be solved by technology</h2>
<p>This worry is not unique to lab-grown meat. It applies to many technological or economic “solutions” to moral crises. Suppose, for example, we develop a clean and cheap renewable energy source, and it is adopted, halting climate change. This would be terrific in one way. But there would also be an important danger: the part of us that had failed to take action on climate change for moral reasons (our cavalier attitude to the plight of future generations or those most affected today) would be preserved. Failure to address this flaw in us could leave us open to committing other atrocities, or harming ourselves in various ways.</p>
<p>My point is not that we should reject lab-grown meat. Given the scale of the harm we do to animals in factory farming, and the unlikelihood of ending it for moral reasons, we should probably embrace these cow-free burgers and pigless sausages. The benefit to animals here likely outweighs the risks of papering over this morally dubious part of us.</p>
<p>Yet if we switch purely for selfish reasons we risk other bad consequences, for ourselves and others. Moral crises like factory farming and climate change should be seen not only as major threats to others, but as opportunities to address or deal with troubling parts of ourselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88909/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben Bramble does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We need to address the mindset that enables this mass slaughter of animals in the first place.Ben Bramble, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.