Category
Society & Politics
Justice, rights, power and law; how we live together.
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My cooks are free to leave, in theory. What republican liberty sees in a kitchen
I came from Goa to cook in Dubai fifteen years ago, and I'm proud of how we treat people in my kitchen now. Nobody is shouted at. Overtime is paid. When someone's mother is ill, we find a way to send him…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
What is ijtihad, and why did Iqbal call it the principle of movement in Islam?
From my law studies I know ijtihad in its narrow legal sense: independent reasoning by a qualified jurist to derive a ruling where texts are silent or unclear. But Iqbal, in the sixth lecture of the Reconstruction, "The Principle of Movement in…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
I came to philosophy through effective altruism, where it's common to count disability as a reduction in wellbeing and to rank interventions accordingly. Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body changed my mind, and I want to defend her thesis. Thesis: disability is a…
Started by Ethan Mercer7 replies -
Free speech should protect offensive religious satire
I write this from a country with strict blasphemy laws, which have led to mob violence and killings. So I'm not neutral on this. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons in 2005, the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 and countless cases in Pakistan raise the…
Started by Sana Rizvi8 replies -
What is Rawls’s veil of ignorance actually supposed to show?
When I talk about Rawls with the younger economists at work, they treat the original position as a risk-aversion exercise. Behind the veil you don't know whether you'll be rich or poor, so you pick the society where the worst-off do best:…
Started by Javier Ferrandis4 replies -
Affirmative action is required by justice, not merely permitted
In 2023, the US Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious admissions in SFFA v. Harvard. India has the opposite constitutional structure: Articles 15(4) and 16(4) allow special provisions and reservations for disadvantaged groups, and Indra Sawhney (1992) upheld reservations for Other Backward Classes,…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
I never agreed to obey the state. Why do I owe it anything?
This week's lecture was on the social contract, and since then one thought keeps coming back while I sit in traffic. I never signed anything. I was born here, like my parents. Nobody asked me if I agreed to the laws, the…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What does “the right side of history” actually assume about history?
At least once a tournament, one of the kids I coach closes a round with “my opponent is on the wrong side of history.” Judges love it. I've started to find it slippery, but I can't say exactly why. As far as…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Reading group: The Second Sex, Introduction and Part One (“Destiny”)
Let's begin The Second Sex (1949) with the Introduction and Part One of the first volume, the three chapters on biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism. A note on translations. The 1953 English translation by H. M. Parshley was abridged and is unreliable…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
An unjust law is not really law: legal positivism is mistaken
H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) defends the separation of law and morality: what the law is is one question, what it ought to be is another. Lon Fuller argued against this in their famous 1958 exchange in the…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies -
When Aristotle calls humans political animals, does he mean we need a government?
At least once a debate tournament some student cites Aristotle: "man is a political animal." It always gets used to mean that people need government, or that humans are naturally into politics, like campaigning and voting. I have a nagging feeling that's…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Algorithmic hiring tools are inherently unjust
I don't say this lightly. Algorithms trained on past hiring decisions learn past discrimination. The best-known case: Amazon built an experimental recruiting tool that, as Reuters reported in 2018, learned to penalise CVs containing the word "women's" (as in "women's chess club…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman6 replies -
A universal basic income would make people freer, not lazier
Philippe Van Parijs, in Real Freedom for All (1995), argues that a just society should maximise everyone's real freedom to do whatever they might want to do, and that an unconditional basic income is the best way to do it. Republicans in…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
Two of my tax clients run nearly identical businesses: same size, same bracket, similar families. Every April one of them tells me, only half joking, that the government is robbing him. The other says, with no irony, that tax is the membership…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore
I've been reading Han Feizi with more sympathy than I expected. His central insight about law is one I see confirmed every week in our courts. Where the rules are unclear, or applied differently depending on who you are, the powerful win…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in return. But when I look for a place…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Why is a banknote money when a perfect copy of it is not?
When Ghana changed its currency in 2007 and took four zeros off the cedi, my mother kept a tin of the old notes. For a while you could exchange them. After that they were just paper. Same paper, same printing, same faces.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Is farming labour or work? Trying to understand Arendt’s distinction
This month my son sent me a chapter about Hannah Arendt, who says English uses "work" for three different things: labour, work and action. I wanted to know which one I do on my farm. From what I understood, labour is what…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Reading group: Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence”
The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961, the year Fanon died of leukaemia at thirty-six. The first chapter, "On Violence", is the most famous and the most misunderstood. Fanon argues that colonialism is itself violence: it establishes and maintains a…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Calling an outcome ‘efficient’ always smuggles in a value judgement
When people evaluate algorithms that allocate small loans, the word "efficient" comes up constantly. An allocation is efficient, a policy is inefficient, this change would improve efficiency. It is spoken as if it were a neutral technical description. I want to argue…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya and the rise and fall of states
The central concept of the Muqaddimah is asabiyya, usually translated "group feeling" or "solidarity". Ibn Khaldun argues that groups living hard lives on the margins of civilisation, often nomadic or tribal, develop strong solidarity. That solidarity lets them conquer settled states. Once…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
What did R. S. Peters mean by calling education an initiation?
I have started reading philosophy of education because I want to understand what I am doing when I teach them at home in the evenings. An introductory book I borrowed says R. S. Peters, in the 1960s, described education as "initiation into…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work?
This question follows me from the office to the langar. Guru Nanak's teaching is often summed up in three practices: naam japna, remembering the divine Name; kirat karni, earning by honest work; and vand chakna, sharing what you have. There's a story…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, they asked him to remove parts, he refused, and…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature as freely creative producers), and from other people. Delivery riders…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
If I try to understand a practice from the inside first, have I signed up to relativism?
I teach at a Māori-language school. When visitors come, I always ask them to understand our practices on their own terms before judging them: why we greet the way we do, why the river is treated as an ancestor, why some places…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Can a baby or an animal have a right if it cannot claim it? Interest theory versus will theory
I think about the ethics of drug trials on animals more than most of our customers would like. Someone at a talk recently said there are two main theories of what a right is: the "will" theory and the "interest" theory, and…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
What makes a fair price for cocoa? Asking Ibn Khaldun, Smith and my cooperative
The price we receive for our cocoa at the farm gate is set each season by the board. Every year we argue about whether it is fair. So I want to ask the question of people who have read more philosophy than…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Writing an eligibility rule taught me that metaphysics doesn’t settle policy
For some years I served on the committee that wrote eligibility rules for our regional school competitions. I'm not going to argue here about any current controversy, and I'd ask others not to. I want to share something I learned that I…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
An outsider can understand a culture, and sometimes better than its own members do
My walking tours go past the Mezquita-Catedral and through the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, the city where both Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were born. Tourists want a story of three faiths living in harmony, the famous convivencia. I try to tell…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto7 replies