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Our conclusion is that it is false that feminism had better be intersectional I instead of i single-axis focused; and at best true that feminism had better I also i be intersectional (in addition to its single-axis focus). It is common for critics of single-axis feminism to conflate "single-axis" with "white feminism", as for example Nora Berenstain does when she says 'White feminism takes only a single-axis approach to gender-based oppression', describing it as a feminism that applies only to 'white, nondisabled, class-privileged, straight, cisgender citizens of "Western" colonial and settler colonial nation-states' while it "masquerades as universal". If black women experience some discrimination on the basis of I only i sex, similar to some white women, then black women, too, have an interest in "non-intersectional" feminism, a form of feminism concerned with sex alone. We certainly don't want to be arguing for the transformation of feminism into the familiar caricature of second-wave feminism. So this couldn't yet make sense of the claim that feminism had better be intersectional, only the weaker claim that feminism had better be intersectional I too i (as well as in addition to). [Extracted from the article]

Punishing groups raises a difficult question, namely, how their punishment can be justified at all. Some have argued that punishing groups is morally problematic because of the effects that the punishment entails for their members. In this paper we argue against this view. We distinguish the question of internal justice—how punishment-effects are distributed—from the question of external justice—whether the punishment is justified. We argue that issues of internal justice do not in general undermine the permissibility of punishment. We also defend the permissibility of what some call "random punishment." We argue that, for some kinds of collectives, there is no general obligation to internally distribute the punishment-effects equally or in proportion to individual contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose that a group of individual agents meets plausible conditions for collective agency, and that the collective agent thereby constituted performs a harmful action. The collective may be blameworthy for having performed that action, and it may be appropriate that the collective be punished for having performed it. But this raises a difficult question: how to punish collectives. Some have argued that we can't, because we cannot punish collectives without punishing at least some of their members. I argue that this is not an objection to collective punishment, so long as members are punished in their role as members, rather than in their role as private individuals. I discuss several issues that come up when we think about punishing groups: the forms punishment can permissibly take; the distribution of collective punishment among members; and the relation between this view of collective punishment and the law of joint enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his article "Carbon Emissions, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, and Unintended Harms," Christopher J. Preston compares the culpability of carbon emitters versus that of geoengineers deploying stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). This comparison relies on a parallel between carbon emitters and SAI deployers that requires both to be agents. However, both are not. While the harms of geoengineering will be caused by culpable agents acting intentionally, the harms connected to climate change emerge out of the uncoordinated actions of billions of people. Taken as a large group, carbon emitters cause harm but do not constitute an agent. Taken individually, carbon emitters are agents but do not cause the harms of climate change. As a result, the parallel collapses, and Preston's "surprising" conclusion is one that he is not entitled to reach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most philosophers believe that a person can have an obligation only insofar as she is able to fulfil it, a principle generally referred to as “Ought Implies Can”. Arguably, this principle reflects something basic about the ordinary concept of obligation. However, in a paper published recently in this journal, Wesley Buckwalter and John Turri presented evidence for the conclusion that ordinary people in fact reject that principle. With a series of studies, they claimed to have demonstrated that, in people’s judgements, obligations persist irrespective of whether those who hold them have the ability to fulfil them. We argue in this paper that due to some problems in their design, Buckwalter & Turri’s conclusions may not be warranted. We present the results of a series of studies demonstrating the problems with their design and showing that, with an improved design, people judge that obligation depends on ability after all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Climate Matters," by John Broome is presented. Topics mentioned include the prevention of climate change for public and environmental health management, the role of private companies for mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions, and the prevention of human rights violation. Also mentioned are the importance of environmental protection and the protection of social freedom.

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many different ways to try to bring about an end to the harms involved in the production of consumer goods. In this article I will start at the bottom, with the individual whose ordinary choices about how to travel, what to eat, what to wear, where to shop, and which policies to support all cause her to confront the possibility of involvement in these harms to the environment, nonhuman animals, and persons.Having dismissed the claim that an individual has a straightforward duty of justice not to consume unethically produced goods, in the second section I map out a few different approaches, all of which I take to be promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically. I argue that the last approach is the most promising and spend the third section of this article developing it. Specifically, I argue that as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labor practices, an individual ought to signal to others her commitments to ethical consumption. In section four I ask whether some signals are too cheap to function as a step toward collectivization, and defend the deliberate consumption of only ethically produced goods as a moderately costly and therefore reliable signal. In the last section I consider a challenge to the proposal in terms of whether it imposes unacceptable costs on consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The politics of climate change is marked by the fact that countries are dragging their heels in doing what they ought to do; namely, creating a binding global treaty, and fulfilling the duties assigned to each of them under it. Many different agents are culpable in this failure. But we can imagine a stylised version of the climate change case, in which no agents are culpable: if the bad effects of climate change were triggered only by crossing a particular threshold, and it was reasonably, but mistakenly, believed by each country that insufficiently many other countries were willing to cooperate in order for that threshold to remain uncrossed, no country would be required to make a unilateral contribution. Yet even without culpability, we can diagnose a moral ill: the world has gone other than it should have. If not for the mistaken beliefs, there would have been a global climate treaty, and all the avoidance of future suffering that would come with it. In this article I argue that this moral ill has implications for the non-culpable agents, in that it generates duties to disgorge actual holdings over and above the counterpart holdings in the relevant counterfactual: those holdings the agents would have had, were the world to have gone as it should. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the moral philosophical concept of non-ideal ought implies non-ideal accessibility, which the author defines as actions of agents based on past behavior, severe pathology and character. The author distinguishes the term 'ought' as a moral action of the agent not only to do what he should originally intends to do, but an action he might likely do given the circumstances. The moral consequences of failure to accomplish actions that should ought to be done are discussed.

To date there is no systematic exploration of the concept of 'political feasibility'. We believe that feasibility is a central issue for political philosophy, conceptually as well as practically, and that it has been given background status for far too long. Roughly, a state of affairs is feasible if it is one we could actually bring about. But there are many questions to ask about the conditions under which we are justified in thinking that we could bring about a political state of affairs. In this article we bring together several aspects of the concept of feasibility defended in the literature thus far, and build upon them to give an analysis of the notion of political feasibility. We suggest that the notion involves a relation between agents and the pursuit of certain actions and outcomes in certain historical contexts, and that there are two important roles for feasibility to play in political theory, corresponding to two feasibility 'tests': one categorical, the other comparative. We show how the tests operate in the assessment of three different levels of a normative political theory: core normative principles, their institutional implementation and the political reforms leading to them. Focusing on the third level, which has received the least attention in the literature, we proceed to explain how feasibility considerations interact with desirability and epistemic considerations in the articulation of normative political judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two dominant arguments within international political theory, arguments from humanity and arguments from justice, can be distinguished along the lines of the well-known distinction between omissions and actions, respectively. The discussion in this paper shows that people in general are psychologically biased towards thinking that omissions producing harm are less morally grave than actions producing equivalent harm. It also canvasses evidence suggesting that greater moral gravity correlates with heightened guilt, and that heightened guilt is more likely to lead to action that would alleviate it, i.e. remedial or compensatory action. For those reasons, it is suggested that we should expect arguments from justice, which track actions, to be a more feasible means to the desired outcome of (local commitment to) global justice than arguments from humanity, which track omissions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the author responds to philosopher Laura Valentini's discussion of the apparent paradox of ideal theory. The article notes that Valentini attempts to undermine three plausible premises in order to free ideal theorists from the paradox. The premises discuss the sound theory of justice. The author of this article disputes the truth of two of Valentini's premises and shows that the third premise can be extended because Valentini's bad kinds of ideal theory do not fail to guide action. The article has the effect of strengthening Valentini's support of ideal theory.

In this paper we develop a new methodology for normative theorising, which we call Directed Reflective Equilibrium. Directed Reflective Equilibrium is based on a taxonomy that distinguishes between a number of different functions of hypothetical cases, including two dimensions that we call representation and elicitation. Like its predecessor, Directed Reflective Equilibrium accepts that neither intuitions nor basic principles are immune to revision and that our commitments on various levels of philosophical enquiry should be brought into equilibrium. However, it also offers guidance about how different types of cases ought to be sequenced to achieve this result. We argue that this 'directional' approach improves, in various ways, upon the non-directional approach of traditional Reflective Equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges political theorists to think about data ownership and policy makers to regulate the collection and use of public data. AI producers benefit from free public data for training their systems while retaining the profits. We argue against the view that the use of public data must be free. The proponents of unconstrained use point out that consuming data does not diminish its quality and that information is in ample supply. Therefore, they suggest, publicly available data should be free. We present two objections. First, allowing free data use promotes unwanted inequality. Second, contributors of information did not and could not anticipate that their contribution would be used to train AI systems. Our argument implies that managing the "global information commons" and charging for extensive data use is permissible and desirable. We discuss policy implications and propose a progressive data use tax to counter the inequality arising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]