The Philosopher & The News

The Philosopher & The News will be resuming next week with guest Camila Vergara, author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Society. If in the meantime you're craving your weekly philosophy fix, I have just the thing for you. This week The Philosopher journal is putting on virtual lectures every single day, to coincide with the release of its spring issue on the topic of Authority and Knowledge.To see the full program, and register for these events, for free, go to: www.thephilosopher1923.org/events .

According to the received narrative, we have entered a new geological era in the history of our planet, the Anthropocene. Human beings, so the theory goes, have become geological agents, having an impact on the planet so profound that it can only be compared to past ice ages and the early stages of the planet’s formation. But this narrative implies that all humans have had a hand in changing the planet, and that that all humans are affected in the same way by climate change. Philosophers, historians and geologists have recently been pointing out that this isn’t the case. Climate change affects different groups of people differently, and the same goes for some of the proposed solutions to climate change. Desmond Tutu has spoken of a climate apartheid. “Climate adaptation” he says “is becoming a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale”. So what does the South-African cleric and human rights activist mean when he compares some climate change solutions to the apartheid regime? What’s the relationship between climate change and racism?  And how can understanding the origins of both help us put forward solutions that don’t reproduce the inequities of the past? Nancy Tuana is Professor of Philosophy, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State College of the Liberal Arts. She is the author of several books and papers on feminism, climate change and the nature of racism, including "Climate Apartheid: The Forgeting of Race in the Anthropocene".This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.  Register for free for the spring series of talks and events at: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

In 1825 the planet’s human population was 1 billion. In 2011, there were 7 billion human beings on the planet.  With the current projections estimating that by the year 2050 the human population will be 9.6 billion, there is a pressing question: Can climate change be stopped simply by moving to greener energy sources and reducing the consumption levels of the developed world? Or is something more drastic in order, like curbing the human population growth ? Given the grim history of states trying to control their population, could something like that be morally acceptable? And if so, how would governments around the world go about implementing such a policy? Sarah Conly is professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College, and author of the book One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? in which she puts forward the argument that in the wake of climate change and the overall environmental destruction, future parents have a moral right to only one child, and that the state should regulate the rate of human reproduction. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.  Register for free for the spring series of talks and events at: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

In 2019 the US Congress representative Alexandria Occasio Cortez and US senator Edward Markey put forward a resolution called the Green New Deal. Borrowing the name from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, a massive state-led plan to save the economy from the 1929 crash, the Green New Deal proposes an even more ambitious state plan, this time to save the planet from climate change. The aim of a net-zero carbon emissions economy within the next thirty years, the argument goes, can only be achieved by huge state intervention. The swift closing down of the oil and gas sectors of the economy will require the state to become the leader in investment planning, and even the guarantor of jobs for everyone. But what assumptions about the economy, the nature of currency and the role of financial institutions do we need to rethink in undertaking such a project? And what are the ethical challenges in giving the state unprecedented power over our future? Alex Douglas is lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews, author of The Philosophy of Debt and co-director of The Future of Work and Income Research Network. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.  Register for free for the spring series of talks and events at: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

What if we’re been thinking about climate change the wrong way? What if it’s not a problem that can be solved, but something that can only be managed? What if climate change is here to stay? Thom Brooks is the author of Climate Change Ethics for an Endangered World. He is professor of Law and Government at the University of Durham, and the outgoing Dean of the Durham Law School. He is also a public policy advisor and the founding Director of the Labour Academic Network. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.  Register for free for the spring series of talks and events at: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

January 1st this year marked the end of the transition period in the UK’s long and tortured journey of leaving the European Union. Four and a half years after the 2016 Brexit referendum the UK began a new chapter in its history, sovereign and independent, as the Leave campaign might have put it, no longer constrained by the EU’s laws and courts.   Underneath those claims lies a variety of different conceptions of freedom. As Isaiah Berlin explained in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” there are at least two, fundamentally different conceptions of freedom.   So what are these conceptions? And how do they apply to Brexit? Are the claims that the UK is a freer country, now that it’s out of the EU true? Or are such claims concealing the many meanings of the concept of freedom?   A joint episode with a fellow podcaster, Toby Buckle, producer and host of The Political Philosophy podcast.  This conversation was based on an article I wrote for the LSE’s Politics and Policy blog, back in 2016, entitled "Isaiah Berlin and Brexit: How The Leave Campaign Misunderstands Freedom", and Toby’s past solo episode on Berlin’s distinction, entitled “Positive and Negative Freedom”. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.  Register for free for the spring series of talks and events at: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday 

On February 22nd, NASA released video footage of the car-sized Rover Perseverance, landing on the surface of Mars. After a journey of seven months and 293 million miles, the robot vehicle finally reached the red planet, with the aim of searching for ancient signs of life on Mars. A couple of weeks later, Elon Musk’s company Space X tested a prototype of Starship, a vehicle meant to enable mass interplanetary travel, and the eventual colonisation of other planets by humans. This, according to Musk, would be an insurance policy against possible events like nuclear war or an asteroid collision, that could wipe out all of humanity if we were to remain on Earth.But is it ethically justifiable for a government to spend billions of dollars on sending a remote control robot to Mars, when that money could be spent on improving the lives of its citizens? Should we leave space exploration to eccentric private individuals, or does that compromise humanity’s future in space? Would it be OK to try and change the surface and atmosphere of Mars, to suit our human needs? And what ethical framework should we apply to our potential future interactions with alien forms of life, if they have evolved in radically different ways from life on Earth? Brian Patrick Green is the director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, in California’s Silicon Valley. In his forthcoming book, Space Ethics, he explores many of the moral questions that arise from a future of space exploration. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.   Check out the upcoming events and register for free at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

One of the many things that the pandemic forced us to rethink is the importance of a sense we usually don’t give much attention to: Our sense of smell. More than half of people with Covid-19 experience the loss of smell or taste and while two-thirds recover within six to eight weeks, many are left without much improvement months down the line. Some of the people who regain their sense of smell, experience it as hugely altered (parosmia) — aromas that they used to enjoy are now overbearingly pungent, and even revolting. The recent progress in the scientific investigation of smell means we now know a lot more about it than we did even 30 years ago: We understand that smell works rather differently from other senses, like vision. Just as you can lose your sense of smell, you can train it – and become a lot more sensitive to the nuances of what a wine smells like. But perhaps most importantly, we have understood that our sense of smell is not just the reception of raw data from our environment. Smell involves judgement and interpretation, and so a different context can alter the way we perceive of the same sensory stimuli. Smelling is thinking. So what do these new discoveries mean for philosophy? Does our understanding of smell mean that the classic model of the mind as a mirror of the external world is wrong? And what does knowing the role smell plays in our choice of sexual partners mean for our idea of ourselves as rational agents? Ann Sophie Barwich is  Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington, and an academic with a dual identity: a cognitive scientist as well as a philosopher. Ann is the author of the book: Smellosophy: What the Nose tells the Mind , which highlights the importance of thinking about the sense of smell both through empirical research in neuroscience as well as through philosophy and cultural history. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.   Check out the upcoming events and register for free at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

The reason Covid-19 became the pandemic it did had to do with a distinctly modern phenomenon: global mass travel. Until about a year ago, getting on a plane and travelling thousands of miles across the Earth for a business meeting, or a short holiday in a different country, was something millions of people didn’t think twice about.These days, travel is one of the things the pandemic has deprived us of, reminding us what a privilege it was to be able to roam freely around the world, making us appreciate what we previously took for granted. Travel is one of those topics that philosophers didn’t really think about until the age of discovery, around the 16th century. Francis Bacon, John Locke and René Descartes all thought travel could make one a better philosopher. But what is the value of travel? Why do we enjoy visiting far-away places, and getting out of our comfort zone? Is there any value to waiting in airport lounges and train stations? And what are the ethical concerns around doom-tourism? Emily Thomas is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Durham, and a member of the Institute of Mediaeval and Early Modern Studies. Emily’s research focuses on metaphysics, the study of the general and necessary features of existence, and more specifically the philosophy of space and time. She is the author of two books on the subject,  Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (2018, Oxford University Press) and Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (2018, Cambridge University Press). But apart from being a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, Emily is also a lover of travel. Marrying her two passions she wrote a book called  The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad .This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal.   Check out the upcoming events and register for free at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/events Music by Pataphysical Artwork by Nick Halliday

One set of ethical questions has been looming large since the start of the pandemic: How do we evaluate the costs and benefits that result from lockdown measures? Is it possible to weight the lives saved by lockdown measures against the unemployment, damage to mental health and education that they resulted in? Or are such comparisons impossible to make?  Is there a price to human life, and if so, how do we arrive at it? What are the ethical principles that we should follow when making decisions under conditions of radical uncertainty? And how has the pandemic challenged our usual framework for making life and death decisions? Jonathan Wolff is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, and was formerly Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy. He has been a public policy advisor on several issues, including gambling regulation, railway safety, bioethics, and at the moment he is co-char of the Working Group for ethics and governance for the Word Health Organisation -  Accelerator Covid Response. Jo has written about his experiences as a public policy advisor, and the lessons there are to be learned for both policy and philosophy, in his book Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Enquiry. This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK’s longest running public philosophy journal. The winter issue of The Philosopher is out, tackling one of philosophy’s perennial puzzles: the concept of Nothing. If you’d like to order a copy of the latest issue, and subscribe to the journal, go to www.thephilosopher1923.org/subscribe. Music by Pataphysical: https://soundcloud.com/pataphysicaltransmission Artwork by Nick Halliday: https://www.hallidaybooks.com/design