The aftermath of the European refugee crisis can be said to have sparked a crisis of solidarity. Despite abundant demonstrations of solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers, what many saw as an exercise of their duty to help was made illegal. The critical term that emerged to refer to this conjuncture was “criminalization of solidarity”. In order to include this term in the academic debate, this ...

This essay discusses Cyril Ghosh’s analysis of the notion of ‘gay covering’ as an act of downplaying one’s gayness in the face of public expectations, and its countermove of ‘reversing cover’. I acknowledge, along with Ghosh, that both the demands to ‘cover’ and ‘reverse cover’ are problematic from the perspective of LGBT+ authenticity. I aim to show, however, that such acts of covering, and reversing ...

It isn’t saying much to claim that morality is demanding; the question, rather, is: can morality be so demanding that we have reason not to follow its dictates? According to many, it can, if that morality is a consequentialist one. This paper takes the plausibility and coherence of this objection – the Demandingness Objection – as a given. Our question, therefore, is how to respond to the Objection. ...

The paper offers a philosophically infused analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The main idea is that McCarthy’s novel is primarily a statement on the meaning of life. Once this idea is argued for and endorsed, by using a parallel between The Road and a 19th century Hungarian dramatic poem, The Tragedy of Man, the paper goes on to argue that the most plausible – although admittedly not the only ...

In many contexts, states have a duty to take special measures to protect minorities. Does this duty include prioritizing minority over majority refugees? To answer this question, we first show that a vulnerabilityfocused notion of ‘minorities’ is preferable to a numerical one. Given the vulnerability-focused notion, there is a presumption in favour of prioritizing minority over majority refugees. ...

Say a jury is going to decide who wins a competition. First, each member evaluates all the competitors by grading them; then, for each competitor, a collective grade is derived from all the judgments of all the members; finally, the jury chooses as the winner the competitor with the highest collective grade. This is <i>collective grading</i>. The grades that are used might typically be numerical ...

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person’s vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that decision affects her interests, independently of her voting weights on other decisions. Further, we consider two recent alternative proposals for how the All Affected Principle should weight votes, and give ...

This article is the first indepth ethical analysis of empirical studies that support the claim that children born without major parts of their cerebral cortex are capable of conscious experiences and have a rudimentary capacity for agency. Congenitally decorticate children have commonly been classified as persistently vegetative, with serious consequences for their well-being and opportunities to ...

The assertion of territorial claims is one of the longest standing political issues in the world and, as the number of ongoing disputes shows, has lost none of its significance in contemporary times. Humans long for a place they can call “theirs”: whether that involves an individual being able to have a “room of one’s own” (Woolf, 1929) within a household, or being able to control the behavior of ...