Bouke de Vries

Recently, countries such as China, India, Iran and Japan have introduced state-run dating apps in an attempt to increase fertility rates. However, dating apps could serve another important social goal that has thus far been largely neglected by policymakers and scholars: increasing population intelligence by facilitating certain forms of assortative mating. This article offers a qualified defense of using dating apps to raise the average intelligence—which is strongly associated, and likely causally linked, to a range of valuable outcomes, including economic prosperity, sociopolitical stability, and gender equality—as well as to increase the number of exceptionally intellectually gifted individuals, who account for a disproportionate share of innovation.

Many scholars and laypeople believe that, to address global warming, residents of high-income countries should limit themselves to having no more than one biological child. This article calls this view into question, referring to it as ‘climate-based procreative limitarianism’ (CPL). However, rather than arguing that the climate-related harms of procreation are outweighed by other considerations—such as individuals’ interests in parenting or in having biologically related offspring—it finds strong grounds for thinking that at least intelligent individuals in these countries may have sufficient climate-related reasons to reproduce at or above replacement level. As will be argued, this is because their offspring are disproportionately likely to contribute to globally significant green innovation and to make above-average economic contributions, the latter being relevant because economic performance shapes countries’ ability and willingness to mitigate climate change.

This article argues that embryo selection for intelligence (ESFI) offers a promising and ethically defensible strategy for eliminating extreme poverty. Drawing on evidence that national cognitive ability is a major driver of economic prosperity, I contend that enhancing intelligence through polygenic embryo selection could yield substantial and enduring gains that surpass the modest and often transient effects of traditional educational and nutritional interventions, while also being heritable and resilient to economic and political disruption. I further argue that advances in genomic prediction, declining sequencing costs, and emerging reproductive technologies are making ESFI increasingly feasible and cost-effective. The article addresses several objections, including concerns about eugenics, social inequality, and stigmatization. Although these concerns have some force, I argue that they are ultimately outweighed by ESFI’s potential to break cycles of deprivation in the world’s most disadvantaged populations. The article concludes by outlining policy and technological developments necessary to support the responsible and widespread adoption of this approach, including legal reform, public subsidies, and the expansion of genomic databases.

This article argues that in countries where dating apps have become the primary means of meeting romantic partners and promise to help users find love, individuals should be entitled to access certain information about how their algorithms function. Specifically, we advocate for a legal right to an explanation that addresses the following, not necessarily exhaustive, questions: (i) Is a given dating app, x, designed to gratuitously prolong users' quests for romantic relationships? (ii) What non‐deceptive changes can users make to their self‐presentation to improve their chances of finding a romantic partner on x? After demonstrating that there are strong personal and societal interests in having these questions answered and indicating how answers to them could be technically provided, several objections to our proposal are addressed, including concerns that it imposes excessive costs on dating app companies and societies at large.

In “Parental Love and Filial Equality,” Giacomo Floris and Riccardo Spotorno offer an explanation for why parents should treat their children as equals. The authors argue that this moral obligation is grounded in parents’ duty to love their children in an attitudinal, though not necessarily emotional, sense. This duty, they contend, requires them to disregard variations in their children’s status-conferring properties, as long as those properties meet a minimum threshold. This article argues that this account of filial equal treatment has serious shortcomings. In its place, it proposes a more outcome-oriented or consequentialist account.

This article defends a new type of preferential hiring. Rather than compensating groups for past or present employment-related discrimination, it seeks to ensure that groups with disproportionate unemployment rates that are due significantly – but not necessarily wholly – to their members having relatively narrow competencies, such as autistic individuals and people with hearing loss, ADHD and lower education levels, are prioritized for jobs that match their abilities. After defending such competency-based preferential hiring based on its benefits for persons with narrower competencies and for societies more broadly, I address several criticisms, including concerns that this approach may be stigmatizing.

In a bid to boost their below-replacement fertility levels, some countries, such as China, India, Iran, and Japan, have launched state-sponsored dating apps, with more potentially following. However, the use of dating apps as tools for social engineering has been largely neglected by political theorists and public policy experts. This article fills this gap. While acknowledging the risks and historical baggage of social engineering, the article provides a qualified defense of using these apps for three purposes: raising below-replacement birth rates, increasing social cohesion, and preventing certain genetic diseases.

Scholars such as S. Matthew Liao have argued that parents have a moral duty to love their children. However, there exists an important related parental duty that has not been defended yet. Besides loving their children, or at least trying to do so, this article argues that at least during their children’s childhood, parents should make efforts to love their children equally insofar as they do not already do so. After clarifying the content of this duty, I defend it by suggesting that having a preferred child is a significant risk factor for parental favoritism, which tends to undermine the wellbeing and development of disfavored children, and often that of favored children as well. I go on to consider whether equal parental love is ever permissibly realized through leveling down (i.e. by reducing one’s love for the favored child), before identifying two possible exceptions to the proposed duty, both of which involve situations where one’s co-parent is unable and/or unwilling to love one’s shared children equally. The article ends by exploring potential further arguments for the duty to try to love one’s children equally, and by proposing avenues for future research.

Many higher-income countries have shortages of care-workers, which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as virtually all of these societies are ageing. The philosophical literature on this problem has concentrated mostly on the merits and demerits of different policy solutions, especially on the recruitment of foreign care-workers and on investments in care robots and other relevant technologies. However, the question of what moral duties, if any, private individuals have to help address care-worker shortages has been entirely neglected. In this article, I help to fill this lacuna by arguing that some inhabitants of higher-income countries have moral duties to age abroad in order to reduce the pressure on the aged care-systems of their current societies, whereby ‘ageing abroad’ is defined narrowly as moving to a foreign country to receive residential or non-residential aged care. As I show, these duties are dependent on a number of conditions being met, including the requirement that the host populations not be made worse off.

In more than 20% of countries, a single religion is recognized in the constitution. This article argues that there are good reasons for opposing such ‘mono-recognition’ as it fails to show due concern to members of constitutionally unrecognized (non-extremist) religions. Yet rather than opting for disestablishment as Sweden did in 2000, I show that there may be a better alternative in many cases: To constitutionally recognize a variety of religions. After distinguishing synchronic forms of plural recognition whereby multiple religions are constitutionally recognized simultaneously from diachronic forms whereby state religions are rotated, I defend the latter option. On this approach, a multi-religious state might have Catholicism as the state religion during the first part of the year, then Islam, then Judaism, and so on, whereby I argue that there ought to be differences in the amount of time that religions are recognized depending on differences in the strength of their claims to constitutional recognition. Besides being fairer than mono-recognition and synchronic plural recognition, I show that when some religious groups are marginalized, diachronic plural recognition has significant advantages over non-recognition of any religion as constitutionally recognizing these groups’ religions sends valuable signals that their members belong to society.

The end of a long-term romantic relationship ranks among the most stressful and momentous events in life. Thus, the decision of whether to break up with someone whom one has been with for many years should generally be made very carefully. Unfortunately, decision theory is often thought to be unable to provide rational guidance in such high-stake life choices due to the outcomes’ presumed transformative character. The present paper shows how agents can rationally decide whether to leave their romantic partner even if the decision is transformative. It does so by using a novel five-level account of transformative decision-making, which can also be used for other key life choices, and which is the first to integrate in a systematic way several approaches for making (certain types of) transformative decisions that have been proposed in recent years.

In a bid to boost their below-replacement fertility levels, some countries, such as China, India, Iran, and Japan, have launched state-sponsored dating apps, with more potentially following. However, the use of dating apps as tools for social engineering has been largely neglected by political theorists and public policy experts. This article fills this gap. While acknowledging the risks and historical baggage of social engineering, the article provides a qualified defense of using these apps for three purposes: raising below-replacement birth rates, increasing social cohesion, and preventing certain genetic diseases.

We often speak of our own “best friends” and those of other people. But what does it mean for someone to be a best friend? While there is a large empirical literature studying the antecedents and consequences of best friendships and a small body of philosophical research on this topic, this question has not been addressed in detail. In this article, my aim is to fill this lacuna by distinguishing three different conceptions of best friends based on the semantic properties of the term and the ways in which it is used in both academic discourse and ordinary parlance. They include those of a (i) comparatively best friend; (ii) comparatively best close/good friend; and (iii) institutional best friend. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this typology for empirical and philosophical work on best friendship and by identifying several avenues for future research.

Over the past decade, many politicians and celebrities in North America have found themselves embroiled in scandals that involved them having worn black make-up and in at least one incident white make-up. In most of these cases, the used make-up was part of a costume for Halloween, Purim, Carnival, or a themed party. This article challenges the view that wearing cross-racial make-up on such occasions as part of personal costumes—as opposed to costumes that are integral to specific cultural traditions, such as the New Orleans Zulu parade—is always wrong. To do so, it assesses the five most promising objections to this practice. Although some of these objections count against certain uses of cross-racial make-up, I show that in several high-profile cases where such make-up was worn, none of them had force, whether because the objections themselves were implausible and/or because they did not apply.

Strong longtermism maintains that how we should act morally is determined almost entirely by the expected effects on the welfare of our descendants existing thousands if not millions of years into the future, who might include both other humans and any artificial agents with a comparable or higher moral status that we end up creating. It is based on three key assumptions: (i) that our descendants will have a moral status that is at least as high as ours and therefore should not have their welfare discounted by us; (ii) that there is a good chance that these individuals will vastly outnumber us; and (iii) that we can do things here and now that can be expected to positively shape the long-term trajectory of humanity. The aim of this contribution is to suggest that authors such as Will MacAskill and Hilary Greaves have been too optimistic about all these assumptions as a result of having ignored evidence that the populations of postindustrial countries are becoming less intelligent due mostly to the negative relationship that has emerged within these societies between intelligence and fertility and to the proclivity of intelligent people to delay parenthood.

Cross-national surveys show that among heterosexual couples who share a household, women tend to perform more housework than their male partners. Many feminists believe that this must be unjust, the assumption being that justice requires an equal distribution of housework between the sexes. My aim in this contribution is to challenge this view. To do so, I distinguish three possible interpretations of it. The first says that heterosexual co-residential partners, construed broadly to include married individuals, should do as much housework as their partner and not more. The second interpretation maintains that they should split evenly the housework that must be done to realize a minimally decent living standard. And the third maintains that the housework co-residential male and female partners each perform as a group ought to be equal, whether or not the constituent loads are equalized on an individual household level. All three versions are found to be untenable.

Over the past decade, many philosophers have argued that to respect the moral equality of their citizens, states should be neutral toward certain forms of diversity among their populations. Areas in which the state neutrality has been advocated include, but are not limited to, citizens’ different religions; languages; and sexual orientations. However, there remains an important area where its normative (ir)relevance has not been discussed: That of neurodiversity. After identifying several ways in which contemporary states disfavor the interests of neurodivergent groups relative to the neurotypical majority, including those of autistic people; dyslectic people; and people with ADHD, the most promising would be-justifications for such unequal treatment are considered. They maintain respectively that states only have to be neutral toward differences that feature in people’s conceptions of the good life; that addressing the discussed neuro-inequalities is too costly, whether financially or otherwise; that doing so raises intolerable risks of a public backlash; and that a commitment to neuro-neutrality leads to overinclusion. None are found to be convincing across the board, which leads me to conclude that states should become significantly more neuro-neutral than they are today.

Unemployment rates among autistic people are high even among those with low-support needs. While a variety of measures is needed to address this problem, this article defends one that has not been defended in detail and that has profound implications for contemporary hiring practices. Building on empirical research showing that job interviews are a major contributor to autistic unemployment, it argues that such interviews should be abolished in many cases for autistic and non-autistic people alike.

In a bid to boost fertility levels, Iran and Japan have recently launched their own dating apps, with more countries likely to follow. The aim of this article is to consider whether state-run dating apps are morally desirable, which is a question that has not received any scholarly attention. It finds that such apps have at least two benefits that collectively, if not individually, render their introduction to be welcomed provided certain conditions are met. These benefits are that they are better placed than commercial dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Badoo to (i) help people find lasting love and to (ii) protect individuals from spending too much money and/or time on online dating. Several objections are discussed and shown to be unconvincing as arguments against state-run dating apps tout court, including the objection that for states to offer their own dating apps is unduly expensive; the objection that it gives them too much power; and the objection that they should invest in creating offline opportunities for meeting potential partners instead.

Being the victim of a microaggression, that is, a relatively minor act of hostility that targets someone's (marginalized) social identity, can be distressing, but so can merely being in doubt over whether one has been the victim of such aggression. To address this last problem, Regina Rini has proposed a novel understanding of microaggressions that is meant to eliminate such doubts. On her “Ambiguous Experience Account,” whenever members of marginalized groups believe they might have been subjected to a microaggression, a microaggression will have been committed even if the would‐be perpetrator was not motivated by prejudiced aggression. This article challenges this account on grounds of being incompatible with people's lived experiences, including those of the would‐be victims, and argues that we should instead accept the conventional account on which microaggressive acts must be consciously or unconsciously motivated by prejudiced aggression. At the same time, it shows that those falsely suspected of having committed microaggressions will still merit blame sometimes for having failed to signal that their behavior was respectful of others, which lessens the concerns that Rini's conceptual engineering seeks to address. I conclude by drawing out some implications for the debate on microaggressions and attributional ambiguity.

All of our lives come to an end. For most people in Western societies, this is not until they reach a relatively advanced age, often 80 years and above. For others, death comes earlier, whether unexpectedly as when someone dies in car crash, or after a short or long period of physical decline as when a middle-aged person develops terminal cancer. To the extent that people experience such a stage of decline, usually with the prior knowledge that it will result in their death, we tend to speak of their ‘end-of-life-stage’. In this chapter, my aim is to analyze one of the main ways in which our personal autonomy might be, and often is, undermined during this stage, namely that we come to suffer from severe cognitive impairments. To be more precise, I seek to show how two different philosophical views on personal autonomy can lead to very different verdicts on how severely cognitively impaired individuals may or ought to be treated in various contexts, whereby I will be mostly critical on one of the views discussed. On the first view, we cease to have autonomy-interests once we become severely cognitively impaired as we will no longer be capable of reflecting upon what makes our life worth living. On the second view, we continue to have such interests provided that we independently endorsed a conception of the good life before we became severely cognitively impaired.

Wearing black make-up to impersonate black individuals has become highly controversial in many countries, even when it is part of long-standing cultural traditions. Prominent examples of such traditions include Saint Nicolas celebrations in the Netherlands (which feature a black character known as “Black Pete” who hands out candy to children), Epiphany parades in Spain (which feature impersonations of the biblical king Balthasar who is traditionally portrayed as black) and the annual Zulu parade in New Orleans (which features impersonations of South African Zulu warriors). In this article, I challenge the widely held view that black make-up traditions are categorically wrong. Specifically, I argue that these traditions can be morally vindicated if (i) the large majority of individuals who help to maintain them do not believe that they denigrate black people; (ii) the relevant traditions do not depict black people in denigrating ways; and (iii) the relevant traditions are not gratuitously offensive. While the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition fails to satisfy these conditions, the New Orleans Zulu tradition is found to satisfy them, as is the Spanish Epiphany tradition in certain cases. I end by identifying another set of conditions under which black make-up traditions might be morally justified.

A significant proportion of states grants constitutional recognition to a single religion, leaving various other religions within society constitutionally unrecognised. Many philosophers believe that this is problematic even when such recognition is (almost) wholly symbolic. The four most common and prima facie plausible objections to what I call ‘mono-recognition’ are that it alienates citizens who do not adhere to the constitutionally recognised religion; that it symbolically subordinates these individuals; that it reinforces oppressive social hierarchies; and that it violates principles of justificatory neutrality. This article shows that none of these objections establish that mono-recognition is wrong within contemporary societies—or even merely pro tanto wrong. However, it goes on to propose a novel argument that does suggest that this type of religious establishment is pro tanto wrong within most societies, if not all. According to this argument, which I refer to as the ‘desire-based objection’, mono-recognition is pro tanto wrong when it fails to accommodate at least some citizens (a) who desire constitutional recognition of their unrecognised religion on morally reasonable, or simply not unreasonable, grounds or who would do so if they were to independently ponder the possibility of receiving such recognition without having to fear any social backlash that receiving it might cause and (b) whose religion is entitled to constitutional recognition based on the size of its population within society; the societal contributions of its members; and any injustices that its members have suffered at the hands of the state or the wider society. As I show, even when one particular religion has the strongest claim to constitutional recognition, this does not normally justify granting sole recognition to it given that the weaker claims of other religions could be accommodated under a system whereby state religions are rotated and recognised for different durations depending on the strength of their claims.

Love, sex, and physical intimacy are some of the most desired goods in life and they are increasingly being sought on dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Badoo. For those who want a leg up in the chase for other people’s attention, almost all of these apps now offer the option of paying a fee to boost one’s visibility for a certain amount of time, which may range from 30 min to a few hours. In this article, I argue that there are strong moral grounds and, in countries with laws against unconscionable contracts, legal ones for thinking that the sale of such visibility boosts should be regulated, if not banned altogether. To do so, I raise two objections against their unfettered sale, namely that it exploits the impaired autonomy of certain users and that it creates socio-economic injustices.

Some philosophers believe that swearing is morally innocent insofar as it is non‐abusive and vulgarities are being used, such as when people exclaim “s**t!” or “f**k!” This article shows this view to be mistaken. I start by arguing that taking offense at non‐abusive vulgar swearing is not irrational, before arguing that, even if it were, such swearing would still not always be justified. The fact that many of us find it hard to overcome profanity‐induced offense, along with the fact that its existence is necessary for swearing to be possible, is sufficient to render even non‐abusive vulgar swearing sometimes wrong. I go on to assess the opposite view, according to which swearing, including non‐abusive vulgar swearing, is never justified, whereby two objections to this activity are addressed. According to the instrumentalization objection, the fact that swearing is possible only if at least some people are sometimes offended by the words that are used means that swearers treat those who are offended by their profanity as mere means. And according to the Ersatz objection, the fact that we can use inoffensive words to raise the emotional content of our speech renders swearing gratuitously offensive. Neither objection is found to be convincing.

Although 43 countries have a monarch as their head of state, the question of whether monarchies can be morally justified has been neglected by contemporary philosophers. In this article, I argue that it is doubtful whether any existing monarchies can be morally justified. As I show, they all suffer from one or more of the following defects: they flout democratic principles; they are non-meritocratic; and/or they fail to provide at least some royals with an adequate range of lifestyle options. However, I go on to identify a novel type of elective monarchy that escapes these problems, and which, I submit, can be vindicated as long as it serves legitimate public objectives (e.g. by promoting social cohesion among citizens and/or by fostering international trade).

Many individuals on the autism spectrum are hypersensitive to certain sensory stimuli. For this group, as well as for non-autistic individuals with sensory processing disorders, being exposed to e.g. fluorescent lights, perfume odours, and various sounds and noises can be real torment. In this article, I consider the normative implications of such offence for the design of office spaces, which is a topic that has not received any attention from philosophers. After identifying different ways in which the senses of hypersensitive workers might be protected within these spaces, I show that many of such accommodations can be made at reasonable cost, before arguing that doing so ought to be a legal requirement.

_Many people who stand to pee raise the toilet seat so that they have a larger target to aim at. However, if the seat is left in this position, any subsequent toilet user who defecates or pees sitting down will need to lower the seat. Some of us believe that this inconvenience should not be visited on those who pee sitting down, while others deny that there is anything wrong with leaving the toilet seat in the position that you used it. This article offers the first scholarly defense of the seat-down norm. In so doing, it shows that recent claims that this norm would be unfair and inefficient are unwarranted_. _Keywords: _Toilet seats; Toilets; Bathrooms; Gender Inequality; Urination; Defecation; Expensive tastes; Stehpinkler; Sitzpinkler.