Maria Da Costa

Feminists disagree about whether or not Rawls’s account of free and equal citizenship is an emancipatory ideal for women, and whether or not the application of the two principles of justice would suffice to dismantle relationships of domination that affect women’s lives. This chapter argues that there is no clear and uncontroversial application of Rawls’s principles of justice that supports those feminists who give affirmative answers to these questions. Regarding the first principle, one unsettled question is whether it protects sexual and reproductive rights, including the right to abortion. Regarding the second principle, there is indeterminacy due to the need to balance the requirements of fair equality of opportunity with parental rights. Moreover, the difference principle’s focus on the maximization of income and wealth for the worst off makes room for policies that do this while still leaving some women exposed to the arbitrary power of others.

Calls have been growing for government interventions to address diets high in ultra-processed foods (i.e., ultra-processed diets), which are associated with a large and rising burden of preventable death and disease. To date, however, government action relating to ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has been mostly insufficient. In this paper, we argue that one of the key reasons behind this lacklustre response has been the dominance of ‘UPF fetishism’ in scientific, public, and policy discussions. Adapting Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, we refer to UPF fetishism as the tendency to view UPFs only in terms of their final qualities or characteristics at the point of purchase (e.g., price, quality, convenience), while failing to consider all the socio-ecological processes, relations, and activities involved in their provisioning (e.g., intensive agriculture, widespread value extraction). UPF fetishism, we argue, undermines efforts seeking healthy, equitable, and sustainable diets worldwide by obscuring the wide range of harms and inequities generated along the entire UPF value chain, and by undermining and potentially foreclosing discussions on alternative visions and solutions for improving population diets. Researchers and advocates can help to challenge UPF fetishism by turning their focus to the structural and systemic drivers of ultra-processed diets. Taking this critical systems-level view ultimately draws attention the need to confront the very systems – particularly corporate food systems, late capitalism, and imperialism – that structure and sustain the harmful processes, relations, and activities underpinning the current system of UPF provisioning. While some trade-offs may be required, particularly with respect to pragmatism and political feasibility, a strategic advantage of moving beyond UPF fetishism is that it may help to illuminate meaningful opportunities for collaboration within the vast ecology of values-aligned movements seeking better diets, food systems, and economies for people and planet.

This paper examines Kieran Oberman’s original application of a particular conception of freedom as non-interference to justify lockdowns during a pandemic. Oberman claims that lockdowns can be justified exclusively on the basis of the value of freedom. He also suggests that people who protested against lockdowns by demanding freedom did not fully grasp the value to which they appealed. This paper argues that the conception of freedom as non-interference Oberman employs is not useful as a guide to make public health policy decisions. This is because it unnecessarily multiplies the freedoms that need to be considered, and unhelpfully reinterprets easily understood harms such as severe illness and death in terms of loss of freedom. This paper argues that this conception of freedom also leads to counterintuitive assessments. Finally, the paper proposes three ways of thinking about freedom that seem better to capture the sense of loss of freedom during the pandemic and the corresponding political demands expressed in protests.

Lars Moen's The Republican Dilemma (2024) offers a novel and insightful contribution to the debate between liberals and republicans about the meaning of political freedom. Moen bases his criticism of republicanism on Ian Carter's Equivalent Judgments Thesis. According to this thesis, the theory of pure negative freedom and the republican theory entail equivalent comparative judgments about the freedom of people. In this paper I argue, first, that there are significant differences between the pure negative freedom theorist's assessment of individual cases and Philip Pettit's republicanism's assessment of those same cases. And I use these differences to raise doubts about the existence of a strong empirical correlation between the implications of the two views. Second, with regard to a putative equivalence in policy recommendations, I concede to Moen that there are important similarities between John Rawls’ and Pettit's recommendations. But I argue that these similarities do not support the equivalent judgments thesis because Rawls is not an advocate of the theory of pure negative freedom.

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal.

Enquanto educador, Rousseau irá propor uma maneira inovadora, à sua época, de adquirir os conhecimentos tradicionalmente constituídos sobre os quais discorre entre os livros dois e três de sua obra pedagógica Emílio ou Da Educação. Partindo dessa premissa, dentro do que pode ser classificado entre os discursos educativos desse autor, o objetivo deste artigo consiste em apresentar a proposta que o filósofo de Genebra delega ao seu aprendiz, Emílio, para a relação que ele deve estabelecer com as Ciências, ou seja, com os saberes constituídos em seu processo de aprendizagem, rol da educação negativa. Para tanto, a metodologia empregada será de análise interpretativa do texto bibliográfico de Rousseau e de comentaristas sobre a temática. O filósofo procura inverter o processo de aquisição do saber ao inserir a experiência como mediadora da aprendizagem enquanto elemento fundamental entre o indivíduo e os elementos empíricos, base aquisitiva para todo conhecimento que componha os discursos científicos ou humanos. Assim, pretende-se contribuir com novas abordagens sobre a teoria do conhecimento em Rousseau e seus reflexos na educação da criança.