Pilar Lopez-Cantero

Ghosting is a major concern for those advocating for more ethical dating apps. It is often cited as an example of bad dating app behaviour, and some public commentators even consider it a form of abuse. In this chapter, I develop an ethics of ghosting that does not overstate the harms involved while provided with well-defined individual duties with respect to ghosting. I start by defining ghosting as the unilateral ending of interaction without an explicit communication that the interaction is to end. Then, I give an account of why ghosting is wrongful in the case of committed relationships: because it deliberately worsens constitutional vulnerabilities concerning people's sense of meaningfulness. In the context of online dating, users are also constitutionally vulnerable, albeit on different grounds: with regards to their hopes and with regards to their status as social beings. I argue that users have a positive duty to an active exit when they foreseeably contribute to vulnerability, and a negative duty with respect to the essentially aggregative harms which constitutionally arise in dating apps. In this way, I conclude that users of dating apps must refrain from ghosting not only when they directly contribute to vulnerability, but also when a user is a likely victim of frequent interactional harm. In other cases, users are bound by a duty to collectively work towards more ethical dating apps, which should remove mechanisms conducive to ghosting.

Oppression, marginalization, and other forms of disadvantage often come with emotional burdens, such as feelings of insecurity or stress. At the same time, some features of oppression are emotional in nature—for example, the dismissal of anger from victims of racial or gender injustice. The concept of affective injustice aims to capture the distinctively emotional wrongs that contribute to, or themselves constitute, unfair disadvantage. This article offers a critical overview of the existing literature on affective injustice, understood as the unjust interference with people’s affective lives.

When travelling to a new city, we acquire knowledge about its physical terrain, directions, historical facts and aesthetic features. Engaging in tourism practices, such as guided walking tours, provides experiences of a city that are necessarily mediated and partial. This has led scholars in tourism studies, and more recently in philosophy, to question the epistemological value of city tours, critiquingthem as passive, lacking in autonomous agency, and providing misrepresentative experiences of the city. In response, we argue that the mediated and partial knowledge of a city acquired through city tours is not epistemologically disvaluable. Although city tours involve the transmission of testimonial knowledge, this does not necessarily render tourists as passive and non-autonomous. Instead,tourists have the potential to participate in the generation of their knowledge actively. Moreover, we argue that city tours also provide a tourist with valuable ‘objectual’ knowledge of a city, whichhas the potential to be first-personal and active, and does not necessarily misrepresent the city’s identity. This type of knowledge is valuable both for tourists as credible epistemic agents, and for the city itself, as the knowledge generated by the tour can facilitate an accurate representation of the city and promote social transformation. We conclude by highlighting four further epistemic and ethical implications of our argument.

The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one’s relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it puzzling how we should understand claims about continued relationships with them. In this article, we resolve this tension by highlighting two fundamental aspects of paradigmatic loving relationships that can, and often do, continue in an adapted form following bereavement: love and mutual shaping of interests, choices, and self-concepts. Attention to these continuing features of relationships helps to capture and clarify the phenomenological and behavioral features of continuing bonds. However, love and mutual shaping must also change in important ways following bereavement. Love becomes unreciprocated, and although the dead continue to shape our interests, choices, and self-concepts, we predominantly shape their legacies and memories in return. These changes place important constraints upon the nature of our interpersonal connections with the dead.