Suzanne Whitten

This article explores the outcome of a Philosophy with Children (PwC)-focused pilot citizenship programme (The Critical Civility Project) on children in post-conflict Northern Ireland. A six-week study was conducted with 10 primary-level classes of children aged 8 to 11. The programme delivered to children combined PwC pedagogy with themes drawn from recent work on civility from political philosophy, where civility here is understood as a set of norms and dispositions that allow individuals (as citizens) to communicate respect for one another, particularly when engaging collaboratively and critically on matters of local and global democratic importance. Post-pilot questionnaire results from children reveal self-reported positive changes in attitudes and behaviours towards others, particularly in contexts of disagreement. While further, more rigorous testing of the benefits of the programme is needed, the study points to the potential for philosophy as an underpinning component of democratic citizenship education in the region.

A growing body of literature in feminist philosophy exposes the way in which occupying a particular group identity inhibits an affected agent’s ability to engage in communicative exchange effectively. These accounts reveal a fault in standard liberal defences of free speech, showing how, if free speech is a goal worth pursuing, then it must involve both a concern about the legitimate limits of state interference and of the effect of social norms on an agent’s communicative capacities. Building on the emergence of a ‘critical’ branch of neorepublicanism, this paper argues that such speech-related injustices are best understood as a feature of structural domination that threatens the agency of those affected. Recalibrating our understanding of free speech along critical republican lines thus secures discursive agency in our communicative exchanges in a way that both ensures democratic legitimacy and realizes equal status for all.

Defenders of academic freedom characteristically claim academics ought to be afforded freedoms not afforded those in other roles or occupations on account of the unique, knowledge-generating status of academic activity and its contribution to the public good. Challenging that claim, this paper argues instead that the capacity for all roles and occupations to benefit the public good of knowledge creation provides justification for granting all workers discretion over work performance, meaningful workplace voice, and the freedom to speak publicly, that the rights typically claimed by academics apply more generally. It advances its challenge by targeting the assumption common to many defenders of academic freedom that academic work’s exceptional nature stems from its ultimate “truth-telling function”, namely that only the academic role pursues the kind of rigorous truth-seeking activities for which worker control is necessary. In doing so, the paper aims both to cast critical light on uninterrogated assertions of academic exceptionalism and to bolster the literature on worker freedoms by offering an epistemic and public-good directed defence of worker rights to accompany defences of such rights from the perspective of justice or individual flourishing.

Reputational damage from others’ speech can profoundly shape what we can do in the world, influencing whether our words receive uptake, the opportunities available to us, and whether we can credibly contest the characterisations made of us. Yet debates about reputational rights typically frame reputation and free speech as competing individual interests, asking when reputational harm crosses a threshold sufficient to justify restricting speech. Drawing on adjacent literatures including hate speech, defamation, privacy, and epistemic injustice, such accounts also tend to treat reputation as effectively synonymous with social standing. This paper challenges both moves. First, drawing on Gloria Origgi’s social-interactionist account, I argue that reputation is conceptually distinct from standing and should be understood as the speech about us that circulates within our communities, which profoundly shapes standing without being identical to it. I then extend this view to defend a modified dignity-based conception of reputation (MDCR) that attends to both the external dimension of reputational damage (one’s standing among others) and the internal dimension (how individuals experience their perception of themselves). Reputational wrongs, on this view, are defined not by falsehood, disesteem, or identity-based hostility, but by the imposition of a social identity over which the individual has limited influence, constraining their capacity for self-authorship. Drawing on theories of relational autonomy, I then argue against the view that reputation and free speech are competing interests. Rather, they are co-constitutive relational goods, such that protecting either requires attending to the social and material conditions that sustain both.