William Tuckwell

An increasing range of everyday behaviours, like offering land acknowledgements or adding pronouns to email signatures, are considered political. We argue that this is misguided. Political action aims at achieving change, yet many of these everyday behaviours have no plausible connection to change. In this paper we oppose conceptual inflation and seek to restore a narrower and more useful conception of political action. We assess five candidate accounts and defend the view that an action is political only when it is itself causally efficacious, or, when it is part of an institutionally-scaffolded joint action that is causally efficacious.

The central claim of standpoint theory is the epistemic advantage thesis: that the oppressed are epistemically advantaged with respect to the workings of oppression (e.g., Narayan 1988; Toole 2018; Dror 2022). This is taken to support a further claim, its methodological imperative: that inquiry into the workings of oppression should start from the lives of the oppressed (e.g., Harding 1992; Fricker 1999; Bright 2018). This methodological imperative is straightforwardly zetetic, in that it bears on how we should conduct inquiry. There are, however, different ways of understanding the epistemic advantage thesis—differing in the nature and extent of the oppressed’s epistemic advantage, and in the mechanisms that produce and maintain it. In this paper, we canvas different arguments for epistemic advantage, assess their plausibility, and trace their implications for inquiry into oppression—particularly for how we should prioritize questions about oppression on our research agendas, and for how we should actively investigate a specific question about oppression.

Calls to amplify marginalized voices are common. In this paper, we examine these calls by paying close attention to how the structure of online environments shape practices of amplification, and what this means for political communication and digital activism. We develop a conceptual and normative framework for understanding amplification as a technologically mediated practice of digital activism by answering three questions. Firstly, what is amplification, in the sense that features in calls to amplify marginalized voices? Second, what is at stake in amplifying well or badly? Third, how should those to whom calls to amplify are addressed respond? In answering the first question, we develop an account of amplification by exploiting an analogy with the amplification of sound in acoustics. In answering the second question, we identify several benefits of amplifying well and costs of amplifying badly. In answering the third question, we identify several heuristics that can be employed to increase the chances of achieving the benefits of successful amplification and reduce the chances of unsuccessful amplification.

In a recent paper, Sparrow and Flenady (AI Soc 40:5285–5296, 2025) argue that the use of GenAI in tertiary education should be resisted. Sparrow and Flenady give many reasons for such resistance, but they say that ‘[t]he most important reason to resist the use of AI in universities is that its outputs are fundamentally bullshit…’. In this paper, we take issue with this claim. We argue that (a) GenAI cannot bullshit, and (b) bullshit is often compatible with the goals of tertiary education. The upshot is that we need to look at other considerations besides whether the outputs of GenAI are bullshit to determine whether and how to integrate GenAI into university education.

This paper is about the workplace surveillance of a particular class of employees: professionals. Professionals have professional obligations. We identify four different ways in which employers' use of workplace surveillance can make it difficult for professionals to fulfil professional obligations. We argue that when employers proceed in these ways they violate the principle of unhindered professionalism, which states that employers ought not to significantly hinder the ability of their professional employees to fulfil professional obligations. We finish up by identifying several constraints on morally permissible uses of workplace surveillance of professionals that follow from the principle of unhindered professionalism.

Conversational contextualists claim that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims depend upon the dynamics of the conversation in which the knowledge claim is made. However, they have failed to appreciate the ways in which conversational dynamics are influenced by unjust distributions of power. What would the implications be for conversational contextualism if its proponents were not guilty of this oversight? I ask this question for Blome-Tillmann’s presuppositional epistemic contextualism (PEC), perhaps the most sophisticated form of conversational contextualism. The investigation turns up a host of counterintuitive implications of PEC that count against it. I suggest placing moral constraints on conversational dynamics as a way of revising PEC in order to avoid the identified counterintuitive implications.

This paper explores the implications of Zeynep Tufekci’s capacities approach to social movements, which explains the strength of social movements in terms of their capacities. Tufekci emphasises that the capacities of contemporary social movements largely depend upon their uses of new digital technologies, and of social media in particular. We show that Tufekci’s approach has important implications for the structure of social movements, whether and what obligations they can have, and for how these obligations distribute to their members. In exploring these implications, we develop a tripartite taxonomy of social movements. Each type of social movement in the taxonomy corresponds to a different type of group: social campaigns, social struggles, and social agitations. We show that all three types of social movement can bear obligations in virtue of their capacities. Finally, we argue that a surprising upshot of the obligations of social movements is that members of oppressed groups can have obligations to resist their own oppression in virtue of being members of social movements.

For all the recent talk of people failing or succeeding as allies to oppressed groups, a well worked out philosophical theory of what it is for someone to be an ally is conspicuously absent. This makes it difficult to evaluate the claims of people failing or succeeding as allies, and consequently diminishes the concept’s usefulness to disadvantaged groups by making it difficult to identify who will genuinely help to further their interests. We aim to rectify this absence by answering the following question: what is an ally? On the view that we develop, allyship is a regrettably hierarchical relationship that holds between a privileged individual and an oppressed group, and is formed through a series of actions taken by the privileged individual in a bid to contribute towards bringing that hierarchy to an end.

ABSTRACT Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that virtue signalling – saying things in order to improve or protect your moral reputation – has a range of bad consequences and that as such there is a strong moral presumption against engaging in it. I argue that virtue signalling also has a range of good consequences, and that as such there is no default presumption either for or against engaging in it. Following from this, I argue that given that virtue signalling is sometimes bad and sometimes good, we should avoid virtue signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be bad, and we should press on with signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be good. For the most part, I focus on three good consequences that are related to trusting dispositions: signalling trustworthiness, avoiding distrust, and scaffolding self-trust. I also highlight some additional positive consequences that are unrelated to trust.

The main aim of this article is to use the resources of relevant-alternatives contextualism to provide an account of an unrecognized form of epistemic injustice that I call irrelevance-injustice. Irrelevance-injustice occurs either when a speaker raises an alternative that is not taken seriously when it should be, or when a speaker raises an alternative that is taken seriously when it should not be. Irrelevance-injustice influences what alternatives are perceived to be relevant and patterns of knowledge ascriptions in ways that are unfair. Asymmetries in whose alternatives are taken seriously affect how many alternatives members of different groups must rule out prior to being ascribed knowledge. Because knowledge ascriptions have socially valuable functions, asymmetries in whose alternatives are taken seriously mean asymmetries in who gets to do socially valuable things with knowledge ascriptions.

Keith DeRose defends contextualism: the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions vary with the context of the ascriber. Mark Richard has criticised contextualism for being unable to vindicate intuitions about disagreement. To account for these intuitions, DeRose has proposed truth-conditions for “knows” called the Gap view. According to this view, knowledge ascriptions are true iff the epistemic standards of each conversational participant are met, false iff each participant's standards aren't met, and truth-valueless otherwise. An implication of the Gap view is that people with divergent standards can enter conversations and thereby render knowledge claims gappy. We characterise this as a form of trolling. We argue that trolling results in unacceptably counterintuitive implications and that this constitutes a reductio against the Gap view. We also briefly explore the implications of trolling for other contextualist views about “knows,” as well as a broader class of context sensitive expressions.

In this chapter we explain what the no-difference challenge is, focusing in particular on act consequentialism. We talk about how different theories of causation affect the no-difference challenge; how the challenge shows up in real-world cases including voting, global labour injustice, global poverty, and climate change; and we work through a number of the solutions to the challenge that have been offered, arguing that many fail to actually meet it. We defend and extend one solution that does, and present a further solution of our own.