My aim in this paper is to reframe, by appeal to specificity, just what we are talking about when we talk of children as public goods: the possibility of some future option set size. This framing highlights a distinction between (a) that which parents produce via their children and (b) that which children produce, which is a distinction critical to any account of justice in which responsibility plays a role. This framing also highlights a crucial truth about liberal theories of justice (or perhaps any theory in which option sets play a role): if a theory remains indifferent about the size of future option sets, that theory has no resources to say parents produce anything of either value or disvalue. What this all entails is vital to any argument about ‘how much’ compensation parents ought to receive (or even, in reverse, non-parents ought to receive) for having and raising children: only when we know the target option set size or range of option set sizes that are permissible within a theory of justice can we derive ‘how much’ compensation is owed.
Peace is a nebulous concept in political discourse. The Global Peace Index offers a solution by providing an empirically led measurement of peace informed by Johan Galtung’s (1930-2024) typology of violence. This typology is structured around personal and structural violence. The paper presents that this expansion of the concept of violence is philosophically unwarranted and leads to conceptual inflation that undermines clarity in both normative and empirical contexts. Specifically, I argue that violence should be restricted to personal violence, where so-called structural violence does not meet the conceptual criteria for violence. This claim shall be substantiated through a critical evaluation of the Global Peace Index, exploring the philosophical concepts behind violence such as intent and moral luck. I offer the view that the structures supporting violence ought to be deinstitutionalised, while critiquing the coherence of treating such societal structures as instances of violence themselves. Narrowing the scope of the typology of violence preserves the moral urgency of addressing structural influence without distorting the concept of violence. This view accommodates empirical tools for assessing peacefulness like the Global Peace Index, while also drawing stricter epistemological boundaries around how we can measure peace.
Thinkers in the political extremism literature, most notably Steve Clarke (2019), David Coady (2024), and Morgan Luck (2025), have recently argued there is nothing wrong with extremism qua extremism. I advance two connected lines of argument against this view. First, that these arguments rely on a fundamentally flawed conceptualisation of extremism that conflates it with the concept of extremeness. The concepts of extremism and extremeness can be separated at the semantic, personal, and ideological level, and insisting on their connection generates deeply counterintuitive extremism-categorisations. Second, I put forth a necessary feature of extremism that can ground the wrongness of extremism qua extremism. I call this feature (Morally) Unjustified Political Violence (UPV): extremist ideologies and their believers- extremists- consider successful purported moral justifications for political violence which actually fail. After clarifying political violence and the nature of the justification-failure, I argue that UPV is extensionally adequate and identifies wrongs with extremism qua extremism.
This paper develops a conception of gaslighting that is absent from popular accounts in the literature, namely, political gaslighting. This conception explains an epistemic injustice inflicted upon an audience by a politician, focusing on value assessments. I will argue that gaslighting is an apt description of the political manipulation that tactfully undermines an audience's epistemic self-trust, in the face of arguments that such manipulation could be explained through other already developed notions, like bald-faced lying or brainwashing. I suggest that a politician’s position of power hands them the capacity to disconcert the audience by repeatedly instilling doubt into the psyches of citizens that their values are expressed in policies they support, until epistemic autonomy is diminished. Political gaslighting is increasingly popular in the post-truth era, and understanding how its effective will help clarify what resistance to gaslighting could look like.
