Login
Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees
Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
Continue reading...World Refugee Day was last week (June 20). Ideally I would have written this then, but I haven’t been as good on real-time commenting since Twitter fell apart. I still found it important to say something here, though.
I am not an expert on this issue. I wrote one article on religious repression and forced migration, but my co-author had the subject matter expertise. I’ve written a few letters in support of asylum seeker resettlement in Vermont, using my understanding of the Middle East and Afghanistan to justify asylum claims.
That being said, I’m getting to the point in my career where I want to actually do something, rather than study it. And I felt surprisingly emotional when viewing Timothy P. Schmalz’s “Angels Unaware” sculpture when I was in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The sculpture, unveiled in 2019, depicts individuals from refugee crises across history and is inspired by Hebrews 13:2, which calls for hospitality to strangers.
But again, I’m not an expert, and would rather listen to and amplify experts at this point, rather than coming up with own my own clever takes. So I wanted to draw attention to this new report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, and an accompanying op-ed in the Boston Globe.
The report contains detailed information on refugees and internally displaced people around the world, highlighting the presence of often overlooked crises. It also points to the increasing severity of this crisis.
It is lighter on solutions, although one could argue bringing awareness to these crises is important enough on its own. But other reports from the group provide more concrete steps.
So I’d just encourage Duck readers to look through this report, if they haven’t already. And I’d argue that this is an issue that touches on just about every aspect of international relations: inter- and intra-state war, political repression, religious and ethnic tensions, climate change and resource limitations, international organization and aid (in) effectiveness, etc.
It’s something we will all need to address at some point.
Libraries continue to sign Transformative Agreements while becoming increasingly convinced that they do not represent the desired transformation. Peter Barr explains why this happens.
The post Guest Post — Why Are UK Libraries Signing a Springer-Nature Deal They Don’t Seem to Like? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Over the past few months, in the lead-up to the publication of my book, I’ve used this space to share brief excerpts. Now the book is out! If you want a copy, you can order it from the University of Michigan website (or other popular book ordering places!). In case you haven’t decided whether this book would be a good addition to your library, here’s a brief overview.
I wrote Thriving as a Graduate Writer because I believe graduate students can reframe their experience of academic writing. We all know that writing is at the heart of the academic enterprise. It is both how we communicate and how we are assessed. That combination can be brutal for any writer, and it’s particularly fraught for graduate writers, who must learn disciplinary writing practices while being judged on their early efforts. Recognizing these challenges is valuable; graduate students are better off knowing that their difficulties with academic writing are entirely legitimate. This recognition, however, is only the first step. The next step must be to find ways to ameliorate those challenges.
In the book, I offer a discussion of principles, strategies, and habits that I think can help. (The table of contents can be found below, so you can see the breakdown of this material.) The principles point to a way of thinking about academic writing. Since writing takes up so much time and energy, it is worth exploring foundational ideas that can ground a writing practice: writing as thinking; writing as revision; writing as reader awareness; writing as authorial responsibility. Those principles lead into concrete strategies that can transform the experience of creating and revising an academic text. The heart of this book is the five chapters that unpack these approaches to working with text: managing structure; managing sentences; managing punctuation patterns; managing momentum; and building a revision process. The final element of the book is the consideration of writing habits. Even with a solid approach to academic writing and range of useful strategies to hand, we all still need to find ways to get writing done. Graduate writers, in particular, need exposure to writing productivity advice that is rooted in their unique experience of academic writing. This chapter provides a range of strategies to help build a consistent and sustainable writing routine: prioritizing writing; setting goals; finding community; developing writing awareness; and grounding productivity in writing expertise.
This book is a short (only 226 pages!) self-study text. You can read through the whole book—in whatever way works for you—and then use it as a reference. The manner in which you refer back to the book will depend on what you currently need to concentrate on. Most readers will benefit from returning to two chapters: Establishing a Revision Process (Chapter Eight) and Developing Sustainable Writing Habits (Chapter Nine). Those chapters are organized around charts that are distributed throughout the chapter (and that appear again at the back of the book). Since every writer has their own challenges and their own optimal writing process, I urge readers to take those charts and rework them—on an ongoing basis—to suit their needs. In addition to the charts, you will also find other resources at the end of the book: guides to using the book in a graduate writing course or graduate writing group and brief account of the blogs and books that I most recommend to graduate writers.
Overall, this book aims to inspire graduate writers to think differently about the nature of writing and then offers concrete strategies for managing both their writing and their writing routines. It was a labour of love to craft the writing advice that I offer everyday—here and in the classroom—into a more coherent and enduring form. I hope it gives you the capacity to approach this indispensable part of academic life with more confidence and more enjoyment. I look forward to hearing what you think!
Thriving as a Graduate Writer is now available from the University of Michigan Press. To order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!
rcayley
Voters outside the Alameda County Courthouse casting their ballots in the 2020 election in Oakland, Calif.
Coming off of Reclaim Open, one of the things I’m thinking about is online resources for self-teaching beginners. When we were interviewing people for the documentary, we asked people what they were glad the internet had now, in the present, that it hadn’t had in the past. And a lot of people — not everyone, but a lot — talked about how there’s a plethora of learning resources for beginners on just about any subject. Which got me thinking about the learning resources that I’ve used and the tutorials I’ve tried to follow.
There are so many things that I want to learn. I’ve got a post in the works about teaching myself to draw. About a month ago, I hit a milestone on my Duolingo streak (800 days!). I used to practice guitar, though I’ve fallen out of that habit in the past year. For a while I was experimenting with some of the beginner guides to Unity. I have an abundance of tutorials and resources on various topics bookmarked — a beginner’s guide to Ruby on Rails, Codecademy, HackerRank, etc. — which I’ve used… at some point in the past. I keep a list of topics to research that only gets longer and longer.
All this, and I still feel like a dabbler in everything. Part of it is that I’ve put aside topics for long periods of time (almost everything except Duolingo, honestly). That’s naturally led to skill atrophy and forgetting what I was doing, which means difficulty picking up where I left off. But for the one thing I have stuck with, I don’t feel like I’m getting any better — my Italian is beginner-level at best, with a poor grasp of grammar and difficulty remembering vocabulary when I need it.
So I’m thinking: what are the differences in the resources I’ve looked at? What do they require? Where do they go together, and where do they fall short?
The framework I’ve got in my head right now for self-teaching is structured vs unstructured learning resources.
Structured resources are things like Duolingo or Codecademy, a series of tutorials designed to build on each other. Unstructured resources are more like the Youtube video tutorials that exist for drawing or guitar, and their related practice tools (guitar tab websites, figure drawing photo banks).
Structured resources are designed methodically by one group in a way that emphasizes logical progress from point A to point B to point C. There’s a general focus on fundamentals first, then building up to more advanced concepts, with exercises designed to practice each new topic. The exercises are usually short and easy enough that lessons can be completed in 5-10 minutes max, to encourage making learning a routine and habitual practice. The focus is on progressing through the course.
Unstructured resources means that there’s a wide range of sources from various unconnected groups, which all specialize in different topics. Learning is self-directed, since there’s no clear path connecting everything, and there are few if any pre-built exercises (a given resource might have 2 or 3, but none of them hang together). Learners can focus their studying in their weakest areas, or specialize in the topics that most interest them, and the lack of pre-built exercises means that their learning goals shape what they’re working on — which means that there’s more intrinsic motivation to learn, since they’re tailoring their practice to their own interests. The most common advice I hear for people who want to learn guitar is “Pick a song you like, and learn to play it.” There’s simplified versions of just about every song out there so beginners can learn the most basic version, and once they have that, they can try something more advanced. It’s learning by doing.
With structured learning, there’s issues of pacing, attention span and motivation. Short, easy lessons are designed to keep attention and build routine, so you can do a little bit every day, but if you do only a little bit every day it might feel like you’re taking months or years to get anywhere. That damages motivation, which is doubly bad because you’re working towards proficiency but not a specific intrinsic goal; that makes it extra-hard to measure progress.
Curated and designed exercises may also not be right for all learners, or self-structured online learning may create certain pitfalls. For example, one major issue I have with Duolingo is that because of the way its lessons are structured, there’s no way to have exercises strengthening true composition (written or spoken). There’s options for translating back and forth between your native language and your target language, but there’s nothing along the lines of “Write a paragraph about your favorite book” or “Talk about your most recent vacation”. That’s a major barrier to fluency, since being able to read and listen in your target language is only one half of communication, and it’s the less challenging half.
With unstructured learning, though, you still get pacing, attention span and motivation issues. This time the issue is that it’s hard to know how much time to spend on certain topics, and where to start or how to build on them. Dumping time into something while feeling like you’re stumbling in the dark trying to figure out what you need to do next is a sure way to damage motivation, which can in turn make your attention focus elsewhere.
Exercises for unstructured learning can also feel repetitive, since your resources only give you a few. Everyone says the way to get good at drawing is to practice figure drawing, which is true — I have definitely improved as a result — but I don’t know how to vary it up to keep learning fresh or which details to pay attention to in order to practice most effectively. And if it’s not repetitive, it’s chaotic — everyone has an opinion, and everyone disagrees. Who do you listen to, and how do you cut through the noise and really decide how to spend your time?
This is a long way of saying: I’ve never learned to teach, and I don’t know how to learn to learn. Because self-structured learning is way different than learning in a classroom, or in a group, or with a mentor. There’s no external framework to keep you accountable, or to provide feedback, or to provide any of the other benefits that come with a learning community.
When it comes to self-directed learning, there’s so many principles I keep hearing about — resilience, goal-setting, failing forward, varying your practice, etc. — but all the resources I’ve found assume learners are coming to them with those principles already well-developed, and that all that’s left is the skill-building section.
Which makes sense! Teaching your learners how to self-teach before teaching them what they actually came to learn, is an absurd thing to ask. But for pretty much everything I learned in school, I learned from other people; I almost never got practice teaching myself.
So there’s a lot of beginner-friendly resources out there. And they’re great for if you have one or two specific things you need to learn. But for people starting in total ignorance who want to work their way up to overarching mastery, how beginner-friendly are they really?
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
Written by Muriel Leuenberger
The more philosophers I have come to know, the more I realize how deeply personal philosophy is. Philosophical positions often emerge from personal experience and character – even the seemingly most technical, detached, and abstract ones. As Iris Murdoch wrote: “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.” Philosophy is an expression of how one sees the world, a clarification, development, and defense of “an outlook that defines who someone is” to add the words of Kieran Setiya.
This personal dimension of philosophy becomes evident in the new philosophical positions and topics that emerge when people with different personal experiences and points of view start to do philosophy. The most prominent example is how women in philosophy, particularly in the last 50 years, have contributed new perspectives – a brush of fresh air in old, stuffy rooms. Philosophy’s allegedly objective view from nowhere was rather the view from a particularly male perspective. Care ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of pregnancy are just some areas where the inclusion of women in philosophy with their own outlook and priorities has advanced the discipline.[i]
The relational turn that can be observed in the philosophy of identity can be seen as a recent addition to this list. Relational identity is the idea that who you are is not just defined by your own properties and characteristics but also by how others define you. Others define us through concepts and norms we acquire in a social context that shape how we see ourselves and the world, they define us through our relations with them as friends, siblings, or members of an ethnic group or a book club, and they have the power to constrain our scope of action or provide opportunities. The latter can be a particularly incisive way of being defined by others. For example, by banning women in Afghanistan from universities the Taliban is defining who they can be. They can no longer become a doctor who dedicates their life to and finds meaning in caring for their patients. Insofar as we are defined by our actions, we can be defined by others who exercise control over what we can do in our lives.
Philosophy has typically been pursued by people whose life was in some sense open to them. They had a range of opportunities – doing philosophy was one of them – and did not face strongly limiting constraints and expectations, as in the example of an Afghan woman today. Academia and with it philosophy have become more accessible in many parts of the world. This means that more people are doing philosophy who either experienced more limiting constraints posed by others or who are aware that only very recent changes or the fact that they are born in a certain country spared them from a life of far-reaching constraints. People who have experienced or can readily empathize with how others can define one’s identity have entered the debate on identity. This development makes the emergence and rising popularity of relational identity views comprehensible.
I want to highlight a further, related reason for how the personal dimension of philosophy creates new trends besides the commonly mentioned shift in who is doing philosophy. The growing literature on philosophy concerned with topics and positions relevant to and based on the experience of a more diverse range of people can also be traced back to a diversification in whose testimony is being heard and taken seriously. As Miranda Fricker argued, marginalized groups are often faced with testimonial injustice – their testimonies are considered less credible due to prejudices related to their identity. For most of the history of philosophy, testimonies of experiences and viewpoints of women, non-western, non-binary, and non-white people were not heard, not taken as seriously or relevant, and not readily accessible. Globalization, digitalization, and a cultural shift towards more openness and equality are gradually changing this (although we still have a long way to go). The increased accessibility and ascribed credibility of testimonies of diverse experiences can inspire new topics and positions in philosophers who do not share those experiences but have come to learn about and empathize with them.
Philosophy clearly profits from taking other perspectives into account. We can get a richer picture of reality, a broader understanding of the moral landscape, raise interesting metaphysical questions, and new philosophical positions can come into sight that challenge established old doctrines. The deeply personal character of philosophy makes the inclusion of and attention to different voices all the more pressing.
[i] Vintiadis, Elly (2021, August). The view from her. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-something-special-about-the-way-women-do-philosophy
A warming world is going to need a lot of cold drinks. Problem is, today’s refrigeration tech is anything but climate friendly.
The way we cool our food and drinks has barely changed in a century and the technology is still reliant on environmentally harmful refrigerants. Now, a German startup thinks it can freeze those refrigerants out of the market using little more than magnets and water while consuming up to 40% less energy.
Magnotherm has been refining its technology, known as magnetocaloric refrigeration, since it was spun out of TU Darmstadt in 2019. Though it’s only a seed-stage company, the startup has already shipped five display coolers to beverage giant Coca-Cola, TechCrunch+ has learned, and it’s on track to build another 55 that will be rented out for events.
But beverage coolers are just the tech demo: “We are really building a bigger box for supermarket cooling cabinets,” co-CEO Timur Sirman said. “This is where we can actually reduce energy costs and maintenance costs significantly.” The global market for commercial refrigeration is worth $37 billion, according to Grand View Research.
To capitalize on the opportunity, Magnotherm is announcing a seed round today. In an exclusive with TechCrunch+, Sirman said the company was shooting for €5 million, “and now, we’re actually oversubscribed.” Investor interest was so great that they’re closing the round with €6.3 million.
Extantia Capital led the round, with Hessen Kapital, Lauda Dr. R. WOBSER Beteiligungs-GmbH and Revent joining. Four investors from the Better Ventures Angel Club also participated.
The technology Magnotherm hopes to dethrone is broadly used and deeply entrenched. It’s not as efficient as it could be, but more troubling are the substances it uses to keep things cool. The refrigerator sitting in your kitchen gets its chill from the physical properties of its refrigerants, the gases that loop through the cooling system.
None of these refrigerants come without tradeoffs. First generation refrigerants — freon and its ilk — chewed a hole in the ozone layer. Newer ones are more ozone-friendly, but they are powerful greenhouse gases, warming the Earth hundreds to thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
Countries are working to phase out their use, but finding replacements hasn’t been easy. One frontrunner, propane, is flammable, and regulators have hesitated to greenlight its use in larger refrigerators in case of leaks. Carbon dioxide is another contender, but it only works as a refrigerant under very high pressures, which makes the whole system more expensive.
Magnets and water net Magnotherm $6.9M seed round to kill hazardous refrigerants by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
This essay was the overall winner in the Undergraduate Category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student, Lukas Joosten
Most parents think they are helping their children when they give them a very high standard of life. This essay argues that giving luxuries to your children can, in fact, be morally impermissible. The core of my argument is that when parents give their children a luxurious standard of life, they foist an expectation for a higher standard of living upon their children, reducing their lifetime wellbeing if they cannot afford this standard in adulthood.
I argue for this conclusion in four steps. Firstly, I discuss how one can harm someone by changing their preferences. Secondly, I develop a model for the general permissibility of gift giving in the context of adaptive preferences. Thirdly, I apply this to the case of parental giving, arguing it is uniquely problematic. Lastly, I respond to a series of objections to the main argument.
I call the practice in question, luxury parenting. Luxury parenting consists of providing certain luxuries to your child which go beyond a reasonably good standard of living. I will consider this through a framework of gift giving, since luxury parenting can be understood as the continual gifting of certain luxuries to children. While my argument also applies to singular gifts of luxury to children, it is targeted at the continual provision of luxury goods and services to ensure a high standard of living throughout childhood.
Section 1: Preference Screwing
When we discuss harming one’s wellbeing, we are usually referring to taking some action which changes the actor’s situation so that they are further from their preferences. However, a person’s wellbeing can be harmed in the opposite way as well, by changing their preferences away from their situation. Consider the following example.
Wine pill: Bob secretly administers a pill to Will which changes his preferences so that he no longer enjoys cheap wine.
Will has been harmed here in some morally significant way without having received any immediate disbenefit. The harm consists in the effect on future preferences. We can call this type of harming “preference screwing”.
Preference Screwing: Making it more difficult for an actor to achieve a certain level of utility by changing the actor’s preferences so that there is a larger divergence between the preference set and the actor’s option set.
Section 2: Adaptive Preferences and Gift-giving
The theory of adaptive preferences tells us that people tend to return to their baseline happiness after positive or negative shocks to their wellbeing because people’s preferences adapt to their current situation. I argue this process of preference adaptation implies that some instances of gift-giving are impermissible, because consuming a high-quality gift, screws with the preferences of the recipient, so that they derive lower utility from future consumption of lower-quality variants of the good they were gifted.
There exists a vast literature debating the accuracy of adaptive preferences.[1] However, my argument only requires a weak restricted form of adaptive preferences. Namely it simply says that there is some negative impact of consuming expensive goods on the enjoyment of future cheap goods. That such an impact exists is generally empirically supported, even if the strength of the impact is debatable.[2]
It might be objected that if preferences are adaptive, then gift-giving has no long-term harm since, upon returning to the lower-quality good, preferences will adapt downward immediately. There are two independent reasons why this is not a problem for my argument.
Firstly, I don’t assume (and the empirics don’t support) complete adaption, only partial adaptation. This means that once the preferences of an actor have (partially) adapted up after consuming the higher-quality good, then if the actor returns to the lower-quality good, their preferences will adapt down but not completely, so there remains a long-lasting upwards pressure on their preferences.
Secondly, as discussed in section 3, since childhood is a formative life-phase, preferences adapt more quickly and more permanently for children. Luxury parenting thus fixes children’s preferences at a high point, which will take much longer to adapt back down in adulthood.
This allows us to develop a model of gift giving. When A gifts X to B, B’s lifetime wellbeing is affected in two ways. Firstly, there is the immediate positive (or negative if a particularly poor gift) utility derived by B’s consumption of X. Call this the immediate utility. Secondly there is the long-term impact of the gift’s preference screwing. The preference screwing effect is the total harm to the lifetime wellbeing of B incurred by B as a result of the preference screwing caused by consuming X. This allows us to state the following:
Net wellbeing impact of gift giving = immediate utility – preference screwing effect
Now, consider that preference screwing through gift-giving is usually not considered a form of wronging. Consider the following example:
Wine gift: Bob gifts a bottle of Château Latour to Will for his birthday. After thoroughly enjoying the wine, Will no longer enjoys cheap wines as much
In wine gift, we would not say that Bob has wronged Will. There are two distinctions between wine gift and wine pill which explain why gift giving to adults is generally permissible.
Firstly, wine gift is not necessarily a net negative for Will’s lifetime utility. The spike in utility of drinking the gifted bottle may outweigh the loss in utility from the future discounted happiness of drinking cheap wines. In wine pill, there is only a negative impact on Will’s utility (ignoring the health effects).
Secondly, and crucially, Will consents into receiving the gift. Generally, we think that a person’s potential complaint versus a particular action is much weaker when they consented into that action being conducted upon them.
This allows us to say that the permissibility of gift given is a function of the following two parameters:
The weight given to each is going to vary with one’s background intuitions on paternalism. Anti-paternalists might thus completely disregard the first parameter, arguing that given sufficient consent, gift-giving is always permissible. My argument is inclusive to a broad pluralism on this matter, since it avoids the 2nd parameter altogether, as discussed in section 3.
Section 3: Giving Children Luxuries
By evaluating luxury parenting on the two parameters, I argue that many instances of practice are impermissible.
Firstly, consider level of consent. Children are usually thought to lack the required capacities for autonomous decision making, such as critical thinking, time-relative agency (ownership of future interests) and independence[3]. This means that children, generally, cannot consent into receiving luxuries from their parents.
As such, we must adapt the model of consent for children. Brighouse suggests that the autonomy rights of children express themselves as fiduciary duties upon parents.[4] Parents thus have the authority to make decisions for their children, but this authority is limited by the duty to act in the child’s best interest. This means that both parents can permissibly give gifts to children, but only when those gifts appear to be in the best interest of the child. Assume now that, ceteris paribus, the non-welfare interests of children are unaffected in cases of gift giving. Given this assumption, we can say that the permissibility of child gift giving boils down to the expected net impact.
Luxury parenting is thus usually impermissible since it is particularly likely to lead to a negative expected net impact. This is because the preference screwing effect is likely to be strong, while the immediate benefit is small. Children are particularly vulnerable to preference screwing from luxury parenting for four reasons.
Firstly, childhood is an especially formative stage in life. Due to the ongoing development of the brain, the patterns children learn are going to be extra lasting. [5] This means that if preferences are formed to expect a high standard of living, these preferences are going to be especially sticky. If the child’s standard of living drops upon reaching adulthood, those preferences will likely adapt down less quickly and won’t adapt down completely.
Secondly, when children experience certain goods, they often experience them for the first time. If the first time they experience a particular good or service, they are experiencing an expensive variant of that good, they are likely to calibrate their future expectation on this expensive good, because they have no cheaper variants to compare it to.
Thirdly, children generally will have a lesser appreciation of the uniqueness or scarcity of the goods they experience at a high standard of living. In wine gift, Will is acutely aware that his drinking of Château Latour is a unique and temporary experience. This awareness can deter the preference adaptation. However, children are less likely to be aware of the fleeting nature of the standard of living and so are not protected from preference adaption in this way.
Lastly, the effect is going to be especially strong because the luxury gifts are provided for an extended period of time. If parents provide a luxurious standard of living for multiple years, that gives a very long time for the child’s preferences to be pushed upwards and solidify there.
On the flip side, the immediate utility effect is going to be smaller for children. The satisfaction people receive from luxuries often goes beyond the direct experiential joy of the good or service. There is also the novelty of the experience, the secondary reflective happiness from knowing that you are consuming something special. Children are much less likely to appreciate the novelty of the experience since they are likely, as argued above, to be less aware of the uniqueness of the experience.
In sum, luxury parenting has strongly negative preferencing screwing effects while it offers a limited positive immediate utility. In turn, luxury parenting is likely to have a negative expected net impact on children, meaning that luxury parenting is often impermissible.
Section 4: Objections
Objection 1: Symmetry Implications
If it is impermissible to give a luxurious standard of life to children, this could imply that it is morally required to give a miserable existence to children instead. If childhood suffering will push preferences down such that children will be happier in the long run, this may be better for the child. This implication would be so clearly unacceptable that it would condemn the whole argument. However, the implications of the model are asymmetrical. This is because children are generally thought to have significant rights, which ought to be respected. They have rights against being physically harmed and to a reasonable standard of living. Parents cannot impose suffering on their children even if it is a net-positive on lifetime wellbeing because this would violate these rights protections.
On the flipside, parents can permissibly withdraw these luxury goods, since children generally are not thought to have a right to luxury living.
Objection 2: Shared Time
One might argue that luxury parenting is permissible because it is necessary for parents to give themselves a high quality of life. Parents are generally thought to be under an obligation to spend quality time with their children because a healthy parental relationship is crucial for the child’s development. This is problematic since many opportunities for quality time are also opportunities for parents to spend money on themselves, such as restaurants, vacations, or entertainment. So, if we think parents should be permitted to spend money on themselves, this could make luxury parenting permissible. There are three responses to this objection.
Firstly, there are still many ways parents can spend on themselves without spending on their children. Parents can spend money on activities without their children or they can spend money on themselves while shielding their children from the same luxury expenditure, for instance by ordering a lobster for yourself and the pasta for your child.
Secondly, the magnitude of this sacrifice, being unable to spend on oneself, directly correlates with the level of wealth parents have. This makes the sacrifice a less significant problem because the wealth of parents reduces the required sacrifice of parenting significantly in other contexts. Wealthy parents can afford babysitters, summer camps, and meal boxes. This means that the sacrifice of giving up luxury is balanced out by the diminished sacrifice in other facets of parenting.
Thirdly, parents are routinely asked to make sacrifices for their children in determining how they spend their time. They can only watch child-friendly movies, avoid bars, and go to child-friendly holiday destinations. It’s unclear, for instance, how giving up luxury is materially different from forcing parents to go on vacation to Disneyland.
In sum, a parent’s interest in treating themselves is insufficient for making luxury parenting permissible.
Works Cited:
Bagenstos, Samuel R., and Margo Schlanger. ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’. Vanderbilt Law Review 60, no. 3 (2007): 745–98.
Brighouse, Harry. ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’, 1 January 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0003.
Coleman, Joe. ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’. In The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by David Archard and Colin M. Macleod, 0. Oxford University Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0009.
Russell, Simon J., Karen Hughes, and Mark A. Bellis. ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’. BMJ Open 6, no. 1 (1 January 2016): e007770. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-007770.
[1] Bagenstos and Schlanger, ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’.
[2] Bagenstos and Schlanger.
[3] Coleman, ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’.
[4] Brighouse, ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’.
[5] Russell, Hughes, and Bellis, ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’.
In a post about work-life balance at Crooked Timber, Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht) writes: “it would help if we would all agree that we should do our fair share of the slack & service work, and what that would entail”.
The idea is that demands of disciplinary service work (refereeing papers, writing tenure and promotion assessments, serving on PhD-examination committees, assessing grant proposals, etc.) will be reduced if each of us contributed adequately. But how much is that?
Dr. Robeyns proposes the following heuristic: “Reciprocity + 1”.
She writes:
I think the only way to reduce workloads is that we all commit to the rule of “reciprocity + 1”. This means, you do as much of this work as you demand from the system (= our colleagues!), plus you add a little bit extra to what you do in order to give the system some oxygen. Many of these types of peer-assessment are generally not done by (very) junior scholars, yet junior scholars also take part in this system. Many PhD candidates submit papers to journals, yet many of them do not yet have the expertise to review papers themselves. So in order to add oil to these machineries, I think we need to be willing to review [the number of referee reports we have received as well as one for the editor’s work + 1 for each paper we submitted in order to add oxygen/oil to the system]. If you submit a paper and receive 2 reports, you should be willing to contribute 4 referee reports to the system. I am pretty sure most of us can (roughly) reconstruct such an overview/balance sheet for ourselves and then keep track towards the future. If you’ve received more from the system than what you’ve given, you have a strong reason not to decline when asked to review; when you’ve given more than what you’ve asked according to the “reciprocity +1” rule, you can decline without feeling guilty. This should be a norm we impose on ourselves, since otherwise we add to the workload of others by not doing our fair share (and to the workload of the editors who have to work endlessly to find reviewers). If we would all accept this rule, and stick to it, it should also reduce the turn-over time for journal submissions, which is another bonus effect.
Clearly, this might have as an effect that some people will discover that they should review more and will have less time to write papers; but that would be fine, since first of all one might think that there are already too many papers published, and secondly, these extra-papers would otherwise be written by freeriding on the work of others—and hence on taking from their leisure and family time.
Dr. Robeyns is aware that norms for individual decision-making are only part of a comprehensive approach to addressing work-life balance, and in her post takes up some institutional proposals, too. You can read the whole post here.
As for “Reciprocity + 1”: what do you think? Will it help? Is this your norm? Is there a better alternative? Discussion welcome.
In a democracy one might, naively, imagine that political deliberation would involve the presentation of the arguments that people think bear on the question at hand. That is, if someone is in favour of a policy they would present the arguments that they believe support it and if someone is against it they they would do the opposite. One of the surreal aspects of British parliamentary debate on refugees and asylum is that neither the government nor the opposition do anything of the kind, and nor, for that matter do the media do much to improve things.
Consider, that everybody knows that Rishi Sunak’s harsh denial of the right to claim asylum of those who arrive “illegally” is motivated by the fact that the base of the Tory party and a sizeable chunk of “red wall” voters are strongly anti-immigration and that Tory strategists are concerned about the “small boats” issue, both because they are worried that a lack of border control gives off a sign of incompetence and because they want to expose Labour as “weak” on “illegal immigration”. In the Tory press, refugees and asylum seekers are constantly demonized as freeloaders, economic migrants, and young male invaders who pose a threat both of sexual predation and terrorism. (The European far-right, including Italy’s Salvini, France’s Zemmour, and the German AfD, in praising the British policy, do so explicitly as keeping the brown hordes at bay.) Labour, on the other hand, while they have a poor record of support for refugee rights, at least stand for maintaining the current human rights framework and upholding the right to claim asylum as set out in the 1951 Convention.
So far, however, in Parliamentary discussion of the issue, the Tories have posed as the real humanitarians, concerned about the most vulnerable and desperate to stop people from undertaking dangerous journeys. Labour, on the other hand, have said little about the basic immorality of the policy and have focused on the claim that the proposed law will be ineffective and that the boats will still come. Neither Sunak nor Starmer stand up and articulate the real reasons why one proposes and the other opposes the law. In Sunak’s case one imagines the primary motivation for this conduct is a debating tactic; in Starmer’s a concern that a proper defence of human rights and the refugee framework would be electorally costly.
Somewhat paradoxically, then, it is in the unelected chamber, the House of Lords, where we are most likely to see a proper debate that approximates the democratic ideal, as the Lords, not facing election, are free to articulate the reasons they think most relevant to the policy. We can be sure, for example, that Lord Dubs,someone who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport, will say all the things that Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper are too cowardly to.
Meanwhile the press and broadcast media do worse than nothing to explain to the democratic public what the issues are, who the refugees and asylum seekers are, what is the relevant international humanitarian law, what is the history of refugee protection, and so on. Rather, the “small boats” issue is presented as an immediate crisis that needs urgent resolution lest the asylum system and indeed the entire country be “overwhelmed”. Rare indeed is the press report that informs the public that “illegal entry” without penalty is explitly provided for in the 1951 Convention. Those who clamour most loudly for the “people” to decide on migration issues are also most concerned to mislead the public about the facts: the false and insincere debate in Parliament is mirrored by a narrative where the “concerns” of a ignorant public need to be pandered to.
In the past few days, the substance of the issue has also been pushed to the background by a secondary debate about whether the impartiality of the BBC has been compromised by Gary Lineker, a former footballer and sports presenter, who compared government discourse around asylum to Germany in the 1930s. Cue a bunch of ministers invoking Jewish family members to argue about the offensive nature of a comparison between their “humanitarian” concerns and the Nazis. Yet comparisons with the 1930s are actually very much to the point, in the following sense: many Jews fleeing the Nazis were refused asylum in countries including the UK, and many travelled through “safe countries” to try to get here. Rishi Sunak is not Hitler, but Sunak’s policies, in denying the right to claim asylum on UK soil, would, if applied in the 1930s have prevented many from finding sanctuary. One of the motivations behind the postwar refugee framework has been “never again”. But it seems never does not last forever.
[Update: under government pressure, the BBC has forced Lineker to “step back” from presenting Match of the Day.]
Everything that Signature Kitchen Suite creates is a masterclass in demonstrating respect for food at every level. From performance to intelligent design to precision, the brand honors the ones who are producing and preparing it – and, of course, the lucky individuals who get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. It’s through these details and dedication that the brand stays True to food and wellness. Now, Signature Kitchen Suite has introduced the 48-inch Built-in French Door Refrigerator/Freezer, providing never-before-seen capacity and functionality – imagine the possibilities!
Ideal for large families, entertainers, and home chefs, the 48-inch French Door Refrigerator/Freezer is a true workhorse that features innovative preservation features, a sleek design, and more. A standout element is the 5-mode convertible drawer that allows you to select a temperature zone to best suit what you’re storing. Choose between Chilled Wine, Fridge/Deli, Meats/Seafood, and Cold Drinks – or drop the temperature to turn the entire unit into an extra freezer. This functionality goes a long way toward increasing food freshness and lifespan, while also making the appliance work in the way that best suits your needs and lifestyle. Dual compressors, a stunning metal interior, and engineering to minimize temperature fluctuations to +/-1° F provide further enhanced food preservation.
Signature Kitchen Suite’s latest episode of True to food with Mark Bittman features Kaitlin Guerin, owner and pastry chef at Lagniappe Bakery in New Orleans. Guerin stresses the importance of using fresh ingredients and being able to control time and temperature when in the kitchen. These are the main elements that decide how long it will take to produce different parts of her pastries – be it hours or days. As Guerin shares, the desserts she makes can only be as good as what goes into them, and high tech refrigeration like that from Signature Kitchen Suite keeps ingredients at their peak for longer. Once the various components of the desserts are created, everything is stored at different temperatures for different lengths of time using temperature zones. “These pastries are temperature controlled so they maintain their balance of flavor and texture,” Guerlin explained. What she does and how she achieves it is truly an art form, with Signature Kitchen Suite eliminating worry of freshness and helping Lagniappe Bakery achieve success.
Signature Kitchen Suite puts a lot of effort into designing and bringing to life appliances that will improve your quality of living. But beyond exceptional food preservation, what else can you do to increase well-being and eliminate stress within your kitchen? With spring on the horizon, we spoke to experts Sarah Barnard, Blair Costello, and Diana Ryu to learn some ways to easily create a joy-filled space where we look forward to spending time.
The 48-inch French Door Refrigerator/Freezer’s ample capacity is impressive, with enough space to accommodate the largest of trays and tallest of bottles. Say goodbye to contorting containers or relegating leftovers to the basement fridge – there’s space enough for it all and then some right here.
The overall design also makes it easy to see what you have in stock. Blair Costello, of Vera Iconica Architecture, designs retreat experiences, workplaces, and life experiences at home with health and holistic wellness in mind. With so many seasonal fruits and vegetables making their appearance this month, there are more options at hand than we’ve had all winter. “Being part of the [cooking] process kicks off digestion and hones your relationship with food, and with yourself.” Costello suggests stocking a diverse pantry full of whole grains and legumes – as well as spices – to help boost nutrition and give you the tools needed to change up meals rotated through on a regular basis. Fresh foods are many things, but boring is not one of their qualities.
Costello added, “Digestion begins with the eyes, so put healthier snacks (fresh fruits, fresh bread, fresh vegetables, etc.) within eyesight to encourage those habits. These small environmental nudges can have a big impact.” Costello added, “Our mind and body are truly connected. What you eat will impact your body function, mental function, and state. Invest in quality food. For me, wellness in the kitchen space revolves around the quality of the ingredients, with a big focus on locally grown produce and locally raised and pastured meats.”
The 48-inch French Door Refrigerator/Freezer also has something special for the ice lovers – you know who you are. The freezer includes a dual ice maker that gives you the option of traditional ice or slow-melting, spherical Craft Ice. If your cocktail game is strong, this is a way to take it to the next level. Relax more with your afterwork beverage or entertain with ease while enjoying this fun feature.
Putting groceries away and meal prepping just got a bit more stress-free with Signature Kitchen Suite’s exclusive Lift and Go Drawers. They make interacting with the appliance incredibly easy, with minimal effort on your part when it comes to lifting. The drawers also make regular cleaning and accidental spills easier to remedy, something we can all appreciate when it comes to unwelcome messes.
Sarah Barnard, WELL AP + LEED AP, is a leading designer of personalized, sustainable spaces that support mental, physical, and emotional well-being. When it comes to a more convenient kitchen, Barnard suggests creating a setup while spring cleaning that will help streamline daily routines and reduce moments of friction apt to build up throughout the day. This can be as simple as knowing where regularly used items are stored and keeping countertops clean for a peaceful start to cooking. Digging deeper, it might mean utilizing a pantry to its fullest capabilities or purging cabinets of their belongings to create more order. “It’s also essential to ensure that the kitchen is more than a place of utility and includes items of joy,” Barnard finds. “If listening to music is part of the cooking experience, having quality kitchen speakers will make a substantial difference in the pleasure of preparing food.”
We can also bring more wellness into our kitchens through good light and a view of nature. This doesn’t mean you need to knock down an exterior wall and install floor-to-ceiling windows – there are workarounds to make both elements a part of your cooking space. If you do have windows in your kitchen, take advantage by making sure the blinds or curtains are open and letting in fresh spring air when weather permits. And if those windows happen to face a backyard or greenspace, all the better.
Diana Ryu is the owner of Namu Home Goods. The brand strives to highlight the natural beauty of wood, sourcing gallery-quality woodwork from Korea with a Korean-American aesthetic. She recommends adding a table lamp to brighten up the room, something that we’ve been seeing more of recently in kitchens. It adds a layer of comfort and warmth that can make a difference during those lingering dark mornings of spring.
Ryu also suggests creating a relaxing ritual. “I keep an incense chamber and incense that I light every morning when I put my kettle on for tea. I like the ritual of lighting the incense, smelling the scent, and hearing the water start to boil.” Easing your way into the new day sets the tone for the rest of it, and savoring even a small moment can make for a stress-free start.
When it comes to incorporating nature, the solution may be as simple as a windowsill garden that can be utilized to add flavor and vitamins to your favorite dishes – and it’s the perfect time of year to start one. “I love growing my own produce, and having that experience extend into my kitchen space has become a significant part of the joy of cooking,” Barnard said. “I keep a small garden on my windowsill of herbs and plants I’ve started from vegetable scraps and have views of my garden from my kitchen, which helps make the gardening experience feel like an active part of my food preparation. Being conscious of where my food comes from and having that be a part of my kitchen design makes me feel more mindful and connected to what I’m cooking.” Adding a garden space in your kitchen can also nicely coexist with creating efficient systems for recycling and composting.
Costello recommends we stay away from cookware coated with Teflon or other “non-stick” coatings when enameled, cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel cookware have been proven non-toxic. “Invest in high-quality, heirloom cookware and bakeware. It will be healthiest for you (from a toxicity standpoint) and future generations will get to share in the use and experience of these items as well.” You can also choose to swap out pieces seasonally for more variety when sitting down to a weeknight dinner or entertaining on the weekend.
Many people don’t view the kitchen as a room where art belongs, but we have to disagree because it brings joy, just as Barnard mentions. “It doesn’t have to be fine art,” Ryu suggests. She suggests doing a quick spring refresh by adding “Prints, beautiful ceramic plates, cups from small artists, pretty spoons and forks – and lots of big bowls on the counter filled with fruits and vegetables. They’re attractive and also healthy.” Barnard adds that visible storage of produce may also encourage the prioritization of these foods, which is something to make a habit of.
Spring’s warmer weather is the impetus to come out of hibernation, optimize your kitchen space, and welcome life back into your home. Ryu and Barnard agree that the positive experience circles back to who you’re surrounding yourself with, with Ryu adding, “There’s nothing better for our health than a loving community.” Technology, like that used in the 48-inch French Door Refrigerator/Freezer, can help further improve upon these times spent together with its capacity and capabilities. “Increasing options in diverse refrigeration systems can be a great asset when hosting, giving guests more independence and hosts more privacy and time to socialize,” shared Barnard. Pastry chef Guerin agreed, adding “There’s always a reason to celebrate, there’s always a reason to eat good food, to be around family and friends.”
The 48-inch French Door Refrigerator/Freezer is available panel ready or with accessory stainless steel panels. Through temperature control, capacity, and flexibility, Signature Kitchen Suite’s refrigeration products can help you confidently keep your food fresh longer and improve on your time spent in the kitchen. To learn more, visit signaturekitchensuite.com.
Article tags
The UK is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, along with a number of other international instruments providing for humanitarian protection. The Convention provides that someone who is a refugee – a status that they have on the basis of their objective circumstances, having a well-founded fear of persecution on specific grounds and being outside their country of citizenship or habitual residence – must be granted certain protections by signatory countries. The most important of these is that they not be sent back to a place where they are at risk of persecution. The weakness of the Convention is that people cannot usually secure recognition as refugees by a country unless they claim asylum on its territory. Accordingly, wealthy nations seek to make it the case that those wanting protection cannot physically or legally get onto the territory to make a claim. That way, states can both vaunt their status as human rights defenders (“we support the Convention”) and nullify its effect in practice.
Today, ostensibly as a response to the “small boats” crisis, which has seen tens of thousands of people from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran arrive in the south of England after crossing the channel, the Conservative government has announced new plans to deter refugees. Those arriving will no longer be able to claim asylum in the UK, as the government will not try to find out whether they are refugees or not, they will be detained, and then they will be removed to their country of origin or to a third country (potentially breaching the non-refoulement provision of the Convention). The plan has been to send them to Rwanda, although because of legal challenges nobody has actually been sent and, anyway, Rwanda lacks the capacity. Even the plan to detain arrivals in the UK runs up against the problem that the UK lacks the accommodation to do so. In addition, people who cross in small boats are to be denied the possibility of ever settling in the UK or of securing citizenship. So as well as being a stain on the UK’s human rights record and a measure of great cruelty, the plans appear to be practically unworkable.
The government, echoed by the Labour opposition, blames “evil smuggling gangs” as the “root cause” of the small boats crisis. But, of course, the real root cause of the crisis are the measures the UK takes to evade its obligations under the Refugee Conventions, measures that make it necessary for anyone wanting to claim asylum on the territory to enter without the authorization of the UK government. People at risk of persecution, whether Iranian women protesting against the veil, or Afghan translators who worked with the British government, are not granted regular visas to hop on a flight, nor will they be able to get to the UK by road or rail. The UK has sealed these routes, making those who want to cross turn to the boats as a solution.
This has suited the UK government because it wants to weaponize asylum for domestic political reasons. The UK now has large numbers of people who have waited for years while their claims go unprocessed, all living on a pittance (around £5 a day) and, since COVID, crowded into hotels in large numbers, thereby providing a focus for local resentment and far-right campaigning, which demonizes victims of persecution as potential terrorists and sexual predators. The regularly televised arrivals of boats on the south coast also generate a sense of perma-crisis that fuels popular concern and resentment. This too has political value, unless it makes the government look weak and out of countrol, hence the latest tightening of the screw.
Of course the government and its media supporters claim that many who come are “bogus” and that “genuine refugees” would stop in the first country they passed through that was safe. But none of this survives scrutiny. The presence of people who are not refugees on boats does not detract from the rights of those who are, and the Home Office ends up accepting that most people from a range of countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea etc) are refugees. There is no obligation under the Convention for refugees just to stop and the first “safe” country, and people may have very good reasons to choose the UK as their destination, including historic links to the UK, family connections, or speaking English. Moreover, the Convention is not just about “safety” but about providing people whose citizenship has been rendered ineffective by persecution with a means to remake their lives as members of a new political community. The UK government seeks to thwart this. A shameful day.
According to Connecticut Public Radio, the Hartford Police Department recently received a grant from the Department of Justice for resources that would reduce violent crime in the city. And the city apparently plans to use those funds to purchase an enterprise version of Slack. — Read the rest
FreshRSS