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An unofficial guide to the disputed artefacts of the British Museum

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The past and the future of a long-embattled policy.

The terrible paradox of the civil-rights movement is that outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. Once we amended the Constitution and passed laws to protect people of color from being treated differently in ways that were harmful to them, the government had trouble enacting programs that treat people of color differently in ways that might be beneficial. We took race out of the equation only to realize that, if we truly wanted not just equality of opportunity for all Americans but equality of result, we needed to put it back in. Our name for this paradox is affirmative action.

The term was introduced to the Kennedy Administration almost sixty years ago, and its arrival was somewhat haphazard. According to Nicholas Lemann's history of meritocracy, " The Big Test," the man who suggested it was an African-American lawyer named Hobart Taylor, Jr. He was a Texan, and when John F. Kennedy was sworn in, in 1961, he dropped in on the inaugural ball for Texans in order to shake hands with the new Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson.

They chatted, and Johnson asked him to come by his office. When Taylor showed up, Johnson handed him a draft of what would become Executive Order 10925, setting up the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson was to chair. Taylor read the draft and said he thought it could use a little work; Johnson asked him to do a rewrite. And that is when Taylor inserted the words "affirmative action." He liked the phrase, he later said, because of the alliteration (or the assonance).

Taylor needed a flexible phrase because Kennedy's committee was a bureaucratic entity with a vague mandate meant to signal the Administration's commitment to fairness in employment. Its purview, like the purview of committees dating back to the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, was the awarding of federal contracts, and its mandate was to see that companies the federal government did business with did not discriminate on the basis of race. The committee had no real enforcement mechanism, though, so "affirmative action" was intended to communicate to firms that needed to integrate their workforce something like "Don't just stand there. Do something." What they were supposed to do, aside from not discriminating, was unspecified.

"Do something" is still one of the meanings of "affirmative action" today. Many firms and educational institutions have affirmative-action or diversity officers. Their job is to insure not only that hiring and promotion are handled in a color-blind manner but that good-faith efforts are made to include racial minorities (and sometimes individuals in other categories, such as women or veterans or disabled persons) in the hiring pool, and, if they are qualified, to attempt to recruit them. In this context, "affirmative" means: demonstrate that you did your best to find and promote members of underrepresented groups. You do not have to give them preferential treatment.

Since the late nineteen-sixties, however, affirmative action has also had a more proactive meaning, as the name of an effort to attain a certain number, or, as it's called today, "critical mass," of underrepresented groups in a business or an educational institution by, if necessary, giving applicants from those groups preference over similarly or better qualified whites. This form of affirmative action is usually branded by those who disapprove of it with the dreaded Q-word, "quota." After 1978, when the Supreme Court declared racial quotas unconstitutional, affirmative-action programs avoided any suggestion of the Q-word. But that is essentially what affirmative action in this second sense entails. You can use terms like "targets" and "goals," both of which are constitutionally legit, but if you have an idea of the point at which you would attain a critical mass then you have a quota.

Apart from stone-cold racists, everyone is happy, or claims to be happy, with affirmative action in the first sense. And many people are happy, or will say they are, with affirmative action in the second sense so far as the outcome is concerned. Legally, we want the system to be color-blind; we want everyone to have the same rights. But socially we understand that people don't want their racial or gender identities to be ignored. They want them to be recognized and respected. People take a civic pride in having a racially diverse workplace or educational institution. It's just that many would rather not contemplate too closely the means used to achieve it.

Of the people who like racial diversity but don't like affirmative action in the preferential sense, there are two types. One type believes that we can ban all forms of preferential treatment and, so long as we enforce existing laws against discrimination, still achieve equality of result. These people see affirmative action as unfairly penalizing those who are not biased themselves and who have enjoyed no personal benefit from discrimination, and they see it as stigmatizing members of underrepresented groups with the suspicion that they are underqualified for the jobs they hold or the school they attend.

The other type of affirmative-action skeptic is the person who knows that this is wishful thinking but is unable to get his or her head around the idea that the way to end discrimination is by discriminating. The law professor Melvin Urofsky, in " The Affirmative Action Puzzle " (Pantheon), says he is agnostic on the issue, but he would seem to be a person of the second type. He wants racial diversity, and he knows that it is not going to come about on its own very soon, but he thinks that specific goals or targets are at odds with the rights of individuals. That's why he calls it a puzzle.

The history of affirmative action is woven into the history of American race relations, and the history of American race relations is woven into the history of America. It is the eternal bone in the national throat. So when Urofsky takes us through the history of affirmative action-he starts with Reconstruction, but the story really begins in the nineteen-sixties-he is giving us what amounts to a history of the country from John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump.

You see the decades go past as you read, and the special flavor of each Presidency comes back: Kennedy's uncomfortable recognition that civil rights was a moral issue that transcended his customary political pragmatism, Johnson's miraculous emergence as the Moses of racial equality, Nixon's inveterate scheming, Reagan's bland duplicity, Obama's undramatic realism. Then we get to Trump, who, Urofsky points out, "is the first Republican since the civil rights revolution to reach the White House without campaigning against affirmative action." Urofsky doesn't say so, but one reason Trump ignored the issue is probably that politicians who oppose affirmative action normally do so in the name of color blindness, and Trump is not color-blind. (Alternative-facts explanation: Donald Trump is the least racist person you have ever met.)

There is a whole library on racial inequality and efforts to address it, and "The Affirmative Action Puzzle" does not offer many novelties. But the book, just by the accumulation of sixty years' worth of evidence, allows us to reach some useful conclusions, and the most important of these is that affirmative action worked. The federal government, with the backing of the courts, weaponized the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its legislative progeny-notably the Education Amendments of 1972, home to the notorious (in the R.B.G. sense) Title IX, banning sex discrimination in federally assisted educational institutions-and forced businesses to hire women and racial minorities.

And they did. Study after study suggests that it is just not the case that "it would have happened anyway." In 1981, for example, as Urofsky tells us, the Reagan Labor Department commissioned a report on gains in hiring among African-Americans and women. It found that between 1974 and 1980 the rate of minority employment in businesses that contracted with the federal government, and were therefore susceptible to being squeezed, rose by twenty per cent, and the rate of employment of women rose by 15.2 per cent. In companies that did not contract with the government, the rates were twelve per cent and 2.2 per cent, respectively.

This was so contrary to everything that Reagan had been saying about affirmative action that the Labor Department hired an outside consulting firm to vet its own report. When the firm returned with the news that the methods and the conclusions were valid, the Administration did the only thing it could do. It refused to release the report, thus allowing politicians to go on telling the public that affirmative action didn't work.

But it did. And guess what? So did the War on Poverty. In 1959, the poverty rate was an estimated twenty-two per cent; in 1975, it was below twelve per cent, which is about where it is today. (That is still thirty-eight million people, more than the population of Canada.) The claim that government programs always backfire was Reagan's campaign calling card-even though he did not eliminate a single major spending program during the eight years he was in office-and it has become one of the most dangerous canards in American politics. Politicians repeat it, and people nod their heads. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.

Did white men suffer as a result of affirmative action? That turns out to be a difficult question to answer. "There is very little hard evidence to prove that a minority hire almost always took place at the expense of a better-qualified white person," Urofsky says. He also tells us that there are "no reliable data" on whether men were shut out of jobs that were offered to women.

"Almost always" would indeed be hard to prove. Obviously, just by the nature of the policy, some significant number of whites and males who would have been admitted or hired before affirmative-action programs were in place were not. But, since no employer or admissions officer ever says, "You were not hired because you're white" or "You were admitted because you're black," proving discrimination is complicated. Americans have come to accept that race and gender are always in the mix, but we can't be certain that either one made the difference in any particular case.

Urofsky's view is that, over all, white men did not go without jobs or the chance to attend college. Turned down by one place, they went someplace else. The number who were "victimized" by affirmative action, he says, is "minuscule." Certainly this is true in the case of college admissions. Most colleges accept almost everyone who applies, so when we talk about race-conscious admissions we are talking about policies that affect a relatively small number of people. Urofsky borrows from Thomas Kane, of the Brookings Institution, an analogy to handicapped parking spaces: a driver looking to park who does not have a permit might feel "excluded" driving past an empty handicapped spot, but he or she usually finds a place to park.

The main source of Urofsky's frustration is the Supreme Court, which, he complains, has spent fifty years kicking around the constitutionality of race-conscious hiring and admissions practices without ever coming up with what he calls "a workable jurisprudence." There is no Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade for affirmative action, no well-established precedent. A lot of the cases that people rely on about university admissions are 5-4 decisions. And some of the Court's opinions have suggested that, insofar as affirmative action constitutes an exception to the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, it will eventually time out (much as a majority of the Court recently decided, in Shelby v. Holder, that part of the Voting Rights Act has outlived our need for it).

The Court's unpredictability in such cases not only distresses law professors like Urofsky. It also creates uncertainty in the marketplace. The judicial parameters are known: to pass constitutional muster, an affirmative-action program must serve a compelling state interest, it must be narrowly tailored, and it must survive strict scrutiny. But one can never be sure how the Court will apply these criteria, or whether it will one day decide that all affirmative-action programs are unconstitutional per se and close out the exception. So groups that oppose racial preferences keep relitigating what is basically the same case, in the hope that a shift in the Court's makeup will produce a definitive result. The Court is effectively inviting these lawsuits.

The marketplace matters because the biggest defenders of affirmative action are not the N.A.A.C.P. and the Democratic National Committee. The biggest defenders are corporations and the military. Thousands of firms adopted affirmative-action programs after 1969, when the Nixon Administration began insisting on diversity benchmarks for government contractors, and "in little more than a decade," Urofsky says, "affirmative action became a way of life for many large corporations." Once those programs were put into place, they remained.

The same thing happened with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The most controversial part of that act was Title II, which applies to public accommodations, like restaurants and hotels. This struck at what was, along with suppression of African-American voting rights, one of the pillars of Jim Crow: social segregation. In December, 1964, five months after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, the Supreme Court, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, upheld the constitutionality of Title II under the commerce clause. All public accommodations that fell within the reach of Congress's power were prohibited from discriminating.

This was not a blow to business. On the contrary. From a business viewpoint, refusing to serve people who want to rent a room in your hotel or order a sandwich at your lunch counter is irrational. The only economic incentive for denying them service is a fear of their driving white customers away. Once the Court made it clear that every hotel and lunch counter must serve every customer regardless of race, that fear was significantly reduced.

Under Jimmy Carter, affirmative-action requirements were extended to virtually all firms, educational institutions, and state and local governments that received contracts or grants from the federal government-which covers a lot of the national waterfront. By and large, the courts went along. And so did businesses. When a company is serving customers of different races, it wants to present a diversified face. If you are selling cars to African-Americans, you do not want all the salesmen in your showroom to be white.

If, to achieve this result, a company diversifies on its own, it is open to lawsuits claiming reverse discrimination. But when a company (or a police department or a fire department) adopts a race-conscious hiring program under government guidance it is immunized. When Reagan made noises about abolishing affirmative-action requirements, the National Association of Manufacturers lobbied him to leave the program alone. It was helping manufacturing companies do what they could not have done without it. The biggest problem businesses had wasn't that they couldn't find qualified women and minorities. It was dealing with labor unions, whose seniority systems overwhelmingly favored white male workers. (Small businesses also resented the paperwork.)

The extent of the corporate buy-in was put on dramatic display in 2003, when the Supreme Court heard Grutter v. Bollinger, another admissions case, this one involving the University of Michigan Law School. The Court received sixty-nine amicus briefs (a lot) arguing in favor of Michigan's affirmative-action admissions program, and among the amici were General Motors, Dow Chemical, and Intel, along with the largest federation of unions in the United States, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. They supported affirmative-action admissions because they wanted universities to produce educated people for a diversified workforce.

The Court also received, in Grutter, what became known as "the military brief." This was an amicus brief signed by big-name generals like Norman Schwarzkopf, Wesley Clark, and John Shalikashvili; by a former Defense Secretary, William Cohen; and by former superintendents of the service academies, all of which, of course, are government agencies. "At present," they told the Court, "the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the service academies and the ROTC use limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies." They were saying that if the Court ruled against Michigan it would be upending efforts, up to that point highly successful, to maintain a diverse officer corps. The Court voted to uphold the Michigan program, but it was a 5-4 decision.

No sector is more committed to diversity than higher education is, but it has proved to be one of the stickiest areas for affirmative action, both legally and practically. Urofsky, perhaps because he is an academic, is more patient with the trouble that universities have had in achieving diversity than he is with the problems of labor unions, to which, in general, he is uncharitable. It is true that probably the main reason Nixon promoted affirmative-action programs was to pit African-Americans against labor, both traditionally Democratic voting bases. And, by many accounts, he succeeded, and created Archie Bunker-the Reagan Democrat, a man who resents special government help for minorities. Still, the leadership of unions like the United Auto Workers, though sometimes fighting their own membership, were active in support of civil rights.

Higher education and unions have a similar problem when it comes to changing the demographics: we are dealing with a cake that cannot be unbaked. The undergraduate population turns over every four years, but the faculty turns over every forty years. When the new students arrive on campus, they often wonder where the professors of color are. The answer is: wait twenty years, and they will show up.

Even so, the lag in diversification between university faculties and their student bodies is striking. As late as 1969, less than five per cent of all professors had African or Asian ancestry, and around eighty per cent were men. Schools like Harvard and Stanford have had trouble even getting to gender balance. In 1976, women made up 1.6 per cent of the arts and sciences faculty at Yale and one per cent at Princeton, although both schools had been admitting women for seven years. Even at Berkeley, which had been admitting women since 1871, women made up just 5.6 per cent of the faculty. Today, less than thirty per cent of all university faculty at Stanford are women, and seven per cent are classified as underrepresented minorities. At Harvard, twenty-seven per cent of tenured faculty are women, and eight per cent are underrepresented minorities.

On the other hand, student bodies, where race- and gender-conscious admissions policies can have an effect more quickly, have diversified. In 1976, eighty-three per cent of university students were white; in 2016, fifty-seven per cent were white. The percentage of black students in that period increased from ten to fourteen; the percentage of students that the government categorizes as Hispanic increased from less than four to more than eighteen. The percentage of black and Latinx graduates (as opposed to enrollees) also increased (although graduation rates for both groups are lower than for whites).

Did affirmative-action admissions help? Starting in the mid-nineties, opponents of affirmative action were able to get laws passed prohibiting the use of race in admissions at public universities in several states, including Michigan, Washington, and California. The top public universities in those states tried to attract minority students by other means, but Urofsky says that the percentage of black and Hispanic students has dropped significantly.

Do students admitted under affirmative-action criteria benefit from their educations? Historically, black students as a group have tended to underperform academically-to get lower grades than their SAT scores predict. (So do varsity athletes.) Nevertheless, William Bowen and Derek Bok showed, in " The Shape of the River " (1998)-the most rigorous statistical analysis of race-conscious college admissions to that point-that of seven hundred black students who entered twenty-eight selective schools under race-preferential criteria in 1976, thirty-two per cent attained doctorates or professional degrees, as compared with thirty-seven per cent of white students. Nearly a hundred and twenty-five of the black students were business executives, and more than three hundred were "civic leaders" (running youth or community groups, for example). Race-conscious admissions policies, Bowen and Bok concluded, have been "highly successful" in advancing educational and societal goals.

As many writers have pointed out, when we are considering colleges and jobs, there is a pipeline problem. That's why, as Urofsky notes, the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women. They went to the same high schools that their brothers did (and most of them probably got better grades). That's also why Barack Obama seemed to be focussed more on improving K-12 for minority children than on expanding access to post-secondary education. The success of affirmative action in employment and university admissions has not eliminated the education and income gaps between whites and blacks. Although the poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics has dropped some since 1970, it is still more than double the rate for whites. Americans of color are starting from much farther behind. Millions never get on board a train that most whites were born on.

The Supreme Court case that admissions offices rely on today is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. It was decided in 1978, and, despite several attempts to relitigate it, it is still the law of the land. Bakke is a good example of the jurisprudential confusion around affirmative action: the Court managed to produce six opinions in that case. The plurality opinion, by Lewis Powell, struck down an admissions program at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, from which Allan Bakke, a white man, had been twice rejected, but it upheld the right of schools to use race-conscious admissions programs.

The problem at Davis was that the medical school basically ran two admissions processes, one for everybody and one that effectively considered only minority applicants, for whom sixteen places were set aside. Bakke was able to show that his record was superior to the records of some of the students who had been admitted through the special program.

The Davis program was obviously not narrowly tailored. One consideration that the university offered in the way of compelling state interest was its belief that minority M.D.s might end up practicing in underserved communities. Powell found no evidentiary basis for this, and it was arguably a racist assumption. The school could have investigated whether applicants had worked with underserved communities in the past. They did not, and Powell suggested that such a standard might be a better proxy than race. Another consideration Davis offered was the aim of "countering the effects of societal discrimination." But Powell, though he allowed that specific race-conscious remedies could be justified by specific instances of discrimination, dismissed the general invocation of discrimination as "an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past."

Still, Powell did think that the goal of a diversified medical-school class was constitutionally permissible, and he played a trump card that is almost never mentioned in discussions of the case, including Urofsky's. Admissions programs determined by race are in violation of both the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in institutions that receive federal funding. Those rights were largely on Bakke's side: you couldn't discriminate against whites simply because nonwhites had once been discriminated against. Powell argued, however, that another right was in play: the First Amendment; specifically, the right of academic freedom. There is no constitutional right of academic freedom, but Powell cited a 1957 case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, in which Felix Frankfurter, in a concurring opinion, quoted South African jurists to the effect that the principle of academic freedom allows a university to determine who will teach its classes and who will sit in its classrooms.

Powell concluded that, since Davis could reasonably decide that a diverse class provides a better learning environment, considerations of an applicant's race-as one factor among others-can fall within the exercise of a constitutionally protected right. (Under the Court's ruling, Bakke was admitted to Davis and he became a doctor; Urofsky says that he went on to work at the Mayo Clinic, where one of his patients was Lewis Powell.)

The Michigan case, Grutter v. Bollinger, in 2003, was basically a relitigation of Bakke. As was Fisher v. Texas, in 2013, and the second round of that case, known as Fisher II, in 2016. The Fisher cases involved a white woman who was turned down for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, U.T.'s flagship campus. Her lawyers argued that, even if she were rejected solely because of her grades and not her race, she could still claim a "Constitutional injury" from being subjected to an unfair admissions process. Each time, the Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions, but they were close calls. The vote in Fisher II was 4-3.

The current Harvard College admissions case, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, is the same case one more time. The person behind both Fisher and the Harvard case is Edward Blum, a man who for whatever reason has decided to devote his time to preventing a small number of black and brown teen-agers from attending colleges that are desperate to have them.

Harvard won at the trial level because the judge ruled that its admissions program is consistent with other Supreme Court decisions, such as Bakke. That's not surprising, since Powell's decision cited the Harvard admissions program as a model. But, given the composition of the Supreme Court, it is all too likely that it will decide that the country has timed out of this particular form of remediation.

For remediation is fundamentally what affirmative action is. Affirmative action has expanded to cover many kinds of difference, and, since Bakke, to be thought of as in service to a general social commitment to diversity per se-so that now people say things like "What about diversity of ideology?," as though that somehow presented the same moral demand as a commitment to racial diversity.

But the reason we have affirmative action is that we once had slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and racial covenants, and that we once had all-white police forces and all-white union locals and all-white college campuses and all-white law firms. To paraphrase George Shultz, Nixon's Secretary of Labor: for hundreds of years, the United States had a racial quota. It was zero. Affirmative action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people. The Fourteenth Amendment protects white people, too, but that is not why it needed to be written.

The Court's decision in Shelby v. Holder vacating a central provision of the Voting Rights Act has backfired. It turns out that, when you remove enforcement mechanisms and remedial oversight, things tend to revert to the status quo ante. The whole history of affirmative action shows, as Urofsky somewhat reluctantly admits, that when the programs are shut down minority representation drops. Diversity, however we define it, is politically constructed and politically maintained. It doesn't just happen. It's a choice we make as a society.

It is possible to understand the opposition to affirmative action of white conservatives, like Ronald Reagan, who regard civil-rights laws as federal overreach and affirmative action as enshrining the un-American notion of group rights. And it is possible to understand the opposition of black conservatives, like Clarence Thomas, who see it as patronizing to African-Americans.

But it is hard to understand the opposition, often diehard, of many white liberals that has persisted since the nineteen-seventies. Did these people really imagine that passing a law against discrimination would reset race relations overnight? Do they really think that white Americans, wherever they work or go to college, do not carry a lifelong advantage because of the color of their skin? Do they really believe that there should be no sacrifice to make or price to pay for the systematic damage done to the lives of millions of American citizens and the men and women who are their ancestors? ♦

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The Changing Meaning of Affirmative Action

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Louis Menand on the past and future of a long-embattled policy.

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t wasn't very long ago that a banana was just a banana - just a curved, yellow fruit. All you knew, if you bought a bunch in 1986, was that they cost around 97p per kilo. You weren't told if they were organic or pesticide-free. You didn't know if they came from Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic. And you certainly weren't invited to worry about the farmers who grew them - or if their children went to school, or whether their villages had clinics. You just picked up your bananas and walked to the next aisle for your coffee or tea or chocolate, none the wiser about where they came from either, or about the people who farmed them.

Back then, the countries that grew these commodities and many others were still known as the Third World, and the habit of not caring about their farming conditions was a legacy of their colonial past. For centuries, trade propelled the colonial project, and exploitation was its very purpose. The farmers of Asia, Africa and South America were forced to raise the crops that the empire's companies wanted, to work the crops in abject conditions, and to part with them at ruinously low prices. In the last century, the empires melted away but the trade remained lopsided - with the imbalance now rationalised by the market, which deemed it "efficient" to pay farmers as little as possible. In the 1970s, a Ghanaian cocoa farmer often received less than 10 cents out of every dollar his beans earned on the commodities market; as a proportion of the retail price of a chocolate bar, his take was smaller still. Child labour was common. The chocolate companies prospered and their customers shopped well; the farmers stayed poor.

Then, in the late 1980s, you began to hear more about these farmers, encountering their stories on television or in newspapers or even on the labels of the packages you bought. The reasons were manifold. Environmental awareness was on the rise. The prices of some commodities were crashing, placing agricultural incomes in even more acute peril than usual. There had already been small groups pushing for more equitable trade: "little do-good shops scattered in cities around Europe, selling products ... bought at fair prices directly from small producers abroad", as one pioneerdescribed it. By the early 1990s, these disparate initiatives began to coalesce into a larger international struggle to radically reform our relationship with what we bought. Trade had long been unfair by design, but now there was a growing movement to make consumers care about that unfairness, and even to help rectify it.

The crown jewel of this movement was Fairtrade International, an umbrella body formed in 1997 out of various national chapters that had sprouted over the previous decade. Fairtrade was founded on the conviction that consumers could make the marketplace more moral. The spine of Fairtrade's philosophy has always been price: simple, clean, the kind of measure that economists like to deal with. If companies pay farmers equitably, Fairtrade believes, other benefits cascade out as well. Farmers can hire adult workers, rather than employing children; they can send their kids to school, and buy medicines; they can improve the yields of their farms by using better fertilisers. Producers must meet a number of standards to qualify for Fairtrade: rules about labour conditions, for instance, or waste disposal. But for companies, the core of their ethical responsibility towards their producers is defined by price.

So Fairtrade works by forming a kind of "virtuous triangle" of ethical business. It recruits farmers and farming cooperatives as members, asking them to meet its standards; periodically, Fairtrade sends inspectors to these farms around the world, ensuring they are still compliant. At another vertex of the triangle, Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price for commodities from these member farms if market prices plunge, and offers to certify products made from such ethically sourced commodities. The final corner is the customer, who can, with a little counsel, be galvanised to shop consciously, and to buy Fairtrade-certified products even if they cost a few pence more.

The Fairtrade certification mark has become widely familiar: a green-blue-black logo, resembling a yin-and-yang with a tear in its middle, soothing the consciences of shoppers the world over. Roughly $9bn worth of Fairtrade products were sold in 2017, their raw material sourced from 1.66 million farmers. Around 2,400 companies, including multinational giants such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer, pay licence fees to their national Fairtrade chapters to use the mark on their products. Fairtrade has becomea byword for ethical consumption; 93% of British shoppers now recognise its mark.

But its two real triumphs are in the realm of ideas, not numbers. First, and most obviously, Fairtrade challenged the entrenched model of the commodities business - the belief that a farmer's lean income was just an unavoidable reality of trade economics. Second, somewhat more stealthily, it cemented the notion that the modern corporation would be ethical if only someone held up a lamp and showed it the way. Capitalism didn't have to be feared; the market would figure out its own checks and balances, through labelling agencies such as Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance, without having to be regulated by any higher authority. Persistent and egregious inequality could be solved by deft pleats and tucks to the garb of trade, rather than by a full reconsideration of its fabric and seams.

Now, though, Fairtrade's success in helping to build a world of heightened expectations of sustainability is perversely paving the way to its own demise. Companies are losing faith in labels such as Fairtrade - losing faith in their ability to secure the future of farming and the future of commodities that drive corporate profit, but also losing faith that these independent stamps of sustainability carry any value at all any more. Instead, the world's giant food multinationals are taking matters into their own hands - setting up their own in-house certification programmes, appraising their own ethics to their own satisfaction.

Although the fate of Fairtrade is not necessarily the fate of fair trade, the former has kept the latter alive as an object of aspiration. A weakened Fairtrade portends the enfeebling of the very idea of fair trade. This poses a serious problem, because Fairtrade relies on companies to constitute one half of its virtuous bazaar. Without the buyers, the Fairtrade bazaar folds up, and companies return to their own devices, to pursue only what's best for themselves. Increasingly, companies are finding it easier and more expedient to produce their own certifications, said Trishna Shah, a Euromonitor analyst who tracks ethical labels: "A big change is happening."

What we're looking at, in short, is something like a corporate capture of fair trade - and it comes at a time when agriculture is already in crisis. The world's population expandedfrom about 4.4 billion in 1980 to more than 7 billion by 2011, but the proportion of people employed in agriculture shrank by 12%. Globally, the average age of a coffee farmer is 55. No one from a younger generation seems to want to grow crops any more. The work is difficult and, in the developing world, nearly always unrewarding. And the coming decades, with all the challenges of a changing climate - waves of heat, virulent pests, droughts and floods - appear grimmer still. The lives of farmers are already poised to get worse. A move towards unfairer trade will only push them back towards the exploited miseries of the past.

he single most damaging blow to Fairtrade came two summers ago, and it was delivered by Sainsbury's, which once proudly boasted that it was the world's largest retailer of Fairtrade products. In May 2017, without any warning, Sainsbury's broke the news that its own-brand teas would no longer be certified by Fairtrade.

"It was a bombshell," Paul Tiony said. He had travelled to Nairobi that month, from his tea farm in Nandi Hills, in western Kenya, to take part in a half-day workshop run by Fairtrade Africa. Other tea farmers, from Malawi, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, were there as well, at the Pride Westlands hotel; so was a team from Sainsbury's. The company called a meeting at the end of the workshop, and Tiony grew excited. Sainsbury's must have some kind of good news, he thought. But after gathering almost 50 workshop participants in a conference room of the hotel, Sainsbury's revealed that its in-house tea brands were abandoning Fairtrade. Instead, an executive said, it was piloting its own ethical label - and calling it "Fairly Traded". Later, Fairtrade estimated that these changes would affect nearly 250,000 farmers and workers.

Among these were the 8,000 members of Sireet, the tea-farming cooperative to which Tiony belongs. Sireet's produce is certified by Fairtrade, and Sainsbury's used to be, by far, the largest buyer of Sireet's Fairtrade tea. So Tiony was dumbstruck at the shock announcement. "Even Fairtrade Africa officials didn't seem to know much about it," he recalled. "They were asking: 'Why are you doing this?'" Someone inquired: "Are you moving out of Fairtrade because of Brexit?"

Sainsbury's had no real answers, Tiony said - but it seemed to be doubting that Fairtrade was working as promised. One Sainsbury's executive singled out one of the central principles of Fairtrade's model: the so-called "premium" above the minimum price that companies must pay, and which cooperatives must use to build schools, or run clinics, or improve their communities in other ways. Sainsbury's was concerned that the premium was being poorly used, and that it was money wasted. "But just a few days earlier," Tiony said, "someone from Sainsbury's had come to look at all our projects." The farmers tried to argue with the executives; the executives insisted they weren't going to change their minds. "The meeting ended just like that."

The announcement kicked off an immediate storm. In an open letter, Fairtrade's tea producers in Africa accused Sainsbury's of seeking "power and control" over farmers in a manner "reminiscent of colonial rule". A coalition of British non-profits urged consumers into a weekend of action under the rubric: "Don't Ditch Fairtrade". Buy a pack of "Fairly Traded" tea and then give it back, they suggested: "Let the sales assistant know you are returning it because it's not Fairtrade." In Parliament, MPs pressed Sainsbury's to reconsider; one accused the company of lying, and another complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the name Fairly Traded would mislead shoppers who confused it for Fairtrade. (Sainsbury's declined to comment for this story. "The launch of Fairly Traded was a bit of a disaster," a former executive told me with a sigh.)

The Fairly Traded experiment ignited fears of a full divorce, in which Sainsbury's would abandon the rest of its Fairtrade products - its coffee and sugar; its flowers; the 650m bananas it sells every year - and move out of the Fairtrade house altogether. That would, the Guardian wrote at the time, bring Fairtrade "crashing down". So far, this hasn't happened, but Sainsbury's is still only a couple of years into its experiment with Fairly Traded. The divorce could still come.

The departure of Sainsbury's wasn't a one-off. Around the world, the largest agribusiness companies are quitting independent certification, either because they think they can do sustainability better in-house, or because they see an opportunity to craft standards that fit their own purposes. Soon after Sainsbury's, the global confectionary giant Mondelēz - whose vast holdings include Cadbury and Toblerone - pulled several of its chocolate bars, including Dairy Milk, away from Fairtrade and into an in-house certification scheme called " Cocoa Life ". Nestlé had launched a similar programme, "Cocoa Plan", back in 2013; between them, Nestlé and Mondelez control roughly 40% of the British chocolate market. Starbucks has "CAFE Practices"; Barry Callebaut, the Swiss cocoa producer, has "Cocoa Horizons"; US giant Cargill has "Cocoa Promise"; McDonald's has its own "McCafé Sustainability Improvement Platform".

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All these firms still have a few products that are certified by third parties - by Fairtrade, or by other agencies such as Rainforest Alliance or UTZ. (The latter two merged in January 2018.) But the ratio is dwindling. The great energies of these corporations, said Trishna Shah, the Euromonitor analyst, are being lavished upon their own, bespoke schemes - each with its own little logo, its own definition of fairness, its own explanatory literature on a web page somewhere.

For shoppers, this promises bewildering times ahead at the supermarket: more and more instances of what people in the industry call "label fatigue". The shelves already crawl with sustainability logos: more than 460 of them on food and beverage packages, and a third of them created over the last 15 years. There are little chromatic decals to testify that tuna is dolphin-friendly; that coffee is bird-friendly; that "wild-collected natural ingredients" are up to FairWild standards; that a slice of salmon is Salmon-Safe and follows Best Aquaculture Practices; that a bottle of wine is LIVE, which means that it fulfills Low Input Viticulture and Ecology benchmarks. One logo promises a carbon-free product, another a carbon-neutral one, and a third a carbon-reducing one. The more labels there are, the less we know about them - about what they stand for, and about how meaningful they are.

In a crowd, there's room to hide. When Fairtrade began, labels were rare and precious things; when you bought a product with a label on it, you knew what you were getting. In contrast, a company today can launch its certification logo into the large ocean of labels, confident that most shoppers will not know what the logo guarantees, but that it will nonetheless salve their consciences. "I think companies are hoping that label fatigue is an enduring trend," said Elizabeth Bennett, a political economist who co-edited the Handbook of Research on Fair Trade. "They're hoping that consumers are tired of learning what 30 different labels in one sector mean, and that we'll all just think: 'Any claim of sustainability is an improvement over no claim.'" This makes it easy for companies to resort to the ruse of "greenwashing" - pretending to be ethical without really being anything of the sort.

Several people in the corporate world offered an even more depressing version of this story: companies are sidling away from third-party certifiers because their optimistic project - the idea that the market can be heedful of its own abuses and correct itself - has, in a grand sense, failed. After decades of work, these certifiers have been unable to truly alter the imbalance in global trade; they have struggled to protect farmers, or to arm them for their various social, economic and environmental battles.

The proof is in the dire projections for the future of farming, showing how vanishing agricultural biodiversity, the warming climate and the ageing and impoverishment of farmers are all endangering the world's crops - which means they are also endangering the supply chains of companies who rely upon farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America to manufacture chocolate bars, coffee pods, or cotton T-shirts. By launching all these in-house programmes, companies are trying to take matters into their own hands - if only to secure their sources of commodities, and their bottom lines.

he Fairtrade movement was born in 1988, when a Dutch non-profit introduced the first certification for ethically traded coffee. The label was named Max Havelaar, after a seminal anti-colonial novel by the Dutch writer Eduard Dekker, published in 1860. In the novel, Dekker described how the Dutch in Indonesia, having made themselves "masters of the country", compelled the Javanese farmer to grow sugar and coffee, instead of rice for his family. The government "punishes him if he sells what he has produced to any purchaser but itself; and it fixes the price actually paid", Dekker wrote. "And because the entire trade must produce profit, that profit cannot be got in any other way than by paying the Javanese just enough to keep him from starving." Naming the label after the novel was a blunt acknowledgement of the straight line connecting colonial exploitation to corporate exploitation. When the label launched, three Dutch coffee brands signed on to source their beans from a farmers' cooperative in Mexico, paying a rate above market price that was agreed to be fair. The following year, coffee prices crashed following a breakdown of trade talks: the cost of a pound of coffee on the commodities market fell to rates last seen in the 1930s. Coffee farmers faced ruin. The universe seemed to be emphasising the urgency of Max Havelaar's mission.

The label was a swift success; within a year, 65% of Dutch consumers had heard of Max Havelaar, and the certified coffee found its way on to shelves at the biggest supermarkets. In tandem with the coffee crisis, Max Havelaar inspired other "alternative trade" initiatives across Europe. In Britain, the Fairtrade Foundation was set up by NGOs and church groups in 1992. By 1997, the various national Fairtrade chapters were gathered into an umbrella body, now called Fairtrade International and headquartered in Bonn, Germany.

In the voluminous literature on its website, Fairtrade sets out the prices it calculates to be "fair". As of mid-July, the minimum price for a metric tonne of cocoa beans was $2,000; for an 18.14kg box of bananas from Cameroon, €6.40; for 1,000 fresh coconuts from the Windward Islands, $112. But Fairtrade doesn't stop with ensuring these minimum prices; it also demands that producers be paid an extra premium - $11 for the Windward Islands coconuts, for instance - and that these premiums be spent to benefit the community.

Fairtrade insists that producers make these investment decisions democratically, which means that farmers have to organise into collectives such as Sireet. There is an undeniable power in Fairtrade bringing these collectives to the negotiating table, said Pauline Tiffen, the editor of the Journal of Fair Trade. "The tea industry used to be so hierarchical until quite recently that it was like something out of Dickens," she said. "And cocoa still felt like it was operating in the 18th century. Until 20 years ago, if you went to any big trade meetings on cocoa, you'd see no women, no people of colour."

The debate over whether Fairtrade's systems truly transform the lives of farmers has raged for nearly all of Fairtrade's lifetime. Its numbers, in relative terms, are still puny. The 1.66 million farmers in the Fairtrade network form a speck within the 2 billion or so people who make their living from agriculture. The sale value of Fairtrade's products may add up to $9bn, but the global market for coffee alone is worth $200bn.

A more dramatic sign of Fairtrade's struggles is that it can't sell, on its terms, all the volumes of commodities it certifies. In 2016, of all the coffee grown as Fairtrade, only 34% of it could be sold at the minimum price. There were no takers for the rest; farmers had to unload the surplus into the standard "unfair" market, at the lower prices that the market determined. For cocoa, the rate is a bit better, 47%. For tea, it's much worse, only 4.7 %. There are tonnes of harvest for which Fairtrade fails to find any fair-minded buyers at all.

Even the benefits that Fairtrade promises to deliver to farmers have been called into question. In 2014, Fairtrade entered into a public squabble with a team from Soas University of London, which had examined how well Fairtrade did in shrinking poverty in Ethiopia and Uganda. The study, funded by the British government, found that schoolchildren had worked on Fairtrade-certified farms. The researchers compared wages on Fairtrade-certified tea and coffee estates - always owned by smallholders, in keeping with Fairtrade's belief in championing the small farmer - with wages on larger, uncertified plantations. Workers on the Fairtrade estates were paid less and often laboured in worse conditions, they concluded. Fairtrade called these "distorted comparisons" and rejected the researchers' conclusions.

In Kenya, the tea farmers of Sireet have experienced some of the frustrations of Fairtrade, but also the sudden precariousness of life without it. The cooperative came together 14 years ago, when 6,230 farmers raised money to buy nearly 1,000 hectares of land to cultivate their tea. Sireet has been a Fairtrade producer from the very beginning, its chairman, Wilson Tuwei, told me. Sireet's farmers worked hard to meet Fairtrade's rules and standards, he said, but even so, the cooperative was never able to sell more than 13% of its harvest at Fairtrade rates.

Even that feels like a bonanza, though, compared to what has happened over the last two years. After Sainsbury's stopped its purchases, Sireet's sales of Fairtrade tea plummeted. "Last year, we were at not even 1%," Tuwei said. Sireet's careful plans started to go up in smoke. "We've stopped most of the projects we were funding with the Fairtrade premium. There were dispensaries. We were paying school fees for some children. There were irrigation projects. They've all become white elephants now. It has really affected us."

he rupture between Sainsbury's and Fairtrade over tea has become the most prominent case of a large company concluding that Fairtrade wasn't quite cutting it any more. The details of that rupture convey why Sainsbury's was dissatisfied with Fairtrade, but also why replacement corporate schemes such as Fairly Traded feel flimsy or stifling to those meant to benefit from them.

Two people who have worked with Sainsbury's told me that the company had been unhappy with Fairtrade for years. When I spoke to these anonymous sources in April, both sounded exasperated at the way Sainsbury's had handled its exit, but they made the case that its reasons were sound. "We were paying these premiums, but it wasn't clear where the money was going. Fairtrade isn't good at keeping tabs on it," one of them said. "It wasn't always going to medicines and schools and things like that, as we found through our own investigations."

Other Fairtrade partners had raised this as well, she added. "We wanted more data ... Instead, there was just a systemic inefficiency." Sainsbury's, as a corporation, was constantly pressured to be transparent, she said. "But it turned out that Fairtrade wasn't quite as transparent. That was frustrating." The other Sainsbury's source confirmed this. "If you wanted to find out what a cooperative had done with a whole wad of Fairtrade premiums, or what the impact of that had been over the years, nobody could tell you. Or you'd get some anecdotal stuff."

A Fairtrade spokesperson told me, in response to these claims, that the organisation wanted farmers to spend their premiums the way they wished, setting their own goals and monitoring their own progress. She added that, since April, Fairtrade has "strengthened the requirements on Fairtrade premium use, management, and reporting, in order to promote best practices and increase transparency". Now, if a cooperative's annual premiums exceed $150,000, it must hire an external auditor to inspect the way it accounts for the money.

Even as Sainsbury's was stewing over the premiums it was paying out, the second Sainsbury's source told me, it had begun to "rain down with standards" over the past decade. Companies and non-profits introduced a fleet of new labels and certifications, their names all seeming to blend hazily into each other. Pasture for Life. New Forest Marque. Food Made Good. Soil Association. Free Range Dairy Pasture Promise. LEAF Marque. "Then Fairtrade starts to look just like a sliver of the pie - an expensive and not very satisfactory one," said the source. "And Sainsbury's thinks: 'I'm sure we can do this ourselves, I'm sure we know what needs to be delivered.'"

Fairtrade didn't think so. Under Fairly Traded, farmer collectives no longer receive their premiums directly, or decide how to spend this money. Instead, they must work on "action plans" and convince a Sainsbury's board of experts in London to release their funds. In their open letter, Fairtrade's tea producers protested that the company was characterising these premiums as "donor money" rather than earnings that rightfully belonged to the farmers. Fairtrade called the board "a further layer of bureaucracy controlled by a group far removed from day-to-day life in Africa".

It feels like a paradox: that, in a moment when sustainability and ethics are more important than ever, corporations want to desert an agency such as Fairtrade, the most famous certifying entity in the field. Companies are under pressure - from customers, governments, banks and investors - to prove their sustainability credentials. Signatories to the UN's Principles of Responsible Investment now manage around $89tn in assets. The network of Sustainable Stock Exchanges - more than 80 bourses around the world - guide and sometimes even require listed companies to report on their sustainability.

In a way, this dialled-up consciousness explains why companies are searching for alternatives to independent labelling systems, said Fredrik Galtung, who runs TrueFootprint, a firm that analyses data to tell businesses if their various sustainability projects make any sort of impact. He detects, in the industries he works with, a hardnosed sense that unsustainable practices will result in economic risk. So he isn't surprised that companies, finding Fairtrade insufficient at tackling that risk, are rushing to erect their own standards. "If Fairtrade producers could show that their farmers were 10 or 20 years younger on average, that would be something. If they could show they're more climate-resistant, that would be a massive advantage. But we're unable to see all this."

Fairtrade denies that its future is dim, or that a schism has appeared between itself and the companies with which it aims to work. In his discussions of these issues, Dario Soto Abril, who has been the CEO of Fairtrade International since 2016, is a model of genial tact. He's in an unenviable position. He must keep his relations with corporations warm; Sainsbury's still retails plenty of Fairtrade-labelled products, for example, and Mondelēz uses Fairtrade's skills to track payments and commodities up and down the supply chain. At the same time, Soto must project his conviction that it is best for everyone concerned - shoppers, farmers, but especially companies - if they all commit fully to Fairtrade.

Agriculture has never been under more stress, Soto said. The world is so densely connected now that a tremor in one part of a supply chain sets off instant price fluctuations elsewhere. Corporate power is consolidating. Just three giants - Barry Callebaut, Cargill and Olam - control 60% of the world's cocoa-processing business, for example; this gives them enormous leverage over the prices they pay to producers. "Cocoa farmers still live in poverty," Soto said. "Banana farmers find that there are hidden costs of production that their sales are not covering."

The effects of climate change alone are "so accelerated", Soto said, "that we think if nothing of significance is done by 2050, at least half the land under coffee production now will be lost, one way or another."

Last year, the UN released a map of the world predicting where yields were likely to drop or rise before 2050. In West Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, which have been plantation-farmed by colonists and then corporations, harvests will shrink. In North America and Europe, which have already cornered the profits of centuries of agribusiness, harvests will expand. The map is iniquity compounded upon iniquity.

Soto insists Fairtrade is flourishing: "Our credibility remains high. We get new partners all the time." Sales of Fairtrade-certified products have swelled year on year around the world, partly as a result of companies exploring new markets. On the other hand, farmers are entering Fairtrade at a slowing pace. Between 2015 and 2016, Fairtrade managed to bring 3,199 new workers into its network; the previous year, it recruited 9,955.

"It's important to note that Fairtrade can't solve everything," Soto said. "We're here trying to solve challenges as old as humanity. We need more committed partners. We need more innovative ideas." But Soto is also forgiving of companies that have chosen to set up schemes to certify themselves. "I think companies are looking to test something new," he said carefully. "We need to allow for that. I will never doubt that companies will do the best they can."

For the chief executive of an organisation founded on the premise that companies need to be cajoled or nagged into paying farmers a living income, this sounded like an astonishingly trusting statement. Soto's most barbed opinion concerned farmer premiums and the larger issue of involving producers in decision-making. "I'm with you when you say that these companies aren't giving farmers a seat at the table," Soto told me. "You have to allow farmers a say in the income generated by sales. They have to own their premiums. That was our biggest suggestion to Sainsbury's."

Last October, the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK acknowledged that, in the new era of self-certification, its function had to evolve. Since companies are setting up their own sustainability schemes, said Lord Mark Price, who chairs the Foundation's board of trustees, "the role of Fairtrade is to help those organisations be the best they can be". Fairtrade will still operate its certification programme; the yin-yang logo will still be seen on products. But for Fairtrade to climb into the role of a consultancy - a supplier of guidance, rather than an umpire enforcing a line for companies to toe - is the most conclusive evidence yet of the transformation under way. And it raises two questions. How will companies behave if they have to testify only to their own code of ethical sourcing? And in what shape will that leave the future of agriculture?

f the animating principle of Fairtrade is "price," that of most corporate in-house programmes is "yield". These programmes may differ in other details. Some are just two years old; others were established more than a decade ago. Some pay their farmers Fairtrade-like minimum prices; others do not. But they are united by their unwavering focus on yield - on squeezing more produce out of a hectare of land. They consider it the best way to protect and grow their supplies of coffee or tea or cocoa, and thus the best way to save agriculture.

The investments are massive. Starbucks has sunk $100m into CAFE Practices, a programme started in 2004 to source sustainably grown coffee. Roughly 99% of Starbucks coffee now falls under this programme, said Michelle Burns, a senior vice president who heads global coffee and tea for the company. Mondelēz will have spent $400m on Cocoa Life, its sustainable cocoa scheme, by 2022. Nearly half of all Mondelēz cocoa is already sourced under this scheme, said Christine McGrath, who heads global impact and sustainability for the $80bn snack giant; she expects that number to have scaled to the full 100% by 2025. Both companies claimed they found existing third-party certifiers inadequate. "There were no programmes we could find that had an emphasis on quality," Burns said. "Nothing that was comprehensive enough."

In my conversations with Starbucks and Mondelēz, farmer welfare rarely came up. The tacit assumption seemed to be that if the companies help farmers improve their productivity, their lives will improve in tandem. Starbucks doesn't set a minimum price, or pay a premium for every tonne of coffee it purchases, the way Fairtrade would have it do. Instead, it pays "strategic premiums" for preferred producers. As a result, last September, when coffee prices fell more than 20% to around $1 a pound, Starbucks had to inject a one-time $20m subsidy to its farmers in Central America.

Mondelēz also does not set a minimum price. It pays "loyalty premiums" to the farmer collectives with which it chooses to work, and Cathy Pieters, director of Mondelēz's Cocoa Life programme, said it was up to them to decide what kind of "action plans" can be funded with the money. She added, though, that Mondelēz commissions large NGOs to work with these cooperatives in determining and crafting these action plans. Once again, as with Sainsbury's and its Fairly Traded programme, the premiums intended to benefit farmers aren't quite wholly theirs to spend as they see fit.

Fairtrade is half-owned by its producer cooperatives, so its standards and metrics are decided in large part by the representatives of farmers. The standards of Cocoa Life, CAFE Practices and other schemes aren't like that; they are written by the companies themselves, in the companies' own best interests. No independent third party certifies their success or failure in meeting these standards and publishes those results. Companies reporting on their own sustainability frequently fail "to prioritise planet over profit", Hans Hoogervorst, who heads the International Accounting Standards Board, said in a speech in April. "Greenwashing is rampant."

Industries are increasingly left to audit themselves, in part because governments have shredded their budgets in the name of austerity. From Volkswagen to Boeing, we don't have to look very hard for evidence that companies fib and cheat when they get to mark their own homework. Bringing sustainability certification in-house is unlikely to empower farmers, or to renovate the structure of trade. "But it's simplistic to say that companies will act in ways that are injurious to farmers," said Fredrik Galtung of TrueFootprint, the sustainability analysts. In his view, the crises in agriculture are so stark that companies are motivated to protect farms and farm workers - if only to secure their own future profits. But TrueFootprint's scorecards indicate that most companies only report their spending on sustainability; almost none of them investigate the impact of these schemes on farmers or on natural resources like air and water. Galtung described it as "just being happy to check off boxes".

Economists like to examine incentives, and to deduce behaviour from them. If the incentives of these companies are misaligned with those of their producers, it's only a matter of time before they produce conflict and rupture. Companies perceive Fairtrade to be rigid, and say that keeping sustainability programmes in-house gives them "flexibility". That word is really standing in, though, for "control": control over how commodities are priced, how to select or discard producers, how farmers farm, even how they live. This may look, for firms and even for consumers, like efficiency, but the effects can be dysfunctional. When four firms - Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus - control between 70% and 90% of the global grain trade, they can bulldoze governments into clearing forested land for crops, crowd out smallholder farmers and push more and more processed grains into our diets. Many of the failings of global agriculture are not the result of multinational companies having too little control; they are the result of companies having too much.

That lesson is available to students of the past as well. After the publication of Max Havelaar shocked the public, in 1901 the Dutch government formulated a new ethical policy - one that would treat Indonesia as a moral responsibility rather than simply as a territory to be exploited. Millions of guilders had flowed from these islands into the Dutch treasury - 187m between 1867 and 1878 alone - and so the government committed to spending 30m guilders over the first decade on the welfare of the Indies' farmers. Not surprisingly, they received agricultural credit and irrigation canals, because the Dutch corporations were avid for better yields. They also gained more schools and more roads; they were not, however, encouraged to industrialise, because this would have inflated the cost of local labour and led to competition with Dutch businesses.

The Dutch ethical policy came undone as soon as the colonist's aims started to clash with those of the colony. The harvests improved, but not enough to warrant the investment. The Great Depression set in, and the government thinned down its expenditures even as Indonesian farmers slid into debt. Educating the populace began to seem like a mistake; there was no work for young Indonesian men who had attended university, and they inevitably drifted into the nationalist movement. By 1940, the government had ceased to fund the welfare projects.

An unnamed administrator, who had once supported the ethical policy, watched with disappointment as the meagre progress unravelled and said: "As soon as we withdraw our hands, everything sinks back into the marsh." But what the Dutch didn't recognise was that they were the ones who made it impossible for the Indonesians to rise from the marsh in the first place.

This article was amended on 24 July 2019. An earlier version said that Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price, which is always set above market price. In fact, the Fairtrade minimum price is charged only when market prices drop below a pre-determined level. Sainsbury's pulled its own-brand teas out of Fairtrade, rather than ceasing to sell any Fairtrade-certified teas; companies buying Fairtrade must meet other standards in addition to price; and the minimum price for bananas from Cameroon is €6.40 per 18.14kg box, not per 1kg. These have been corrected.

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t wasn't very long ago that a banana was just a banana - just a curved, yellow fruit. All you knew, if you bought a bunch in 1986, was that they cost around 97p per kilo. You weren't told if they were organic or pesticide-free.

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Oprah’s Tearful Speech at Power of Women

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Oprah’s Tearful Speech at Power of Women

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Oprah’s Tearful Speech at Power of Women

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On April 9, 2019, the Ministry of Finance announced new designs for the 1,000-, 5,000- and 10,000-yen bill, and the new 5,000-yen bill will feature a portrait of Umeko Tsuda, the founder of Tsuda University.

According the ministry's announcement and the website of the National Printing Bureau, the selection criteria for portraiture requires that the individual be a notable historical figure from the Meiji era onwards, with two benchmarks for adoption:

In order to prevent counterfeiting, there must be a detailed photograph or portrait of the individual that is readily available.
The individual must be a Japanese citizen who boasts global prominence and is and well-known among the general public (included in textbooks, etc.).
Umeko Tsuda is known for improving the social status of women, with an impact that extends into the present era. As such, her selection for portraiture has significant meaning. The new bill is planned for issuance in 2024 following a five-year preparatory period.

Image of the new 5,000-yen bill

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Portrait of Umeko Tsuda, founder of Tsuda University, to be featured on the new 5,000-yen bill

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On April 9, 2019, the Ministry of Finance announced new designs for the 1,000-, 5,000- and 10,000-yen bill, and the new 5,000-yen bill will feature a portrait of Umeko Tsuda, the founder of Tsuda University.

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The Sustainable Development Agenda, adopted by UN Member States in 2015, set a 2030 deadline for the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. Now, with under 10 years left to meet it, the world is not on track. Amid the intersecting crises of COVID-19, the climate emergency, and rising economic and political insecurity, progress on gender equality has not only failed to move forward but has begun to reverse. Around the world, a growing backlash against women's rights is threatening even well-established freedoms and protections.

Without heightened commitment from the global community, gender equality will remain nothing more than an unrealized goal. The time to act and invest in women and girls is now.

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In focus: Sustainable Development Goal 5 | UN Women - Headquarters

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The Sustainable Development Agenda, adopted by UN Member States in 2015, set a 2030 deadline for the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. Now, with under 10 years left to meet it, the world is not on track.

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https://theletterfilm.org/watch/

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A LETTER THAT LIGHTS THE WAY. We have the power to protect our common home.

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"Taking masculinity away from us [males]" is often a response when confronted with non-patriarchal systems... and this is an excellent response.

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A post shared by Antiracist Education (@antiracisteducation)

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What is Woman? (de Beauvoir + Metroid) – 8-Bit Philosophy

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FINAL HOURS — We're worried FINAL DAY — We're worried

This is a difficult time and donations to Truthout are down — we urgently need your support to keep publishing the brave ideas that drive social change. Truth and justice won't win unless we all do what we can. Will you make a donation to help us raise the $6,000 we urgently need? This is a difficult time and donations to Truthout are down — we urgently need your support to keep publishing the brave ideas that drive social change. Truth and justice won't win unless we all do what we can. Will you make a donation to help us raise the $6K we urgently need?

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Religion's Role in the Struggle for Justice Archives

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What can religious traditions contribute to the collective struggle for justice and liberation?

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Guiding Principles Explained is directly from the Seisen Handbook (Thanks Ms. Joji)

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Buttigieg, "Infrastructure is meant to connect, not divide" 

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Buttigieg, "Infrastructure is meant to connect, not divide" 

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How can we create spaces that build community?

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A post shared by The Daily Show (@thedailyshow)

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Stories and lessons for growing minds

We are a free multimedia platform for educators and students. Through our immersive storytelling and curricula, we aim to plant seeds of empathy, interconnectedness, and a sacred relationship with our planet. Use our award-winning films, photo essays, and essays to learn about social, cultural, and environmental issues from individuals and communities worldwide. For grades 3-12, our stories and lessons encourage students to broaden their perspectives and worldviews while fostering universal human values and respect for the living world. We aim to bring universal values into the lives of educators and students.

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Student Winners and Finalists: The Environment Is in You

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In this contest, students documented the fragility, hope, and future of our planet's ecosystem due to climate change. Inspired by four environmental writers-Linda Hogan, Robert Hass, Wendell Berry, and Dara McAnulty-students explored changes to local systems, how the environment shapes our identity, and how our actions and awareness today can impact the future.

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"This film has historic relevancy. I can see myself using it to encourage students to think about the value of the space program and how it speaks to the American Spirit and how we are often looking forward in our progress. This film begs to be used as an exploration of what it means to be a global citizen, how students can learn from people not like themselves, and what actions students can take in their everyday lives to make the world a better place."

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The gallery encourages students to learn from each other's perspectives. How are students witnessing and engaging with the world in new ways since the start of Covid-19? Search by theme, previous Global Oneness Project contests, or from locations around the world. The gallery is accompanied by an image analysis activity, including a Visible Thinking Routine from Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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Ecological Transformation | Jewish Perspectives

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Ecological Transformation | Jewish Perspectives

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The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World

Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/ecological-transformation/)

Ecological Transformation

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You can personally do something for Earth right now!

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Arthur Waskow's strategy to melt the hearts of people who have become hostile to each other – “blue” and “red” Americans – by massively supporting neighborhood solar and wind co-op programs they both need.

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Harmonic Convergence

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Sandra Bass reviews Michael Nagler’s "The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the Story of Human Nature."

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The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World

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The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World

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The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World

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Basic overview of Feminism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ZWRf3GA6k

How have women been oppressed?

Are women still oppressed?

Do all women have the same experience?

Who and how are groups being oppressed today?

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Case Study: Feminist Men Can Help Change the World?

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Case Study: How a French Bank Captured Haiti

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Case Study: How a French Bank Captured Haiti

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Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Every sentence of the invitation ended with an inky flourish, a triple loop of calligraphy befitting a night of dinner, dancing and fireworks at Haiti's national palace.

Debt had smothered the country for more than half a century. Despite ousting its colonial rulers in a war of independence, Haiti had been forced to pay the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to its former French slave masters, a ransom for the freedom it had already won in battle.

But on the night of Sept. 25, 1880, paying off the last of that money finally seemed within reach. No longer would Haiti lurch from one financial crisis to the next, always with a weather eye on the horizon for the return of French warships. The new president, Lysius Salomon, had managed a feat that had eluded the nation since birth.

"The country will soon have a bank," he told his guests, proposing a toast. Outside, soldiers paraded down streets festooned with enormous flags.

Lysius Salomon Credit... Cannaday Chapman

Salomon had reason for optimism. European national banks had financed railroads and factories, softened the blows of recessions and added certainty to the business of governing. They helped bring life to a majestic version of Paris, one with clean water, sewers and grand avenues - investments that would pay off long into the future.

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Now, it was Haiti's turn. Salomon called it "a great event, which will go down in history."

It was all a mirage.

The National Bank of Haiti, on which so many hopes were pinned that night, was national in name only. Far from an instrument of Haiti's salvation, the central bank was, from its very inception, an instrument of French financiers and a way to keep a suffocating grip on a former colony into the next century.

Haiti's central bank was set up by a Parisian bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial. At a time when the company was helping finance one of the world's best-known landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, as a monument to French liberty, it was choking Haiti's economy, taking much of the young nation's income back to Paris and impairing its ability to start schools, hospitals and the other building blocks of an independent country.

Crédit Industriel, known in France as C.I.C., is now a $355 billion subsidiary of one of Europe's largest financial conglomerates. But its exploits in Haiti left a crippling legacy of financial extraction and dashed hopes - even by the standards of a nation with a long history of both.

Haiti was the first modern nation to win its independence after a slave uprising, only to be financially shackled for generations by the reparations demanded by the French government for most of the 19th century.

And just when that money was nearly paid, Crédit Industriel and its national bank - the very instruments that seemed to hold the promise of financial independence - locked Haiti into a new vortex of debt for decades more to come.

French elites, including a descendant of one of the wealthiest slaveholders in Haiti's history, controlled Haiti's national bank from the French capital. Their ledgers show no investments in Haitian businesses, much less the kinds of ambitious projects that modernized Europe.

Instead, original records uncovered by The New York Times show that Crédit Industriel siphoned tens of millions of dollars out of Haiti and into the pockets of French investors.

The national bank that Crédit Industriel created charged fees on nearly every transaction the Haitian government made. French shareholders earned so much money that in some years, their profits exceeded the Haitian government's entire public works budget for a country of 1.5 million people.

That history has been all but erased. Scholars say most of Crédit Industriel'sarchives have been destroyed, and Haiti does not appear on the timeline used to publicize the company's history as one of France's oldest lenders. When it commissioned an official history to commemorate its 150th birthday in 2009, Haiti barely warranted a mention. The scholar who wrote that history, Nicolas Stoskopf, called the company "a bank without a memory."

A spokesman said the bank had no information about this period and declined repeated requests to discuss it. "The bank that we manage today is very different," the spokesman, Paul Gibert, said. (After this article was published, the chairman of the bank's parent company said it would hire researchers to delve into the bank's history in Haiti and any role it may have played in "financial colonization.")

Today, the brazen assassination of Haiti's president in his own bedroom, the rampant kidnappings and the gangland lawlessness in the capital have given fresh urgency to a question that has long bedeviled the Western world: Why does Haiti seem perpetually stuck in crisis, with staggering illiteracy, $2-a-day wages, hunger and disease? A country without public transportation, reliable electricity, garbage collection or sewage systems?

Demanding Justice: In 2003, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's president, began calling for reparations from France. It was part of his undoing. Read in French.

Bibliography: The project drew on original documents, as well as the work of historians and researchers. Here is the list of sources.

Persistent corruption by Haiti's leaders is surely part of any answer. But another part can be found in long-forgotten documents sprinkled in archives and libraries across Haiti and France.

The Times sifted through 19th-century texts, diplomatic records and bank documents that have seldom, if ever, been studied by historians. Together, the documents make clear that Crédit Industriel, working with corrupt members of the Haitian elite, left the country with barely anything to operate, let alone build a nation.

By the early 20th century, half of the taxes on Haiti's coffee crop, by far its most important source of revenue, went to French investors at C.I.C. and the national bank. After Haiti's other debts were deducted, its government was left with pennies - 6 cents of every $3 collected - to run the country.

The documents help explain why Haiti remained on the sidelines during a period so rich with modernization and optimism that Americans dubbed it the Gilded Age and the French called it the Belle Époque. This extraordinary growth benefited both faraway powers and developing neighbors, yet Haiti had vanishingly little to invest in basics like running water, electricity or education.

The damage was lasting. Over three decades, French shareholders made profits of at least $136 million in today's dollars from Haiti's national bank - about an entire year's worth of the country's tax revenues at the time, the documents show.

The Times vetted its methodology and sources for these calculations with economic historians and accountants. The financial historian Éric Monnet of the Paris School of Economics summed up the national bank's role as "pure extraction."

But the cumulative losses to Haiti were far greater: Had the wealth siphoned off by Haiti's national bank stayed in the country, it would have added at least $1.7 billion to Haiti's economy over the years - more than all of the government's revenues in 2021.

And that's if the money had simply remained in the Haitian economy, circulating among its farmers, laborers and merchants, withoutbeing invested in bridges, schools or factories, the sort of projects that help nations prosper.

More important, the toll Haiti's national bank took came after generations of payments to former slaveholders that inflicted as much as $115 billion in losses to the Haitian economy over the last two centuries.

It did not take long after the fireworks and feasting at the palace for Haitians to realize that something was not right. The national bank extracted so much and returned so little that Haitians quickly called it "the financial Bastille," equating it with the notorious prison that became a symbol of a despotic French monarchy.

"Isn't it funny," the Haitian politician and economist Edmond Paul wrote of the national bank in 1880, "that a bank that claims to come to the rescue of a depleted public treasury begins not by depositing money but by withdrawing everything of value?"

Haiti's president was not the only one with heady aspirations. In Paris, the president of Crédit Industriel, Henri Durrieu, had ambitions of his own.

Durrieu was not born into the world of high finance. He started his career as a tax collector, like his father, before striking off in his 40s to join a new bank, C.I.C. But the early years were tough. The bank had introduced the checking account to France, yet the novelty had not taken off and, by the 1870s, the company remained stuck in the second tier of French finance.

Crédit Industriel enjoyed an advantage, though. It was the preferred bank for much of the nation's Catholic bourgeoisie, clients who had money to invest and expected returns.

Henri Durrieu Credit... Cannaday Chapman

Durrieu, with a taste for risk taking, drew inspiration from state-led banks in French colonies like Senegal and Martinique. He and his colleagues were enthralled by the idea of "creating a bank in these rich but distant countries," as they described it in handwritten notes found in the French National Archives.

These banks "generally give brilliant results," the founding fathers of the National Bank of Haiti said.

Haiti - "a country new to credit markets, a country of renowned wealth," the national bank's executives concluded - seemed a good bet.

"Wealth" might seem a peculiar word for a Parisien banker to use to describe Haiti at the time. Its capital, Port-au-Prince, was overrun by trash and human waste that washed into the harbor. Streets and infrastructure were so neglected that Haitians had a saying: "Go 'round a bridge, but never cross it."

But while Haitians themselves were poor, Haiti could make you rich. As a British diplomat, Spenser St. John, wrote in 1884: "No country possesses greater capabilities, or a better geographical position, or more variety of soil, of climate, or of production."

Slaveholders had taken that wealth for themselves, first with the whip, then with a flotilla of French warships, demanding compensation for plantations, land and what France considered its other lost property: the Haitian people. It was the first and only instance in which generations of free people had to pay the descendants of their former slave masters.

A half-century later, Durrieu and C.I.C. approached Haiti with a different tactic: the outstretched hand of a business partner.

Durrieu knew how to sell a dream.

Five years earlier, C.I.C. and a now-defunct partner had issued Haiti a loan of 36 million francs, or about $174 million today. The money was supposed to build bridges, marketplaces, railroads and lighthouses.

It was a time of worldwide investment. England built new schools and passed laws on mandatory education. Paris opened a 97-mile aqueduct carrying clean drinking water to the capital. In New York, the iconic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge rose above the East River, an engineering marvel that would forever transform the city's economy.

Beyond bricks and steel, Haiti earmarked about 20 percent of the French loan to pay off the last of the debt linked to France's original ransom, according to the loan contract. "The country will finally come out of its malaise," the Haitian government's annual report predicted that year. "Our finances will prosper."

None of that happened. Right off the top, French bankers took 40 percent of the loan in commissions and fees. The rest paid off old debts, or disappeared into the pockets of corrupt Haitian politicians.

"None of the goals has been achieved," one Haitian senator declared in 1877. "We owe more than before."

The 1875 loan from Crédit Industriel and its partner left two major legacies. First is what the economist Thomas Piketty called the transition from "brutal colonialism" to "neocolonialism through debt."

Haiti took on millions in new interest, hoping to finally shed the burden of paying its former slave masters. In that way, the loan helped prolong the misery of Haiti's financial indentureship to France. Long after the former slaveholding families considered the debt settled, Haiti would still be paying - only now to Crédit Industriel.

Haitian leaders, of course, share the responsibility, and some scholars have argued that this loan shows that politicians cared more about lining their pockets than developing a nation.

The second legacy was felt more immediately. The loan initially obligated the Haitian government to pay C.I.C. and its partner nearly half of all the taxes the government collected on exports, like coffee, until the debt was settled, effectively choking off the nation's primary source of income.

That was the first step, giving Durrieu and his French bank a claim to much of Haiti's financial future. He soon set his sights on even more.

The National Bank of Haiti in 1907.

Haiti had tried to start a national bank for years.Salomon's predecessor had even bought bank vaults. But in 1880, Haiti's longing for financial independence aligned neatly with Durrieu's plans.

The contract establishing Haiti's national bank reads like a series of giveaways. Durrieu and his colleagues took over the country's treasury operations - things like printing money, receiving taxes and paying government salaries. Every time the Haitian government so much as deposited money or paid a bill, the national bank took a commission.

Lest there be any doubt where that money was headed, the contract said the National Bank of Haiti would be chartered in France and exempted from Haitian taxes and laws. All power was put in the hands of the board of directors in Paris. Haiti had no say in the operation of its own national bank.

The national bank's headquarters - which also happened to be Crédit Industriel's headquarters - sat in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris, in the shadow of the lavish Palais Garnier opera house.

Durrieu was the first chairman of a board that included French bankers and businessmen, including Édouard Delessert, a great-grandson of one of the biggest slaveholders in Haiti's colonial history, Jean-Joseph de Laborde.

Handwritten notes from the national bank show, from the beginning, who was in charge. As the Paris Financial Association wrote in 1896: "The National Bank of Haiti is a French financial institution whose headquarters, which is open to bondholders, is in Paris. Its offices in Haiti are only branches, placed under the authority and control of the head office."

Durrieu's gamble paid off. At a time when typical French investment returns hovered around 5 percent, board members and shareholders in the National Bank of Haiti earned an average of about 15 percent a year, according to a New York Times analysis of the bank's financial statements. Some years, those returns approached 24 percent.

Durrieu made out handsomely. His contract with Haiti granted him thousands of special shares in the national bank, worth millions in today's dollars.The same year he christened Haiti's national bank, he was named a commander of the Légion d'Honneur, an order of merit awarded for service to France.

The fact that Haiti would agree to such debilitating terms - particularly with the same bank behind an earlier loan so publicly condemned - shows its desperation. But it also highlights a recurring figure in Haitian history: the self-serving member of Haitian society who prospers as his country suffers.

In the case of the national bank, Haiti's chief negotiator was Charles Laforestrie, a Haitian official who had spent most of his life in Paris. The French newspaper La Petite Presse described him at the time as a man whom "fortune had always taken by the hand and led to the best seats in government."

When Parisian bankers held a party to celebrate the 1875 loan from Crédit Industriel, Laforestrie made a grand entrance. At a time when Haitian coffee farmers raised families on roughly 70 cents a day, Laforestrie arrived elegantly dressed, passing out expensive cigars, according to Paul, the Haitian economist, who described the gala a few years later.

Laforestrie pushed so hard to get the national bank approved that the president of Haiti called him out by name during the palace celebration, according to a diplomat's handwritten notes of the party. But Laforestrie did not stick around for the fallout. Dogged by corruption allegations, he resigned and retired to France.

Laforestrie's critics ruefully noted that he retired with a generous pension from the Haitian government. He later padded that retirement with another job: as a board member of the National Bank of Haiti.

"That's not the first case of a Haitian official selling the interest of his country for personal gains," said Georges Michel, a Haitian historian. "I would say it's almost a rule."

That's why, historians say, Haitians cannot blame French or American meddling alone for their misfortunes.

"They were betrayed by their own brothers," Mr. Michel said, "and then by foreign powers."

Soon after the fireworks display at the national palace, Haitians began realizing they had received a raw deal.

The national bank offered no savings accounts to Haitian people or businesses. And though the contract allowed it to loan money to businesses - and Haitians clearly hoped it would - bank ledgers from an archive in Roubaix, France, showed that seldom, if ever, happened.

"It is not from the Bank of Haiti, as it functions, that Haitians can expect their recovery," Haiti's finance secretary, Frédéric Marcelin, wrote at the time.

Frédéric Marcelin Credit... Cannaday Chapman

Marcelin, the mustachioed son of a successful Haitian merchant, emerged as the bank's most passionate opponent. A businessman, journalist and politician, he spent years trying to wrest control of the national bank from Paris.

The relationship was so lopsided that, Marcelin wrote, "at the National Bank of Haiti, the only positions reserved for Haitiens are the cashier boys."

The second half of the 19th century should have offered Haiti an enormous opportunity. Global demand for coffee was high, and Haiti's economy was built around it.

Across the Caribbean Sea, Costa Ricans were putting their coffee wealth to work building schools, sewage systems and the first municipal electrified lighting system in Latin America. Haiti, by contrast, obligated much of its coffee taxes to paying France - first to its former slaveholders, then to Crédit Industriel.

Despite all that, Haiti was a middle-of-the-road Caribbean economy, thanks to high coffee prices. But when the market tanked in the 1890s, Haiti's coffee taxes exceeded the price of the coffee itself. The entire economic model was on the brink of collapse.

It was time for yet another loan: 50 million francs (about $310 million today) from the National Bank of Haiti in 1896. It was, once again, guaranteed by coffee taxes, the country's most reliable source of money.

Haitians had been poor for generations. But this moment - when the country was tethered to coffee, C.I.C. and the national bank - is when Haiti began its steep decline relative to the rest of the region, according to data compiled by Victor Bulmer-Thomas, a British economist who studies Caribbean history.

"Haiti made plenty of its own mistakes," he said, like taking on new debt and failing to diversify its economy. "But there's no doubt, a lot of its problems from the late 19th Century onward can be attributed to these imperial powers."

Durrieu died in 1890, before the unraveling of the national bank he created.

The Haitian authorities began accusing the bank in 1903 of fraudulent overbilling, double-charging loan interest and working against the best interest of the country. But the bank reminded them of an important detail: It was chartered in France, and considered such disputes beyond the reach of Haitian courts.

Undeterred, Marcelin persuaded Parliament to retake control of the government treasury. Haiti would print its own money and pay its own bills.

But records in the French Diplomatic Archives show that the national bank still had a powerful ally in its corner: the French government.

In January 1908, France's envoy to Haiti, Pierre Carteron, met with Marcelin and urged him to restore normal relations with the bank. Marcelin refused. The National Bank of Haiti, should it survive at all, would actually need to work toward the economic development of Haiti, he said.

That might be possible, Carteron replied. Of course, he added, Haiti would first have to return its treasury to French control. And besides: "You need money," Carteron said, according to his own notes. "Where are you going to find it?"

As his handwritten messages show, Carteron suspected Marcelin would never agree to that. So he encouraged his colleagues in Paris to come up with a new plan.

"It is of the highest importance that we study how to set up a new French credit establishment in Port-au-Prince," Carteron wrote, adding: "Without any close link to the Haitian government."

That new institution opened in 1910 with a slight tweak to the name: the National Bank of the Republic of Haiti. France still had a stake, but, after 30years, Crédit Industriel et Commercial was out.

By then, there was a new center of gravity in the financial world: Wall Street, and a swaggering group of bankers from the National City Bank of New York, which ultimately became Citigroup.

The American financiers continued operating from Durrieu's playbook and became the dominant power, leading to a consequence even more lasting than the debt he helped orchestrate.

After all, Wall Street wielded a weapon more powerful than a French diplomat making oblique threats. American bankers called on their friends in Washington and, 35 years after Durrieu's bank came into existence, the United States military invaded Haiti.

It was one of the longest military occupations in American history, enabling the United States to seize control over Haiti's finances and shape its future for decades to come.

Once again, the country had been undermined by the institution President Salomon had so proudly feted that night at the palace: Haiti's national bank.

Reporting was contributed by Daphné Anglès and Claire Khelfaoui in Paris; Sarah Hurtes and Milan Schreuer in Brussels; Kristen Bayrakdarian in New York; Ricardo Lambert, Harold Isaac and Charles Archin in Port-au-Prince. Photo editing by Craig Allen. Produced by Rumsey Taylor. Additional production by Gray Beltran.

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Mauricio Lima for The New York Times To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Every sentence of the invitation ended with an inky flourish, a triple loop of calligraphy befitting a night of dinner, dancing and fireworks at Haiti's national palace.

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John Rawls

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Preferential Option for the Poor
-Short Wikipedia explanation

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Distributive Justice

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Structures of marriage

"Emasculate"

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We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston

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Guiding Principles

Our guiding principles are based on the tradition of learning and service handed down from St. Raphaela, the founding member of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Educate women for social and cultural transformation

Nurture faith development

Shape international mindedness and celebrate diversity

Side with the poor

Reach out to the world with hospitality and hope

Act as leaven for worldwide community building

Reverence creation

Share all that we are and have

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Critical Theory

Critical Philosophy of Race

Critical Disability Theory

Florida wants to avoid critical race theory and ‘social justice’ in social studies texts

A quick Wikipedia definition
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture to reveal and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychology, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.

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10 Principles of Catholic Social Teaching (C)

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10 Principles of Catholic Social Teaching (C)

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1. Dignity of the Human Person
2. Common Good
3. Solidarity
4. Preferential Option for the Poor
5. Stewardship of Creation
6. Subsidiarity & the Role of Government
7. Participation
8. Rights & Responsibilities
9. Economic Justice
10. Peace

COMPENDIUM OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH (Primary Source)

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10 Principles of Catholic Social Teaching

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What is 'patriarchy?'

What does it mean to be 'anti-patriarchy?'

What would a non-patriarch world look like?

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Is it just women that are oppressed?

Do all women have the same experience?

Intersectionality broadens the lens of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender, to include the different experiences of women of color, women who are poor, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women's different experiences and identities.

("What Does Intersectional Feminsim Actually Mean?". International Women's Development Agency. 11 May 2018. Archived from the original on 23 April 2019.)

Scholars:

-Kimberle W. Crenshaw

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Feminist Environmental Philosophy

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The life and legacy of the Catholic writer and activist, who some hope will be made a saint.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn't know what to do about Dorothy Day. It was 1941, and Director J. Edgar Hoover was concerned about Day's onetime communism, sometime socialism, and all-the-time anarchism. After months of investigating-interviewing her known associates, obtaining her driving record and vital statistics, collecting her clips from newspaper morgues, and reviewing the first of her autobiographies, "From Union Square to Rome" ("an interesting, running account of the life of the authoress")-the F.B.I. decided that the subject of Bureau File 100-2403-1 would not need to be detained in the event of a national emergency. Day would have disagreed with them: not because she felt she was dangerous but because she knew that the nation was already in an emergency, and had been for some time.

The emergency was poverty, and Day had been alarmed by it her whole life. She first encountered it in the slums of Chicago, where she lived as a teen-ager, and she saw it all around her in New York City, where she moved after dropping out of college, and lived for more than six decades. Even before the Great Depression, Day had been sensitive to the plight of the poor, a sensitivity that ultimately shaped her calling. At thirty, she converted to Catholicism. In the years that followed, she started a radical newspaper and began opening what she called "houses of hospitality" for those who needed something to eat and somewhere to stay.

Eventually, Day's Catholic Worker Movement would serve the poor in more than two hundred communities. Under her guidance, it would also develop a curiously dichotomous political agenda, taking prophetic stands against racial segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft, and armed conflict around the world, while opposing abortion, birth control, and the welfare state. That dichotomy seems especially stark today, when most people's beliefs come more neatly packaged by partisan affiliation. But by the time she died, in 1980, Day had become one of the most prominent thinkers of the left and doers of the right. In her lifetime, it was the secularists-including Dwight Macdonald, in a two-part Profile published in this magazine, in 1952-who called Day a saint. Now, though, the cause of her sainthood is officially advancing within the Catholic Church, a development that has occasioned a new biography and a documentary, both of which explore the contentious question of who owns her legacy.

She wasn't sure if she was afraid of God or the ground, but the nightmares Dorothy Day had as a child featured a noise that got louder and nearer until she woke up sweaty and terrified. She had been born in New York, in 1897, but her family relocated to California in 1904, and they were living in Oakland two years later, when the San Francisco earthquake struck. That tragedy changed Day's life in two ways. First, it affirmed her preëxisting fears about annihilation, while simultaneously stirring in her a theory of mercy based on her mother's nightly reassurances and the broader response of collectivity and charity. Why, she wondered, couldn't the community care for all its members so generously the rest of the time? The second change was more pragmatic: her father, John, was a sportswriter who could barely support his wife and five children on his salary, so when the earthquake destroyed the press that printed his newspaper he moved the family again, this time to Chicago.

John and Grace, his wife, had been married in a church, but they never took their children to worship. Even so, Dorothy, their middle daughter, was a pious child who read Scripture as ravenously as novels and watched with interest as her friends and their families prayed. At twelve, she demanded to be baptized at a nearby Episcopal church; in high school, she learned Greek and practiced her translation skills on the New Testament. She tested her way into a scholarship at the University of Illinois, where she matriculated not long after the socialist Eugene Debs got nearly a million votes in the 1912 Presidential election. Like many other students, she was drawn to the college Socialist Club, which is where she heard a lecture by Rose Pastor Stokes, a feminist who went on to help found the Communist Party of America.

Politics change like the weather, and this era of falling atmospheric pressure is nicely captured in "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century," a new biography co-written by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. It was the great age of "isms," especially on American campuses, and at first Day enthusiastically embraced them. Her family had always been financially marginal, and that left her receptive to all politics that prioritized the poor; at the same time, a rising atheism and anti-authoritarianism left her eager to cast off her religious faith, which her comrades regarded as risible. She joined a literary club called the Scribblers and submitted work to a magazine and a newspaper on campus, along with the local paper in Urbana-Champaign. Her writing was more impressive than her grades, which included an F in biology, so, when her family moved back to New York, Day dropped out and went with them.

Day's father had helped her brothers find journalism jobs, but he refused to help her, so she was left to knock on the doors of papers around the city. When that failed, she remembered the alternative media and leftist publications she had learned about on campus, and found a job with the Call, a socialist daily in which her first byline appeared under the headline "Girl Reporter, with Three Cents in Her Purse, Braves Night Court." A few weeks later, she interviewed Leon Trotsky, who was then living in the Bronx. After that, she managed to craft a feature from a three-minute conversation with Margaret Sanger's sister, newly released from prison and desperate to drum up support for the American Birth Control League.

In between writing for every radical outlet in town, Day palled around with Marxists, got arrested for picketing the White House with the suffragists, and took a billy club in the ribs at an antiwar riot. "Bohemian" doesn't begin to describe Day's life in this period. Her drinking was legendary, even by Greenwich Village standards; the literary critic Malcolm Cowley claimed, in his memoir, that Day could hold her liquor better than most gangsters. Some of that drinking took place during Prohibition, and was thus illegal, and much of it took place at a bar alternately known as the Hell Hole and the Bucket o' Blood. Day's friends were all writing books or appearing in them, and she was said to be the model for characters in "The Malefactors," by her onetime roommate the novelist Caroline Gordon, and in "A Moon for the Misbegotten," by her onetime lover the playwright Eugene O'Neill.

Day herself wrote a book during this time: an autobiographical novel called "The Eleventh Virgin," published in 1924. It told the story of a disastrous affair she'd had with an older writer, which ended after she attempted suicide and had an illegal abortion, a procedure performed by an ex-boyfriend of the anarchist Emma Goldman. Day wrote the novel while honeymooning in Europe with a different man. The rebound ended no better than the previous relationship: one morning, Day took off her wedding ring, left it on the bureau, and walked out of the marriage.

She moved back to Chicago, where she took jobs in a department store, at a library, in a restaurant, and as an artist's model. Her employment was erratic, but her politics were consistent. When the Chicago police raided the Industrial Workers of the World boarding house, Day was there, and got arrested for prostitution-only because the police couldn't arrest people for socialism. She was released from jail a week later, and eventually made her way back to New York.

There Day fell in love with a man named Forster Batterham. After the abortion, she assumed that she could not have children, and so was astonished when she became pregnant, then awed by the birth of a daughter, Tamar Teresa, in 1926. Without consulting Batterham, an atheist, she stopped a nun on the street and asked to have the baby baptized. Plenty of new parents are inspired to return to religion, and Day would later write of how God had long haunted her life, but she could never fully explain why she was so suddenly and urgently drawn to Catholicism. The nun she stopped, Sister Aloysia Mary Mulhern, didn't agree to the baptism right away, because Day was not yet Catholic; over the next few months, the pair studied the catechism together, and talked about the faith into which the activist had become convinced that she and her daughter needed to be received.

Batterham did not believe in marriage, and, after converting to Catholicism, Day left him. Then she met someone else: a fellow-Catholic named Peter Maurin, who, although never romantically involved with Day, was, in the deepest sense, her soul mate. Maurin liked to call himself a French peasant but in reality he was equal parts philosopher, troubadour, and troublemaker. He had heard about Day from some other Catholic radicals and was waiting in her apartment when she came home one day in December, 1932. Most people would have called the police, but she listened patiently as he expounded on his many ideas and theories and dreams and programs and plans.

Day had just returned from covering the Communist Party's hunger march in Washington, D.C. What Maurin couldn't have known is that, before leaving the city, she had gone to the basilica at Catholic University and prayed to find a way to alleviate the suffering of the hungry. The country was three years into the Great Depression, and Day worried that her writing was not doing enough to help; it seemed obvious that Maurin was the answer to her prayer. She quickly agreed to the first of many of his ideas: a newspaper to serve the poor.

The first issue of the Catholic Worker came out on May Day, 1933, and asked, "Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?" A religious press printed twenty-five hundred copies, and, at a time when the economy was so constricted that there were literally no new nickels and dimes in circulation, Day sold the paper for a penny each in Union Square. She had written most of its eight pages herself-arts coverage, exposés on child labor and racial discrimination, an article about the Scottsboro Boys going to trial, and a list of upcoming strikes for those who wanted to support the labor movement. The editors confessed that it wasn't "yet known whether it will be a monthly, a fortnightly, or a weekly," since they had no idea if any subscriptions or donations would follow.

Trusting in what Christ preached about the lilies of the field, Day and Maurin focussed on the present, letting God provide for their future. That didn't mean money wasn't an issue; it always was. They wouldn't hoard it, so an endowment was a nonstarter, and relying on government funds was anathema to them both, so they often went begging, which they felt helped them live in solidarity with those they served. Grocery bills, printer's bills, electric bills: they asked for money to pay them all, and for extensions or forgiveness when they could not. (Years later, when they faced a substantial fine from the city for the allegedly slumlike and hazardous conditions of their headquarters, the entire amount was paid by W. H. Auden.)

Day and Maurin sent the Catholic Worker to parishes and priests around the country, and it soon had a circulation of a hundred thousand. They published the paper monthly, and it became a mixture of articles that Day thought would promote and influence the political left and what Maurin called his "easy essays," prose poems that amounted to aphorisms: "The world would be better off / if people tried to become better. / And people would become better / if they stopped trying to become better off."

It was Maurin who began writing about how the early followers of Jesus had kept "Christ rooms" in their homes, offering rest and hospitality to strangers. He lamented the end of that culture of welcome, and implored priests and bishops to use their rectories and diocesan properties for such a purpose. With more than ten million Americans unemployed, more than half the country living below the poverty line, and two million people without homes, Maurin asked why the Catholic Church wasn't doing more to address the crisis. The newspaper had secured an office and enough of a budget that he and Day could occasionally rent apartments for people who had been laid off. But there were more than twenty thousand people living on the street in New York City alone, and the Catholic Workers, as the paper's writers and readers came to call themselves, knew that far more sweeping action was needed.

In the winter of 1934, Day and Maurin rented a four-story, eleven-bedroom building on Charles Street, the first of their hospitality houses. From the start, the Catholic Workers served the sorts of individuals even other social reformers might not have allowed through the door: the mentally ill, the drunk, the offensive, the disobedient, the ungrateful. When challenged by another Catholic activist about an encounter with a racist and anti-Semitic guest on Charles Street, Day said she would not remove him: "He, after all, is Christ." The man, an alcoholic with dementia, lived with the Catholic Workers until he died.

Within a few years, there were thirty-two hospitality houses, from Buffalo and Baltimore to St. Louis and Seattle. Day and Maurin continued to publish their newspaper and to organize for labor rights, racial integration, and radical equality. Hardly a protest took place in New York without at least a few Catholic Workers showing up. Not even the Bishop of Rome was spared: when the gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery went on strike against the trustees of St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Archbishop of New York, the workers supported them, including by picketing the office of the chancery. The Church hierarchy was even more vexed by Day's pacificism, which was so unpopular during the Second World War that the newspaper's circulation collapsed and Church officials tried to have "Catholic" removed from its title.

But Dorothy Day was always equal parts "Catholic" and "worker." Many followers of the Pope found her politics inconvenient and offensive; many leftists thought her faith oppressive and absurd. Day's family initially mistook her conversion for an emotional crisis, and her friends suspected that she had simply traded her political fanaticism for the religious variety; both camps were surprised when it lasted. Had Day been an anodyne Protestant or an agnostic Unitarian, her spirituality would have raised fewer eyebrows, but she opted in to what many of her friends regarded as the most regressive and patriarchal institution outside of the federal government.

That government, by contrast, was somewhat assuaged by Day's religiosity. Part of what kept her F.B.I. file from getting any larger was the assurances offered by the very hierarchy her leftist friends so despised: as one agent noted, "Church officials believe her to be an honest and sincere Catholic." That was putting it mildly: Day took to the Rosary and the saints, the confession and the liturgy, the miracles and the sacraments as, to quote the psalmist, a deer longs for flowing streams. She felt that the Church had cured her alienation and isolation, drawing her into fellowship with a community of living souls. "We cannot love God," Day wrote in her memoir "The Long Loneliness," published in 1952, "unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more."

It wasn't all balm, though. Day had reservations about Catholic dogma, was dismayed by the faith's history of impieties and intolerance, and, above all, had no patience for its failures to live up to Christ's core teachings. Still, to her mind, her politics were not contradicted but confirmed by the Catholic Church, both in the Gospels and in two of the most consequential encyclicals of the post-industrial age. The first, Pope Leo XIII's 1891 "Rerum Novarum," praised labor unions and called for reforming capitalism, asserting that "some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class." The second, Pope Pius XI's "Quadragesimo Anno," delivered forty years later, affirmed the earlier teaching and called for a new economy based on solidarity and subsidiarity. Both encyclicals showed a respectful apprehension about the role of the state, believing that it should not interfere in the private lives of its citizens or usurp the moral authority of the Church. This explained Day's ongoing anarchism and her hostility to government welfare programs, which she pilloried as a "sop thrown to the proletariat."

To the socialists and communists who stood with Day on the picket lines and protested with her in front of statehouses and corporate headquarters, such teachings seemed as nonsensical as the Immaculate Conception. And her distance from would-be allies only increased during the sixties and seventies. Although she had been plenty countercultural in her own youth, she disapproved of the drug use, sexual promiscuity, and general disdain for authority that came with hippie culture. Many of the young people who showed up at the houses of hospitality-and at the kibbutz-like communal farms the Catholic Worker Movement tried to establish-did not even know who Day was, and they were as confounded as the old left had been by her joy in the ritual of worship and her solace in the habit of prayer. But what most alienated Day from her fellow-radicals was her conviction that what was needed was not a violent revolution but "a revolution of the heart," as she called it: an ability to see Christ in others, and to love others as God loves us.

As the years passed, faith and radicalism, which coexisted so seamlessly in Day herself, grew further and further apart in the outer world. The left wanted less heart and more revolution; the faithful, less revolution and more heart. Day wanted what she always had: justice for the poor and peace for all. There was an admirable consistency, perhaps even obstinacy, in much of her political life: in the nineteen-tens, she had picketed for suffrage; in the twenties and thirties, she had marched for the hungry; in the forties, she criticized the government for the internment of Japanese-Americans; in the fifties, she refused to participate in civil-defense drills and protested nuclear proliferation; in the sixties, she denounced the Vietnam War, inspiring the men of the Catholic Worker Movement to become the first in America to burn their draft cards; in the seventies (and in her seventies), she was standing with Cesar Chavez's farm laborers in California when she was arrested for the last time.

Yet, for almost every one of those stands, she took others that she or history or both later judged less kindly. Day defended the Catholic Church's sexual ethics at the ongoing expense of those who sought abortions like the one she'd had, needed the birth control she'd once used, were abused by their priests, or were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. She opposed Social Security, believing it to be overreach by the state, then lived long enough to watch it save many senior citizens from financial ruin. She saw the atrocities of the Holocaust ended by the Allies through the global conflict she had opposed, and she witnessed the sufferings caused by the Cuban Revolution, which she had praised.

In the early years of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day joked that she wrote down how much money came in and how much money went out but never reconciled the two columns-which is more or less how she lived her life. Unfortunately, it also more or less describes Loughery and Randolph's biography: a comprehensive, chronological account that never arrives at a meaningful summation of the life it chronicles. It doesn't go much beyond what has been written before: by Day herself in her memoirs; in collections of her letters and diaries, carefully edited by Robert Ellsberg, the managing editor of the Catholic Worker in the late seventies and the son of the Pentagon Papers whistle-blower; and in the biographies "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty" (Scribner), by her youngest granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, and "Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion" (Da Capo Press), a perceptive portrait by the Catholic Worker turned psychiatrist Robert Coles.

A more compelling addition to the many studies of Day is Martin Doblmeier's new documentary, "Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story," the latest in his "Prophet Voices" series, which has already featured films about the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Howard Thurman. (The movie aired on PBS last month and is now available on PBS.org.) Admiring without being hagiographic-an obvious temptation with the life of a putative saint-it's a fine example of what Day herself was always extolling: a kind of personalist experience whereby our hearts are changed not by airtight argument or moral perfection but by direct encounters with human needs and those who rise to meet them.

Both the documentary and the biography attempt to sate the curiosity of a public newly aware of Day because of the effort to have her sainted. Not everyone is pleased by that possibility. Loughery and Randolph write that some conservatives are "horrified at the prospect of canonizing a woman who had an abortion and a child out of wedlock and who condemned capitalism far more frequently and vehemently than she condemned Marxism-Leninism," while some progressives "fear the loss of her radical edge," believing that sainthood "would be antithetical to her very uninstitutional, anti-hierarchical approach to spiritual growth and social change."

That controversy reflects the continuing animosity between the two central aspects of Day's identity. The Catholic Worker Movement still exists, with nearly two hundred houses of hospitality around the world and a newspaper that is still published and sold for a penny (plus postage if you take it by mail), and it still evangelizes for the "personalist" approach-those revolutions of the heart. But Day's influence is also felt in the Democratic Socialists of America, the insurgent political organization that was founded in the nineteen-seventies by Michael Harrington, who had been an editor at the Catholic Worker in the early fifties, but who left after losing his faith. He went on to publish "The Other America: Poverty in the United States," which became the basis for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Unlike Day, who fought for suffrage but never voted, the D.S.A. has poured a great deal of its energy into electoral politics to change not only hearts, but parties and systems.

Needless to say, neither approach, personalist or structural, has succeeded. Even before the coronavirus devastated our economy and added millions to the unemployment rolls, half a million Americans were homeless, twenty-seven million lacked health insurance, thirty-eight million lived in poverty, and forty million relied on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which the current Administration is trying to cut. In the face of that national emergency, one suspects that Day would insist that no one is the rightful owner of her legacy, because, as yet, no one has fulfilled it. Stop talking about me, she'd almost certainly say, and start talking about the poor. ♦

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The life and legacy of the Catholic writer and activist, who some hope will be made a saint. The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn't know what to do about Dorothy Day. It was 1941, and Director J. Edgar Hoover was concerned about Day's onetime communism, sometime socialism, and all-the-time anarchism.

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Is Urban Planning just designing buildings and roads?

How can we make communities more inviting for everyone?

East Bay Community Foundation

"Just Oakland" Infographic Plan

Do we design cities reconsideration with everyone's ability in mind? Sustainable cities and communities

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We believe that race, space, and place still matter in defining individual and community outcomes. They determine our access to opportunities, health, wealth, and even basic human necessities. Racial disparities in poverty, health, income, housing stability, and education did not evolve overnight. They have been shaped by a long history of racist policies, divestment, and neglect.

It will first take centering the people most impacted to have the power to define and solve the problems. It will also take the audacity to come together to design cities that remember our collective past of grave injustices, vow never to repeat that history, and forge new roadmaps of inclusion and self-determination - this is what restorative justice looks like.

01

RELATIONSHIPS FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

Growing racial and income segregation of our neighborhoods and schools means that we don't know one another. And if we don't know one another, then we don't care about each other's pain. Just Cities convenes all of us to care about the people most impacted by racial injustice, centers their leadership, and moves the collective towards concrete solutions.

02

Multiracial Leadership Development

Just Cities operates leadership development programs for future planning and policy leaders that call forth our beauty and brilliance, raise consciousness of structural causes of injustice, and facilitate collective design and implementation of solutions.

03

HOUSING FOR ALL

Housing in the US is treated as a market commodity rather than a fundamental human need, like public education or healthcare. Just Cities takes a comprehensive approach through prevention of harm, production of accessible housing, access for the most disenfranchised, and justice innovation.

04

UN HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARDS

Many US cities have adopted international standards when it comes to climate change or economic development. However, very few cities apply international human rights standards to the treatment of their most vulnerable residents. We believe in practicing international human rights standards to address homelessness, displacement, and the growing educational/economic divides.

05

Inclusive Development

After decades of public and private disinvestment from cities, we are finally seeing resources and investments in urban areas but many of these efforts are done in ways that harm low-income communities of color. We believe it's an imperative to invest in community-based development as the antidote to the current untenable situation of development with displacement.

06

Public Financing Innovation

Under Proposition 13, California cities are limited in revenue generation strategies and rely on regressive taxation strategies that hurt low income communities. Funding for safety net services that keep people housed were decimated by federal funding cuts and the demise of California Redevelopment. Instead, we must develop new innovative solutions to public financing woes.

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We believe that race, space, and place still matter in defining individual and community outcomes. They determine our access to opportunities, health, wealth, and even basic human necessities. Racial disparities in poverty, health, income, housing stability, and education did not evolve overnight. They have been shaped by a long history of racist policies, divestment, and neglect.

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Does the fashion industry represent everyone?

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The Fashion World Promised More Diversity. Here’s What We Found. (Published 2021)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tracking an industry where Black representation has been rare.

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The Micropedia of Microaggressions - the first encyclopedia of microaggressions.

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Browse this site to learn about microaggressions and their impact.

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What would Theology be like if it was not male dominated but feminine?

Could you re-imagine other systems if they were developed through a feminine lens?

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Weaving the World: Feminist Theology and Process Theology

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A lecture delivered at Xavier University, October, 1983 for the purpose of introducing the audience to basic elements of feminist and process thought. The lecture appeared in Process Studies ,...

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Are some languages seen as more valuable than others?

Are accents and dialects seen as more valuable than others?

Does a language change the way you experience the world? What if you could not speak your language?

Racial Equity Tools (More info here)

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Creative Localization:
A Community-Based Approach to Ecological Civilization
in Practice and Theory​

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Interestingly, these communities are having a good bit of fun along the way. Some of them are part of the transition network described above. Sparked by the creativity of their own ordinary citizens, these communities are inspired by the ideas of local livelihoods, local training, local food, local energy, and local currencies. They are interested in inner transformation as well as outer transformation. They are resilient.

But they are not resilient in a static or homogenized way. They embrace cultural, religious, and philosophical diversity; and they do not hide from enriching tensions. Even as they have their roots in the bonds of local affiliation, they have wings to fly. They are creatively and adventurously resilient.

Depth and Breadth

spacious and gracious simplicity of living with less "stuff," cultivating what one of our columnists, Patricia Adams Farmer, calls "fat souls."

A fat soul is someone who can live in an open-minded and open-hearted way, filled with a sense of respect and care for the community of life. A fat soul has roots and wings.

Relational Power

relational power." Relational power is the power to receive and absorb influences from others in a generous way, and then to respond with creative generosity, guided by the hope of mutual well-being. Relational power seeks win-win solutions, not win-lose solutions.

Multi-Polar World, another of our columnists, Les Muray, points out that this kind of power also applies to international relations and hopes for the world. An appreciation of relational power entails a critique of colonizing and imperial rule --political, corporate, consumerist, or capitalist -- and, in local settings, a welcoming of consensus thinking over conflict thinking. Relational power does not hide from conflict, but it also knows that, in the last analysis, persuasion not coercion is the most lasting kind of power.

Improvising and the Open Future

In these and other ways relational philosophies have an important role to play to play in encouraging transitions to a post-petroleum world. Such philosophies emphasize that we humans dwell within, not apart from, the network of felt relations, human and ecological, that shape our lives; and that we have possibilities for living creatively and compassionately amid these relations. These philosophies see the future is influenced by the past, sometimes in deeply damaging ways, but believe that, in the present itself, there is a kernel creativity that can help create a different kind of future.

Thus, these philosophies are not mechanistic or deterministic. They see the universe as a whole, not only as a web of interconnected events, but also as a journey, a pilgrimage through time and space that creates time and space within the pilgrimage. The future doesn't exist until the universe creates it.

A Divine Lure toward Creative Transformation There's a religious side to all of this. Some among these philosophies -- Whitehead's version, for example -- speak of a divine lure toward creative transformation, present in the cosmos and present in life on earth. The Whiteheadian version of relational thinking sees the transition movement itself as one way of responding to this lure. God calls toward peace among people and peace with the earth, toward creative frugality and adventurous living.

This does not mean that all participants in the transition movement are, or need to be, religious. Nor does it mean that they need belong to a single religion. From the Whiteheadian perspective the diversity of cultures and faiths in our world makes the whole of life, and the whole of the divine life, richer. Even God takes satisfaction in the multiplicity and is nourished by it.

This means that transition communities can be, and need to be, multi-faith communities and the inter-religious dialogue can have a practical aim: namely to draw from resources within and beyond religions toward the creation of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called beloved communities. Each religion has something to offer, and no religion has all the answers. Multi-Faith Communities

But it all begins with a combination of creative and experimental practice, guided by good intentions and courage of soul. It is the business of the future to be dangerous, says Whitehead. He adds that, with fortitude and spunk, creativity and resilience, the future can be beautiful, too.

Five Foundations for a New Civilizationand Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet, John B. Cobb. Jr. offers more particular ideas that deepen what has been said above. There is a need for hospitable urban design, for sustainable economics, for a revitalization of rural life, for wise and responsive governance that moves in the direction of biocracy. -- Jay McDaniel. January 2020

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Interestingly, these communities are having a good bit of fun along the way. Some of them are part of the transition network described above. Sparked by the creativity of their own ordinary citizens, these communities are inspired by the ideas of local livelihoods, local training, local food, local energy, and local currencies.

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The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities embraces differences between human beings and underlines the importance of embracing disability as part of human diversity. Persons with disabilities are recognized as rights-holders and their rights must be respected, protected and fulfilled, just like everyone else.
 
With these short video animations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities aims to raise awareness on the barriers faced by people with disabilities to exercise rights. The series of four audio-visual pieces discuss and explain the notion of “ableism”, as well as how to protect the rights of people with disabilities to legal capacity, sexual and reproductive health, and participation in decision-making. They are intended for the general public, including persons with disabilities and their organizations, policymakers, human rights defenders, and educators.

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Process Philosophy

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language - what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine - can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

"Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human," said Dan Jurafsky, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. "Discovering what's universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity."

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it's headed next.

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

What to read next:

Ask a lot of questions, journalist Charles Duhigg advises. And make them deep ones.

Building canals to drain water from peatlands for conversion to agriculture unlocks far more planet-warming carbon dioxide than previously thought.

Despite common lore about major lapses in memory, the effects of healthy aging on cognitive functions are actually quite subtle, says Stanford neurologist Sharon Sha.

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The power of language: How words shape people, culture

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At Stanford, linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time.

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Racial Equity Tools Glossary

Words and their multiple uses reflect the tremendous diversity that characterizes our society. Indeed, universally agreed upon language on issues relating to racism is nonexistent. We discovered that even the most frequently used words in any discussion on race can easily cause confusion, which leads to controversy and hostility. It is essential to achieve some degree of shared understanding, particularly when using the most common terms. In this way, the quality of dialogue and discourse on race can be enhanced.

Language can be used deliberately to engage and support community anti-racism coalitions and initiatives, or to inflame and divide them. Discussing definitions can engage and support coalitions. However, it is important for groups to decide the extent to which they must have consensus and where it is okay for people to disagree. It is also helpful to keep in mind that the words people use to discuss power, privilege, racism and oppression hold different meanings for different people. For instance, people at different stages of developing an analysis tend to attach different meanings to words like discrimination, privilege and institutional racism. Furthermore, when people are talking about privilege or racism, the words they use often come with emotions and assumptions that are not spoken.

Many of the terms in this glossary have evolved over time. For example, given the changing demographic trends in the United States, the word "minority" no longer accurately reflects the four primary racial/ethnic groups. The terms "emerging majority" and "people of color" have become popular substitutes. Also, the terms used to refer to members of each community of color have changed over time. Whether to use the terms African American or Black, Hispanic American, Latinx or Latino, Native American or American Indian, and Pacific Islander or Asian American depends on a variety of conditions, including your intended audiences' geographic location, age, generation, and, sometimes, political orientation.

SOURCE: Project Change's "The Power of Words." Originally produced for Project Change Lessons Learned II, also included in A Community Builder's Toolkit - both produced by Project Change and The Center for Assessment and Policy Development with some modification by RacialEquityTools.org.

The main source for each definition is noted with its term below. Some definitions are paraphrased or updated. If you plan to use a couple of the terms in your materials, we encourage you to keep the SOURCE citation(s) that we have listed for them.

You can download a PDF version of this glossary . Please feel free to share the RET Glossary PDF or post a link on your site. We request that you use the following citation: Racial Equity Tools Glossary, MP Associates, Center for Assessment and Policy Development, and World Trust Educational Services, July 2022.

For guidance on evaluation terms in particular, see .

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Words and their multiple uses reflect the tremendous diversity that characterizes our society. Indeed, universally agreed upon language on issues relating to racism is nonexistent. In this way, the quality of dialogue and discourse on race can be enhanced.

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Feminist Perspectives on Power

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Domination (Foucault)

Soft Power

Microaggressions

Agency (Sartre)

Subjugation

Subjectivity (Philosophy)

Developing Subjectivity (Simone de Beauvoir)

Cultural Heritage

Cultural Property

Reparations

Cultural Appropriations

Dominate Culture/Non-Dominate Culture

Hegemony

Exploitation

Colonialism

Post-Colonialism

De-Colonization

Consent

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Simone de Beauvoir

"Simone de Beauvoir’s position as a feminist theorist has never been in question. Controversial from the beginning, The Second Sex’s critique of patriarchy continues to challenge social, political, and religious categories used to justify women’s inferior status." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Read more

Watch this for a quick overview

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Learning for Justice seeks to uphold the mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center: to be a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people.

We support this mission by focusing our work with educators, students, caregivers and communities in these areas:

1. Culture and Climate

2. Curriculum and Instruction

3. Leadership

4. Family and Community Engagement

Since our founding as Teaching Tolerance in 1991, we have had a strong foundation of providing educational resources, and we are building on that foundation with expanded engagement opportunities for communities, especially in the South.

Our free educational resources-articles, guides, lessons, films, webinars, frameworks and more-help foster shared learning and reflection for educators, young people, caregivers and all community members. Our engagement opportunities-conferences, workshops, and school and community partnerships-provide space where people can harness collective power and take action.

Through this continual cycle of education and engagement, we hope that we can build and maintain meaningful relationships with communities and we can all move from learning for justice to creating it.

You can learn more about the reasons for our name change here and read the announcement of our new name here.

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Learning for Justice seeks to uphold the mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center: to be a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people.

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1. Justice: Mapping the Concept

'Justice' has sometimes been used in a way that makes it virtually indistinguishable from rightness in general. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between 'universal' justice that corresponded to 'virtue as a whole' and 'particular' justice which had a narrower scope (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, chs. 1-2). The wide sense may have been more evident in classical Greek than in modern English. But Aristotle also noted that when justice was identified with 'complete virtue', this was always 'in relation to another person'. In other words, if justice is to be identified with morality as such, it must be morality in the sense of 'what we owe to each other' (see Scanlon 1998). But it is anyway questionable whether justice should be understood so widely. At the level of individual ethics, justice is often contrasted with charity on the one hand, and mercy on the other, and these too are other-regarding virtues. At the level of public policy, reasons of justice are distinct from, and often compete with, reasons of other kinds, for example economic efficiency or environmental value.

As this article will endeavour to show, justice takes on different meanings in different practical contexts, and to understand it fully we have to grapple with this diversity. But it is nevertheless worth asking whether we find a core concept that runs through all these various uses, or whether it is better regarded as a family resemblance idea according to which different combinations of features are expected to appear on each occasion of use. The most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the Institutes of Justinian, a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as 'the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due'. This is of course quite abstract until further specified, but it does throw light upon four important aspects of justice.

1.1 Justice and Individual Claims

First, it shows that justice has to do with how individual people are treated ('to each his due'). Issues of justice arise in circumstances in which people can advance claims - to freedom, opportunities, resources, and so forth - that are potentially conflicting, and we appeal to justice to resolve such conflicts by determining what each person is properly entitled to have. In contrast, where people's interests converge, and the decision to be taken is about the best way to pursue some common purpose - think of a government official having to decide how much food to stockpile as insurance against some future emergency - justice gives way to other values. In other cases, there may be no reason to appeal to justice because resources are so plentiful that we do not need to worry about allotting shares to individuals. Hume pointed out that in a hypothetical state of abundance where 'every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetites can want', 'the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of' (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 183-4). Hume also believed - and philosophical controversy on this point persists until today - that justice has no place in close personal relationships, such as the family, where (it is alleged) each identifies with the others' interests so strongly that there is no need and no reason for anyone to make claims of personal entitlement. (See Sandel 1982 for a defence of this view; for a critique, see Okin 1989. See also the entry on feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family).

That justice is a matter of how each separate person is treated appears to create problems for theories such as utilitarianism that judge actions and policies on the basis of their overall consequences aggregated across people - assuming that these theories wish to incorporate rather than discard the idea of justice. In Section 4 below we examine how utilitarians have attempted to respond to this challenge.

Although justice is centrally a matter of how individuals are treated, it is also possible to speak of justice for groups - for example when the state is allocating resources between different categories of citizens. Here each group is being treated as though it were a separate individual for purposes of the allocation.

1.2 Justice, Charity and Enforceable Obligation

Second, Justinian's definition underlines that just treatment is something due to each person, in other words that justice is a matter of claims that can be rightfully made against the agent dispensing justice, whether a person or an institution. Here there is a contrast with other virtues: we demand justice, but we beg for charity or forgiveness. This also means that justice is a matter of obligation for the agent dispensing it, and that the agent wrongs the recipient if the latter is denied what is due to her. It is a characteristic mark of justice that the obligations it creates should be enforceable: we can be made to deliver what is due to others as a matter of justice, either by the recipients themselves or by third parties. However it overstates the position to make the enforceability of its requirements a defining feature of justice (see Buchanan 1987). On the one hand, there are some claims of justice that seem not to be enforceable (by anyone). When we dispense gifts to our children or our friends, we ought to treat each recipient fairly, but neither the beneficiaries themselves nor anyone else can rightfully force the giver to do so. On the other hand, in cases of extreme emergency, it may sometimes be justifiable to force people to do more than justice requires them to do - there may exist enforceable duties of humanity. But these are rare exceptions. The obligatory nature of justice generally goes hand-in-hand with enforceability.

1.3 Justice and Impartiality

The third aspect of justice to which Justinian's definition draws our attention is the connection between justice and the impartial and consistent application of rules - that is what the 'constant and perpetual will' part of the definition conveys. Justice is the opposite of arbitrariness. It requires that where two cases are relevantly alike, they should be treated in the same way (We discuss below the special case of justice and lotteries). Following a rule that specifies what is due to a person who has features X, Y, Z whenever such a person is encountered ensures this. And although the rule need not be unchangeable - perpetual in the literal sense - it must be relatively stable. This explains why justice is exemplified in the rule of law, where laws are understood as general rules impartially applied over time. Outside of the law itself, individuals and institutions that want to behave justly must mimic the law in certain ways (for instance, gathering reliable information about individual claimants, allowing for appeals against decisions).

1.4 Justice and Agency

Finally, the definition reminds us that justice requires an agent whose will alters the circumstances of its objects. The agent might be an individual person, or it might be a group of people, or an institution such as the state. So we cannot, except metaphorically, describe as unjust states of affairs that no agent has contributed to bringing about - unless we think that there is a Divine Being who has ordered the universe in such a way that every outcome is a manifestation of His will. Admittedly we are tempted to make judgements of what is sometimes called 'cosmic injustice' - say when a talented person's life is cut cruelly short by cancer, or our favourite football team is eliminated from the competition by a freak goal - but this is a temptation we should resist.

This agency condition, however, is less restrictive than it might at first appear. It by no means excludes the possibility that agents can create injustice by omission - for example by failing to create the institutions or to enact the policies that would deliver vital resources to those who need them. Thus it is now common to speak of 'systemic injustice' in the case of bad outcomes that no-one intends to occur but that could be prevented by a shift in social norms or institutional practices. The agents in these cases are all those who by acting together to change these things could invert the injustice, but have so far failed to do so.

2. Justice: Four Distinctions

We have so far looked at four elements that are present in every use of the concept of justice. Now it is time to consider some equally important contrasts.

2.1 Conservative versus Ideal Justice

Philosophers writing on justice have observed that it has two different faces, one conservative of existing norms and practices, the other demanding reform of these norms and practices (see Sidgwick 1874/1907, Raphael 2001). Thus on the one hand it is a matter of justice to respect people's rights under existing law or moral rules, or more generally to fulfil the legitimate expectations they have acquired as a result of past practice, social conventions, and so forth; on the other hand, justice often gives us reason to change laws, practices and conventions quite radically, thereby creating new entitlements and expectations. This exposes an ambiguity in what it means to 'render each his due'. What is 'due' might be what a person can reasonably expect to have given existing law, policy, or social practice, or it might be what the person should get under a regime of ideal justice: this could mean what the person deserves, or needs, or is entitled to on grounds of equality, depending on which ideal principle is being invoked.

Conceptions of justice vary according to the weight they attach to each of these faces. At one extreme, some conceptions interpret justice as wholly concerned with what individuals can claim under existing laws and social conventions: thus for Hume, justice was to be understood as adherence to a set of rules that assign physical objects to individuals (such as being the first possessor of such an object) (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II). These rules can be explained by reference to the natural associations that form in people's minds between persons and external objects, and although the system of justice as a whole can be shown to be socially useful, there are no relevant independent standards by which its principles can be assessed (Hume briskly dismissed equality and merit as principles for allocating property to persons). In similar vein, Hayek argued that justice was a property of individual behaviour, understood as compliance with the 'rules of just conduct' that had evolved to enable a market economy to function effectively. For Hayek, to speak of 'social justice' as an ideal standard of distribution was as meaningless as to speak of a 'moral stone' (Hayek 1976, p. 78)

At the other extreme stand conceptions of justice which posit some ideal principle of distribution such as equality, together with a 'currency' specifying the respect in which justice requires people to be made equally well off, and then refuse to acknowledge the justice of any claims that do not arise directly from the application of this principle. Thus claims deriving from existing law or practice are dismissed unless they happen to coincide with what the principle requires. More often, however, ideal justice is seen as proposing principles by which existing institutions and practices can be assessed, with a view to reforming them, or in the extreme case abolishing them entirely, while the claims that people already have under those practices are given some weight. Rawls, for example, whose two principles of justice count as ideal principles for this purpose, is at pains to stress that they are not intended to be applied in a way that disregards people's existing legitimate expectations. About the 'difference principle', which requires social and economic inequalities to be regulated so that they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, he says:

It applies to the announced system of public law and statutes and not to particular transactions or distributions, nor to the decisions of individuals and associations, but rather to the institutional background against which these transactions and decisions take place. There are no unannounced and unpredictable interferences with citizens' expectations and acquisitions. Entitlements are earned and honored as the public system of rules declares. (Rawls 1993, p. 283)

Here we see Rawls attempting to reconcile the demands of conservative and ideal justice. Yet he does not directly address the question of what should happen when changing circumstances mean that the difference principle requires new laws or policies to be enacted: do those whose prior entitlements or expectations are no longer met have a claim to be compensated for their loss? We could call this the question of transitional justice (though this phrase is often used now in a more specific sense to refer to the process of reconciliation that may occur following civil war or other armed conflicts: see the entry on transitional justice).

2.2 Corrective versus Distributive Justice

A second important contrast, whose pedigree reaches back at least as far as Aristotle, is between justice as a principle for assigning distributable goods of various kinds to individual people, and justice as a remedial principle that applies when one person wrongly interferes with another's legitimate holdings. Thus suppose Bill steals Alice's computer, or sells Alice faulty goods which he claims to be in perfect order: then Alice suffers a loss, which justice demands that Bill should remedy by returning the computer or fulfilling his contract honestly. Corrective justice, then, essentially concerns a bilateral relationship between a wrongdoer and his victim, and demands that the fault be cancelled by restoring the victim to the position she would have been in had the wrongful behaviour not occurred; it may also require that the wrongdoer not benefit from his faulty behaviour. Distributive justice, on the other hand, is multilateral: it assumes a distributing agent, and a number of persons who have claims on what is being distributed. Justice here requires that the resources available to the distributor be shared according to some relevant criterion, such as equality, desert, or need. In Aristotle's example, if there are fewer flutes available than people who want to play them, they should be given to the best performers (Aristotle, The Politics, p. 128). In modern debates, principles of distributive justice are applied to social institutions such as property and tax systems, which are understood as producing distributive outcomes across large societies, or even the world as a whole.

The conceptual distinction between distributive and corrective justice seems clear, but their normative relationship is more difficult to pin down (see Perry 2000, Ripstein 2004, Coleman 1992, chs. 16-17). Some have claimed that corrective justice is merely instrumental to distributive justice: its aim is to move from a situation of distributive injustice brought about by the faulty behaviour to one that is more nearly (if not perfectly) distributively just. But this view runs into a number of objections. One is that so long as Alice has a legitimate title to her computer, her claim of corrective justice against Bill does not depend on her having had, prior to the theft, the share of resources that distributive justice ideally demands. She might be richer than she deserves to be, yet corrective justice still require that the computer be returned to her. In other words, corrective justice may serve to promote conservative rather than ideal justice, to use the distinction introduced in 2.1. Another objection is that corrective justice requires the wrongdoer himself to restore or compensate the person he has wronged, even if the cause of distributive justice could be better served by transferring resources from a third party - giving Alice one of even-more-undeservedly-rich Charles's computers, for example. This underlines the bilateral nature of corrective justice, and also the fact that it comes into play in response to faulty behaviour on someone's part. Its primary demand is that people should not lose out because others have behaved wrongfully or carelessly, but it also encompasses the idea that 'no man should profit by his own wrong'. If Alice loses her computer in a boating accident, she might, under an insurance scheme, have a claim of distributive justice to a new machine, but she has no claim of corrective justice.

If corrective justice cannot be subsumed normatively under distributive justice, we need to explain its value. What is achieved when we make Bill return the computer to Alice? Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, ch. 4) suggested that corrective justice aims to restore the two parties to a position of equality; by returning the computer we cancel both Bill's unjustified gain and Alice's unjustified loss. But this assumes that the computer can be returned intact. Corrective justice requires that Alice be made no worse off than she was before the theft, even if that means Bill suffering an absolute loss (e.g. by paying for a new computer if he has damaged Alice's). Aristotle himself recognized that the idea of evening out gain and loss made no literal sense in a case where one person assaults another and has to compensate him for his injury - there is no 'gain' to be redistributed. It seems, then, that the value of corrective justice must lie in the principle that each person must take responsibility for his own conduct, and if he fails to respect the legitimate interests of others by causing injury, he must make good the harm. In that way, each person can plan her life secure in the knowledge that she will be protected against certain kinds of external setbacks. Philosophers and lawyers writing on corrective justice disagree about what standard of responsibility should apply - for example whether compensation is required only when one person wilfully or negligently causes another to suffer loss, or whether it can also be demanded when the perpetrator displays no such fault but is nevertheless causally responsible for the injury.

A third distinction that must be drawn is between the justice of the procedures that might be used to determine how benefits and burdens of various kinds are allocated to people, and the justice of the final allocation itself. It might initially seem as though the justice of a procedure can be reduced to the justice of the results produced by applying it, but this is not so. For one thing, there are cases in which the idea of an independently just outcome makes no sense. A coin toss is a fair way of deciding who starts a game, but neither the Blues nor the Reds have a claim of justice to bat first or kick off. But even where a procedure has been shaped by a concern that it should produce substantively just outcomes, it may still have special properties that make it intrinsically just. In that case, using a different procedure to produce the same result might be objectionable. In an influential discussion, John Rawls contrasted perfect procedural justice, where a procedure is such that if it is followed a just outcome is guaranteed (requiring the person who cuts a cake to take the last slice himself is the illustration Rawls provides), imperfect procedural justice, where the procedure is such that following it is likely, but not certain, to produce the just result, and pure procedural justice, such as the coin-tossing example, where there is no independent way to assess the outcome - if we call it just, it is only on the grounds that it has come about by following the relevant procedure (Rawls 1971, 1999, § 14).

Theories of justice can then be distinguished according to the relative weight they attach to procedures and substantive outcomes. Some theories are purely procedural in form. Robert Nozick distinguished between historical theories of justice, end-state theories, and patterned theories in order to defend the first against the second and third (Nozick 1974). An end-state theory defines justice in terms of some overall property of a distribution (of resources, welfare, etc.) - for example whether it is egalitarian, or whether the lowest position in the distribution is as high as it can be, as Rawls' difference principle requires. A patterned theory looks at whether what each receives as part of a distribution matches some individual feature such as their desert or their need. By contrast, an historical theory asks about the process by which the final outcome has arisen. In Nozick's particular case, a distribution of resources is said to be just if everyone within its scope is entitled to what they now own, having acquired it by legitimate means - such as voluntary contract or gift - from someone who was also entitled to have it, leading back eventually to a just act of acquisition - such as labouring on a plot of land - that gave the first owner his valid title. The shape of the final distribution is irrelevant: according to Nozick, justice is entirely a matter of the sequence of prior events that created it (for critical assessments of Nozick's position, see Paul 1982, Wolff 1991, Cohen 1995, chs. 1-2).

For most philosophers, however, the justice of a procedure is to a large extent a function of the justice of the outcomes that it tends to produce when applied. For instance, the procedures that together make up a fair trial are justified on the grounds that for the most part they produce outcomes in which the guilty are punished and the innocent are acquitted. Yet even in these cases, we should be wary of assuming that the procedure itself has no independent value. We can ask of a procedure whether it treats the people to whom it is applied justly, for example by giving them adequate opportunities to advance their claims, not requiring them to provide personal information that they find humiliating to reveal, and so forth. Studies by social psychologists have shown that in many cases people care more about being treated fairly by the institutions they have to deal with than about how they fare when the procedure's final result is known (Lind and Tyler 1988).

2.4 Comparative versus Non-Comparative Justice

Justice takes a comparative form when to determine what is due to one person we need to look at what others can also claim: to determine how large a slice of pie is rightfully John's, we have to know how many others have a claim to the pie, and also what the principle for sharing it should be - equality, or something else. Justice takes a non-comparative form when we can determine what is due to a person merely by knowing relevant facts about that particular person: if John has already been promised the whole of the pie, then that is what he can rightfully claim for himself. Some theories of justice seem to imply that justice is always a comparative notion - for example when it is said that justice consists in the absence of arbitrary inequality - whereas others imply that it is always non-comparative. But conceptually, at least, both forms seem admissible; indeed we can find cases in which it appears we have to choose between doing justice comparatively and doing it non-comparatively (see Feinberg 1974; for a critical response, see Montague 1980). For example, we might have several candidates all of whom are roughly equally deserving of an academic honour, but the number of honours we are permitted to award is smaller than the number of candidates. If we honour some but not others, we perpetrate a comparative injustice, but if to avoid doing so we honour no-one at all, then each is treated less well than they deserve, and so unjustly from a non-comparative perspective.

Theories of justice can then be categorised according to whether they are comparative, non-comparative, or neither. Principles of equality - principles requiring the equal distribution of some kind of benefit - are plainly comparative in form, since what is due to each person is simply an equal share of the benefit in question rather than any fixed amount. In the case of principles of desert, the position is less straightforward. These principles take the form ' A deserves X by virtue of P', where X is a mode of treatment, and P is a personal characteristic possessed by A (Feinberg 1970). In the case of both X and P, we can ask whether they are to be identified comparatively or non-comparatively. Thus what A deserves might either be an entitlement, or an absolute amount of some benefit - 'a living wage', say - or it might be a share of some collective benefit, or a multiple or fraction of what others are receiving - 'twice what B is getting', say. Turning to P, or what is often called the desert basis, this may be a feature of A that we can identify without reference to anyone else, or it may be a comparative feature, such as being the best student in a graduating class. So desert-based claims of justice might take one of four different forms depending on whether the basis of desert and/or the deserved mode of treatment is comparative or non-comparative (see Olsaretti 2003 for essays that address this question; for a more advanced treatment, see Kagan 2012, Part III).

Among principles of justice that are straightforwardly non-comparative are 'sufficiency' principles which hold that what justice requires is that each person should have 'enough', on some dimension or other - for instance, have all of their needs fulfilled, or have a specified set of capabilities that they are able to exercise (for a general defence of sufficiency, though not one that links it specifically to justice, see Frankfurt 2015; for a critique, see Casal 2007). Such principles, however, need to be supplemented by other principles, not only to tell us what to do with the surplus (assuming there is one) once everyone has sufficient resources, but also to guide us in situations where there are too few resources to bring everyone up to the sufficiency threshold. Should we, for example, maximise the number of people who achieve sufficiency, or minimise the aggregate shortfall suffered by those in the relevant group? Unless we are prepared to say that these are not matters of justice, a theory of justice that contains only the sufficiency principle and nothing else looks incomplete.

Some theories of justice cannot readily be classified either as comparative or as non-comparative. Consider one part of Rawls' theory of social justice, the difference principle, which as noted above requires that social and economic inequalities be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (Rawls 1971, 1999, §12-13). Under this principle, ideally just shares are calculated by determining what each person would receive under the set of social institutions whose economic effect is to raise the worst off person to the highest possible level. This is neither a fixed amount, nor one that depends in any direct sense on what other individuals are receiving, or should receive. Applying the difference principle does require making comparisons, but these are comparisons between the effects of different social institutions - say different tax laws, or different ways of defining property rights - not between individual people and the amounts of benefit they are receiving. We might call theories of this kind 'holistic' or 'systemic'.

3. The Scope of Justice

When we raise questions about the scope of justice, we are asking about when principles of justice take effect and among whom. We have already, when discussing Hume, encountered the idea that there might be circumstances in which justice becomes irrelevant - circumstances in which resources are so abundant that it is pointless to allocate individual shares, or, as Hume also believed, in which resources are so scarce that everyone is permitted to grab what he can in the name of self-preservation. But even in circumstances that are less extreme than these, questions about scope arise. Who can make claims of justice, and who might have the corresponding obligation to meet them? Does this depend on the kind of thing that is being claimed? If comparative principles are being applied, who should be counted as part of the comparison group? Do some principles of justice have universal scope - they apply whenever agent A acts towards recipient B, regardless of the relationship between them - while others are contextual in character, applying only within social or political relationships of a certain kind? The present section examines some of these questions in greater detail.

3.1 Human vs non-human animals

What does a creature have to do, or be like, to be included within the scope of (at least some) principles of justice? Most past philosophers have assumed that the line should be drawn so as to exclude all non-human animals, but more recently some have been prepared to defend 'justice for animals' (Nussbaum 2006, ch. 6; Garner 2013). Against this, Rawls asserts that although we have 'duties of compassion and humanity' towards animals and should refrain from treating them cruelly, nonetheless they are 'outside the scope of the theory of justice' (Rawls 1971, p. 512; Rawls 1999, p. 448). How could this claim be justified?

We can focus our attention either on individual features that humans possess and animals lack, and that might be thought relevant to their inclusion within the scope of justice, or on asymmetries in the relationship between humans and other animals. To begin with the latter, Hume claimed that the domination humans exercised over animals - such that an animal could only possess something by virtue of our permission - meant that we were 'bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them' (Hume, Enquiry, p. 190). For Rawls and those influenced by him, principles of distributive justice apply among agents who are related to one another as participants in a 'cooperative venture for mutual advantage', and this might seem to exclude animals from the scope of such principles. Critics of this view have pointed to cases of human-animal co-operation (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, Valentini 2014); however these arguments focus mainly or entirely on the special case of dogs, and it seems implausible to generalise from them in an attempt to show that human-animal relationships generally have a co-operative character.

But the claim that justice only applies to participants in co-operative practices is anyway vulnerable to the objection that it risks excluding seriously disabled people, people living in isolated communities, and future generations from the scope of justice, so it does not seem compelling as a claim about justice in general (see further below). Might there be other reasons why animals cannot make claims of justice on us? Another Rawls-inspired suggestion is that animals lack the necessary moral powers, in particular the capacity to act on principles of justice themselves. They cannot distinguish what is justly owed to them from what is not; and they cannot determine what they owe to others - whether to humans or to other non-human animals - as a matter of justice. This suggestion interprets justice as involving a kind of reciprocity: an agent to whom justice is due must also in principle be an agent who could dispense justice to others, by virtue of having the relevant capacity, even if for physical reasons - such as suffering from severe disability - they cannot do so in practice.

If this suggestion is rejected, and we allow that some animals, at least, should be included within the scope of justice, we can then ask about the form that justice should take in their cases. Using the distinction drawn in 2.4 above, it appears that justice for animals must be non-comparative. For example, we might attribute rights to the animals over whom we exercise power - rights against cruel treatment, and rights to food and shelter, for instance. This would involve using a sufficiency principle to determine what animals are owed as a matter of justice. It is much less plausible to think that comparative principles might apply, such that giving special treats to one cat but not another could count as an injustice.

3.2 Relational vs Non-Relational Justice

The Rawlsian view introduced in the previous section, which holds that principles of social justice apply among people who are engaged together in a co-operative practice, is a leading example of a relational theory of justice. Other theories offer different accounts of the relevant justice-generating feature: for example, Nagel has argued that principles of distributive justice apply among people who by virtue of being citizens of the same state are required both to comply with, and accept responsibility for, the coercive laws that govern their lives (Nagel 2005). In both cases, the claim being made is that when people stand in a certain relationship to one another, they become subject to principles of justice whose scope is limited to those within the relationship. In particular, comparative principles apply within the relationship, but not beyond it. If A stands in a relationship (of the right kind) to B, then it becomes a matter of justice how A is treated relative to B, but it does not matter in the same way how A is treated relative to C who stands outside of the relationship. Justice may still require that C be given treatment of a certain kind, but that will be justice in its non-comparative guise.

Whether justice is relational in either of the ways that Rawls and Nagel suggest has large implications for its scope. In particular it bears on the question whether there is such a thing as global distributive justice, or, in contrast, whether distributive principles only apply to people who are related together as members of the same society or citizens of the same state. For example, might the global inequalities that exist between rich and poor in today's world be unjust simply as inequalities, or are they unjust only insofar as they prevent poor people from living lives that we judge to be acceptable? (see entries on international distributive justice and global justice) So much hangs on the question whether, and if so in virtue of what, distributive justice has a relational character. What reason can be given for thinking that it does?

Suppose we have two people A and B, of whom one is significantly better off than another - has greater opportunities or a higher income, say. Why should this be a concern of justice? It seems it will not be a concern unless it can be shown that the inequality between A and B can be attributed to the behaviour of some agent, individual or collective, whose actions or omissions have resulted in A being better off than B - in which case we can ask whether the inequality between them is justifiable, say on grounds of their respective deserts. This reiterates the claim in 1.4 above that without an agent to whom the outcome can be attributed there can only be justice or injustice in a metaphorical, 'cosmic', sense. Relational theorists claim that when people associate with one another in the relevant way, they become agents of justice. On a small scale they can organize informally to ensure that each receives what is due to him relative to the rest. On a larger scale, distributive justice requires the creation of legal and other institutions to achieve that outcome. Moreover failure to co-ordinate their actions in this way is likely to be a source of injustice by omission.

Debates about the scope of justice then become debates about whether different forms of human association are of the right kind to create agency in the relevant sense. Take the question of whether principles of social justice should apply to market transactions. If we see the market as a neutral arena in which many individual people freely pursue their own purposes, then the answer will be No. The only form of justice that arises will be justice in the conduct of each agent, who must avoid inflicting harm on others, must fulfil her contracts, and so forth. Whereas if we see the market as governed by a humanly-constructed system of rules that the participants collectively have the power to change - by legislation, for example - then we cannot avoid asking whether the outcomes it currently produces meet relevant standards of distributive justice, whatever we take these to be. A similar issue arises in the debate about over principles of global justice referred to above: is the current world order such that it makes sense to regard humanity as a whole as a collective agent responsible for the distributive outcomes it allows to occur?

3.3 Individuals vs Institutions

Once institutions are established for the purpose (among other things) of delivering justice on a large scale, we can ask what duties of justice individual people have in consequence. Is their duty simply to support the institutions, and comply with whatever rules of conduct apply to them personally? Or do they have further duties to promote justice by acting directly on the relevant principles in their daily lives? No one doubts that some duties of justice fall directly on individuals, for example duties not to deceive or defraud when engaging in commercial transactions (and duties of corrective justice where behaviour is faulty), or duties to carry out one's fair share of an informally organized project from which one expects to benefit, such as cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Others fall on them because they are performing a role within a social institution, for example the duty of an employer not to discriminate on grounds of race or gender when hiring workers, or the duty of a local government officer to assign public housing to those in greatest need. But what is much more in dispute is whether individual people have more extensive duties to promote social justice (for contrasting views, see Cohen 2008, ch. 3, Murphy 1998, Rawls 1993, Lecture VII, Young 2011, ch. 2).

Consider two cases: the first concerns parents who confer advantages on their children in ways that undermine fair equality of opportunity. If the latter principle of justice requires, to cite Rawls, that 'those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin' (Rawls 2001, p. 44) then there are myriad ways in which some parents can bestow advantages on their children that other parents cannot - financial benefits, educational opportunities, social contacts, and so forth - that are likely to bring greater success in later life. Are parents therefore constrained as a matter of justice to avoid conferring at least some of these advantages, or are they free to benefit their children as they choose, leaving the pursuit of equal opportunities entirely in the hands of the state (for a careful analysis, see Brighouse and Swift 2014)?

The second example concerns wage differentials. Might individuals whose talents can bring them high rewards in the labour market have a duty not to make use of their bargaining power, but instead be willing to work for a fair wage - which if fairness is understood in egalitarian terms might mean the same wage as everyone else (perhaps with extra compensation for those whose labour is unusually burdensome)? Rawls, as we saw above, argued that economic justice meant arranging social and economic inequalities to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and in formulating the principle in this way he assumed that some inequalities might serve as incentives to greater production that would also raise the position of the worst-off group in society. But if individuals were willing to forego incentives, and so economic inequalities served no useful purpose, then the arrangement that worked to the greatest benefit of the (otherwise) least advantaged would be one of strict equality. Cohen (2008) argues that Rawls' position is internally inconsistent. As citizens designing our institutions we are supposed to be guided by the difference principle, but as private actors in the marketplace, we are permitted to ignore that principle and bargain for higher wages, even though doing so will work to the disadvantage of the worst-off group. Justice, according to Cohen, requires us to embrace an ethos of service that disdains material incentives.

Why might we hesitate before agreeing that in cases such as these, justice requires people to refrain from doing things that they are permitted to do by the public rules of their society (passing on benefits to their children; seeking higher wages)? One reason is that the refraining is only going to have a significant effect if it is practised on a large scale, and individuals have no assurance that others will follow their example; meanwhile they (or their children) will lose out relative to the less scrupulous. A connected reason has to do with publicity: it may be hard to detect whether people are following the required ethos or not (see Williams 1998). Is the person who sends her child to a private school because she claims he has special needs that the local state school cannot meet being sincere, or is she just trying to buy him comparative advantage? How can we tell whether the person who claims more money, but merely, he says, as compensation for the unusual stress that his work involves, is reporting honestly? (for Cohen's response, see Cohen 2008, ch. 8) It appears, then, that there are principles of justice that apply to what Rawls calls 'the basic structure of society [as] a public system of rules' that do not apply in the same way to the personal behaviour of the individuals who live within that structure. Attending to the scope, as well as the content, of justice is important.

3.4 Recognition vs. Redistribution

Recent philosophical writing on justice has drawn attention to forms of injustice that do not involve the material treatment that people receive, either from other persons or from institutions, but the harms they suffer through failures of recognition. They are impacted by social norms and social practices that diminish their sense of agency and induce them to see themselves as of lesser value than others. Here then justice is understood as being adequately and appropriately recognized, and injustice as involving failures of recognition, or in some cases 'misrecognition', when a person is placed in a category or assigned an identity that is not their own. In one influential formulation of this idea, 'it is unjust that some individuals and groups are denied the status of full partners in social interaction simply as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value in whose construction they have not equally participated and which disparage their distinctive characteristics or the distinctive characteristics assigned to them' (Fraser in Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 29).

What, then, does it mean to be recognized? In general it means to be viewed and treated by others in the way that is appropriate to the features that you possess, but most philosophers regard recognition as multidimensional. In particular, they distinguish between being recognized as an equal, where a person is accorded the kind of standing that gives them an equal status with other members of the relevant group, and being recognized for having characteristics, achievements or an identity that may be uniquely their own. Recognition in this second sense may involve the unequal granting of social esteem. Justice as recognition, therefore, is internally complex. At the social level, Axel Honneth distinguishes 'three forms of social recognition, based in the sphere-specific principles of love, equal legal treatment, and social esteem' (Fraser and Honneth 2003 p. 180)

The question that arises is how best to understand the relationship between justice of this kind and distributive justice, involving the allocation of material resources and so forth. For Honneth, justice as recognition is understood expansively so that it can also capture issues of economic justice, the thought being that the harm inflicted when, say, labour is not adequately rewarded can be understood as a failure to offer adequate recognition of the worker's social contribution. For Nancy Fraser, by contrast, recognition and redistribution are seen as two mutually irreducible but jointly necessary conditions for social justice. Failures of recognition can be experienced by some among the economically privileged - such as 'the African-American Wall Street banker who cannot get a taxi to pick him up' (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 34). Justice as recognition requires cultural shifts in the way that different forms of identity and different types of achievement are valued that are independent of the institutional changes required to achieve distributive justice.

A particular form of recognitional injustice is epistemic injustice as diagnosed by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007). This occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a source of knowledge, and it takes two main forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. As Fricker explains 'testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone as at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences' (Fricker 2007, p. 1). She argues that testimonial injustice matters for two reasons. First, the person who suffers from it is less able to protect or advance their interests - for example they are less likely to be believed when having to defend themselves in court. Second, since others are unwilling to regard them as competent sources of knowledge, they may lose trust in their own capacity to know, leading in some cases to 'prolonged self-doubt and loss of intellectual confidence'.

Hermeneutical injustice arises in the context of unequal relationships in which the subordinated party lacks the concept or concepts needed to make sense of their experience (and thereby to challenge their subordination). Fricker uses the example of a woman who suffered sexual harassment at the time before feminists had developed that concept, and so had no adequate word to describe what she was experiencing. Hermeneutical injustice matters most when it is systematic, brought about by power inequalities that leave certain groups 'hermeneutically marginalised'. However she treats epistemic justice as a virtue that individual hearers can develop, in contrast to recognition theorists like Fraser and Honneth for whom achieving recognitional justice requires collective action to change social and cultural norms on the part of misrecognized groups.

4. Utilitarianism and Justice

Can justice be understood in utilitarian terms? This may in the first place depend on how we interpret utilitarianism. We treat it here as a normative theory whose aim is to supply a criterion - the greatest happiness principle - that can be used, directly or indirectly, both by individuals and by institutions (such as states) in deciding what to do, rather than simply as a tool for evaluating states of affairs. Utilitarianism cannot plausibly provide a theory of justice unless it is interpreted in this action-guiding way, in light of what was said above about justice and agency. We also assume that the most likely candidate will be a rule-utilitarian view that treats principles of justice as belonging to the set of rules which when followed by the relevant agents will tend to produce the greatest total utility (for different ways of formulating this view, see the entry on rule consequentialism).

4.1 Accommodating intuitions about justice

Most utilitarians have regarded it as part of their task in defending utilitarianism to show that it can both accommodate and explain much of what we intuitively believe about justice. This is certainly true of two of the greatest among them, John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, both of whom went to considerable lengths to show that familiar principles of justice could be given a utilitarian rationale (Mill Utilitarianism, ch. 5; Sidgwick 1874/1907, Book III, ch.5). Bentham, in contrast, was more cavalier: 'justice, in the only sense in which it has a meaning, is an imaginary personage, feigned for the convenience of discourse, whose dictates are the dictates of utility, applied to certain particular cases' ( The Principles of Morals and Legislation, pp. 125-6). If we follow the lead of Mill and Sidgwick in wishing to take seriously how justice is commonly understood, the utilitarian has two challenges to face. First he or she must show that the demands of justice as commonly understood correspond roughly to the rules that when followed by persons, or implemented by institutions, are most conducive to the greatest happiness. They need not mirror the latter exactly, because utilitarians will argue, as both Mill and Sidgwick did, that our intuitions about justice are often ambiguous or internally inconsistent, but there must be enough overlap to warrant the claim that what the utilitarian theory can accommodate and explain is indeed justice. (As Sidgwick (1874/1907, p. 264) put it, 'we may, so to speak, clip the ragged edge of common usage, but we must not make excision of any considerable portion'.) Second, some explanation must be given for the distinctiveness of justice. Why do we have a concept that is used to mark off a particular set of requirements and claims if the normative basis for these requirements and claims is nothing other than general utility? What accounts for our intuitive sense of justice? The task confronting the utilitarian, then, is to systematize our understanding of justice without obliterating it.

By way of illustration, both Mill and Sidgwick recognize that desert, of both reward and punishment, is a key component of common understandings of justice, but they argue that if we remain at the level of common sense when we try to analyse it, we run into irresolvable contradictions. For instance, we are inclined to think that a person's deserts should depend on what they have actually achieved - say the economic value of what they have produced - but also, because achievement will depend on factors for which the person in question can claim no credit, such as inborn talent, that their deserts should depend only on factors for which they are directly responsible, such as the amount of effort they expend. Each of these conceptions, when put into practice, would lead to a quite different schedule of rewards, and the only means to escape the impasse, these utilitarians claim, is to ask which schedule will generate most utility by directing people's choices and efforts in the most socially productive way. Similar reasoning applies to the principles of punishment: the rules we should follow are the rules that are most conducive to the ends for which punishment is instituted, such as deterring crime.

To explain the distinctiveness of justice, Mill suggests that it designates moral requirements that, because of their very great importance to human well-being, people have a right to have discharged, and are therefore matters of perfect obligation. A person who commits an injustice is always liable to punishment of some kind, he argues. So he explains our sense of justice in terms of the resentment we feel towards someone who breaches these requirements. Sidgwick, who laid greater stress than Mill on the connection between justice and law, also underlined the relationship between justice and gratitude, on one side, and resentment, on the other, in order to capture the way in which our concern for justice seems to differ from our concern for utility in general.

4.2 Utilitarian theories of justice: three problems

Yet despite these efforts to reconcile justice and utility, three serious obstacles still remain. The first concerns what we might call the currency of justice: justice has to do with the way that tangible benefits and burdens are assigned, and not with the happiness or unhappiness that the assignees experience. It is a matter of justice, for example, that people should be paid the right amount for the jobs that they do, but, special circumstances aside, it is no concern of justice that John derives more satisfaction from his fairly-earned income than Jane does from hers (but see Cohen 1989 for a different view). There is so to speak, a division of labour, under which rights, opportunities, and material benefits of various kinds are allocated by principles of justice, while the conversion of these into units of utility (or disutility) is the responsibility of each individual recipient (see Dworkin 2000, ch. 1). Utilitarians will therefore find it hard to explain what from their point of view seems to be the fetishistic concern of justice over how the means to happiness are distributed, rather than happiness itself.

The second obstacle is that utilitarianism judges outcomes by totalling up utility levels, and has no independent concern for how that utility is distributed between persons. So even if we set aside the currency issue, utilitarian theory seems unable to capture justice's demand that each should receive what is due to her regardless of the total amount of benefit this generates. Defenders of utilitarianism will argue that when the conduct-guiding rules are being formulated, attention will be paid to distributive questions. In particular, when resources are being distributed among people we know little about individually, there are good reasons to favour equality, since in most cases resources have diminishing marginal utility - the more of them you have, the less satisfaction you derive from additional instalments. Yet this is only a contingent matter. If some people are very adept at turning resources into well-being - they are so-called 'utility monsters' - then a utilitarian should support a rule that privileges them. This seems repugnant to justice. As Rawls famously put the general point, 'each member of society is thought to have an inviolability founded on justice which....even the welfare of every one else cannot override' (Rawls 1971, p. 28; Rawls 1999, pp. 24-25).

The third and final difficulty stems from utilitarianism's thoroughgoing consequentialism. Rules are assessed strictly in the light of the consequences of adopting then, not in terms of their intrinsic properties. Of course, when agents follow rules, they are meant to do what the rule requires rather than to calculate consequences directly. But for a utilitarian, it is never going to be a good reason for adopting a rule that it will give people what they deserve or what they are entitled to, when desert or entitlement are created by events in the past, such as a person's having performed a worthwhile action or entered an agreement. Backward-looking reasons have to be transmuted into forward-looking reasons in order to count. If a rule such as pacta sunt servanda ('agreements must be kept') is going to be adopted on utilitarian grounds, this is not because there is any inherent wrongness in defaulting on a compact one has made, but because a rule that compacts must be kept is a useful one, since it allows people to co-ordinate their behaviour knowing that their expectations about the future are likely to be met. But justice, although not always backward-looking in the sense explained, often is. What is due to a person is in many cases what they deserve for what they have done, or what they are entitled to by virtue of past transactions. So even if it were possible to construct a forward-looking rationale for having rules that closely tracked desert or entitlement as these are normally understood, the utilitarian still cannot capture the sense of justice - why it matters that people should get what is due to then - that informs our common-sense judgements.

Utilitarians might reply that their reconstruction preserves what is rationally defensible in common sense beliefs while what it discards are elements that cannot survive sustained critical reflection. But this would bring them closer to Bentham's view that justice, as commonly understood, is nothing but a 'phantom'.

5. Contractarianism and Justice

The shortcomings of utilitarianism have prompted several recent philosophers to revive the old idea of the social contract as a better way of bringing coherence to our thinking about justice. The idea here is not that people actually have entered a contract to establish justice, or that they should proceed to do so, but that we can understand justice better by asking the question: what principles to govern their institutions, practices and personal behaviour would people choose to adopt if they all had to agree on them in advance? The contract, in other words, is hypothetical; but the search for agreement is meant to ensure that the principles chosen would, when implemented, not lead to outcomes that people could not accept. Thus whereas a utilitarian might, under some circumstances, be prepared to support slavery - if the misery of the slaves were outweighed by the heightened pleasures of the slave-owners - contractarians claims that no-one could accept a principle permitting slavery, lest they themselves were destined to be slaves when the principle was applied.

The problem that contractarians face is to show how such an agreement is possible. If we were to ask people, in the real world, what principles they would prefer to live under, they are likely to start from a position of quite radical disagreement, given their interests and their beliefs. Some might even be willing to endorse slavery, if they were fairly certain that they would not end up as slaves themselves, or if they were sado-masochists who viewed the humiliations inflicted on slaves in a positive light. So in order to show how agreement could be achieved, contractarians have to model the contracting parties in a particular way, either by limiting what they are allowed to know about themselves or about the future, or by attributing to them certain motivations while excluding others. Since the modelling can be done differently, we have a family of contractarian theories of justice, three of whose most important members are the theories of Gauthier, Rawls and Scanlon.

5.1 Gauthier

Gauthier (1986) presents the social contract as a bargain between rational individuals who can gain through co-operating with one another, but who are competing over the division of the resulting surplus. He assumes that each is interested only in trying to maximise his own welfare, and he also assumes that there is a non-co-operative baseline from which the bargaining begins - so nobody would accept a solution that left her less well off than in the baseline condition. Each person can identify the outcome under which they fare best - their maximum gain - but they have no reason to expect others to accept that. Gauthier argues that rational bargainers will converge on the principle of Minimax Relative Concession, which requires each to concede the same relative proportion of their maximum possible gain relative to the non-co-operative baseline. Thus suppose there is a feasible arrangement whereby each participant can achieve two-thirds of their maximum gain, but no arrangement under which they all do better than that, then this is the arrangement that the principle recommends. Each person has made the same concession relative to the outcome that is best for them personally - not accepting the same absolute loss of welfare, let it be noted, but the same proportionate loss.

There are some internal difficulties with Gauthier's theory that need to be recorded briefly (for a full discussion, see Barry 1989, esp. Part III). One is whether Minimax Relative Concession is in fact the correct solution to the bargaining problem that Gauthier introduces, as opposed to the standard Nash solution which (in a simple two-person case) selects the outcome in which the product of the two parties' utilities is maximised (for discussion of different solutions to the bargaining problem, see the entry on contemporary approaches to the social contract, § 3.2). A second is whether Gauthier is able to justify positing a 'Lockean' baseline, under which each is assumed to respect the natural rights of the others, as the starting point for bargaining over the surplus - as opposed to a more conflictual 'Hobbesian' baseline in which individuals are permitted to use their natural powers to threaten one another in the process of establishing what each could expect to get in the absence of co-operation. But the larger question is whether a contract modelled in this way is an appropriate device for delivering principles of justice. On the one hand, it captures the idea that the practice of justice should work to everyone's advantage, while requiring all those involved to moderate the demands they make on one another. On the other hand, it prescribes a final distribution of benefit that appears morally arbitrary, in the sense that A's bargaining advantage over B - which stems from the fact that his maximum possible gain is greater than hers - allows him to claim a higher level of benefit as a matter of justice. This seems implausible: there may be prudential reasons to recommend a distribution that reflects the outcome that self-interested and rational bargainers would arrive at, but claims of justice need a different basis.

5.2 Rawls

John Rawls' theory of justice is the most widely-cited example of a contractarian theory, but before outlining it, two words of caution are necessary. First, the shape of the theory has evolved from its first incarnation in Rawls (1958) through his major work A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and on to Rawls (1993) and Rawls (2001). Second, although Rawls has consistently claimed that the principles of justice he defends are the principles that would be selected by people in a suitably designed 'original position' in which they are asked to choose the social and political institutions they will live under - this is what qualifies his theory as contractarian - it is less clear how important a role the contract itself plays in his thinking. His principles, which are discussed elsewhere (see the entry on John Rawls), can be defended on their own merits as a theory of social justice for a modern liberal society, even if their contractual grounding proves to be unsound. Rawls presents the contracting parties as seeking to advance their own interests as they decide which principles to favour, but under two informational constraints. First, they are not allowed to know their own 'conception of the good' - what ends they personally find it most valuable to pursue - so the principles must be couched in terms of 'primary goods', understood as goods that it is better to have more rather than less of whatever conception of the good you favour. Second, they are placed behind a 'veil of ignorance' that deprives them of any knowledge of personal characteristics, such as their gender, their place in society, or the talents and skills they possess. This means that they have no basis on which to bargain for advantage, and have to consider themselves as generic persons who might be male or female, talented or untalented, and so forth. In consequence, Rawls argues, all will choose to live under impartial principles that work to no-one's advantage in particular.

The problem for Rawls, however, is to show that the principles that would be selected in such an original position are in fact recognizable as principles of justice. One might expect the parties to calculate how to weigh the primary goods (which Rawls catalogues as 'rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth') against each other, and then to choose as their social principle 'maximise the weighted sum of primary goods, averaged across all persons'. This, however, would bring the theory very close to utilitarianism, since the natural method of weighing primary goods is to ask how much utility having a given quantity of each is likely, on average, to bring (for the claim that utilitarianism would be chosen in a Rawlsian original position, see Harsanyi 1975). Since Rawls wishes to reject utilitarianism, he has to adjust the psychology of the parties in the original position so that they reason differently. Thus he suggests that, at least in developed societies, people have special reason to prioritise liberty over the other goods and to ensure that it is equally distributed: he argues that this is essential to safeguard their self-respect. In later writing his argument is less empirical: now the parties to the contract are endowed with 'moral powers' that must be exercised, and it is then fairly easy to show that this requires them to have a set of basic liberties.

When he turns to the distribution of income and wealth, Rawls has to show why his choosers would pick the difference principle, which considers only the position of the worst-off social group, over other principles such as maximising average income across the whole society. In Theory of Justice he does this by attributing special psychological features to the choosers that make it appropriate for them to follow the 'maximin' rule for decisions under uncertainty (choose the option whose worst possible outcome is least bad for you). For example, they are said to be much more concerned to achieve the minimum level of income that the difference principle would guarantee them than to enjoy increases above that level. In his later work, he abandons this reliance on maximin reasoning and gives greater prominence to another argument hinted at in Theory. This portrays the contracting parties as starting out from the presumption that income and wealth should be distributed equally, but then recognizing that all can benefit by permitting certain inequalities to arise. When these inequalities are governed by the difference principle, they can be justified to everyone, including the worst off, thus creating the conditions for a more stable society. But we need then to ask why equal distribution should be treated as the benchmark, departures from which require special justification. When Rawls says that it is 'not reasonable' for any of the parties initially to expect more than an equal share (Rawls 1971, p. 150; Rawls 1999, p. 130), is this simply a corollary of their position as rational choosers behind a veil of ignorance, or has Rawls in addition endowed them with a substantive sense of justice that includes this presumption of equality?

Although Rawls throughout presents his theory of justice as contractarian, we can now see that the terms of the contract are in part determined by prior normative principles that Rawls engineers the parties to follow. So in contrast to Gauthier, it is no longer simply a case of self-interested contractors negotiating their way to an agreement. Rawls candidly admits that the contractual situation has to be adjusted so that it yields results that match our pre-existing convictions about justice. But then we may ask how much work the contractual apparatus is really doing (see Barry 1989, ch. 9 for a critical appraisal).

5.3 Scanlon

Scanlon (1998) does not attempt to deliver a theory of justice in the same sense as Rawls, but his contractarian account of that part of morality that specifies 'what we owe to each other' covers much of the same terrain (for an explicit attempt to analyse justice in Scanlonian terms, see Barry 1995). Like Rawls, Scanlon is concerned to develop an alternative to utilitarianism, and he does so by developing a test that any candidate moral principle must pass: it must be such that no-one could reasonably reject it as the basis for informed, unforced general agreement (see the entry on contractualism). Scanlon's contractors are not positioned behind a veil of ignorance. They are able to see what effect adopting any proposed principle would have on them personally. If that effect is unacceptable to them, they are permitted to reject it. Each person has, so to speak, a veto on any general principle for regulating conduct. Those that survive this test are defensible as principles of justice - Scanlon concedes that there might be alternative sets of such principles appropriate to different social conditions.

It might seem, however, that giving each person a veto would lead straightforwardly to deadlock, since anyone might reject a principle under which he fared badly relative to some alternative. Here the idea of reasonable rejection becomes important. It would not, Scanlon thinks, be reasonable to reject a principle under which one does badly if the alternatives all involve someone else faring worse still. One needs to take account of other people's reasons for rejecting these alternatives. It might then appear that Scanlon's contractualism yields the difference principle, which requires the worst-off group in society to be as well of as they can be. But this is not the conclusion that Scanlon draws (though he acknowledges that there might be special reasons to follow Rawls in requiring basic social institutions to follow the difference principle). The claims of other groups must be considered too. If a policy greatly benefits many others, while slightly worsening the position of a few, though without leaving them very badly off, it may well not be rejectable. Scanlon's position leaves some room for aggregation - it makes a difference how many people will be benefitted if a principle is followed - though not the simple form of aggregation that utilitarians defend.

Scanlon also says that a person can have a reason for rejecting a principle if it treats them unfairly, say by benefitting some but not others for arbitrary reasons. This presupposes a norm of fairness that the contractarian theory does not itself attempt to explain or justify. So it looks as though the purpose of the theory is to provide a distinctive account of moral reasoning (and moral motivation) but not to defend any substantive principles of distributive justice. In this respect, Scanlon's contractualism is less ambitious than either Gauthier's or Rawls'.

6. Egalitarianism and Justice

In the recent past, many philosophers have sought to establish a close connection between justice and equality: they ask the question 'what kind of equality does justice require?', and to that several competing answers have been given (see, for example Cohen 1989, Dworkin 2000, Sen 1980). But we should not be too hasty to assume that what justice demands is always equality, whether of treatment or of outcome. Perhaps it does so only in a formal sense. As we saw in sect 1.3, justice requires the impartial and consistent application of rules, from which it follows that when two people are alike in all relevant respects, they must be treated equally. But, as Aristotle among others saw, justice also involves the idea of proportional treatment, which implies recipients getting unequal amounts of whatever good is at issue (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, ch. 3). If A is twice as deserving or twice as needy as B, justice may require that she receives more than B does. So here formal equality of treatment - the same rule applied to both - leads to an unequal outcome. Again, when justice takes the conservative form of respect for existing entitlements or legitimate expectations (see para 2.1) there is no reason to anticipate that what is due to different people will be substantively the same.

6.1 Justice as Equality

So we need to ask about the circumstances in which justice requires a substantively equal distribution of advantages. One rather obvious case occurs when the members of the group within which the distribution is going to occur have no relevant distinguishing features, so there are no grounds on which some can claim greater shares of benefit than others. Suppose a group experiences a windfall gain for which no-one can claim any credit: a pot of gold somehow appears in their midst. Then unless any member can make a justice-related claim for a larger-than-equal share - say that she has special needs that she lacks sufficient resources to meet - an equal distribution of the gold is what justice demands, since any other distribution would be arbitrary. Equality here is the default principle that applies in the absence of any special claims that can be presented as reasons of justice.

Equality also acts as a default in circumstances where, although people may indeed have unequal claims to whatever good is being distributed, we have no reliable way of identifying and measuring those claims. By sharing the good equally, we can at least ensure that every claim has been partially satisfied. Thus suppose we have limited supplies of a drug that can treat malaria, and a number of patients displaying symptoms of the disease, but lacking specialised medical knowledge we cannot tell whether one person's condition is more serious than another's; then by sharing out the drug equally, we can guarantee that each person at least receives the highest fraction of what they really need. Any other distribution must leave at least one person with less (this of course assumes that there is no threshold amount of the drug beneath which it is ineffective; if that assumption is wrong, justice under the stated conditions might require a lottery in which the chosen ones receive threshold-size doses).

If justice requires equality only by default, it might seem to apply only in a narrow range of cases. How could egalitarian justice be made more robust? One approach involves declaring a wider range of factors irrelevant to just distribution. Thus one formulation of the principle holds that no-one should be worse-off than anyone else as a result of their 'morally arbitrary' characteristics, where a characteristic is morally arbitrary when its possessor cannot claim credit for having it. This captures a widespread intuition that people should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their race or gender, but extends it (more controversially) to all personal features with a genetic basis, such as natural talents and inborn dispositions. In doing so, it discounts most claims of desert, since when people are said to deserve benefits of various kinds, it is usually for performing actions or displaying qualities that depend upon innate characteristics such as strength or intelligence. In the following section, we will see how egalitarian theories of justice have tried to incorporate some desert-like elements by way of response. But otherwise justice as equality and justice as desert appear to be in conflict, and the challenge is to show what can justify equal treatment in the face of inequalities of desert.

A second approach answers this challenge by explaining why it is positively valuable to afford people equal treatment even if they do display features that might appear to justify differential treatment. A prominent advocate of this approach is Dworkin, who argues that fundamental to justice is a principle of equal concern and respect for persons, and what this means in more concrete term is that equal resources should be devoted to the life of each member of society (Dworkin 2000). (The reference to membership here is not redundant, because Dworkin understands egalitarian justice as a principle that must be applied within sovereign states specifically - so in the terms of 3.2, this is a relational view of justice.) The thought is that showing persons equal respect may sometimes require us to afford them equal treatment, even in the face of relevant grounds for discrimination. Thus we insist on political equality - one person, one vote - even though we know that there are quite large differences in people's competence to make political decisions.

6.2 Responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism

As noted above, justice as simple equality of treatment seems open to the objection that it fails to acknowledge the agency of the recipients, who may have acted in ways that appear to qualify them to receive more (or less) of whatever benefit is being distributed. To answer this objection, several recent philosophers have presented alternative versions of 'responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism' - a family of theories of justice that treat equal distribution as a starting point but allow for departures from that baseline when these result from the responsible choices made by individuals (see Knight and Stemplowska 2011 for examples). These theories differ along several dimensions: the 'currency of justice' used to define the baseline of equality, the conditions that must be fulfilled for a choice to qualify as responsible, and which among the consequences that follow from a choice should count when the justice of an outcome is being assessed (it may in particular appear unjust to allow people to suffer the full consequences of bad choices that they could not reasonably have anticipated). The label that is often used to describe a sub-class of these theories is 'luck egalitarianism'. According to luck egalitarians, justice requires that no-one should be disadvantaged relative to others on account of 'brute' bad luck, whereas inequalities that arise through the exercise of personal responsibility are permissible (for a full discussion of luck egalitarianism, see the entry on justice and bad luck). 'Brute' luck is interpreted widely to include not only external circumstances such as one person's initially having access to more resources than another, but also internal factors such as possessing natural abilities or disabilities, or having involuntarily acquired expensive tastes. All such inequalities are to be ironed out by redistribution or compensation, while people's choices about how to use the assets they are granted should be respected, even if this leads to significant inequality in the long run.

Luck egalitarianism has proved surprisingly influential in recent debates on justice, despite the evident difficulties involved in, for example, quantifying 'brute luck disadvantage' in such a way that a compensatory scheme could be established. There are, however, a number of problems it has to face. By giving scope to personal responsibility, it seeks to capture what is perhaps the most attractive part of the conventional idea of desert - that people should be rewarded for making good choices and penalised for making bad ones - while filtering out the effects of having (undeserved) natural talents. But in reality the choices that people make are influenced by the talents and other qualities that they happen to have already. So if we allow someone to reap advantages by, for example, devoting long hours to learning to play the piano at a high level, we must recognize that this is a choice that she would almost certainly not have made unless early experiment showed that she was musically gifted. We cannot say what she would have chosen to do in a counterfactual world in which she was tone deaf. There seems then to be no coherent half-way house between accepting full-blooded desert and denying that people can justly claim relative advantage through the exercise of responsibility and choice (see further Miller 1999, ch. 7) .

A second problem is that one person's exercise of responsibility may prove advantageous or disadvantageous to others, even though they have done nothing to bring this change about, so from their point of view it must count as 'brute' luck. This will be true, for example, in any case in which people are competing to excel in some field, where successful choices made by A will worsen the comparative position of B, C, and D. Or again, if A acts in a way that benefits B, but does nothing comparable to improve the position of C and D, then an inequality is created that counts as 'brute bad luck' from the perspective of the latter. One of the most influential exponents of luck egalitarianism seems to have recognized the problem in a late essay: 'unlike plain egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism is paradoxical, because the use of shares by people is bound to lead to a distribution flecked by luck' (Cohen 2011, p. 142).

6.3 Relational Egalitarianism

We have seen that equality can sometimes be understood as required by justice; but it can also be valued independently. Indeed there can be circumstances in which the two values collide, because what justice demands is inequality of outcome. The kind of inequality that is independently valuable is social equality, best understood as a property of the relationships that prevail within a society: people regard and treat each other as social equals, and the society's institutions are designed to foster and reflect such attitudes. A society of equals contrasts with one in which people belong to different ranks in a social hierarchy, and behave towards one another as their relative ranking prescribes. Different reasons can be given for objecting to social inequality, and conversely for valuing social equality (see Scanlon 2003).

Those who find equality valuable for reasons other than reasons of distributive justice are often described as 'relational egalitarians' (see Anderson 1999, Wolff 1998, Fourie, Schuppert and Wallimann-Helmer 2015). It is tempting to regard relational egalitarianism as a rival theory of justice to the luck egalitarian theory outlined in §6.2, but it may be more illuminating to see it instead as providing an alternative account of why we should care about limiting material inequality. Thus, faced with a world like the one we currently inhabit in which income differences are very large, justice theorists are likely to criticize these inequalities on grounds that they are not deserved, or arise from brute luck, etc., whereas relational egalitarians will say that they create a divided society in which people are alienated from each other, and cannot interact in a mutually respectful way. Relational equality does not address issues of distribution directly, and so cannot function as a theory of justice itself, but it can provide grounds for preferring one theory of justice to its rivals - namely that implementing that particular theory is more likely to create or sustain a society of equals.

7. Conclusion

We saw at the beginning of this article that justice can take a number of different forms, depending on the practical context in which it is being applied. Although we found common elements running through this diversity of use - most readily captured in Justinian's 'suum cuique' formula - these were formal rather than substantive. In these circumstances, it is natural to look for an overarching framework into which the various contextually specific conceptions of justice can all be fitted. Three such frameworks were examined: utilitarianism, contractarianism and egalitarianism. None, however, passed what we might call the 'Sidgwick/Rawls test', namely that of incorporating and explaining the majority at least of our considered convictions about justice - beliefs that we feel confident in holding about what justice requires us to do in a wide and varied range of circumstances (for Rawls' version of the test see the entry on reflective equilibrium). So unless we are willing to jettison many of these convictions in order to uphold one or other general framework, we will need to accept that no comprehensive theory of justice is available to us; we will have to make do with partial theories - theories about what justice requires in particular domains of human life. Rawls himself, despite the bold title of his first book ( A Theory of Justice), came to recognize that what he had outlined was at best a theory of social justice applied to the basic institutional structure of a modern liberal state. Other forms of justice - familial, allocative, associational, international - with their associated principles would be applicable in their respective domains (for an even more explicitly pluralist account of justice, see Walzer 1983; for a fuller defence of a contextual approach to justice, see Miller 2013, esp. ch. 2).

One way to loosen up our thinking about justice is by paying greater attention to the history of the concept. We can learn a great deal by reading what Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Hume, has to say about the concept, but as we do so, we also see that elements we would expect to find are missing (there is nothing about rights in Aristotle, for example), while others that we would not anticipate are present. This may in some part be due to the idiosyncrasies of each thinker, but more importantly it reflects differences in the form of social life in which each was embedded - its economic, legal and political structure, especially. Various attempts have been made to write histories of justice that are more than just catalogues of what individual thinkers have said: they aim to trace and explain systematic shifts in the way that justice has been interpreted (for contrasting examples, see MacIntyre 1988, Fleischacker 2004, Johnston 2011). These should not be read as enlightenment stories in which our understanding of justice steadily improves as the centuries roll by. MacIntyre's view, for example, is that modern liberal societies cannot sustain the practices within which notions of justice find their proper home. We can get a better grasp of what justice means to us by seeing the various conceptions that compete for our attention as tied to aspects of our social world that did not exist in the past, and are equally liable to disappear in the future.

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Coleman, Jules, 1992, Risks and Wrongs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka, 2011, Zoopolis: a political theory of animals rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dworkin, Ronald, 2000, Sovereign Virtue: the theory and practice of equality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Feinberg, Joel, 1970, "Justice and Personal Desert," in Doing and Deserving: essays in the theory of responsibility, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

---, 1974, "Noncomparative Justice," Philosophical Review, 83: 297-338.

Fleischacker, Samuel, 2004, A Short History of Distributive Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fourie, Carina, Fabian Schuppert and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (eds.), 2015, Social Equality: on what it means to be equals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frankfurt, Harry, 2015, On Inequality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition? : a political-philosophical exchange, London: Verso.

Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice; power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garner, Robert, 2013, A Theory of Justice for Animals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gauthier, David, 1986, Morals by Agreement, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Harsanyi, John, 1975, "Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory," American Political Science Review, 69: 594-606.

Hayek, Friedrich, 1976, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Volume II:The Mirage of Social Justice), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

---, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Johnston, David, 2011, A Brief History of Justice, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kagan, Shelly, 2012, The Geometry of Desert, New York: Oxford University Press.

Knight, Carl and Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), 2011, Responsibility and Distributive Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lind, E. Allan and Tom Tyler, 1988, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice, New York and London: Plenum Press.

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1988, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London: Duckworth.

Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government, ed. A.D. Lindsay, London: Dent, 1964.

Miller, David, 1999, Principles of Social Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

---, 2013, Justice for Earthlings: essays in political philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Montague, Phillip, 1980, "Comparative and Non-Comparative Justice," Philosophical Quarterly, 30: 131-40.

Murphy, Liam, 1998, "Institutions and the Demands of Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27, 251-91.

Nagel, Thomas, 2005, "The Problem of Global Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33, 113-47.

Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford: Blackwell.

Nussbaum, Martha, 2006, Frontiers of Justice: disability, nationality, species membership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Okin, Susan, 1989, Justice, Gender, and the Family, New York: Basic Books.

Olsaretti, Serena (ed.), 2003, Justice and Desert, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Paul, Jeffrey (ed.), 1982, Reading Nozick : essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Oxford: Blackwell.

Perry, Stephen, 2000, "On the Relationship between Corrective and Distributive Justice," in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Fourth Series, edited by Jeremy Horder, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Raphael, D. D., 2001, Concepts of Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rawls, John, 1958, "Justice as Fairness," Philosophical Review, 67: 164-94.

---, 1971, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

---, 1993, Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press.

---, 1999, A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

---, 2001, Justice as Fairness: a restatement, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ripstein, Arthur, 2004, "The Division of Responsibility and the Law of Tort," Fordham Law Review, 72: 1811-44.

Sandel, Michael, 1982, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scanlon, T. M., 1998, What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

---, 2003, "The Diversity of Objections to Inequality," in The Difficulty of Tolerance: essays in political philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sen, Amartya, 1980, "Equality of What?" in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 1, ed. S. McMurrin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sidgwick, Henry, 1874/1907, The Methods of Ethics, London: Macmillan.

Valentini, Laura, 2014, "Canine Justice: An Associative Account," Political Studies, 62: 37-52.

Walzer, Michael, 1983, Spheres of Justice: a defence of pluralism and equality, New York: Basic Books.

Williams, Andrew, 1998, "Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27: 225-47.

Wolff, Jonathan, 1991, Robert Nozick : property, justice and the minimal state, Cambridge: Polity.

---, 1998, "Fairness, Respect and the Egalitarian Ethos," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27: 97-122.

Young, Iris Marion, 2011, Responsibility for Justice, New York: Oxford University Press.

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'Justice' has sometimes been used in a way that makes it virtually indistinguishable from rightness in general. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between 'universal' justice that corresponded to 'virtue as a whole' and 'particular' justice which had a narrower scope (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, chs. 1-2).

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: 'In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body'

Objectification

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Freedom to follow Conscience

What is conscience?

How does one follow their conscience?

Can conscience be developed?

Catholic teaching via Gaudium et Spes

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What is Critical Pedagogy?

Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.

It insists that issues of social justice and democracy are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning. The goal of critical pedagogy is emancipation from oppression through an awakening of the critical consciousness, based on the Portuguese term conscientização. When achieved, critical consciousness encourages individuals to effect change in their world through social critique and political action in order to self-actualize.

Critical pedagogy was founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It subsequently spread internationally, developing a particularly strong base in the United States, where proponents sought to develop means of using teaching to combat racism, sexism, and oppression. As it grew, it incorporated elements from fields like the Human rights movement, Civil rights movement, Disability rights movement, Indigenous rights movement, postmodern theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory. (Wikipedia)

Freire Institute

bell hooks on Freire (watch the short video)

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Click to read)
--Reading Guide--

What is the role of education?

What was the historical method of education?

What would you like education to be in the future?

What is the role of the teacher?

What is the role of the student?

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bell hooks and Laverne Cox in a Public Dialogue at The New School (Link). #feminism, identity, trans, black, people of color

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Kimberle W. Crenshaw

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When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 30 years ago, it was a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it went viral.

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Connections | PBS

bell hooks & john a. powell: Belonging Through Connection (Othering & Belonging Conference 2015)

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Case Study: Sexual and reproductive rights of girls and young women with disabilities

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Case Study: Sexual and reproductive rights of girls and young women with disabilities

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The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities embraces differences between human beings and underlines the importance of embracing disability as part of human diversity. Persons with disabilities are recognized as rights-holders and their rights must be respected, protected and fulfilled, just like everyone else.

With these short video animations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities aims to raise awareness on the barriers faced by people with disabilities to exercise rights. The series of four audio-visual pieces discuss and explain the notion of “ableism”, as well as how to protect the rights of people with disabilities to legal capacity, sexual and reproductive health, and participation in decision-making. They are intended for the general public, including persons with disabilities and their organizations, policymakers, human rights defenders, and educators.

Upload, livestream, and create your own videos, all in HD.

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Sexual and reproductive rights of girls and young women with disabilities

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The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities embraces differences between human beings and underlines the importance of embracing disability as part of human diversity. Persons with disabilities are recognized as rights-holders and their rights must be respected, protected and fulfilled, just like everyone else.
 
With these short video animations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities aims to raise awareness on the barriers faced by people with disabilities to exercise rights. The series of four audio-visual pieces discuss and explain the notion of “ableism”, as well as how to protect the rights of people with disabilities to legal capacity, sexual and reproductive health, and participation in decision-making. They are intended for the general public, including persons with disabilities and their organizations, policymakers, human rights defenders, and educators.

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Soooooooo many case studies

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UN Human Rights - YouTube

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The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) represents the world's commitment to universal ideals of human dignity. We have a unique mandate from the international community to promote and protect all human rights. The High Commissioner for Human Rights is the principal human rights official of the United Nations.

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About the Forum

The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology is an international multireligious project contributing to a new academic field and an engaged moral force of religious environmentalism. With its conferences, publications, monthly newsletter, and website, it explores religious worldviews, texts, and ethics in order to contribute to environmental solutions along with science, policy, law, economics, and appropriate technology.

The Forum was founded in 1998 by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim and has been based at Yale University since 2006. Please explore the About Us section for more information on the Mission, History, and Projects of the Forum.

Others have helped lead this work, such as the National Religious Partnership on the Environment, GreenFaith, Interfaith Power and Light, Earth Ministry, Faith in Place, and Blessed Tomorrow in the United States. In Britain, the Alliance of Religion and Conservation (ARC) was an early leader and the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment has advanced scholarly research.

Available now!
New Religion & Ecology Online Courses

We are pleased to announce that we have just launched six free courses on

“Religions and Ecology:
Restoring the Earth Community”

through Yale University and the Coursera online learning platform. The courses are free to audit, available anywhere in the world, and pursued at your own pace. Community mentors are provided for each course for further support and engagement.

Go here to see the full list of courses and find out more details on this exciting new offering.

Read the Yale Daily News article about the courses.

FORE SPOTLIGHTS Video/Podcast Series

S potlights Clips, 2.35, Ecology in Islam with Huda Alkaff
This is a clip from the episode of Spotlights featuring Huda Alkaff, the Founder and Director of Wisconsin Green Muslims, a grassroots group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin formed in 2005 to connect faith, environmental justice, and sustainability through education and service. In this clip, she talks about the cosmological and ecological orientation of Islam, particularly as expressed in the Quran and Hadith. Details for the full episode are here: https://fore.yale.edu/blogs/entry/165…

You can also access the SPOTLIGHTS series as audio podcasts by going here.
Watch all episodes of Spotlights from our archive page.

Check back here each Monday for a new episode.

Congratulations to FORE Spotlights for being named one of the 20 best podcasts of 2021 on environmental activism!

Partner Organizations

UNEP: Faith for Earth Initiative

The mission of Faith for Earth is to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.  On May 4, 2020 UNEP Faith for Earth announced a partnership with the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. See our Faith for Earth page for further information.

Interfaith Rainforest Initiative

The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) is an international, multi-faith alliance that works to bring moral urgency and faith-based leadership to global efforts to end tropical deforestation. They provide a platform for religious leaders to work hand-in-hand with indigenous peoples, governments, civil society organizations and businesses on actions that protect rainforests and safeguard the indigenous peoples that serve as their guardians. Read more.

Parliament of the World’s Religions Climate Action Task Force

The Parliament of the World’s Religions, acting with the leadership of its Climate Action Task Force, seeks to encourage and enable collective and individual action to reduce and counter the adverse impacts of human-caused climate change. Read more.

Religions for Peace

Religions for Peace is where the world’s religions join together to ensure that all people enjoy peace, harmony, and prosperity. We are more than an organisation. For 50 years, Religions for Peace has been a movement changing the world and challenging the status quo through our mutual conviction that religions are more powerful, inspiring, and impactful when they work together. Read more.

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GreenFaith inspires, educates, organizes, and mobilizes people of diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds globally for environmental action. Our work is based on beliefs shared by the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. We believe that protecting the Earth is a sacred act, and that environmental stewardship is a moral responsibility. Read more.

Center for Earth Ethics

The Center for Earth Ethics envisions a world where value is measured according to the sustained well-being of all people and our planet. They work to cultivate the public consciousness needed to make changes in policy and culture that will establish a new value system based on this vision. Their four core programs are: Eco-ministry; Environmental Justice & Civic Engagement; Original Caretakers; and Sustainability & Global Affairs. Read more

Rotating Header photos: Faith leaders process to the Ise shrine,©Alexander Mercer, courtesy of ARC; Newspaper Rock, Utah; Maukib procession Kano, Nigeria, ©Darul Qadiriyyah, Courtesy of ARC; Cambodian monks ordaining trees, ©Chantal Elkin, Courtesy of ARC

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Welcome | Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology

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The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology is an international multireligious project contributing to a new academic field and an engaged moral force of religious environmentalism. With its conferences, publications, monthly newsletter, and website, it explores religious worldviews, texts, and ethics in…

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Case Study: Medical School Ordered to Compensate Women For Making Entrance Test Easier For Men

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Case Study: Medical School Ordered to Compensate Women For Making Entrance Test Easier For Men

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Is this just?

Can redemption be found?

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Medical School Ordered to Compensate Women For Making Entrance Test Easier For Men

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The Japanese school argued that women are more mature than men of the same age and have an unfair advantage in admission tests.

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Case Study: An economist explains why women are paid less

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Case Study: An economist explains why women are paid less

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1. Laura D'Andrea Tyson Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

2. Ceri Parker Commissioning Editor, Agenda, World Economic Forum

It's a basic principle of fairness: men and women should have the same economic opportunities in life. But all around the world, despite progress and protests and legislation, there is a persistent gap between what men and women are paid.

For every dollar a man earns, on average a woman is paid 54 cents. Based on today's rate of progress, it will take 202 years for this gap to close, according to the World Economic Forum. As this chart of major OECD economies shows, the discrepancy plays out all around the world.

But what's going on behind those numbers? Both outright discrimination and a complex web of factors that influence and constrain the options open to women, according to the American economist Laura Tyson. She pinpoints parenthood as the moment the gap widens, with mothers taking a wage penalty while fathers enjoy a premium.

The below is an edited transcript of a conversation with Laura Tyson, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley.

" There are many factors behind the wage disparity between men and women. I would start simply with the fact that until recently there were different levels of educational attainment for men and women, and educational attainment is a major determinant of earnings. But during the past 20 years, the world has made tremendous progress on eliminating the educational differences between men and women, so these differences now play a much smaller role in gender earnings differences particularly among younger workers with comparable educational attainment levels.

So, let's go now to some other factors that affect the gender gap in earnings.

Women choose different occupations from men. And there are large and persistent differences in the earnings of different occupations. Around the world, occupations like teachers pay less than occupations like engineers. So gender differences in occupational choice affect gender differences in earnings. Why do women and men make different occupational choices. Are there not enough role models for women in higher paying occupations? Are there barriers to female advancement in those occupations? The answer to both questions is yes. Moreover, even within high-paying occupations, women tend to be employed at lower levels of the occupational hierarchy: there is a persistent gender gap at higher ranks of management and leadership within occupations and this in turn contributes to the gender pay gap within them.

There are related gender differences in earnings by industry or sector of economic activity. Around the world, men are more likely to hold jobs at any skill level in manufacturing, a sector that pays relatively high earnings, while women are more likely to hold jobs in educational services, a sector that pays considerably less than manufacturing.

Gender differences in employment by occupation and industry are important determinants of gender differences in earnings around the world. So to understand and reduce the gender gap in earnings it is necessary to understand and reduce the gender differences in employment by occupation and sector.

What's the World Economic Forum doing about the gender gap?

The World Economic Forum has been measuring gender gaps since 2006 in the annual Global Gender Gap Report.

The Global Gender Gap Report tracks progress towards closing gender gaps on a national level. To turn these insights into concrete action and national progress, we have developed the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerators model for public private collaboration.

These accelerators have been convened in ten countries across three regions. Accelerators are established in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Panama in partnership with the InterAmerican Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean, Egypt and Jordan in the Middle East and North Africa, and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

All Country Accelerators, along with Knowledge Partner countries demonstrating global leadership in closing gender gaps, are part of a wider ecosystem, the Global Learning Network, that facilitates exchange of insights and experiences through the Forum's platform.

In 2019 Egypt became the first country in the Middle East and Africa to launch a Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator. While more women than men are now enrolled in university, women represent only a little over a third of professional and technical workers in Egypt. Women who are in the workforce are also less likely to be paid the same as their male colleagues for equivalent work or to reach senior management roles.

In these countries CEOs and ministers are working together in a three-year time frame on policies that help to further close the economic gender gaps in their countries. This includes extended parental leave, subsidized childcare and removing unconscious bias in recruitment, retention and promotion practices.

If you are a business in one of the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator countries you can join the local membership base.

If you are a business or government in a country where we currently do not have a Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator you can reach out to us to explore opportunities for setting one up.

Women around the world are also more likely than men to work part-time. And part-time work, even for the same kind of job in the same occupation and sector, has a lower hourly wage with fewer social protections and benefits than comparable full-time work. According to the ILO, women account for about 57% of global part-time work, and the earnings gap between comparable full-time and part-time work is in the order of 10%.

There is also evidence that motherhood and associated gender differences in household care responsibilities are significant factors behind the gender pay gap.

There's evidence of a wage penalty for motherhood: all else being equal, there is a negative relationship between a woman's wage and the number of children she has. According to OECD data, the motherhood penalty amounts to about a 7% wage reduction per child. There is also some evidence of a fatherhood premium: a positive relationship between a man's wage and the number of children he has.

When you compare men and women with comparable educations at the beginning of their careers, working full-time in the same occupation and sector, the gender gap in earnings has largely disappeared in many advanced industrial economies. Same education, same work, same wage.

Five to ten years later, often after the arrival of children, the gender gap in earnings appears. A non-existent wage gap becomes a significant and growing wage gap.

Women often choose to move to part-time employment or to step out out of a career promotion pathway in order to have more time for motherhood and childcare when their children are young. If they return to work full-time, they are often forced to accept a lower wage compared to the wage they would have earned had they stayed in their original job.

There is a significant amount of work associated with running a household and raising children. That work exists. And right now, not just in advanced industrial countries but around the world, that work is disproportionately done by women. And it's not paid.

An important step to closing the gender pay gap is the more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities between men and women. Paid parental leave policies that provide both maternity and paternity leave help achieve this goal, increasing the participation of fathers in child care and reducing gender stereotyping in childcare and related household responsibilities. When paternity care is non-transferable, men are more likely to take advantage of it, reducing the gender differences in labour force participation rates associated with children. Paternity leave is frequently cited as a very important policy to reduce or eliminate the pay differential resulting from the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood premium.

Discrimination, stereotyping and implicit biases still play a role. Finally, and this is significant: even taking out the education effect, the occupation effect, the sector effect, the part-time work effect,and the motherhood and fatherhood effects, a gender gap in earnings remains. This gap is evidence of persistent discrimination, stereotyping and implicit biases in earnings and promotion opportunities for women. Government policies, legal protections, and changes in business practices, such as regular pay assessments of earnings by gender and pay transparency, are necessary to combat these sources of the gender gap in pay.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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An economist explains why women are paid less

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Praxis: Refers to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas. (Wikipedia)

Service:

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Noam Chomsky

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Robert Nozick

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Case Study: Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’ 

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Case Study: Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’ 

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It was meant to be a critique of heterosexual assumptions within feminism, but it turned out to be more about gender categories. For instance, what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of "women" to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women. And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of "men".
Let's talk about Gender Trouble's central idea of 'performativity'. This remains a controversial view of how gender works, so what did you have in mind?
At the time I was interested in a set of debates in the academy about speech acts. "Performative" speech acts are the kind that make something happen or seek to create a new reality. When a judge declares a sentence, for instance, they produce a new reality, and they usually have the authority to make that happen. But do we say that the judge is all-powerful? Or is the judge citing a set of conventions, following a set of procedures? If it is the latter, then the judge is invoking a power that does not belong to them as a person, but as a designated authority. Their act becomes a citation - they repeat an established protocol.
How does that relate to gender?
I suggested more than 30 years ago that people are, consciously or not, citing conventions of gender when they claim to be expressing their own interior reality or even when they say they are creating themselves anew. It seemed to me that none of us totally escape cultural norms.

At the same time, none of us are totally determined by cultural norms. Gender then becomes a negotiation, a struggle, a way of dealing with historical constraints and making new realities. When we are "girled", we are entered into a realm of girldom that has been built up over a long time - a series of conventions, sometimes conflicting, that establish girlness within society. We don't just choose it. And it is not just imposed on us. But that social reality can, and does, change.
Today's queers often talk about gender being 'assigned at birth'. But your meaning here seems pretty different?
Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to "assign" gender to us. The powers that do that are part of an apparatus of gender that assigns and reassigns norms to bodies, organises them socially, but also animates them in directions contrary to those norms.

Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. Yet gender is also what is made along the way - we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.
Arguments around identity have become central to much of our politics these days. As someone who is sceptical of stable identity categories, what do you make of that?
I think it matters a great deal how we understand that "centrality". My own political view is that identity ought not to be the foundation for politics. Alliance, coalition and solidarity are the key terms for an expanding left. And we need to know what we are fighting against and for, and keep that focus.

It is imperative that we work across differences and that we build complex accounts of social power. Accounts that help us to build links among the poor, the precarious, the dispossessed, LGBTQI+ peoples, workers and all those subject to racism and colonial subjugation. These are not always separate groups or identities, but overlapping and interconnected forms of subjugation that oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia but also capitalism and its destructions, including the destruction of the Earth and indigenous ways of life.
Theorists such as Asad Haider have adopted your theory to address racial divides in the United States. Haider emphasises your view of identity formation as restless and always uprooted. But don't the right wing usually score victories by pushing a much more fixed vision of identity? Today we often hear about the importance of listening to those with a 'lived experience' of oppression. Political philosopher Olúfémi O Táíwò has warned that noble intentions to 'decentre' privileged perspectives can easily backfire.
The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as "identity" politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom or against sexual violence as concerned only with "identity". In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should mean. In this way, they are essential to any radical democratic movement, so we should reject those caricatures.
How has your own gender identity informed your political theory?
So what does that mean for the left? If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realise ideals of radical justice, equality and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions.

Yes, it is important to acknowledge that, whilea white person cannot claim to represent Black experience, that is no reason for white people to be paralyzed on matters on race, refusing to intervene at all. No one needs to represent all Black experience in order to track, expose and oppose systemic racism - and to call upon others to do the same.
You have often been the target of protesters across the world. In 2014, anti-gay marriage protesters in France marched on the streets denouncing 'théorie du genre' - gender theory You've always stressed that your gender theory is not only informed by scholarly debate but also your own years participating in lesbian and gay communities. Since the early 1990s you've become a uniquely influential thinker within these circles. How much has changed since you came out? What kind of issues were being addressed by radical gay and lesbian politics before the word 'queer' emerged? . In 2017, you were burnt in effigy by evangelical Christian protesters in Brazil chanting 'take your ideology to hell'. What do you make of that?
If white people become exclusively preoccupied with our own privilege, we risk becoming self-absorbed. We definitely don't need more white people making everything about themselves: that just re-centralizes whiteness and refuses to do the work of anti-racism.

My sense is that my "gender identity" - whatever that is - was delivered to me first by my family as well as a variety of school and medical authorities. It was with some difficulty that I found a way of occupying the language used to define and defeat me.

I still rather think that pronouns come to me from others, which I find interesting, since I receive an array of them - so I am always somewhat surprised and impressed when people decide their own pronouns or even when they ask me what pronouns I prefer. I don't have an easy answer, though I am enjoying the world of "they". When I wrote Gender Trouble, there was no category for "nonbinary" - but now I don't see how I cannot be in that category.
Many gender theorists have written on your work's direct impact on them, from Julia Serano's sheepish recounting of your attending a poetry reading that included the line 'Fuck Judith Butler!', to Jordy Rosenberg's immersive reflection 'Gender Trouble on Mother's Day'. What has becoming an intellectual celebrity felt like for you personally?
The anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement,insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained, and that gender is a destructive fiction, taking down both "man" and "civilization" and "God". Anti-gender politics have been bolstered by the Vatican and the more conservative evangelical and apostolic churches on several continents, but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.

Jules Joanne Gleeson is a queer historian. She is also the co-editor of Transgender Marxism

This article was amended on 7 September 2021. One section of the Q&A was removed by editors because the interview and preparation of the article for publication occurred before new facts emerged regarding an incident at Wi Spa in Los Angeles. The consequent lack of reference in the relevant question to this development, in which an arrest was made for alleged indecent exposure at the spa, risked misleading readers and for that reason the section was removed. This footnote was expanded on 9 September 2021 to provide a fuller explanation.

This movement is at once anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, opposing both reproductive freedom and trans rights. It seeks to censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education - a topic so important for young people to discuss. And to reverse major legal and legislative successes for sexual freedom, gender equality and laws against gender discrimination and sexual violence.

Oh, I never came out. I was outed by my parents at the age of 14. So, I've been identified variously as butch, queer, trans* for over 50 years.

I was certainly affected by the gay and lesbian bars I frequented too often in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I was concerned then as well with the challenges faced by bisexuals to gain acceptance. I met with intersex groups to understand their struggle with the medical establishment and eventually came to think more carefully about the difference between drag, transgender and gender in general. I've always been involved in non-academic activist groups, and that is an ongoing part of my life.

The demonstrations in my youth were certainly about the right to come out, the struggle against discrimination and pathologization and violence, both domestic and public. We fought against psychiatric pathologization and its carceral consequences. But also we fought for a collective right to live one's body in public without fear of violence, the right to grieve openly over lives and loves that were lost. And this struggle took a very dramatic shape once HIV arrived and Act Up emerged.

Queer was, for me, never an identity, but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia. It began as a movement opposed to the policing of identity - opposing the police, in fact.

These protests focused on rights to healthcare, education, public freedoms and opposing discrimination and violence - we wanted to live in a world where one could breathe and move and love more easily. But we also imagined and created new forms of kinship, community and solidarity, however fractious they tended to be.

I went to dyke demonstrations but also worked on international human rights, understanding what those limits were. And I came to understand that broader coalitions equally opposed to racism, economic injustice and colonialism were essential for any queer politics. We see how this works now in queer Marxism groups, Queers for Economic and Racial Justice, queers against apartheid, 'alQaws, the Palestinian group against both occupation and homophobia.

How does political life today compare?

Today I appreciate especially queer and feminist movements that are dedicated to healthcare and education as public goods, that are anti-capitalist, committed to the struggle for racial justice, disability rights, Palestinian political freedoms, and which oppose the destruction of the Earth and indigenous lifeworlds - as evident in the work of Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis - the work of Ni Una Menos and abolition feminism. There is now a broader vision, even though this is a time of great despair as we see global economic inequalities intensify under the pandemic.

I have found a way to live to the side of my name. That has proven to be very helpful. I know that many queer and trans folks feel strongly about their names and I respect that. But my survival probably depends on my ability to live at a distance from my name.

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Judith Butler: 'We need to rethink the category of woman'

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The author of the ground-breaking book Gender Trouble says we should not be surprised when the category of women expands to include trans women

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More...

-Judith Butler: looking back on 'Gender Trouble'

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Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender | Big Think

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Fratelli tutti (3 October 2020) | Francis

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Encyclical Fratelli tutti (All Brothers) of the Holy Father Francis, 3 October 2020

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Laudato si' (Link to primary source)

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Feminist Perspectives on Objectification

Case Study: Ex Machina

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Feminist Perspectives on Objectification

Martha Nussbaum (1995, 257) has identified seven features that are involved in the idea of treating a person as an object:

1. instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes;

2. denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination;

3. inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity;

4. fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects;

5. violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity;

6. ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold);

7. denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Rae Langton (2009, 228–229) has added three more features to Nussbaum’s list:

1. reduction to body: the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts;

2. reduction to appearance: the treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses;

3. silencing: the treatment of a person as if they are silent, lacking the capacity to speak.

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Case Study: Gospel Women [Handmaids] at the United Nations

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Case Study: Gospel Women [Handmaids] at the United Nations

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New York, N.Y. - A new book on the work of sisters at the United Nations does not pull any punches about the global body's shortcomings.

The U.N.'s structure is outdated and unwieldy, and it faces financial challenges and remains in thrall to its most powerful members, like the United States, writes Sr. Margaret Scott in her recently published Gospel Women at the United Nations.

But Scott, a member of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart, still affirms the U.N.'s work and mission as well as the need for religious congregations to continue their advocacy and the practice of what she calls "public theology," promoting Gospel values in the public sphere, including at the international level.

Her congregation's aim at the U.N.? "To engage, at the crossroads of world affairs, with the social issues embedded in contemporary," Scott writes, "and to do public theology."

Religious congregations have chosen to do advocacy work at the U.N. so they "live a more dynamic renewal of their original charisms and to announce the gospel in a new place in a way," Scott writes, adding that there will always be "consecrated women involved in our global reality and in the United Nations, in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the US - wherever God calls them to minister and to be."

Focusing in particular on the ministry of her congregation, Scott concludes her 134-page book by affirming the Gospel values of solidarity "with the poor and the vulnerable" through advocacy at a global level.

"Public theology is who we are and what we do, our identity and our mission," writes Scott, a board member of the U.N.-based advocacy coalition UNANMIA International, whose work also figures prominently in her book.

Scott said the U.S. province of the Handmaids, based outside of Philadelphia, is "a relativity small congregation without the finances and personnel" to have its own consultative status at the U.N., so it joined UNANIMA for the congregation to be part of its "presence and work at the U.N."

Global Women at the United Nations - with a subtitle of "Handmaids of the Sacred Heart Doing Public Theology" - grew out of Scott's 2017 doctoral dissertation at Lutheran Theological Seminary (now United Lutheran Seminary) in Philadelphia. When Scott decided to publish the dissertation as a book, it didn't take long to adapt the original text, Scott said.

"I enjoyed writing it immensely," Scott told GSR. "I just love doing research and am passionate about the poor and the planet and am deeply energized by being in contact with like-minded people."

Scott acknowledges that any book on international issues dates quickly: The two years since the completion of her dissertation "have been packed with change," she said. "Several things have happened that would be good to add to the text."

These include the fact that the "onus is [now] on national governments" to implement the U.N.'s 17 sustainable development goals, Scott said. As part of that story, she said, UNANIMA and its member congregations are "concentrating on our membership on the ground to lobby and prod. To that end, we have been convoking regional meetings to encourage the sisters to do just that."

Similarly, Scott notes in her book that the global situation is in great flux, and the world faces enormous uncertainty. However, she writes, the work of her congregation and others at the United Nations is unshakeable because of the values such advocacy represents.

That's not surprising. As Scott told GSR - and as she relates in a history of the congregation included in her book - the Handmaids' Spanish foundress, St. Raphaela Mary, "was well ahead of her time and in so many ways refused to be limited by borders."

In the early years of the congregation, Scott said, "a Spanish bishop urged her to continue to open new communities in Spain, and Spain only. Her reply was heartfelt. 'No, we must be universal like the church!' She [Raphaela Mary] also said that she wanted the heart of each Handmaid to open to the whole world."

Scott said Raphaela and the first Handmaids "would be dismayed by the growing nationalistic unilateralism we are witnessing today and would have considered it short-sighted and impractical but also theologically flawed and indefensible from a Christian standpoint."

She added: "For them, we were all one family, dependent on one another and, with the fierce spirit that was theirs from the beginning, they would have no problem in opposing nationalism in any of its present forms."

Scott notes in the book that the United Nations, established after World War II, was meant as a bulwark against such nationalism. But nationalism and the dominance of "great powers" have always been a reality in the U.N.'s work and in the wider world.

The war in Syria serves as a reminder of those dynamics, Scott writes. What began as an uprising in the wake of the Arab Spring became "a brutal proxy war that has drawn in regional and world powers: Russia and Iran, the U.S., the UK, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Israel, each with their own agenda."

The result has been tragic, Scott writes, with casualties that "now number at least half a million dead and [as well] more than nine million refugees, forcibly displaced from their homes."

Scott asks where the U.N. has been amid this tragedy, "committed as it is to brokering peace, protecting civilians, and bringing humanitarian aid? Statements of concern have abounded. But little else, The United Nations has been effectively sidelined."

Scott said this reality partially mirrors her experience at the U.N., which she describes as alternatively "inspiring and heartbreaking."

The problem, Scott said, is that member states continue pursuing their national interests, with some nations refusing "to not sign or ratify U.N. protocols." Equally troubling, she said, is that the U.N. "is badly out of date and in need of reform."

Yet Scott praises the committed U.N. staffers - "great people," she calls them - who give her hope, as does U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, whom she calls "an amazing man ... [who] continues to raise important issues."

Scott also said the U.N.'s commitment to reducing poverty and other social ills through its promotion of the sustainable development goals as well as "recent protocols on immigration and trafficking, together with the Paris Climate Agreement, are all wonderful examples of the U.N. being true to its founding charter and the [landmark 1948] declaration on human rights."

Moreover, Scott said it is important that the U.N. be a global public forum, a place where she has "witnessed memorable moments, like the voice of the indigenous peoples being heard and recognized."

As such, Scott said the U.N. offers is a place where groups of "like-minded" people - like sisters - who are determined to work together can "try to find solutions for the world's problems."

"I think that the U.N. will continue to limp along into the future," she said, "but is still and will remain the only truly global forum where governments and civil society together can try to make the world a better place."

The work of sisters is no small part of that, Scott notes. In the book, she quotes former Ambassador Joy R. Ogwu, a Nigerian diplomat who argues that religious congregations at the U.N. "are the most influential faith-based NGOs," or nongovernmental organizations.

"They have not only played a range of positive roles," Ogwu said, "but have also affected UN decision making and its approach to global issues by the moral and ethical consciousness they bring to the entire process of peace, security and development."

[Chris Herlinger is GSR international correspondent. His email address is cherlinger@ncronline.org.]

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New book says prevailing national interests and need for reform hinder United Nations

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New York, N.Y. - A new book on the work of sisters at the United Nations does not pull any punches about the global body's shortcomings. The U.N.'s structure is outdated and unwieldy, and it faces financial challenges and remains in thrall to its most powerful members, like the United States, writes Sr.

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Case Study: Sr. Anna Koop, a Catholic Worker ministering to Denver's homeless

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Case Study: Sr. Anna Koop, a Catholic Worker ministering to Denver's homeless

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Editor's note: More than 1.6 billion people worldwide live in substandard housing. Of those, at least 150 million have no home at all. In this special series, A Place to Call Home, Global Sisters Report is focusing on women religious helping people who are homeless or lack adequate shelter. Over the next few months, we will examine how homelessness and a lack of affordable housing affect teens and young adults, families, migrants, the elderly and those displaced by natural disasters and climate change in stories from Kenya, India, Vietnam, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the United States and elsewhere.

Denver — Sr. Anna Koop, a Sister of Loretto, is a Denver-based housing activist who opened the Denver Catholic Worker House in 1978. The original Catholic Worker house had nine bedrooms, but in 2016, it was destroyed in a fire. In 2018, the house reopened in a new form: a four-bedroom home in a block of low-income units purchased and operated by the Catholic Worker over the years.

The city of Denver, which is the 19th-largest metro area in the United States, has experienced nearly 20% population growth since 2010, and the trend is continuing. Along with it, Denver has the most competitive housing market in the United States, according to Forbes, and an increasing homeless population. One effort the city is currently making to address population growth is an update to an ordinance that limits the number of unrelated adults allowed to share a home from two to as many as eight.

Please tell us how you or other sisters in your community are at work in ministry helping those who are homeless, providing affordable housing, or advocating to address housing issues, and we will add it to an interactive GSR map. Click here to fill out the form.

Koop has been an outspoken supporter of these changes. She sat down to talk with Global Sisters Report about the Catholic Worker house; growth, gentrification and homelessness in Denver in general; and how the COVID-19 pandemic affects her ministry.

GSR: When did you become interested in housing?

Koop: I have a long history. I've really worked in housing since the '70s. I was working for Denver Catholic Community Services at the time. One of our asks of the city was that they create a mayor's housing task force. In doing that, we were really helping to form housing policy in the city. There were some good tenant-landlord laws that were being proposed. We felt really good about that.

Ultimately, I became pretty disenchanted with the city and the state, the political process that ultimately didn't much care about the people I cared about, people who couldn't house themselves. There was no emergency housing. I mean, the shelters were built after that time. I don't even know if we had "homeless" in our vocabulary at that time. It was more like, "travelers on the road" or something.

I left Catholic Community Services, took a year sabbatical in Santa Fe, and came back with the intention of creating the Denver Catholic Worker House. I concluded that the political process was not getting it done; I should think about providing something myself.

The original Denver Catholic Worker House had nine bedrooms. Having that many unrelated adults living together is against the city's current housing policy, which puts a cap on more than two unrelated adults living together. How did that work?

Thirty-eight years we lived in the house, and we never had a permit. Never. I mean, we always considered it our home, and the people living there were our guests. It's not a nonprofit. It just doesn't function in the way of an agency or a program. It's just offering hospitality in the Catholic Worker tradition, which is to live as equally with the people who are here as possible and function on volunteer help.

The original Catholic Worker house burned down in 2016, and in 2018, it relocated into a four-bedroom house. How has that process gone, in terms of the city's housing policy?

We went to the city to talk about a permit for the house. I can't say the city wasn't kind. They worked with us; they tried to find something. But every time they found something, it didn't fit because the Worker is a very different situation. The current zoning only allows two unrelated adults, but the head of city planning was really on our side, and she managed to bump up the number to four unrelated adults for a permit. So we did get a permit. But we're not up to capacity. We have a room upstairs that's not occupied because of that condition.

That's where the [proposed change to the city's group-living ordinance] comes in. Eight is about what we think the capacity would be here. There's a bedroom downstairs and three upstairs. One of them is really a large family room. That's our hope of what will happen sometime this summer, perhaps.

Can you speak to what it does to a person's psyche, to have a room?

I just think it's a big relief. [Our current guests are] a man and his son from the Republic of Congo. We did a lot of talking on who we would welcome into the house and decided on immigrant people.

Of course, we know that's all around us and such a huge need, with immigration policy changing so horribly and asylum-seekers having to wait long, long periods and by and large coming to this place with no resources. They were totally at survival level for some time. To just be in a place where there's some food and some welcoming people and a sense that it's family-like, people really caring about them, is huge. We have a weekly potluck and prayer.

We always hope for in the process some kind of empowerment. In the old house, the scheduling was you had to be out of the house between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. So people had to be out and about, working on their lives, and if they were able to work, they needed to be seeking employment, and some of those kinds of things.

In the early days of the Worker, people would be able to get their lives together in a couple of months because they could both find a job that gave them a living wage and they could find housing. In the later years, beginning in the 2000s, we had people with us for a year [without finding work or housing]. We absolutely got to the point where we couldn't see ourselves requiring people to be out of the house by a certain time. We would certainly talk with people who didn't seem to be working on things, but we understood that there just wasn't housing available. How could we require that of them when it wasn't attainable?

Could you speak more about that evolution you have witnessed over the years, of the increase in homelessness and decrease in available housing in Denver?

In the last three years, our property taxes on these units have been raised 100%. That's huge. That's just one indication of where housing is going in the city. In the '80s, we were renting an apartment [in this same neighborhood] for $150 [per month]. Between that and now — over $1,000 for a one-bedroom. Huge difference. I mean, it's just outpriced a strata of our population.

Denver's becoming a middle-class city. Poor people live on the streets in tents. I'd say the tents started within the last three years. The mayor passed a camping ban. Through everything, the mayor will not let go of the camping ban. He just will not. [There have been] many attempts to go to him. Which is not to say there aren't some really well-meaning people on the council.

In many ways, Denver is a wonderful place to live, but not for poor people. We kind of bemoan the fact that there's no substandard housing, properties that wouldn't pass inspection. That's what used to be available at $100, $150 a month or whatever. And it just disappeared.

A few years ago, I think the numbers were, "We need 30,000 units for 'affordable housing.' " So you gear up to build affordable housing, and you leverage all this money, etc., and the people at the bottom don't get served at all. The people who need it the most are still not served because they are the no-income, not just low-income.

One thing I would say about the housing policy that is really good is they just don't tear everything down. There has been a consistent effort to preserve the housing that exists. This is turn-of-the-century housing. That's a good thing. The bad thing is that people focus on renovating it, and the neighborhoods gentrify, and the poor people have to move out.

What's your impression of how Denver is addressing gentrification compared to the rest of the United States?

There's a housing crisis in the nation. Denver's especially attractive for people to move here. And the one thing they're doing that I don't particularly care for is production of housing. They're really encouraging growth. And I don't think that's a good idea. But of course, every mayor is going to push that because that's how you be successful at being a mayor. You're expanding. Things are growing. Things are beautiful in Denver.

I wish we would put a cap on growth. Say, "No more growth until our residents are housed." Just no more. No more construction permits until the people here are housed. And you hear, "Well, that can't be. We have to build housing for them." That's not necessarily true. There are places that can be renovated. There are buildings that could be refurbished in a way. We have motels going down all over. Pick those up and make them available at a very reasonable price. There are a lot of alternatives that could happen.

Things can turn around. I don't feel hopeless. But things shouldn't be done in the ever-popular old capitalist ways: If you build housing, you should be able to make a lot of money. You have to get your money back. Not only that, you have to profit.

So thinking of housing as a way to generate profit at all is at odds with your philosophy?

It is. It should be a basic human right. It should be like Medicare. Housing for all.

How has the coronavirus affected your work with the Catholic Worker house?

Probably the most difficult thing for me was the decision to no longer go in and out of the Catholic Worker house. I am one of those vulnerable persons because of my age, and I am a diabetic. We still have contact with folks by phone and occasional conversations outside at social distance.

It is hard to be socially distanced from people you are trying to be supportive of, and they all have their problems. We have definitely experienced kindnesses from our friends who have been bringing food and supplies, and we do have the sense that people in general are doing what they can to help people who are less privileged.

The city of Denver along with a nonprofit organization, Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, recently secured several hundred hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness to stay in during the coronavirus pandemic. How do you feel about the city's response?

I have a newfound appreciation for the mayor, his housing staff and the city council. Housing, providing health care and food for some 800 men and women is no small task.

Like so many other things during this virus, we are learning that where there is the will, there is a way. The challenge will be when we move away from the needs during the virus time, many of which were there before the virus. Will there be a will politically and economically to really tackle our housing and health care crises, not to mention economic inequities so prevalent in our society? To me, I believe that it is going to require massive systemic change coming from a far more generous place than I have seen operative in our systems for decades.

[Georgia Perry is a journalist based in Denver.]

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Q & A with Sr. Anna Koop, a Catholic Worker ministering to Denver's homeless

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Sr. Anna Koop, a Sister of Loretto, is a Denver-based housing activist who opened the Denver Catholic Worker House in 1978. The original Catho...

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Their centuries-old faith tradition of nourishing anyone in need has found new energy and purpose in America's turmoil.

The Sikh Center of New York, in Queens Village, has served more than 145,000 free meals in the last two months, as part of their faith tradition of feeding anyone in need. Credit... Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

Inside a low, brick-red building in Queens Village, a group of about 30 cooks has made and served more than 145,000 free meals in just 10 weeks. They arrive at 4 a.m. three days a week to methodically assemble vast quantities of basmati rice, dal, beans and vibrantly flavored sabzis for New York City hospital workers, people in poverty and anyone else in search of a hot meal.

This isn't a soup kitchen or a food bank. It's a gurdwara, the place of worship for Sikhs, members of the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, with about 25 million adherents. Providing for people in need is built into their faith.

An essential part of Sikhism is langar, the practice of preparing and serving a free meal to promote the Sikh tenet of seva, or selfless service. Anyone, Sikh or not, can visit a gurdwara and partake in langar, with the biggest ones - like the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India - serving more than 100,000 people every day.

Since the coronavirus pandemic has halted religious gatherings in most of the country, including langar, gurdwaras like the Sikh Center of New York, in Queens Village, are mobilizing their large-scale cooking resources to meet the skyrocketing need for food aid outside their places of worship.

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Some are feeding the protesters marching in outrage over the killings of George Floyd and other black Americans by the police. Last week, a dozen or so volunteers from the Queens center served 500 portions of matar paneer, rice and rajma, a creamy, comforting dish of red beans stewed with tomatoes, and 1,000 bottles of water and cans of soda to demonstrators in Sunnyside. They also offered dessert: kheer, a sweetened rice pudding.

"Where we see peaceful protest, we are going," said Himmat Singh, a coordinator at the World Sikh Parliament, an advocacy group providing volunteers for the Queens Village efforts. "We are looking for justice. We support this."

Since the pandemic began, soup kitchens have had difficulty keeping up with demand. Shuttered schools and even fine-dining restaurants are using their kitchens to prepare and serve hot meals. But few other places are as well positioned to handle the sheer scale of assistance required right now as the gurdwaras. Most have large, well-equipped kitchens, a steady stream of volunteers and no shortage of ingredients, thanks to regular donations from community members.

During the last annual Sikh Day Parade in New York, in April 2019, the Queens Village kitchen - which has a walk-in cooler, multiple freezers, 50-liter stockpots and a huge grill that can cook dozens of rotis at once - produced 15,000 meals in a single day.

The Sikhs' biggest challenge isn't keeping up with demand. It's letting people know that they're here - without making a big show of it or proselytizing, which is forbidden.

Founded in the 15th century in Punjab, India, by the spiritual leader Guru Nanak, Sikhism has an estimated 500,000 followers in the United States and 280 gurdwaras, according to the Sikh Coalition, a civil-rights organization in New York City. One of the most visibly distinctive features of the Sikh practice is the turban - a symbol of the religion's belief in equality - though not everyone chooses to wear one.

Sikhs in America have been often been prey to bigotry, hate crimesand Islamophobia, particularly since 9/11. A few volunteers said in interviews that before going out to distribute meals, they worried that they might hear ignorant comments. But Santokh Dillon, the president of the Guru Nanak Mission Society of Atlanta, said the people he serves are often more puzzled than prejudiced. Most have never even heard of Sikhism, he said.

When some find out that the meals are free, "They look at us and say, 'You are kidding, right?' "

At least 80 gurdwaras in the United States are now providing food assistance. For many, the transition has been quick and seamless.

This is not just because the infrastructure is already there, said Satjeet Kaur, the executive director of the Sikh Coalition. "The call to action and the responsibility" for helping others is deeply entrenched in the Sikh way of life. Sikhs are expected to donate at least 10 percent of their time or income toward community service.

It took the Gurdwara Sahib of Fremont, Calif., just a few days after suspending religious services in March to set up a meal and grocery delivery program, and a drive-through meal pickup system outside the gurdwara.

Cooks wear gloves and masks, and the kitchen is big enough for workers to stand more than six feet from one another. As at most gurdwaras, the menu changes regularly, but is typically Indian and always vegetarian. (Meat is not permitted in gurdwaras.)

While these Sikh volunteers, known as sevadars, are experts in mass-meal preparation, they aren't as accustomed to spreading the word. The Fremont kitchen has produced 15,000 to 20,000 meals a day on holidays like New Year's Eve, said Dr. Pritpal Singh, a member of the gurdwara. But now, the gurdwara is serving just 100 to 150 people each day.

Dr. Singh said he hoped that more people in need would come pick up food. "We could do hundreds of thousands of meals if given the task," he said.

But with the demonstrations unfolding around the country, Sikhs aren't waiting for people to come to them any longer. On Tuesday, volunteers from the Gurdwara Sahib attended a protest in Fremont and handed out several hundred bottles of water as a show of solidarity.

On a recent Friday, Gurjiv Kaur and Kiren Singh asked the volunteers at their gurdwara, the Khalsa Care Foundation, in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles, to prepare meals in the community kitchen that they could take to the protest. The next morning, they and others picked up about 700 containers of pasta with a garlic- and onion-laden tomato sauce and 500 bottles of water from the gurdwara, and set up a tent in Pan Pacific Park. Soon, protesters started arriving at the tent with other donations, like medical supplies, snacks and hand sanitizer.

"It is our duty to stand up with others to fight for justice," said Ms. Kaur, a graduating senior at the University of California, Irvine. "Langar at its core is a revolution - against inequality and the caste system," the antiquated hereditary class structure in South Asia, which Sikhism has always rejected.

In Norwich, Conn., volunteers from five gurdwaras handed out a few hundred bottles of water to protesters last Tuesday, and on Friday, distributed as many containers of rajma, or kidney beans, and rice on a Main Street sidewalk, a block from City Hall.

Swaranjit Singh Khalsa, a volunteer and a member of the Norwich Board of Education, noted that historically, many Sikhs in India have been killed by the police while fighting for their civil rights.

At many gurdwaras in the United States, most of those who show up for langar meals are Sikhs. Now that they are catering to a broader population, menus have changed to suit different tastes. In the Seattle area, volunteers at the Gurudwara Sacha Marag Sahib are making pasta and tacos in addition to rice and dal.

At the Hacienda de Guru Ram Das in Española, N.M., meals have included enchiladas and burritos. Still, Harimandir Khalsa, a volunteer, said the community kitchen is operating at less than 10 percent of its capacity.

"I think it is about convenience," Mr. Khalsa said, as the gurdwara isn't centrally located. "If we had a food truck parked in front of Walmart that said, 'Free food,' we could get more takers. But for people to get in their cars and drive over to this place - people aren't that desperate yet."

Location is also an issue for the Guru Ramdas Gurdwara Sahib in Vancouver, Wash., as the neighborhood doesn't have much foot traffic, said Mohan Grewal, the gurdwara secretary. So every other Sunday, volunteers pack up 300 to 400 meals made in the gurdwara and drive them to the Living Hope Church, a Christian congregation six miles away, in a more urban part of the city.

One of the biggest challenges for gurdwaras is that many hospitals, shelters and other charitable organizations they'd like to helpdon't take cooked food because of hygienic concerns, or accept it only if it meets certain health codes. Many Sikhs have started collecting and distributing pantry items in addition to making meals.

Still, some gurdwaras are bustling. In Riverside, Calif., a hub for the Sikh population, volunteers from the United Sikh Mission, an American nonprofit aid group, and the Khalsa School Riverside, a children's program, serve 3,000 to 5,000 meals every day at the Riverside Gurdwara. People line up in the drive-through as early as 9:30 a.m., even though it doesn't open until 11:30.

The process is highly systematized. The cooking team shows up at 5:30 a.m. to prepare meals based on previous days' numbers, as well as requests from senior centers, hospitals and nursing homes; another team packs the meals into microwave-safe boxes; and the third distributes them at the drive-through and other locations. The gurdwara shares information about the free meals through regular posts on large Facebook groups for local residents.

"We didn't just sit there and say we are going to cook and wait for people to come," said Gurpreet Singh, a volunteer for the United Sikh Mission.

Since the protests, Mr. Singh and others have been reaching out to black organizations, like churches, offering to drop off meals or groceries. They expect to see an increase in people showing up for meals, as thousands have been attending protests in the area.

Groups like United Sikhs, an international nonprofit, are helping to get the word out. They have stepped up efforts to identify areas of need, connect gurdwaras with organizations seeking assistance, provide best practices for food preparation during the pandemic and mobilize Sikhs to help feed protesters.

While the pandemic continues, a few gurdwaras aren't using their kitchens. Tejkiran Singh, a spokesman for the Singh Sabha of Michigan, west of Detroit, said the gurdwara committee decided it was too risky to start a meal distribution service, especially since Michigan has become a hot spot for the coronavirus.

When the Sikh Society of Central Florida, in Oviedo, reopens on June 14, services will be limited to fewer people, and food will be handed out in to-go containers as they leave.

But Amit Pal Singh and Charanjit Singh, the chairman and the treasurer of the Sikh Society of Central Florida, also want to continue the drive-through and delivery services they developed during the pandemic.

"The concept of langar is to serve the needy," Mr. Pal Singh said. Before the pandemic, he said, most people participating in langar were local Sikhs coming more for social and religious reasons than out of need. The drive-through and deliveries will allow them to put meals into the hands of people who struggle to afford to eat.

That will mean a lot of extra food for volunteers to prepare, in a city where the Sikh population is still small. But none of that seemed to worry Mr. Pal Singh.

"We would love to be in that situation," he said, his optimism vibrating through the phone. "We will handle it."

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How to Feed Crowds in a Protest or Pandemic? The Sikhs Know

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Their centuries-old faith tradition of nourishing anyone in need has found new energy and purpose in America's turmoil. Inside a low, brick-red building in Queens Village, a group of about 30 cooks has made and served more than 145,000 free meals in just 10 weeks. They arrive at 4 a.m.

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A volunteer at Amritsar's Golden Temple stacks metal plates. Over 300,000 plates, spoons and bowls are used at the langar here. Photo by Jenna Belhumeur.

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

At the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, nearly 100,000 people eat here on an average day-and not a single one of them will pay for the food they consume.

This article originally appeared on MUNCHIES in April 2015.

A young man in a hot-pink turban raises his hands humbly as he sits crossed-legged on the floor. Into his raised hands falls a hot roti that he plops into the metallic tray in front of him. Next to him is an elderly woman wearing a saffron sari. She raises her hands next and is offered the same. On either side of them are hundreds of others, all seated cross-legged, and all with the same metallic tray.

Everyone eats the same food being dished out by the volunteers: dal, vegetables, and a thick South Asian rice pudding called kheer. It is lunchtime at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, and of the nearly 100,000 people who eat here on an average day, not a single one of them will pay for the food they consume. Who said there is no such thing as a free lunch?

A meal of this scale is made possible by a cadre of volunteers and an astonishing amount of raw materials: 12,000 kilos of flour, 1,500 kilos of rice, 13,000 kilos of lentils, and up to 2,000 kilos of vegetables. While much of the work is done by hand, a mechanized oven and conveyor belt turn out 200,000 rotis on a daily basis. The langar, as it's called, never closes-and even late at night, pilgrims will stop by for a meal.

Nearly 500 years ago, a Sikh guru living in the Indian subcontinent introduced a revolutionary idea when it comes to the consumption of food. The idea was simple enough: a place should exist where everyone, regardless of religion or social status, could sit on the ground together as equals and eat the same food. The philosophy behind this free meal was a radical departure from the prevailing norms, where caste hierarchies decided what you ate and with whom you ate it.

Tradition tells that Guru Nanak, the first Sikh guru, disappeared at the age of 30 after having a vision. Three days later, he reappeared, saying only that "there is no Hindu, and there is no Musalman [Muslim]." With these words, and the belief attached to them that all are equal before God, the Sikh faith was born. At the core of Sikh teachings about equality and oneness is the langar, a free community kitchen where everyone is welcome regardless of social or religious distinctions. The langar at the Golden Temple is a living example of the Sikh faith's rejection of the notion of caste.

Though Sikh temples around the world have free kitchens, the langar at this colossal complex of white marble and gold is the biggest and most elaborate. With more than 100,000 visitors on weekdays, and swelling up to 150,000 on holy days, the Golden Temple attracts more visitors than the most famous of India's tourist destinations, the Taj Mahal. After visiting the temple, devotees and visitors alike move in droves towards the langar, where the hundreds of volunteers are busy preparing food around the clock. The food never runs out, and no one is ever turned away.

In a 16th-century India heavily organized by caste, the idea of the langar was both spiritually and socially radical. In one sense, it was a tool to alleviate hunger, and in another, a powerful call to social reformation. The prevailing narrative of modern India is one that boasts the rise of new money and an increasingly powerful middle class, yet old social hierarchies tied to caste are still widely observed, particularly in rural areas. Discrimination based on caste has been illegal in India for more than six decades, but its presence is still felt in those areas of life where it always had a strong hold: religious worship, marriage, and food. In this climate, the langar remains almost as radical and revolutionary as it was 500 years ago.

"The Sikh gurus worked very intentionally to challenge social distinctions in various forms," said Simran Jeet Singh, the senior religion fellow for the Sikh Coalition and a PhD candidate at Columbia University.

According to Singh, the writings of the gurus speak explicitly about the problem of caste and reject any concept in which somebody has any more divinity within them than somebody else. Beyond the langar's use as a lever for a more egalitarian society, Singh pointed to its more practical contribution to a community in the Middle Ages, one without modern technologies for agriculture.

"To create a space where people could just come for sustenance was revolutionary in terms of creating healthier communities," said Singh. Even today, there is a large population of impoverished people who stay outside of the Golden Temple and rely on it as their source of food. "It created a resource for sustenance while also challenging the social divisions that were prevalent at the time, and which continue to be prevalent."

In India, the phrase "you are what you eat" takes on a special significance. For a millennium, food in India has been consumed according to the rules of this vast and informal system of social engineering. It is organized like a food chain, with those wielding power and influence at the top, and those marginalized at the bottom. Food has also been a trigger for intercommunal violence. Hindu-Muslim riots have been sparked by the throwing of a pig's or a cow's head into the grounds of a mosque or Hindu temple. In lavish areas in Mumbai, housing complexes may use a "vegetarian-only" clause to keep out Muslims, Christians, or lower-caste tenants who may eat meat.

The recent ban on consumption and slaughter of beef in some states has been a particularly heated issue. Dividing lines have been drawn along caste and religious lines. Most other communities, except religious Hindus, include beef in their diet, mainly because it is cheaper than other proteins.

Although Sikhs are not exclusively vegetarian, the langar at the Golden Temple serves only nourishing vegetarian meals. The volunteers here come from different faiths and socioeconomic backgrounds. They are young, old, and in-between, and work in a highly efficient, almost machine-like way. With each onion chopped or roti flattened, you can hear them chant, " Wahe Guru...Wahe Guru," invoking the name of God.

One of the volunteers at the langar is Sukhdev Singh, a 55-year-old Sikh devotee from Fresno, California, who moved to Amritsar in 2013. Singh, with his flowing ivory beard and Khalsa blue vest, could easily be mistaken for a temple elder, yet he is one of the hundreds of people who flock to the kitchens of the Golden Temple daily to volunteer. Though today it costs tens of millions of dollars to run this kitchen, Singh reminds us that Guru Nanak began the langar with only 20 rupees and a handful of volunteers. Even with the astronomical cost, Singh says the donations for the cost of preparations are offered up to two years in advance in some cases. For the largely anonymous group of donors and volunteers, keeping this kitchen running is a religious and social obligation.

"There are only three things in our religion," said Singh. "Chant the name of God, sing religious hymns, and volunteer. I work as long as my legs allow me to stand."

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A volunteer at Amritsar's Golden Temple stacks metal plates. Over 300,000 plates, spoons and bowls are used at the langar here. Photo by Jenna Belhumeur. At the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, nearly 100,000 people eat here on an average day-and not a single one of them will pay for the food they consume.

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