A barrier or bridge? Serious problems revealed in the UK citizenship test

Thom Brooks has examined the UK citizenship test and finds that it is highly irrelevant to living in this society, has many inconsistencies, and suffers from serious gender imbalance. To make matters worse, changes to the test this year have transformed it from being a practical trivia quiz to being purely trivial. Greater care needs to be taken to ensure balance and consistency, and it is worth reconsidering the purpose of the test

Equality, Fairness and Responsibility in an Unequal World

Severe poverty is a major global problem about risk and inequality. What, if any, is the relationship between equality, fairness and responsibility in an unequal world? I argue for four conclusions. The first is the moral urgency of severe poverty. We have too many global neighbours that exist in a state of emergency and whose suffering is intolerable. The second is that severe poverty is a problem concerning global injustice that is relevant, but not restricted, to questions about responsibility. If none were responsible, this does not eliminate all compelling claims to provide assistance. The third is that severe poverty represents an inequality too far; it is a condition of extremity with denial of basic needs. The fourth is that there is a need for an approach that captures all relevant cases—and the capabilities approach and the connection theory of remedial responsibilities are highlighted as having special promise

Political Philosophy

G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is widely considered to be one of the most important contributions to the history of political philosophy, but also among the more complex. This chapter explains the central ideas to this ground-breaking work in an accessible approach that keeps technical terminology to a minimum. My aim is to clarify the distinctiveness of Hegel’s project and illuminate its widely influential discussions about freedom, recognition, the individual’s relation to the state and punishment to provide readers with a clear understanding of the Philosophy of Right within Hegel’s philosophical system through a close reading of this text

UK citizenship test is inconsistent and riddled with errors

When I took the UK citizenship test in 2009, I got the number of MPs in the House of Commons wrong, not because I didn’t know the answer, but because the Home Office didn’t. Preparing for the test was subject of increasing curiosity mixed with incredulity as yet another “correct” answer provided in the handbook was found to be false. Passing the test was more about remembering what the Home Office wanted to hear than what was, in fact, true. By this time, there had been a growing crisis surrounding the test’s use since 2007

Is eating meat ethical?

Eating meat can be ethical, but only when it does not violate rights. This requires that the ways in which meat is produced and prepared for human consumption satisfies certain standards. While many current practices may fall short of this standard, this does not justify the position that eating meat cannot be ethical under any circumstances and there should be no principled objection to its possibility

What is Wrong about the "Criminal Mind"?

Retributivists argue for a strong link between a criminal’s mind-set at the time of an offence and our community’s response through punishment. This view claims that punishment can be justified depending on the possession of a criminal mind which can be affected by factors that may affect culpability, such as mitigating factors. Retributivism is a powerful influence on our sentencing practices reflected in policy. This article argues it is based on a mistake about what makes the criminal mind relevant for punishment. It will be argued that a currently popular view of retribution endorsed by Feinberg and Duff – ‘retributivist expressivism’ – incorrectly link punishment to a criminal’s possession of moral responsibility. This is a problem because its absence is no defence to strict liability offences, the largest subset of crimes. It is not a crime’s threat or harm to morals that is most salient, but instead its threat or harm to our rights