Games and simulations--from quantitative modeling to immersive, experiential scenarios--as methods for engagement within futures studies have a substantial history. In recent years, there has been a surge of projects using a wide array of tools. As practitioners and researchers have gravitated toward more playful approaches, there is a need to review and evaluate such approaches. This chapter provides an introduction to gaming and simulations as anticipatory processes. Offering a snapshot of contemporary projects from around the world, this chapter utilizes a (...) range of voices and perspectives on gaming and simulations to explore how such tools and methods use the future. (shrink)

Survivors of trauma commonly report feeling as though a part of themselves has died. This article provides a theoretical interpretation of this phenomenon, drawing on Waldenfels' notion of the split self. We argue that trauma gives rise to an explicit tension between the lived and corporeal body which is so profoundly distressing that it can be experienced by survivors as the death of part of oneself. We explore the ways in which this is manifest in the posttraumatic phenomena of dissociation; (...) indescribability; and the fragmentation and repetition of time. Acknowledging that the traumatic loss of part of oneself involves significant grief, we then consider whether the bereavement literature might be helpfully applied. We focus specifically upon the continuing bonds model, which emphasizes an ongoing and meaningful relationship with the deceased through an active process of memorializing. In considering how this might be appropriated to the death of the self in trauma, we suggest that the development of an intrapersonal relationship between parts lost and living might, over time, offer a unique way in which to adapt to loss and approach the future. (shrink)

This essay presents deductive arguments to an introductory-level audience via a discussion of Aristotle's three types of rhetoric, the goals of and differences between deductive and non-deductive arguments, and the major features of deductive arguments (e.g., validity and soundness).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesJake Beery, Neethi Pinto, Marcia King, Laura Wachsmuth, Alisha, Katie L. Gholson, T.S. Moran, Calvin R. Gross, Joanne Alfred, Cindy Bitter, Jenna Bennett, Nadia Khan, Clarice Douille, Kristen Carey Rock, Adrienne Feller Novick, Andrea Eisenberg, Japmehr Sandhu, Katherine Bakke, Heer Hendry, Karan K. Mirpuri, and Katerina V. Liong• Being the Difference• Grieving One More Time• Echoes of Grief: Tales from an Emergency Medicine and Critical (...) Care Nurse• Searching for Peace in Death• “I’d Love to go Off the Grid and Never Come Back”• “A Mother’s Love”• Tiny Person, Big Impact• Night Shift• Cracked Armor• Who Tells the Story• Navigating Hard Situations that Medical School Cannot Prepare You For• The Wish• Break• Five More Minutes• I Saw My Reflection• The Aftermath• Where the Journey Begins• Lessons Learned in Room 208• Joint and Grief Aches• My First Loss: Carrying His Legacy• Grieving the Loss of What Medicine Was Supposed to BeCopyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Susanne K. Langer contributed an exhaustive account of aesthetics, Feeling and Form, in which she articulated her schema of the virtual and wove together the aesthetic elements of music, visual arts, dance, and literature/theater. This analysis of her work centers on two key concepts within her philosophy: the virtual as the aesthetic effect of the work and the perception of the work through intuition. In this paper, I re-read Langers philosophy through a perspective built on intersections between phenomenology, pragmatism, and (...) post-structuralist theory in order to reveal the relevance of her work to current understandings of how the dancing body produces and conveys meaning. I endeavor to show how her work provides a practical, conceptual system for understanding dance as an a-linguistic form of meaning-making, bodily experience, and knowledge. (shrink)

In The Good Place, the characters’ attempts to find “marginal comforts” worsen their suffering by lulling them into a false sense of security and keeping them from fully resisting or rebelling against their situation. People will justify the worst and most hellish marriages, jobs, and living situations, if they can find small marginal comforts that keep them stable. Being comfortable is not a “why” in life, and it's really just a good way to hurt oneself all the more. But as (...) much as marginal comforts provide for complacency, too much comfort and guaranteed pleasure can undermine what it means to be human. Suffering, to some extent, appears to give and shape meaning in our lives. The lack of suffering and the lack of the absurdity of death keep the residents of The Good Place from being able to do new and interesting things. (shrink)

Stephen Barber _Artaud: The Screaming Body_ London: Creation Books, 1999 ISBN 1840680091 126 pp.

Background: Doping has been a prominent issue for the sport of athletics in recent years. The endurance disciplines, which currently account for 56% of the global anti-doping rule violations in athletics, appear to be particularly high risk for doping.Objective: Using this high-risk, high-pressure context, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the human impact of doping and anti-doping on “clean” athletes. The secondary aim of the study was to better understand the reasons for, and barriers to, competing “clean” (...) among this group of athletes.Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 elite distance runners from the UK to explore: the reasons and motivations for competing clean. Perceptions of the anti-doping system, and experiences of being part of that system. Views on the prevalence and causes of doping and the impact of doping on the lives of clean athletes. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis.Results: Four major themes were identified: The participants in this study have not been tempted to use prohibited substances or methods; they compete in their sport for the personal satisfaction of seeing how good they can be, rather than in pursuit of winning at all costs. Anti-doping does not currently prevent doping effectively and is not implemented evenly across the globe. Doping was perceived as a major issue and was felt to be borne out of certain sporting cultures in which doping is enabled. Doping has impacted the careers of clean athletes in irreversible ways and presents a continuing challenge to the psychological preparation for competition.Conclusions: Clean athletes suffer negative consequences from both doping and anti-doping. ADOs must collaborate across borders to ensure a more even implementation of anti-doping activities, to facilitate a more level playing field on the global stage. ADOs must also acknowledge the existence of a large group of athletes who would never consider deliberately doping and make anti-doping work for these athletes too. (shrink)

Although researchers generally take great care to ensure that human subjects do not suffer very serious harms from their involvement in research, the situation is different for nonhuman animal subjects. Significant progress has been made in reducing unnecessary animal suffering in research, yet researchers still inflict severe pain and distress on tens of thousands of animals every year for scientific purposes. Some bioethicists, scientists, and animal welfare advocates argue for placing an upper limit on the suffering researchers may impose on (...) animal subjects, with rare exceptions for research that promises critical social benefits. In this article, I argue against such an upper limit on harm on the grounds that researchers often can compensate animal subjects for their suffering, even severe and long-lasting suffering. If animal subjects receive adequate compensation for the harms they suffer, then there is no general limit on how much suffering researchers may impose on them for scientific purposes. (shrink)

Philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) places investigations of value, meaning, and the good life at the center of philosophical investigation, especially of one’s own life. I argue PWOL is compatible with general introductory philosophy courses, further arguing that PWOL-based general introductions have several philosophical and pedagogical benefits. These include the ease with which high impact practices, situated skill development, and students’ ability to ‘think like a disciplinarian’ may be incorporated into such courses, relative to more traditional introductory courses, (...) as well as the demonstration of philosophy’s value to students by explicitly tying philosophical investigation to students own lives. (shrink)

The structure of police agencies, especially how the boundaries of their authority are drawn, is a crucial element of their legitimacy. Poorly drawn boundaries encourage unjustified police power and illegitimate police agencies. Claiming that realized political entities in developed democracies are illegitimate is fraught, in part because the difference between legitimate and illegitimate political power can be subtle in practice. To overcome this difficulty, I propose thinking in terms of “legitimacy-risk profiles.” I develop a way of determining a measure of (...) risk to legitimacy associated with various kinds of police power and agency structure. I then use it to explore the institutional boundaries recommended by the legitimacy-risk profiles of different kinds of policing. The result is a normative framework for thinking about political legitimacy at the realized—that is, not the fundamental and idealized—level. (shrink)

In this article, I examine stigmatizing and especially patronizing attitudes towards others’ depression that people who are well-intentioned produce. The strategy of the article is to consider the social experience of depression through two separate subfields of philosophy: epistemic injustice and phenomenology. The solution that I propose is a phenomenological account of empathy. The empathetic attitude that I argue for involves actively listening to the depressed individual and taking their depression testimony as direct evidence. The article has been written both (...) for those who seek to better support neurodiverse people in their lives and for depressives (and other neurodivergents) themselves in order to provide them with a better account for advocating for themselves against social stigma. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that physicians have normative authority over patients. First we elaborate on the nature of normative authority. We then examine and critique Arthur Isak Applbaum’s view that physicians lack authority over patients. Our argument appeals to four cases that demonstrate physicians’ authority.

The world passed the halfway point of oil supply in 2005. World demand for oil likely will severely outstrip supply in 2008, leading to increasingly higher oil prices. Consequences are likely to include increasing gasoline prices, rapidly increasing inflation, and subsequently a series of increasingly severe recessions followed by a worldwide economic depression. Consequences may include, particularly in industrialized countries such as the United States, massive unemployment, economic collapse, and chaos.

A survey of the recent literature suggests that physicians should engage religious patients on religious grounds when the patient cites religious considerations for a medical decision. We offer two arguments that physicians ought to avoid engaging patients in this manner. The first is the Public Reason Argument. We explain why physicians are relevantly akin to public officials. This suggests that it is not the physician’s proper role to engage in religious deliberation. This is because the public character of a physician’s (...) role binds him/her to public reason, which precludes the use of religious considerations. The second argument is the Fiduciary Argument. We show that the patient-physician relationship is a fiduciary relationship, which suggests that the patient has the clinical expectation that physicians limit themselves to medical considerations. Since engaging in religious deliberations lies outside this set of considerations, such engagement undermines trust and therefore damages the patient-physician relationship. (shrink)

Probability theory promises to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The (...) first three parts discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been brought to bear on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent 'fine-tuning' for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth part addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal's famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final part offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement. (shrink)

Aulisio and Arora argue that the moral significance of value imposition explains the moral distinction between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. The former objects to directly performing actions, whereas the latter objects to indirectly assisting actions on the grounds that indirectly assisting makes the actor morally complicit. Examples of non-traditional conscientious objection include objections to the duty to refer. Typically, we expect physicians who object to a practice to refer, but the non-traditional conscientious objector physician refuses to refer. (...) Aulisio and Arora argue that physicians have a duty to refer because refusing to do so violates the patient’s values. While we agree with Aulisio and Arora’s conclusions, we argue value imposition cannot adequately explain the moral difference between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. Treating autonomy as the freedom to live in accordance with one’s values, as Aulisio and Arora do, is a departure from traditional liberal conceptions of autonomy and consequently fails to explain the moral difference between the two kinds of objection. We outline how a traditional liberal understanding of autonomy would help in this regard, and we make two additional arguments—one that maintains that non-traditional conscientious objection undermines society’s autonomy, and another that maintains that it undermines the physician-patient relationship—to establish why physicians have a duty to refer. (shrink)

Organizations are making massive investments in artificial intelligence, and recent demonstrations and achievements highlight the immense potential for AI to improve organizational and human welfare. Yet realizing the potential of AI necessitates a better understanding of the various ethical issues involved with deciding to use AI, training and maintaining it, and allowing it to make decisions that have moral consequences. People want organizations using AI and the AI systems themselves to behave ethically, but ethical behavior means different things to different (...) people, and many ethical dilemmas require trade-offs such that no course of action is universally considered ethical. How should organizations using AI—and the AI itself—process ethical dilemmas where humans disagree on the morally right course of action? Though a variety of ethical AI frameworks have been suggested, these approaches do not adequately address how people make ethical evaluations of AI systems or how to incorporate the fundamental disagreements people have regarding what is and is not ethical behavior. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we theorize that a person will perceive an organization’s use of AI, its data procedures, and the resulting AI decisions as ethical to the extent that those decisions resonate with the person’s moral foundations. Since people hold diverse moral foundations, this highlights the crucial need to consider individual moral differences at multiple levels of AI. We discuss several unresolved issues and suggest potential approaches for thinking about conflicts in moral judgments concerning AI. (shrink)

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the (...) criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” is among the central contributions of _The Sublime Object of Ideology_, a reading abounding in importance throughout Žižek’s use of Lacan in his theory of ideology. A close reading of Lacan’s original paper, though, reveals numerous theoretical divergences. In this essay, I explore Žižek’s reading and critique his analysis on various points—including the priority of the cut, the dialectic of synchrony and diachrony, (...) and the relation of $♢D (the matheme for drive) to S(Ⱥ) (the matheme for the lack in the Other)—to suggest a foundational reinterpretation of the quilting point. With particularly the completed graph in mind, I contest Žižek’s reading of the primacy of fantasy, the definition of the sinthome, and the $♢D-to-S(Ⱥ) arrow, all of which are apotheosized in Žižek’s exposition on Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Benjamin, despite Žižek’s theoretical utilization of him, we find substantial divergence from Žižek: there is indeed a quilting point of the mo(ve)ment that takes the lessons of processuality, the cut, the synchrony/diachrony dialectic, and $♢D to S(Ⱥ) seriously—a quilting point that, contra its usual associations with closure, is radically open and revolutionary. (shrink)

One of the most popular arguments in favor of dualism is the zombie-conceivability argument. It is often argued that the possibility of zombies would entail that mental properties are epiphenomenal. This paper attempts to defuse the argument, offering a model of dualist mental causation which can serve as a basis for a modified, interactionist-friendly zombie argument.

Innovative practice occurs when a clinician provides something new, untested, or nonstandard to a patient in the course of clinical care, rather than as part of a research study. Commentators have noted that patients engaged in innovative practice are at significant risk of suffering harm, exploitation, or autonomy violations. By creating a pathway for harmful or nonbeneficial interventions to spread within medical practice without being subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation, innovative practice poses similar risks to the wider community of patients (...) and society as a whole. Given these concerns, how should we control and oversee innovative practice, and in particular, how should we coordinate innovative practice and clinical research? In this article, I argue that an ethical approach to overseeing innovative practice must encourage the early transition to rigorous clinical research without delaying or deferring the development of beneficial innovations or violating the autonomy rights of clinicians and their patients. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the UK has low levels of financial literacy by international standards, particularly among those in lower socio-economic groups. This may have an impact upon young people, with social inequalities in financial attitudes, behaviours and skills perpetuating across generations. Using parent-child linked survey data from 3,745 UK families, we find sizeable socio-economic inequalities in young people’s financial capabilities, aspects of their mindset, and their financial behaviours. Sizeable differences are also observed in the financial education that socio-economically (...) advantaged and disadvantaged children receive at school, and how they interact with their parents about money. Parental interactions can account for part of the socio-economic gap in money confidence, money management, financial connections, and financial behaviours, but less so in boosting financial abilities. However, we find no evidence of differences in financial education in schools driving differences in young people’s financial capabilities. (shrink)

Many persons find it intuitive that being friends with someone with immoral beliefs is wrong as such. I contest this claim, instead I argue that there is nothing necessarily wrong with such friendships. In coming to this conclusion I examine a number of arguments, including two of the most notable contributions put forward by Mason (2021) and Isserow (2018), that attempt to elucidate the wrongness involved in such friendships and find they do not successfully do so. I conclude by offering (...) some arguments as to why such friendships are not necessarily wrong. (shrink)

In the eighth book of Lucan'sBellum Ciuile, Pompey sends the Galatian king Deiotarus into the distant East to seek an alliance with Parthia, the vast empire beyond the Euphrates ruled by the Arsacid dynasty. His instructions to Deiotarus begin with these lines (8.211–14):‘quando’ ait ‘Emathiis amissus cladibus orbis,qua Romanus erat, superest, fidissime regum,Eoam temptare fidempopulosque bibentisEuphraten et adhuc securum a Caesare Tigrim.’.

uirginibus Tyriis mos est gestare pharetram,purpureoque alte suras uincire cothurno.It is customary for us Tyrian girls to carry a quiverand to lace our calves up high in red boots. With these words a disguised Venus explains the accessories of her costume to Aeneas and Achates shortly after the Trojan landing in North Africa. Even detailed commentaries on this passage overlook an important feature: the lines contain a reference to Julius Caesar, who claimed descent from Venus and made a political point (...) of wearing red boots during his dictatorship. This allusion to Caesar connects in significant ways to adjoining passages of the first book of the Aeneid. (shrink)

It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choice that he claims to be borne out (...) by the sharp model but not by any promising incarnation of its imprecise counterpart. After first pointing out that Elga has fallen short of establishing that his principle is indeed uniquely borne out by the sharp model, I cast aspersions on its plausibility. I show that a slight weakening of the principle is satisfied by at least one, but interestingly not all, varieties of the imprecise model and point out that Elga has failed to motivate his stronger commitment. (shrink)

The mental health crisis and loneliness epidemic have sparked a growing interest in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots as a potential solution. This report examines the benefits and risks of incorporating chatbots in mental health treatment. AI is used for mental health diagnosis and treatment decision-making and to train therapists on virtual patients. Chatbots are employed as always-available intermediaries with therapists, flagging symptoms for human intervention. But chatbots are also sold as stand-alone virtual therapists or as friends and lovers. (...) There is evidence that these uses of AI and chatbots can provide better quality service, improve accessibility, and lower costs. The systems can reduce the stigma and shame of sharing their problems and leverage a mass of biometric and behavioral data to supplement self-reports. As the systems' intelligence rapidly improves, they will need to be rigorously tested for the accuracy and precision of their diagnoses and the quality of their interactions with patients. As chatbots become indistinguishable from humans and leverage their superhuman capacity to detect affect and draw on knowledge of a patient’s life, patients will be drawn to attribute personality to and relationship with the chatbot. Consequently, it will be essential to study what the “therapeutic alliance” with an actual human counselor provides and the risks of patients attributing such a relationship to a one-sided or “parasocial” relationship. (shrink)

I explore how agent-regret and its object—faultlessly harming someone—can call for various responses. I look at two sorts of responses. Firstly, I explore responses that respect the agent’s role as an agent. This revolves around a feature of “it was just an accident”—a common response to agent-regret—that has largely gone ignored in the literature: that it can downplay one’s role as an agent. I argue that we need to take seriously the fact that those who have caused harms are genuine (...) agents, to ignore this fails to allow these agents to move on. Secondly, following Sussman and MacKenzie, I explore responses that benefit the victim. I argue that we should strive to understand how to configure these responses in a way that does not blame the agent. To do this I look at the role of actions in our self-understanding, as people who have done particular things. I end by briefly considering the ways in which tort law and restorative justice might help us to understand how to appropriately respond to accidentally harming someone. I urge that we need to take this as a starting point to find a better way to respond to the agents of faultless harms. (shrink)

Political philosophy often focuses on “major institutions” that make up the “basic structure” of society. These include political, economic, and social institutions. In this paper I argue first that policing plays a substantial role in generating the kinds of inequalities and problems that are concerns of social or structural justice, and therefore that police agencies qualify as a major institution. When we abandon full compliance or similar idealizations, it is clear that policing is not a concern secondary to, e.g., the (...) electoral system or the scheme of property rights in a society. Nor, I argue, does maintaining full compliance or moral character idealizations obviate an active enforcement role. Eliminating that role from an idealized model society requires engaging in a methodologically and substantively unattractive amount of abstraction. The result is that an active enforcement role is at the core of a complete theory of justice rather than something that is significant only “downstream” from more fundamental issues. (shrink)

Recent controversial cases of killings by police have generated competing Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Blue Lives Matter proponents claim that the focus on and protests in light of police killings of unarmed black persons is unwarranted. Part of this dispute turns on the moral evaluation of the killing of citizens by law enforcement. To address the dispute, I develop an account of the special moral obligations of law enforcement and show how it can be applied. I (...) argue that members of law enforcement have special moral obligations against killing citizens. The account generates moral guidance for law enforcement in a number of other ways. It implies, finally, that the Blue Lives Matter proponents fundamentally misunderstand the ethics of law enforcement. (shrink)

The case (Dawson et al. 2024) describes an Institutional Review Board (IRB) chair who seeks consultation about waiving the requirement that investigators obtain prospective, informed consent for collection of microbiome samples by swabbing the perianal region of severely burned patients shortly after their admission to an intensive care unit (ICU). We argue that it is ethically permissible to waive informed consent requirements for the perianal swab and that the IRB should approve a waiver as permitted by regulations.

In this paper I examine John Rawls’s understanding of desert. Against Samuel Scheffler, I maintain that the reasons underlying Rawls’s rejection of the traditional view of distributive desert in A Theory of Justice also commit him to rejecting the traditional view of retributive desert. Unlike Rawls’s critics, however, I view this commitment in a positive light. I also argue that Rawls’s later work commits him to rejecting retributivism as a public justification for punishment.

Legitimate political institutions sometimes produce clearly unjust laws. It is widely recognized, especially in the context of war, that agents of the state may not enforce political decisions that are very seriously unjust or are the decisions of illegitimate governments. But may agents of legitimate states enforce unjust, but not massively unjust, laws? In this paper, I respond to three defences of the view that it is permissible to enforce these unjust laws. Analogues of the Walzerian argument from patriotism, the (...) Vitorian epistemic argument, and the proceduralist argument found in Rawls, Estlund, and others do not show that law enforcement is usually permitted to enforce unjust laws. Finally, I develop a proceduralist argument for the thesis that law enforcement is permitted to disregard unjust laws. I conclude by considering objections concerning the problem of optimizing society for justice and the problem of law enforcement agents with deplorable moral beliefs. (shrink)

Buddhism originated and developed in an Indian cultural context that featured many first-person practices for producing and exploring states of consciousness through the systematic training of attention. In contrast, the dominant methods of investigating the mind in Western cognitive science have emphasized third-person observation of the brain and behavior. In this chapter, we explore how these two different projects might prove mutually beneficial. We lay the groundwork for a cross-cultural cognitive science by using one traditional Buddhist model of the mind (...) – that of the five aggregates – as a lens for examining contemporary cognitive science conceptions of consciousness. (shrink)

What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of (...) it which is impervious to this objection. At the core of our account is the idea of joint authorship. You are a joint author of something when that thing expresses your joint intentions. Democracy may not make any one of us sole author of our political affairs, but it can make us their joint authors. It is in such joint authorship, we claim, that the intrinsic value of democratic self-government consists. (shrink)

Several contemporary philosophers have argued that democracy earns its moral keep in part by rendering political authority compatible with social or relational equality. In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Motchoulski examines these relational egalitarian defenses of democracy, finds the standard approach wanting, and advances an alternative. The standard approach depends on the claim that inequality of political power constitutes status inequality (the ‘constitutive claim’). Motchoulski rejects this claim on the basis of a theory of social status: once you (...) see what social status is, Motchoulski thinks, the constitutive claim is a non-starter. In its place, Motchoulski suggests that relational egalitarians can and should content themselves with a defense of democratic institutions on the basis of a causal-instrumental link between equality of political power and equality of social relations. In this reply, I advance three main claims. First, relational egalitarians have good reason to hope for a defense of the constitutive claim, since that claim is required if relational equality is to vindicate the intrinsic value of democracy. Second, Motchoulski’s argument against the constitutive claim fails, because it depends on conflating one species of social status for the genus as a whole. Finally, I argue that the constitutive claim is trivially true for one kind of status, namely de facto authority, but, since equality of that kind of status is not intrinsically valuable, this does not amount to a defense of the intrinsic value of democracy. (shrink)