What is Wrong With Inequality? (Amartya Sen)

Dr Sen discusses the value of inequality-aversion judged as a basic human concern and to what extent it might conflict with other human values, such as economic efficiency and freedom. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, and in 2012 he became the first non-American in history to be awarded the National Humanities …

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The Supreme Court Finally Gets Affirmative Action Right (Bruce Thornton)

After 45 years of bad decisions rationalizing discrimination outlawed by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court finally voted 6-3 to end affirmative action and the use of racial preferences in college admissions. This outcome joins the Dobbs vs. Jackson decision last June as another major pushback against activist Supreme …

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Opinion: The Supreme Court rewrites American society once again (CNN)

To say that I’m disappointed in today’s Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in college admissions would be an understatement. I am the daughter of immigrants: My father immigrated from the Philippines when he was 17, and my maternal grandparents immigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s. I was born in Los Angeles, surrounded by dozens of family …

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Affirmative action’s fatal flaw (Ayaan Hirsi Ali)

Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions of applicants, some sort of discrimination in deciding who gets accepted is inevitable. The question …

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Feminist Perspectives on Objectification

Objectification is a notion central to feminist theory. It can be roughly defined as the seeing and/or treating a person, usually a woman, as an object. In this entry, the focus is primarily on sexual objectification, objectification occurring in the sexual realm. Martha Nussbaum (1995, 257) has identified seven features that are involved in the idea …

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Jürgen Habermas (1929 – )

Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language …

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