Current debates
Open questions philosophy is arguing about today – with the main positions, who holds them, and where to read more.
Animals & Nature
- Animals and Factory Farming
Pigs, cattle and chickens can suffer – science has settled that. So how can it be justified to breed tens of billions of them every year, to confine most of them in factory farms and to kill them for our food?
5 positions
- Rights for Animals?
That sentient animals matter morally is hardly disputed any more. But do they have rights – and if so, which ones: only the right not to be made to suffer needlessly, rights like those of persons, above all not to be used as property, or even political rights, such as citizenship for domesticated animals and sovereignty for wild ones?
6 positions
- Animal Experiments
Animals used in research can suffer, and research on animals has helped to save many human lives. May we make animals suffer for medicine and knowledge – and if so, for what, and how much?
5 positions
- Climate, Anthropocene and Responsibility to the Future
That humans are heating the planet, and that the damage falls hardest on those who did least to cause it, is settled. So what do we owe to people not yet born – and who must bear the cost of protecting them?
5 positions
- Green Growth or Degrowth?
Some rich countries already emit less while their economies grow – but far too slowly to meet the Paris climate goals. Can growth be made green in time, or must rich countries learn to prosper without it?
4 positions
Democracy & the Public
- Democracy, Truth and Polarisation
Falsehoods can reach millions within hours, and large parts of some electorates reject facts that courts and election officials have established. How can a democracy defend factual truth without making anyone the arbiter of what is true?
5 positions
- Free Speech and Its Limits
No democracy protects all speech: threats, incitement to violence and fraud are illegal everywhere. So where should the line run – may a free society also ban words that demean whole groups or spread lies, and whom can it trust to draw the line?
5 positions
- Social Media and the Public Sphere
What billions of people see of politics is now selected by the algorithms of a few private companies, and a single owner can remake a central forum overnight. Is this breaking up the shared debate democracy needs – or only exposing a fragmentation that was always there?
5 positions
Mind & Technology
- Can Machines Think or Feel?
Language models now hold conversations that people often cannot tell from a human’s. Does that mean they understand anything – and could they ever feel, or only make us believe they do?
5 positions
- Algorithms, Fairness and Power
It is mathematically proven that no risk score can meet all the usual standards of fairness at once when groups differ in their base rates – how often, say, people reoffend. So when software helps decide who gets a loan, a job or release before trial, which standard should count – and should such decisions be left to software at all?
5 positions
- Should Machines Have Rights?
No one can yet say whether AI systems could ever feel – and we may never know for certain. Should we then protect machines that might suffer, or would rights for machines only shield the companies that build them?
4 positions
- What Is Consciousness?
That experience depends on the brain is beyond doubt: anaesthesia switches it off, and damage to particular regions takes away particular parts of it. But why should physical processes feel like anything at all – or is that question itself a mistake?
5 positions
- Are We Free? Free Will in an Age of Neuroscience
None of us chose our genes, our upbringing or the brain we decide with – no one disputes that. Can we still act freely – and can anyone deserve blame or punishment for what they do?
5 positions
Justice & Power
- Justice and Equality
The richest tenth of humanity owns about three quarters of all wealth, the poorer half about two per cent. Which inequalities can be justified – and what makes the distribution of wealth, opportunity and power in a society just?
5 positions
- War and Peace: When Is Armed Force Justified?
The UN Charter outlaws wars of aggression, and international law allows a state to defend itself. But what may a people under attack and its allies do – and when do the costs of fighting, in lives and in the risk of nuclear escalation, become too high?
5 positions
- Open or Closed Borders? The Ethics of Migration
States control their borders, and most have also bound themselves by the Refugee Convention not to return refugees to persecution. Where does a democracy’s right to decide who may come and stay end – and what does it owe to those who come, or are turned away?
4 positions
- Do We Deserve Our Success? Meritocracy
That success still depends heavily on family background is well documented: meritocracies fall short of their own promise. The harder question is whether the ideal itself is just – can anyone deserve rewards for talents they did not choose, and what does the belief in merit do to winners and losers?
5 positions
Identity & Recognition
- What Is Gender?
That bodies differ by sex, and that the roles attached to sex differ from one society to another, is undisputed. Disputed is what makes someone a woman or a man – the body, a social position, what one does or how one understands oneself – and which of these should count where: in law, in sport, in single-sex spaces.
6 positions
- Race and Racism
Human genetic variation does not divide into discrete, ranked races – biology has settled that. So what is race, which still shapes where people live, how they are policed and how healthy they are – and how does racism work when no one admits to it?
5 positions
- Recognition or Redistribution? The Politics of Identity
Discrimination on grounds of race, sex or sexual orientation and the unequal distribution of wealth are both well documented – and often affect the same people. Should struggles for justice centre on respect for identities or on a fair share of resources – or can neither be won without the other?
5 positions
- Who Is Believed? Epistemic Injustice
That prejudice can make some people’s word count for less than the evidence warrants – in hospitals, at police stations, in court – is well documented. When does such disbelief wrong someone as a knower – and how can it be corrected without simply believing whoever speaks?
5 positions
- Decolonising Thought
Formal colonial rule has largely ended, but the borders, economies and institutions it shaped remain – that much is not in dispute. Does colonialism also live on in how knowledge is ordered – and does overcoming it mean opening the canon, or rejecting ideas that arrived with empire?
6 positions
Ethics & the Good Life
- A Right to Die? Assisted Dying
That competent patients may refuse life-saving treatment is widely accepted. May a society also help people end their lives at their own request – and can it do so without putting the old, the sick and the disabled under pressure to choose death?
4 positions
- Doing the Most Good? Effective Altruism and Longtermism
Some charities save a life for a few thousand dollars, others achieve far less with the same money – the evidence on that is solid. Are we then obliged to give where it does the most good – and does that include people who will live in the far future?
4 positions
- Acceleration, Resonance and the Good Life
Wealth and technology have grown enormously, and in countries such as the United States people have more free time than in the 1960s, not less. Why, then, do so many feel rushed and exhausted – and what would a good life look like instead?
6 positions
Historic disputes
- Al-Ghazali and Averroes: Can Philosophy Prove What It Claims?
1095–1180 · Can the philosophers prove their teachings about God, the eternity of the world and the soul with the certainty of demonstration – and do causes in nature act by necessity, or does God create each event?
3 positions
- Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant: One Intellect for All?
1270–1277 · Does each human being think with an intellect of their own, or is there, as Averroes read Aristotle, a single intellect for all – and may a philosopher follow an argument to conclusions that contradict the faith?
3 positions
- Leibniz and Clarke on Space, Time and God
1715–1716 · Are space and time realities in their own right or only orders of relations between things – and what does the answer imply about how God acts in the world?
3 positions
- Hume and Rousseau: The Quarrel of 1766
1766 · Was the break between Hume and Rousseau a clash of temperaments and misunderstandings – or also a conflict between two ideas of the self, of sincerity and of living among others?
3 positions
- Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos
1929 · Is the human being bound by an insurmountable finitude, or can it attain, through culture, science and morality, something of objective and lasting validity – and which of the two did Kant teach?
3 positions
- Carnap, Heidegger and the Nothing
1932 · Can the logical analysis of language show that metaphysical questions such as Heidegger’s question of the nothing are meaningless – or does it presuppose what it ought first to examine?
3 positions
- University Philosophy and National Socialism
1933–1945 · How much responsibility does university philosophy bear for National Socialism?
3 positions
- Camus and Sartre on Revolt and History
1952 · Can one condemn revolutionary violence without siding with the existing order – and can one act within history without letting history justify murder?
3 positions
- The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology
1961 · Should the social sciences test their theories like any other science, or can society only be understood – and criticised – as a contradictory whole to which the researchers themselves belong?
3 positions
- Arendt and Scholem on Eichmann in Jerusalem
1963 · What does it mean to call evil “banal” – and how can one judge the conduct of the perpetrators and of the Jewish councils without either demonising or trivialising?
3 positions
- Adorno and the Jargon of Authenticity
1964 · Is the language of authenticity a genuine philosophical insight into human existence, or an ideology that dresses up social conditions as timeless fate?
3 positions
- Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature
1971 · Is there a human nature on which a concept of justice can be grounded – or are human nature and justice themselves notions formed within a particular society and its relations of power?
2 positions
- Derrida and Searle on Speech Acts
1977 · Is the meaning of an utterance anchored in the speaker’s intention and a determinable context – or does the fact that every sign can be repeated and quoted elsewhere leave both open in principle?
3 positions
- The Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit)
1986 · Can the Holocaust be compared with other mass crimes and placed in a wider historical context without being relativised – and on what should national identity in Germany rest after Auschwitz?
3 positions
- The Sokal Affair
1996 · When the humanities and social sciences borrow concepts from physics and mathematics or describe scientific knowledge as socially constructed, what standards of competence and evidence apply – and what, if anything, can a hoax prove?
3 positions