Geography and ethics II: Justification and the ethics of anti-oppression

Abstract

This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-oppression also shift the terms of normative justification across a range of considerations within geography and beyond it, from refugees and asylum seekers to food production and blockades against extractive infrastructure.