Arguing for a Better World

‘Brings cooling clarity to the heat of today’s culture wars’ Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire

‘Allows us to not only interrogate our own views, but to persuade others using reason and optimism. A must read’ Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Can white people be victims of racism?
Is it sexist to say ‘men are trash’?
Should we worry about ‘cancel culture’?

Tired of having the same old arguments? Kicking yourself for not being able to justify your views? Wondering whether individuals can bring about meaningful change?

Now imagine that instead of losing another hour of your life in a social media spat or knowing that the only way to make it through lunch was by biting your tongue, you could find a way to talk about injustice – and, just possibly, change someone’s mind.

Many of us know what we think about inequality, but flounder when asked for our reasoning, leading to a conversational stalemate – especially when faced with a political, generational, or cultural divide. But living in echo chambers blunts our thinking, and if we can’t persuade others, we have little hope of collectively bringing about change.

In Arguing for a Better World, philosopher Arianne Shahvisi draws on examples from everyday life to show us how to work through a set of thorny moral questions, equipping us to not only identify our positions but to carefully defend them.

‘Logical, readable, authoritative . . . An everyday manual on how oppression came about, how it works, why it persists, and how to defeat it’ Danny Dorling, author of Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists and A Better Politics