Paul Billingham and Tom Parr

Paul Billingham is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Tom Parr is Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Warwick

Paul Billingham is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. Most of his research focuses on debates within political liberalism and concerning the place of religion in public life. He is currently particularly interested in collective religious liberty. With Tom Parr, he has also written on the morality of public shaming (as this blog post proves).

Tom Parr is Assistant Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. During the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years, he will be a Marie Curie Individual Fellow in the Department of Law at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he will work on questions relating to social justice and the future of work. With Paul Billingham, he has also written on the morality of public shaming (as this blog post proves).

Entries written by Paul Billingham and Tom Parr

Blog

A Sackable Offence? Employers’ Responses to Public Shaming

By Paul Billingham and Tom Parr

“The Ramble, Central Park” by Phil Whitehouse. Used under: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

On May 25^th 2020, Christian Cooper was birdwatching in The Ramble, an area in Central Park, New York, where dogs must be leashed. He encountered Amy Cooper (no relation) and asked her to put her dog on a leash. She refused, and during the resulting confrontation she called 9-1-1 to say that she was being threatened by “an African American man”. This incident was recorded, the video was uploaded to social media, and it went viral within hours. Amy Cooper’s conduct was widely condemned as racist by very many viewers who reasonably interpreted her as falsely reporting a threat from a person of colour and, in doing so, perhaps endangering his life – something emphasized by the tragic killing of George Floyd by a police officer on the same day.