Public Affairs Quarterly (PAQ) publishes work in all areas of practically engaged normative philosophy, broadly understood to include normative work on issues of public concern in applied moral, social, political, and legal philosophy. The journal welcomes contributions from a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches on any practically oriented topic in any of these areas.
Topics covered by the journal include subjects of long-standing debate such as abortion, capital punishment, and just war theory; more recently emerging subjects of controversy such as climate change, affirmative action, commercial surrogacy, and the treatment of non-human animals; topics relating to current social movements such as those concerning racism and sexual harassment, and to current technological developments such as those involving gene editing and autonomous weapons systems; and cutting-edge issues that are just now on the verge of attracting attention from philosophers. Submissions of a more general nature that address implications for a cluster of such issues rather than focusing on a single issue are also welcome, such as papers that advance claims that have practical implications but are about more general subjects such as race, sexuality, gender, social identity, nationalism, paternalism, privacy, distributive justice, economic fairness, political inequality, commodification, or desert.
PAQ is published by the University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical Publications.
