This is philosophy bites.

This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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Sending someone to Coventry means in English idiom

we're fusing to speak to to them pretending they don't exist.

The origins of the phrase are disputed, but it's clear that cutting someone off entirely

from the social world is a particularly cruel punishment. Not all people who lack

social contact have been deliberately ostracized as punishment however. Some are

just lonely, but that can be a devastating state nonetheless.

There's an interesting question lurking here.

Do we all have a right to social contact?

Kimberly Brownley believes we do.

Kimberly Brownley, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for the invitation.

The topic we're going to focus on is social deprivation.

What is social deprivation?

So I define it as lacking minimally adequate access to decent human contact. So someone who's put in solitary confinement in prison, or someone who's held in long-term medical quarantine or even

someone who's incidentally chronically acutely lonely like the elderly

person who's unable to get out of the house to seek social contact they would be

...