Recently, her lyrics have begun to address more public issues, like the promise and futility of politics. At first glance, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince,” released in 2019, is a coming-of-age song about teenage relationship drama. However, Swift is also describing her own political awakening and disillusionment when she writes, “My team is losing, battered and bruising.” Lyrics like, “American stories burning before me” and “You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes” further reinforce a parable about political despair.

At the same time, other songs develop arguments for the promise of advocating for political change. In “Only The Young” she addresses someone who sees that “The game was rigged,” reminding them “They aren’t gonna change this / We gotta do it ourselves … Only the young can run.”

Swift’s nonpolitical songwriting also has implications for long-standing ethical debates. In “Gorgias,” a dialogue written by Socrates’ student Plato, the philosopher asks whether it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it – a theme that appears in several Swift songs.

Socrates argued it is better to suffer injustice, because committing injustice is an affront to one’s own dignity and integrity. In her 2022 song “Karma,” Swift seemingly agrees: “Don’t you know that cash ain’t the only price?” of immorality, before she warns her listener that karma’s “coming back around.”

For philosophers, every aspect of the human experience is fair game for further analysis. As the 20th century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars wrote, the purpose of philosophy should be “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

By holding people’s beliefs to logical standards of consistency and coherence, philosophical analysis reveals contradictions in an effort to discover what’s really true.

Swift’s songwriting addresses some of the trickiest paradoxes, such as whether there is even such a thing as a true, authentic self.

Tackling the question in “Mirrorball,” she seems to endorse the view that one’s sense of self is largely strategic, socially constructed to fit the situation. “I’m a mirrorball, I’ll show you every version of yourself,” she sings before stating, “I can change everything about me to fit in” and “I’ve never been a natural. All I do is try, try, try.”

Similarly, in “Mastermind,” Swift describes calculatedly trying to win someone’s affection when she sings, “I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ‘cause I care.” In both songs, Swift points out how authentic displays of vulnerability can also be a form of strategic speech, prompting the listener to wonder whether genuine authenticity is possible.

Another tricky paradox in philosophy involves the idea of supererogation, which refers to acts that are morally good but not morally required. This idea also allows that acts can be “suberogatory,” meaning that they are morally bad but nevertheless permissible.

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