T. H. Marshall, a British sociologist, gave a series of lectures in 1949 under the title “Citizenship and Social Class.” To many American intellectuals, his analysis still offers a persuasive account of the origins of the welfare state in the West. But Marshall spoke in the early postwar era, when the case for expanded social benefits seemed unassailable. Today's politics are more conservative. In every Western country the welfare state is under review. Yet Marshall's conception can still help define the (...) issues in social policy and the way forward. (shrink)

Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...) proper framework for not only explaining a social phenomenon like oppression but also understanding the proper sites for social change. The second goal of this dissertation is to answer three interrelated questions about how we should respond, morally, to a chronic and complex social problem like racial or gender inequality: (1) Why do the current interventions to address these problems fail? (2) Do social movements play any unique role in addressing these problems? (3) What is our individual responsibility to participate in social movements? In response, I argue that the explanatory frameworks that we choose to understand the cause(s) of social problems can be the source of the inadequacy of our intervention. I argue that a proper social and moral intervention needs to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the social world. I also show that changing the explanatory framework allows us to see the unique role social movements play in making effective and sustainable social change possible. Finally, I conclude supporting such movements is a moral imperative. (shrink)

This article focuses on a specific political ethos of current developed societies, on what we call ‘self-service democracy’. The ethos essentially springs from the technologies, policies, structures and ideas promoting the ‘individualization trend’ in the provision of services as opposed to the allegedly passivizing system of the classical welfare state of the 1970s and the early 1980s. We review the conceptual history of self-service, its current core features, and the forms it has assumed in the political regimes of post-war Western (...) societies. The focus has moved from the services provided by the state to the activities and responsibility of individual citizens and organizations. Consumerist citizenship and personal responsibility, with the assistance of new information technologies, can open up novel channels for interaction and participation, but at the risk of rendering common political concerns into individual matters. The article investigates the political implications of this new emphasis on individualized, self-service-centred governance processes for democracy, and democratic participation and representation in particular. (shrink)

The present ‘healthfare’ state in the United States in neither practically nor morally justified. The nation currently fails to provide adequate access to health care for tens of millions of uninsured citizens. To suggest that the United States' half-million physicians should provide their care as charity is an inadequate solution. The transfer of assets from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have-nots’ through taxation in a ‘healthfare state’ undermines human compassion, and fails to respect minimal moral requirements. However, alternative strategies are possible. (...) During the next 20 years health care could come to be financed on the basis of sound quasi-libertarian moral and prudential principles. In the interim deliberate political action is required to achieve novel health policy, available and affordable job and career training, and universal employment. It is possible to achieve universal access to adequate health care while sustaining individual choice, and at the same time to reduce or virtually eliminate taxpayersubsidised health care. This approach would, in time, eliminate the healthfare state and eventually encourage and even require citizens to go off the healthfare dole. (shrink)

The Bell Curve aims to establish a set of causal claims. I argue that the methodology of The Bell Curve is typical of much of contemporary social science and is intrinsically defective. I claim better methods are available for causal inference from observational data, but that those methods would yield no causal conclusions from the data used in the formal analyses in The Bell Curve. Against the laissez-faire social policies advocated in the book, I claim that when combined with common (...) sense and other information, the informal data mustered in The Bell Curve support a range of "liberal" social policies. (shrink)

Aging brings about the ordeal of coping. Younger people also cope, but for those in old age, the ordeal is so often elegiac, forced upon the self by changing functions within the body and by the outside social world, with its many impediments to the continuity of former roles, pursuits, and self‐identities. Coping with change can be affirming, but when what is being forgone seems more valuable than what lies ahead, it is travail. For most, the coping is managed more (...) moderately by a sense of resignation. This is especially true for those who survive into profound old age, when one is viewed as if being old is one’s essential identity and nature. We must recognize and affirm difference and change without stigmatizing or losing sight of the specific capabilities and circumstances of the individual. This is what I think the often‐used, but less often clearly defined, notion of a “person‐centered” orientation should signify.Individuals age, but so do societies, not simply because they have a large population over age sixty‐five, but in the sense that societies as a whole are also buffeted by significant disruption in orders of meaning. Aging has a public as well as a private manifestation, a social as well as a personal embodiment, and how it is paid attention to in culture, politics, and policy makes a great difference to how aging is concretely experienced in human lives. In this essay, I explore how the moral imagination nurtured by the practices of solidarity and care—and nurturing them in turn—can come of age—and how these practices can take their rightful place in an ethically mature political culture. (shrink)

Toronto physician Brian Goldman had thought about “joining the camp that favours private health care for Canada.” Writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, he tells us that he changed his mind after one of his cats experienced a series of illnesses and misadventures that resulted in a Can$3,101 medical bill. “I’m just glad,” he says, “that the cost of health care never entered my deliberations.”’Canadian citizens and permanent residents are similarly free from most worries about the direct costs of (...) their own medical care, and have been for more than a generation. This reflects a fundamental difference between the Canadian and United States contexts for health policy. Since the failure of President Clinton's first-term efforts to provide something approximating universal health insurance, reforms to the existing regime of providing and financing health care in the United States have been incremental, and primarily responsive to the changing nature of the health care marketplace. In Canada, universal publicly funded first-dollar coverage for most physicians’ and hospitals’ services has been a reality since the early 1970s. (shrink)

In the last decade, Australian federal and state governments’ commitment to the economic rationalist imperatives of performance measures, accountability for outcomes, and value-for-money has driven significant change in the Australian not-for-profit community services sector. In an environment shaped by neoliberal-inspired government policies and a renewed government commitment to austerity, Australian not-for-profit community service organizations are now, more than ever, actively engaged in a variety of income-generating strategies to achieve and/or maintain economic sustainability. Central to this process is meeting the dual (...) challenge of succeeding financially in a competitive environment and simultaneously serving mission. In this context, it is time to more closely examine the impact of these challenges, in particular the implications for the organizational values of not-for-profit community service providers themselves. This paper reports on a qualitative study of fourteen not-for-profit community service organizations, their core purposes, and their strategies for economic sustainability. In addition to the new data presented here, this paper contributes to the broader theoretical framework—the lens of value pluralism, which, we argue, provides a sharper focus on the relationship between mission and margin. (shrink)

Analysis of ART and abortion must include the experiences of women at the emerging center of American life, as well as those at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Our contribution explores the triple system of fertility regulation, analyzing the intersections between fertility and class and using the experiences of women in the middle to add depth to our understanding of women's exercises of autonomy.

Social justice has been a central normative component of U.S. social welfare and social work for over a century, although the meaning and implications of the term have often been ambiguous. A major source of this ambiguity lies in the conflict between universalist views of social justice and those which focus on achieving justice for specific groups. This conflict has been masked by several long-standing assumptions about the relationship between social justice and multiculturalism – assumptions which have been challenged by (...) recent developments. The assumption that the pursuit of social justice requires the creation of a more egalitarian society has been challenged by the new political-economic realities of globalization. The assumption that the maintenance of individual rights complements the pursuit of social equality has been challenged by racially-based attacks on social welfare benefits and civil rights. Most significantly, the assumption that a socially just society is one in which different groups share a compatible vision of social justice has been challenged by the realities of multiculturalism. This paper explores the evolution of four themes regarding the relationship between social justice and multiculturalism during the past century and discusses their implications for the contemporary demographic and cultural context of the U.S. These themes are: the relationship of cultural diversity to the nation’s values and goals; the contradiction between coerced cultural assimilation and coerced physical and social segregation; the relationship between individual and group identity and rights; and the linkage between “Americanization” and the equal application of justice. (shrink)

Charles Murray 's political philosophy is utilitarian, individualist, and communitarian. The basis for his success in making these components cohere is his account of happiness, inspired by the motivation theory of Abraham Maslow. Murray claims that belonging to a community and self?respect are constituents of happiness. Hence utilitarians should attribute special value to community. He also argues that active national governments are inimical to the formation and functioning of communities, and that communities are fostered by governments that observe the constraints (...) of liberal individualism. (shrink)

While libertarians affirm personal responsibility as a central moral and political value, libertarian theorists write relatively little about the theory and practice of this value. Focusing on the work of F. A. Hayek and David Schmidtz, this article identifies the core of a libertarian approach to personal responsibility and demonstrates the ways in which this approach entails a radical revision of the ethics and American politics of personal responsibility. Then, I highlight several central implications of this analysis in the American (...) political and economic status quo. First, this analysis makes a mockery of so-called libertarian/conservative ‘fusionism’, such that libertarian personal responsibility cannot partner with meritocratic conservative thought to provide a plural grounding for rejecting progressive or redistributive economic policy. Next, preferred libertarian policies threaten the status, esteem and social bases of self-respect of citizens who are worse-off through little or no fault of their own. Finally, these policies undermine the ethics of personal responsibility that Americans from across the ideological spectrum value and many conservatives and libertarians celebrate. In the American status quo, those who value personal responsibility must reserve a central place for policies that mitigate opportunity and distributive inequalities. (shrink)

My concern in this thesis is with the transcendental question concerning the condition of possibility for social science. I argue that for social scientific knowledge to obtain one must: have a conception of knowledge formation as theoretically mediated and fallible; and, social scientific knowledge claims must be about an object of study which conceptualises social structure as an enablement as well as an external constraint upon agency. This means: arguing for an anti-foundational epistemology, which avoids becoming truth-relativism, by being complemented (...) with a metaphysical realist ontology ; and, using a social realist meta-theory of emergent properties to explain how methodology has a conceptually mediated and fallible access to social reality. Developing a critical examination of the presuppositions of social scientific knowledge also means, afortiori, using realism as an underlabourer. The negative underlabouring role is to proscribe theories based on some form of epistemic immediacy, or being-knowing identity. It therefore means rejecting positivist, empiricist and essentialist versions of social science. The form of essentialism dealt with is called the sociological logic of immediacy, and this pertains to definitive ontologies of social structures or human being. Whereas the use of positivist and empiricist epistemology as a positive underlabourer produces a methodology that conflates the real into the 'actual', the use of an essentialist ontology makes methodology either redundant, or an exercise in arbitrary verificationism. Against this, realist anti-foundationalism can act as apositive underlabourer for the social sciences if it is complemented by a social realist ontology of emergent properties, to act as a metatheory which guides methodology. In developing this argument my chief concern is to show that realism is a more adequate position than post-Wittgensteinian positions which focus on 'practices' and how people 'go on' in 'forms of life'. 'Adequacy' in this sense pertains to epistemological discussions about the status of knowledge, together with ramifications of post-Wittgensteinianism for knowledge of the socio-political realm. This means providing a critique of Rorty and Giddens, after dealing with the issue of empiricism. Although Rorty's critique of 'postmodernism' as essentialist is accepted. Whereas realism can explain how we have a conceptually mediated and fallible knowledge of reality, including social reality, post-Wittgensteinian positions fall into truth-relativism and essentialist conceptions of human being and social structures. (shrink)

Is capitalism inimical to community? Yes, say communitarians, a large part of whose body of writing is given over to the elaboration and defense of various forms of this thesis. The aim of the present essay is to contest this answer. Not only, I will argue, is there no good reason for supposing capitalism inimical to community, but there is reason to think it more conducive to community than are the feasible alternatives to it.

: The purposes of this critical analysis are to clarify why high stakes testing reforms have become so prevalent in the United States and to explain the connection between current federal and state emphases on standardized testing reforms and educational opportunities. The article outlines the policy context for high stakes examinations, as well as the ideas of testing and accountability as major tenets of current education reform and policy. In partial explanation of the widespread acceptance and use of standardized tests (...) in the United States, we argue that there is a pervasive testing culture, in addition to other contributing factors such as administrative utility, profit motives, and political ideology. Finally, we offer a critique of high stakes testing reforms in light of concerns about equality of educational opportunity. (shrink)

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the (...) back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street. (shrink)

Gender affects us, but we also affect gender. This study reveals some of the ways women in two types of occupations—furniture sales and secretarial—shape the system of gender. As they struggle to define their identities within a segregated occupational structure, these women evoke notions of their differences from men and from other women, as well as their similarities to each group, in ways that are consistent with feminist theoretical positions on these issues. I argue that the ways these women define (...) themselves have consequences for the shape of the system of gender. Many women inadvertently reinforce gender either by upholding traditional gender categories or by devaluing women. Yet some women create a powerful opportunity to dismantle gender by appreciating the work women have done and aligning themselves with these women to break out of staid gender categories. (shrink)

Women and men are biologically and reproductively dissimilar. This sexual distinctiveness gives rise to a “sexual asymmetry”—the fundamental reality that the potential consequences of sexual intercourse are far more immediate and serious for women than for men. Advocates of contraception and abortion sought to cure sexual asymmetry by decoupling sex from procreation, relieving women from the consequences of sex, and thus equalizing the sexual experiences of men and women. But efforts to suppress or reject biological difference have not relieved women (...) of the consequences of sex and the vulnerabilities of pregnancy, even as they have further relieved men. Although secular feminist responses to biological difference have served to exacerbate sexual asymmetry, Catholic teaching on abortion, sex, and marriage—even contraception—provides an authentically pro-woman cultural response. (shrink)

Respon'sible, liable to be called to account or render satisfaction: answerable: capable of discharging duty: able to pay. The old Chambers's dictionary gives a behavioristic view of responsibility: in terms of action, not thought or belief. “Lust in the heart” is not equated to lust in flagrante. It is this view I shall explore in this essay, rather than the more subjective notion of moral responsibility, as in, “I feel moral responsibility for not doing anything to save the Tutsis [Hutus, (...) ethnic Albanians, etc.].” My presumption is that responsibility implies capability: you cannot be held responsible for something over which you have no control. There is obviously uncertainty in some cases—where control is less than total, where the degree of potential control depends on our own efforts, where we cannot know if we have control until we try to exert it, etc. The relation between responsibility and degree of control is a separate topic which I shall not treat here. (shrink)

This essay examines the educational opportunities of people in poverty who receive social welfare assistance. The dominant political theory underlying social policy (including education policy) in the United States has evolved from 1960s and 1970s welfare liberalism into 1980s and 1990s style neo-conservatism—a theory that embraces principles of the market and individual liberty as paramount social values. Against this backdrop, I review two recent books that provide compelling evidence for this turn and I call for increased understanding of the relationship (...) between social welfare policies and higher education opportunities for those in poverty. (shrink)

Based on data from participant observation and in-depth interviews with women who live in a relatively homogeneous small, rural town, this article examines how women act to produce social class representations. By presenting symbols of socioeconomic positions, including behaviors, tastes, and values, during their work, the women in the town present themselves as working, middle, or upper class women. Through these representations, they secure a place within the town's subjective social class system.

The current problems of rural people and communities expose the weakness of the social sciences in agriculture, both as to epistemological limitations and as to the environment in which they operate. That weakness involves not ony an inability to make reasonably accurate predictions, but also to explain scientifically the nature of the current situation. This conclusion is reached after an examination of the context of the current problems of rural America, an evaluation of the epistemological capabilities of the relevant social (...) sciences, and an appraisal of the environment in which the social sciences within agriculture exist. An over-allocation of resources to the economics of commercial agriculture and an under-allocation to the other social sciences and the economics of rural development is suggested as a serious problem. Significant reallocation of resources will be required if the traditional agricultural establishment is to remain relevant to rural people and their needs. (shrink)

We are now seeing a new wave of literature about the “crisis” of the welfare state. In the earlier wave, some critics charged that social spending significantly detracted from macro‐ or microeconomic performance, while others challenged the legitimacy or efficacy of welfare programs; a third group worried about the effect of macroeconomic problems on the viability of the welfare state. None of these criticisms can be said to have been satisfactory, and continued reiterations of them betray a lack of cross‐national (...) perspective and a priori reasoning about empirical matters. Works with greater historical depth and more recent studies constitute a much‐needed reaction against the “crisis” literature. (shrink)

Paul Gomberg ABSTRACT: In the United States the Civil Rights Movement emerging after World War II ended Jim Crow racism, with its legal segregation and stigmatization of black people. Yet black people, both in chattel slavery and under Jim Crow, had provided abundant labor subject to racist terror; they were workers who could be recruited...