Poverty is often defined as lacking the financial resources to meet a set of basic needs. Here, I consider four questions. First, how is the relevant level of basic needs to be determined? Second, given that the possibility of satisfying basic needs is not solely determined by possession of financial resources, is poverty better understood or measured at least in part in non-financial terms? Third, what, if anything, is owed to people in poverty and by whom? And finally, what social (...) policies should be favoured in attempting to deal with poverty? The key message is that overcoming poverty is more than meeting needs for food and shelter, but also includes meeting the human need for a social life and fitting in with what is commonly expected in society (overcoming relative poverty). Out of respect for all, governments have a duty to adopt policies to bring people out of poverty. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Text werde ich zwei Thesen entfalten: Erstens, dass romantische Liebe Teil einer guten Jugend ist. Liebe als Teil einer guten Jugend hat mehrere Bestandteile: Jugendliche sollten romantische Liebe erleben können, wenn sie es wollen. Sie sollten das Wissen und die Fähigkeiten erlangen, romantische Liebe zu verstehen und adäquat mit den positiven Potentialen und auch den Risiken umgehen zu können. Jugendliche sollten lernen, die möglichen Enttäuschungen, die mit romantischer Liebe verbunden sein können, adäquat zu verarbeiten und darin gegebenenfalls Unterstützung (...) erfahren. Jugendliche sollten darin befähigt werden, die sozialen und kulturellen Normen und Praktiken, die die Vorstellungen romantischer Liebe prägen, zu reflektieren und zu hinterfragen. Zweitens ist zu klären, welche moralischen Rechte und Pflichten die Eltern und staatliche Institutionen haben. Ich plädiere dafür, diese so zu verstehen, dass sie Jugendliche in der Erlangung und adäquaten Auslebung romantischer Liebe unterstützen und ihnen bei der Entwicklung dieser Fähigkeiten die notwendigen Ressourcen zur Verfügung stellen sollten. (shrink)

This introduction provides a brief overview of the field of childhood ethics. It briefly outlines current debates about children’s autonomy and vulnerability, children’s rights, the relationship between children and parents, and (social and global) justice for children.

Children of prisoners are often negatively affected by their parents’ incarceration, which raises issues of justice. A common view is that the many negative effects associated with parental imprisonment are unjust, simply because children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed or unjustly punished by their parents’ incarceration. We argue that proposals of this kind have problems with accounting for cases where it is intuitive that prison might create social injustices for children of prisoners. Therefore, we suggest that in addition to the (...) question of whether children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed, we should ask whether the inequalities that these children endure because of their parent’s incarceration are objectionable from a social justice perspective. To answer this latter question, we examine the negative effects associated with parental imprisonment from the perspective of luck egalitarianism. We develop a luck egalitarian account that incorporates insights from the philosophy of childhood. On our account, children of prisoners might endure two different types of objectionable inequalities, since they are often deprived of resources that are important for ensuring fair equality of opportunity in adulthood, but also because they are likely to suffer inequalities in terms of childhood welfare. After defending this account, we explore its implications for policy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe problem of child labor is worse in Myanmar than nearly anywhere else in the world. Moreover, unlike in many other countries where this practice occurs, in Myanmar, child labor is conduc...

Justice for children and during childhood and the particular political, social and moral status of children has long been a neglected issue in ethics, and in social and political philosophy. The application of general, adult-oriented theories of justice to children can be regarded as particularly problematic. Philosophers have only recently begun to explore what it means to consider children as equals, what goods are especially valuable to them, and what are the obligations of justice different agents have toward children. In (...) addition, while philosophers have extensively written about global poverty and inequality, the issue of disadvantages during childhood, especially child poverty, has only been superficially addressed. This also applies to the Capability Approach (CA) as a normative theory. Although the socio-scientific and economic literature on how to conceptualize capabilities and functionings of children and how to measure them in the context of poverty and wellbeing is steadily growing, the normative aspects of these issues are still under-theorized. The CA offers a unique framework to engage with both the topic of justice for children and questions concerning what justice implies and demands with regard to children living and growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. Furthermore, justice and disadvantage during childhood is a compellingly interdisciplinary topic that invites the combination of ethical and philosophical reasoning together with socio-scientific theories and empirical knowledge. In this special issue of Ethical Perspectives we bring together theoretical and empirically informed discussions that explore the CA in relation to children and the many disadvantages they can face in their lives. (shrink)

Children are affected by poverty more often than adults, and growing up in poverty has severe and long-lasting negative consequences for a child’s well-being. How-ever, children are also in a very weak position, both to escape poverty on their own and to publicly and politically enforce their claims to a better life. Accordingly, children living in poverty are victims of two intersecting forms of powerlessness: they are children and they are poor. In this article, we analyze this particular type of (...) powerlessness from a children’s rights perspective and argue that, in order to effectively restore justice to children in pov-erty, the State has to implement a comprehensive children’s rights regime. We argue that the State is obliged to consider children’s best interests in all its policies – even those that are not directly related to children – in order to compensate for the lack of political agency during childhood. This demand reflects the particular social and political status of children, namely: that they are dependent on others for their well-being, that childhood is a phase of particular vulnerability and that (young) children lack certain competencies that are needed to enforce their claims. (shrink)