I shall argue that, with a proper realignment of core Confucian values, an explicitly feminist reading of Confucianism—a conception of Confucian feminism—could be constructed to promote the feminist goal of gender equality in contemporary Confucian societies. My paper proceeds in the following order: first, I shall identify two aspects of Confucianism implicated in the Confucian subjugation of women: li and family. Given the centrality of both li and family in Confucianism, it may seem that Confucianism is (...) inherently antagonistic to the feminist goal of gender equality. In order to determine whether this is the case, I shall reconstruct the valuational system of Confucianism and examine the proper locations of li and family within it. I shall argue that Confucian ethics promotes women’s self-cultivation on a par with men’s and that Confucian emphases on li and family do not necessitate the subjugation of women. However, some may worry that the importance of family in Confucianism may require the undivided attention of at least one parent, which in reality would be mostly the mother. To alleviate this worry, I shall argue that a democratic Confucian welfare state, entailed by the Confucian thought system, ought to pick up the responsibility of providing comprehensive assistance to families so that families can thrive in the Confucian polity. (shrink)

The welfare state refers to a concept of a state that focuses on ensuring that a broad range of social rights is provided for all citizens by acting on the social mechanisms and consequences of the market economy. In such a state government plays a vital role in balancing social inequalities by providing or subsidizing social benefits and services. This activity is called social policy. Individual countries are characterized by different welfare state models, goals, (...) values, and groups of beneficiaries. Such a state usually supports a recovery from the difficult situation of the population, which is not, itself, able to take care of their basic needs. (shrink)

Can taxation and the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state be conceived as a modern system of circulation of the gift? But once such a gift is institutionalized, regulated and sanctioned through legal mechanisms, does it not risk being perverted or corrupted, and/or not leaving room for genuinely altruistic motives? What is more: if the market’s utilitarian logic can corrupt or ‘crowd out’ altruistic feelings or motivations, what makes us think that the welfare state cannot (...) also be a source of corruption? To explain the standard answers to the abovementioned questions as well as their implications I will first re-examine two opposing positions assumed here as paradigmatic examples of other similar positions: on the one hand, Titmuss’s work and the never-ending debate about it; on the other, Godbout’s position, in-so-far as it shows how Titmuss’s arguments can easily be turned upside down. I will then introduce and reinterpret Einaudi’s “critical point” theory as a more complex and richer anthropological explanation of the problems and answers considered herein. Through the analysis of these paradigmatic positions I will develop two interrelated arguments. 1) The way these problems are posed as well as the standard answers to them are: a) subject to fallacies: the dichotomy fallacy and the fallacy of composition; b) too reductive and simplistic: we should at least try to clarify what kind of ‘gift’ or ‘corruption’ we are thinking about, and who or what the ‘giver’, the ‘corrupter’, the ‘receiver’ and/or the ‘corrupted’ party are. 2) The answers to these problems cannot be found by merely following a theoretical approach, nor can they be merely based on empirical evidence; instead, they need to take into account the forever troublesome, ambiguous and unpredictable matter of human freedom. (shrink)

Some Romanian feminist scholars argue that welfare policies of post-communist states are deeply unjust to women and preclude them from reaching economic autonomy. The upshot of this argument is that liberal economic policy would advance feminist goals better than the welfare state. How should we read this dissonance between Western and some Eastern feminist scholarship concerning distributive justice? I identify the problem of dependency at the core of a possible debate about feminism and welfare. Worries about (...) how decades of communism have shaped citizenry feed feminists' suspicion of the welfare state and fears of paternalist policies. I criticize the arguments in favour of neoliberal policies and I suggest a crucial distinction between legitimate, universal forms of human dependency and dependencies that result from particular social arrangements. (shrink)

The paper links higher education reforms and welfare states reforms in postcommunist Central European countries. It links current higher education debates (and reform pressures) and public sector debates (and reform pressures), stressing the importance of communist-era legacies in both areas. It refers to existing typologies of both higher education governance and welfare state regimes and concludes that the lack of the inclusion of Central Europe in any of them is a serious theoretical drawback in comparative social research. (...) The region should still, after more than two decades of transition and heavy international policy advising, be viewed as a “laboratory of social experimentation”. It is still too risky to suggest generalizations about how Central European higher education and welfare systems fit existing typologies. Consequently, the “transition” period is by no means over: it is over in terms of politics and economics but not in terms of social arrangements. Both higher education and welfare states should be viewed as “work in progress”: permanently under reform pressures, and with unclear future. (shrink)

This book is a critical analysis of Australian family policy issues. The argument of the book rests on three cardinal principles. The first is that the family is a miniature society, a social unit. The second is that in producing, caring for, and educating children the family contributes to the good of the wider society. The third is that in caring for dependants – young or old – the family is a welfare institution. The general thrust of the book (...) is in favour of the principle of financial support for families with children, but with equity between separated and divorced families and intact families. (shrink)

In his insightful book, Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier (2021) convincingly shows that the legitimacy and sustainability of liberal democratic institutions are dependent upon the maintenance of social and institutional trust. This insight, I believe, has value beyond the illustrious halls of post-Rawlsian, post-Gausian thought. Indeed, while I remain skeptical towards some of the premises of public reason liberalism, I am convinced that any liberal democratic political philosopher who takes the trust literature seriously and who has made their (...) (pragmatic or principled) peace with redistribution has good reasons to sympathize with the general outlines of the institutional palette that emerges out of his book. In this article, I will take for granted Vallier’s assumption that the erosion of social and institutional trust is a serious problem. This motivates investigating the trust-bearing attributes of the redistributive welfare state and the “principle of social insurance” that underpins it. I reconstruct and critically analyse Vallier’s case for a liberal democratic welfare state. I show that he makes a convincing public reason argument for universal social insurance but proceeds too hastily to exclude the principle of unconditionality from consideration. The rest of my paper consists of defending this claim by presenting two kinds of arguments— empirical and theoretical—that I think public reason liberals like Vallier, according to their own commitments, should be motivated to incorporate into their comprehensive discussion of the public justifications for and against basic income. They will show that Universal Basic Income (UBI), although it remains contentious, has some features that could appeal to a diverse citizenry, and thus tilt the balance of public reason judgments towards UBI. (shrink)

Although the economic thought of Marshall and Pigou was united by ethical positions broadly considered utilitarian, differences in their intellectual milieu led to degrees of difference between their respective philosophical visions. This change in milieu includes the influence of the little understood period of transition from the early idealist period in Great Britain, which provided the context to Marshall’s intellectual formation, and the late British Idealist period, which provided the context to Pigou’s intellectual formation. During this latter period, the pervading (...) Hegelianism and influences of naturalism arising from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were challenged by Hermann Lotze, a key transitional thinker influencing the Neo-Kantian movement, who recognised significant limits of naturalism, on the one hand, and the metaphysical tenor of absolute idealism, on the other, and attempted to provide a balance between the two. The goal of this paper is to make the provisional case for the argument that Pigou’s views on ethics were not only directly influenced by utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Sidgwick, but they were also indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, via the influence of the Neo- Kantian movement on late British idealism. To that end, Pigou’s essays in The Trouble with Theism (1908), including his sympathetic consideration of the ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche, reflect the influence of Lotze indirectly through the impact at Cambridge of: James Ward’s critique of associationist psychology, and consideration of the limits of naturalism including the critique of evolutionary ethics; Bertrand Russell’s rejection of neo-Hegelianism and, together with Alfred North Whitehead, the development of Logicism; and G.E. Moore’s critique of utilitarian ethics on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy and the development of his own intuitionist system of ethics. (shrink)

What does effective poverty relief entail? How are we to assess the capacity of advanced industrialized societies to solve the problem of poverty? What role, if any, is left for the welfare state? This chapter argues that poverty relief, far from being primarily a matter of post hoc redistribution, primarily consists in a Hayekian-Schumpeterian discovery (or innovation) procedure whereby the problems of the poor are continuously discovered, identified, and eventually solved from the bottom up. This suggests new avenues (...) for reform. I argue, from the point of view of complexity theory, that governments must overcome knowledge and governance problems that limit their competence in the realm of solving the problems of the poor. As a result, any efficient system of poverty relief is unlikely to emerge from imposing an efficient and equitable top-down delivery of given goods and services based on established practices or preferences. The knowledge of what goods and services are required, and what practices should be modified to produce them, is not given to policy makers; it needs to be discovered. And this discovery is best modeled as an entrepreneurial, inquisitive, and experimental process. This process is best understood by applying complexity theory and the Austrian (Hayekian) epistemic paradigm. (shrink)

In a number of works, James M. Buchanan set out a proposal for a ‘demogrant’— a form of universal basic income that applied the principles of generality and non discrimination to the tax and the transfer sides of the scheme and was to be implemented as a constitutional rule outside the realm of day-to-day politics. The demogrant has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, but this article locates it in Buchanan’s broader constitutional political economy project and shows it was a logical (...) application of his theoretical framework to the problem of inefficient and unfair welfare systems when reform to the basic institutions of majoritarian democracy was not forthcoming. The demogrant aims to end the problems of majority cycling and rent seeking that plague contemporary welfare states and therefore offers a model of welfare without rent seeking—a constitutional welfare state. We compare Buchanan’s demogrant model to other universal basic income and negative income tax models and consider the most important criticisms. We conclude that rescuing the demogrant model from relative obscurity would be a fruitful future task of applied constitutional political economy and public choice. (shrink)

I provide a defence of the classical liberal tradition (from Locke and Smith to Hayek and Tomasi) as a blueprint for a 'bleeding-heart libertarian' framework of society. Such a society defends three principles: 1) Freedom from private coercion (Private Property), 2) Freedom from public coercion (Limited Government); and 3) Within these limits, the provision of a limited range of public goods and public welfare (Limited Welfare State). I show that principles can be abstracted from a reading of (...) the classical liberal tradition. Then, through an extensive analysis of Locke, I show the importance, and consequentialist justifications, of the Three Principles for any liberal welfare state. Through a critique of Nozick, I show the inadequacy of the hardcore libertarian interpretation. Then, I show that John Tomasi, Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek have all defended versions of limited welfare states. On this basis, I propose that the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is a good example, supported by Hayek, Buchanan and Friedman, of a welfare principle that is compatible with bleeding-heart libertarianism. I believe we can justify, on the basis of a consequentialist theory, that the limited welfare state, which combines welfare with liberty, and the free market with a social safety net, has highly beneficial effects on the society. It thus suggests itself as a viable competitor to rights-based libertarianism and more expansive social liberalism. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of libertarianism for welfare policy. There are two central arguments. First, the paper argues that if one adopts a libertarian framework, it makes most sense to be a Lockean right-libertarian. Second, the paper argues that this form of libertarianism leads to the endorsement of a fairly extensive set of redistributive welfare programs. Specifically, the paper argues that Lockean right-libertarians are committed to endorsing welfare programs under which the receipt of benefits is conditional (...) on meeting a work requirement, and also endorsing some form of publicly funded jobs of last resort for potential welfare recipients. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article contributes to the debate on the relationship between marketing and propaganda through an analysis of social marketing as a mode of governing in permanent campaigning. The working hypothesis is that social marketing operations are agitational rather than propagandistic. The conceptual approach stems from a comparison of propaganda and marketing with Fordist and post-Fordist modes of production and governance. The research into the role of agitation involves an empirical study of the UK government campaign against benefit fraud, the most (...) expensive of its kind. Using a combination of methodologies, the political context is framed through a discourse analysis that charts the historical emergence of the problem of benefit fraud and the material effects of this discourse on welfare spending allocation, content analysis is used to identify correspondences between different newspapers’ rhetoric and policy under different governments, and semiotic analysis helps to decode the message of the campaign against benefit fraud, as it relates to the overall government’s strategy on this issue. The study offers insights into the political strategy of the government of New Labour between 1997 and 2010 and its resort to agitational techniques, exposing the limitations of government marketing and public relations in the context of an overall crisis of its political legitimacy, in both economic and political terms. (shrink)

The notion of responsibility has come to play a leading role in both political discourse and political philosophy. Yasha Mounk’s The Age of Responsibility provides a wide-ranging exploration of this zeitgeist. As the author notes, ‘[t]his book stands at an unusual methodological intersection. It contains elements of intellectual history, social theory, comparative politics, and normative political philosophy’ (26). Philosophical theories of free will and moral luck battle for space with analyses of welfare conditionality and Obama’s speeches. The author navigates (...) this diverse terrain with skill, providing an authoritative survey of the recent history of an idea. (shrink)

Many criminal offenders come from disadvantaged backgrounds, which punishment entrenches. Criminal culpability explains some disadvantageous treatment in state-offender interactions; yet offenders remain people, and ‘some mother’s child’, in Eva Kittay’s terms. Offending behaviour neither erases needs, nor fully excuses our responsibility for offenders’ needs. Caring is demanded in principle, recognising the offender’s personhood. Supporting offenders may amplify welfare resources: equipping offenders to provide self-care; to meet caring responsibilities; and enabling offenders’ contribution to shared social life, by providing support (...) and furthering the choices of others seeking to engage with them. The desistance paradigm (viewing desistance from offending as a process, following from an offender’s active choice in the context of stabilising social structures and personal circumstances), implies that a supportive environment may facilitate reduced recidivism. While decisions about criminal culpability need justice, we may use state resources most effectively by also including care ethics in our thinking about punishment. (shrink)

This essay argues that the concept of dependence now invoked in noramtive discussions of the welfare state is both incoherent and biased as a result of its conflation of four distinctly different notions of dependence, ranging from the purely causal to that associated with lower class identities.

Classical liberals have a long and convoluted history with the welfare state. Welfare policy has engaged liberals ever since the debates round poor relief, land ownership, and distributive justice in authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. However, the majority of the welfare state debate, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, has been conducted primarily on the basis of rule-consequentialist reasoning, weighing the expected (long-term) costs (...) and benefits of different institutional rules. Classical liberals tend to be primarily concerned with welfare in the “happiness of individuals” sense and only secondarily with welfare in the “government handout” sense. This necessitates an investigation into the expected benefits and costs of various institutional rules and social policies. As a result, any disagreements about the best institutional pathway forward must be settled through comparative institutional analysis. Today, it seems to me that the classical liberal perspective must choose between two alternative pathways, each of which has its pros and cons, and each of which seems compatible with the abstract and general rules of the market society: 1) The Minimally Redistributive State based on a classical liberal constitution supported by robust market institutions and a civil society mosaic of polycentric mutual aid networks; or 2) The Welfare State of Law which, in addition to all of the above, adds a few carefully rule-bound and market-conforming redistributive mechanisms, the most important of which is the robust guarantee of something like a conditional minimum income scheme or an unconditional UBI/NIT scheme. In addition, the 3) “Third Way” models of the Social Market Economy and the Free Market Welfare State are also sometimes included as a third option. (shrink)

I explore the idea that the state should love its citizens. It should not be indifferent towards them. Nor should it merely respect them. It should love them. We begin by looking at the bases of this idea. First, it can be grounded by a concern with state subordination. The state has enormous power over its citizens. This threatens them with subordination. Love ameliorates this threat. Second, it can be grounded by the state's lack of moral (...) status. We all have reason to love everyone. But we beings with moral status have an excuse for not loving everyone: we have our own lives to lead. The state has no such excuse. So, the state should love everyone. We then explore the nature of the loving state. I argue that the loving state is a liberal state. It won't interfere in its citizens' personal spheres. It is a democratic state. It will adopt its citizens' ends as its own. It is a welfare state. It will be devoted to its citizens' well-being. And it is an egalitarian state. It will treat all its citizens equally. This constitutes a powerful third argument, an abductive argument, for the ideal of the loving state. (shrink)

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper (...) describes a perspectival pluralist account of animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a (...) philosophical perspective to answer the question of how we can measure the welfare of animals. Animal welfare science is an applied area of biology, aimed at measuring animal welfare. Although philosophy of animal ethics is common, philosophy focussing on animal welfare science is rare. Despite this lack, there are definitely many ways in which philosophical methods can be used to analyse the methodologies and concepts used in this science. One of the aims of the work in this thesis is to remedy this lack of attention in animal welfare. Animal welfare science is a strong emerging discipline, but there is the need for conceptual and methodological clarity and sophistication in this science if it is to play the relevant informative role for our practical and ethical decision-making. There is thus is a strong role here for philosophical analysis for this purpose. The central aim of this thesis is to provide an account of how we can measure subjective animal welfare, addressing some of the potential problems that may arise in this particular scientific endeavour. The two questions I will be answering are: what is animal welfare, and how do we measure it? Part One of the thesis looks at the subjective concept of animal welfare and its applications. In it, I argue for a subjective welfare view - that animal welfare should be understood as the subjective experience of individuals over their lifetimes - and look at how the subjective welfare concept informs our ethical decision-making in two different cases in applied animal ethics. Part Two of the thesis looks more closely at the scientific role of welfare. Understanding welfare subjectively creates unique measurement problems, due to the necessarily private nature of mental states and here I address a few of these problems, including whether subjective experience is measurable, how we might validate indicators of hidden target variables such as welfare, how we can make welfare comparisons between individual animals and how we might compare or integrate the different types of experience that make up welfare. I end with a discussion of the implications of all these problems and solutions for the practice of welfare science, and indicate useful future directions for research. (shrink)

The state has always authoritatively used criminal law to give effect to its policy of condemning acts either antisocial or unacceptable to the conscience of the law and society. The existence of criminal law is well justified on grounds of ‘social welfare’ or “reinforcement of those values most basic to proper social functioning”. This initiates or sustains the process of criminalization. The relativity of ‘social welfare’ makes law ‘dynamic’ as well as ‘varying’, vis-à-vis its ambit and scope. (...) Current scholarship is critical of what is referred to as the trend of overcriminalization or rapid increase in criminalizing of acts, as leading to ‘uncertainty’ in criminal law. The rationale for such a critique is that there are activities that need not be labeled as offences if they do not possess the potential to cause damage that criminal law seeks to protect. In light of the overcriminalization critique, this paper examines the criminalization of certain offences labeled as public welfare offences. (shrink)

The Song and Ming dynasty Confucians make frequent use of what would today be identified as a slippery slope argument. The Book of Changes and its early commentaries provide both the language and the rationale for this argument, inasmuch as the Confucians regard these texts as a method for identifying tiny problems that will one day threaten the state. While today the slippery slope argument is often criticized for promoting an unreasoned resistance to change, a close look at its (...) use by Confucians reveals that they largely avoid this criticism, using the argument in a reasoned way to target not change, but excess. (shrink)

The classical liberal paradigm has always argued for strong economic freedom combined with limits on government power. But it has also been always openminded about using government programs to improve the society. These principles, if applied to today’s society, are simultaneously a criticism of “really existing” welfare state ideology – with its lack of economic freedom and its reliance on the expansive bureaucracy – but also an opportunity for reforming welfare states toward more freedom-based alternatives. There is (...) a utopian potential in classical liberalism. This book articulates how several strands of liberalism, including Austrian school liberalism and Chicago school liberalism, may support something like universal basic income (UBI). (shrink)

Several areas of welfare economics seek to evaluate states of affairs as a function of interpersonally comparable individual utilities. The aim is to map each state of affairs onto a vector of individual utilities, and then to produce an ordering of these vectors that can be represented by a mathematical function assigning a real number to each. When this approach is used in intertemporal contexts, a central theoretical question concerns the evaluative weight to be applied to utility coming (...) at different times. This question concerns the rate of pure time preference, which is one key determinant of the social discount rate. This article argues that the standard philosophical account of pure time preference is mistaken, because it ascribes to economists a methodological commitment they need not, and often do not, accept. This in turn undercuts the most common philosophical objection to pure time preference, which traces at least to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The article then evaluates three further objections to pure time preference, concluding that it might still be defensible under certain circumstances. The article closes by articulating a final argument that is suggested by the “Social, Economic and Ethical Concepts and Methods” chapter of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. If this further argument is sound, it would constitute a decisive objection to pure time preference as it currently figures in much intertemporal welfare economics. (shrink)

The Confucian philosopher Mengzi believes that ‘extending’ one's kindness facilitates one's moral development and that it is intimately tied to performing morally good actions. Most interpreters have taken Mengzian kindness to be an emotional state, with the extension of kindness to centrally involve feeling kindness towards more people or in a greater number of situations. I argue that kindness cannot do all the theoretical work that Mengzi wants it to do if it is interpreted as an emotion. I (...) submit that Mengzi's notion of extending kindness is best understood as the exercise of a capacity for intelligently performing kind actions. (shrink)

This article challenges the view most recently expounded by Emily Jackson that ‘decisional privacy’ ought to be respected in the realm of artificial reproduction (AR). On this view, it is considered an unjust infringement of individual liberty for the state to interfere with individual or group freedom artificially to produce a child. It is our contention that a proper evaluation of AR and of the relevance of welfare will be sensitive not only to the rights of ‘commissioning parties’ (...) to AR but also to public policy considerations. We argue that AR has implications for the common good, by involving matters of human reproduction, kinship, race, parenthood and identity. In this paper we challenge presuppositions concerning decisional privacy. We examine the essential commodification of human life implicit in AR and the systematicity that makes this possible. We address the objection that it is an ethically neutral way of having children and consider the problem of ‘existential debt’. After examining objections to the thesis that AR is illegitimate for reasons of public policy and the common good, we return to the issue of decisional privacy in the light of considerations concerning the legitimate role of the state in matters affecting human reproduction. (shrink)

This paper compares criticisms of Singapore’s meritocracy, especially against its impact on income disparities and class divisions, with Michael Sandel’s critique of the meritocratic ethic in the United States. Despite significant differences in their history and politics, meritocracy has similar dysfunctions in both societies, allowing us to draw theoretical conclusions about meritocracy as an ideal of governance. It then contrasts Sandel’s communitarian critique of meritocracy with recent Confucian promotion of political meritocracy and meritocratic justice and argues that the (...) class='Hi'>Confucian principle of “promoting the virtuous and talented” is different from the contemporary conception of meritocracy. Textual evidence indicates that a Confucian understanding of “merit” is contrary to the technocratic expertise of contemporary meritocracies. Furthermore, pre-Qin Confucian texts do not support a conception of justice that emphasizes individual desert; they address distributive problems from the perspective of needs and sustaining social relations. The texts also support limiting the reign of merit when it results in inequalities that cause suffering, inhibit personal cultivation of some groups, or undermine social relations. The paper concludes with an assessment of Singapore’s on-going attempts to improve its meritocracy from a Confucian perspective. (shrink)

Based on key passages in The Analects, I develop a Confucian account of agency: more precisely, an account of the relation between agent and deed (action). The Confucian view is contrasted with "standard" causal accounts of action (e.g., Davidson, Searle), which hold that what makes an event an action is that it is intended. According to the Confucian account, the defining mark of action is not the causal involvement of a (prior) intention, but instead the expressive relation (...) between agent and action. What's distinctive about an action is that it is expressive of who the agent is; the action expresses one's character or self. For the Confucians, what one really intends (the content of one's intention) is not a prior state to the action, but is rather determined or settled by the action as it is completed. I then explore the implications of the Confucian account for our understanding of three moral-psychological phenomena: weakness of will, self-deception, and moral regret. (shrink)

The neo-liberal upsurge of the last twenty years and the neo-liberal case against the welfare state has gained much of its emotional force from a sub-text which is highly gendered. Whereas social liberalism had contained the promise of more autonomy within the private sphere and more caring values in the public sphere, neo-liberalism depicts the results of social liberalism as a loss of self reliance – through ‘over-protection’ by the state in the public sphere and usurpation of (...) male roles in the private sphere. The identification of the welfare state as female (the ‘nanny state’) helps fuel resentment on the part of those already confused by rapidly changing gender roles. This paper tracks the sex change which took place in the image of the liberal state as it evolved out of the night watchman state – the link between the women's suffrage movement and social regulation, maternal principles of distribution and demands for the public organization of caring. It examines the neo-liberal rejection of the breast and neo-liberal claims that the maternal state is incompatible with ‘self-reliance’ and a barrier to competitiveness in the world market. (shrink)

Programs of drug testing welfare recipients are increasingly common in US states and have been considered elsewhere. Though often intensely debated, such programs are complicated to evaluate because their aims are ambiguous – aims like saving money may be in tension with aims like referring people to treatment. We assess such programs using a proportionality approach, which requires that for ethical acceptability a practice must be: reasonably likely to meet its aims, sufficiently important in purpose as to outweigh harms (...) incurred, and lower in costs than feasible alternatives. In the light of empirical findings, we argue that the programs fail the three requirements. Pursuing recreational drug users is not important in the light of costs incurred, while dependent users who may require referral are usually identifiable without testing and typically need a broader approach than one focussing on drugs. Drug testing of welfare recipients is therefore not ethically acceptable policy. (shrink)

Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in “The Doctrine of Right” reveals (...) an argumentative structure sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy. (shrink)

In this essay I propose a new measure of social welfare. It captures the intuitive idea that quantity, quality, and equality of individual welfare all matter for social welfare. More precisely, it satisfies six conditions: Equivalence, Dominance, Quality, Strict Monotonicity, Equality and Asymmetry. These state that i) populations equivalent in individual welfare are equal in social welfare; ii) a population that dominates another in individual welfare is better; iii) a population that has a (...) higher average welfare than another population is better, other things being equal; iv) the addition of a well-faring individual makes a population better, whereas the addition of an ill-faring individual makes a population worse; v) a population that has a higher degree of equality than another population is better, other things being equal; and vi) individual illfare matters more for social welfare than individual welfare. By satisfying the six conditions, the measure improves on previously proposed measures, such as the utilitarian Total and Average measures, as well as different kinds of Prioritarian measures. (shrink)

I aim in this paper to provide defense of one way to look at what should be regulated in the market place. In particular, I discuss what should be tolerated and argue against corporate welfare. I begin by endorsing John Stuart Mill’s harm principle as a normative principle of toleration. I call strict commitment to the harm principle when considering the regulatory structure of markets market libertarianism and oppose that to promotionism, the view that endorses government interference to promote (...) business interests. I next discuss the widespread use of promotionist policies, arguing against them and for market libertarianism. I also consider problems for my view, recognizing that one of my responses may leave some thinking the paper is a reductio of the market libertarian view because of the sort of slow-growth state it endorses. Others will recognize it as a view promoted by some of the U.S. founding fathers and find it attractive in its own right. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare –some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect (...) welfare, but a deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)

This paper offers an assessment of current welfare policy in the United States. I argue that there is a genuine set of reciprocal obligations owed between fellow citizens that both justify and constrain U.S. welfare policy. In particular, I argue that there is both a widespread duty for potential welfare recipients to seek employment and a similarly robust obligation for other members of society to provide publicly funded jobs of last resort for those unable to find traditional (...) employment. This leads me to endorse elements of current U.S. welfare policy but also recommend several substantial changes that would make the overall policy more just. (shrink)

A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, (...) we argue that the vast majority of proposals that purport to select for virtue are either (a) unlikely to be effective, (b) not implementable at the scale of most current nations, or (c) have already been incorporated into most democratic states. Thus defenders of meritocratic institutions should take more seriously the practical barriers that will almost certainly arise when trying to implement these proposals at scale. Historical proponents of meritocratic values were well aware of concerns about the feasibility of their political ideals, and we should be too. (shrink)

The Way of Humanity, second edition, presents a Confucian vision for personal and social transformation intended to bring about a worldwide social order of harmony, dignity, and justice for all peoples, beyond divisive sectarianism and nationalism. It is based on ideals for human flourishing gleaned from Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought as distilled by a highly respected elder philosopher in South Korea, Yi Dong Jun, PhD (Haengchon, literary name). He is Professor Emeritus of the College of Confucian (...) Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. This work is the first detailed presentation of a contemporary Korean philosopher’s perspective on Confucianism as grounded in daily life, its implications for personal spiritual development, and its potential to contribute to world development. The book holistically presents Master Haengchon’s insights through vivid stories, philosophical essays, numerous illustrations, audio recordings of Confucian chanting, recommendations for further reading, and, new to the second edition, poems inspired by Confucian classics about ideals for an opening of the world to wellbeing and justice for all peoples. There are two recordings of chants included as supplemental.mp3 files. For open access to the ebook and associated audio files, go to the University of Kansas ScholarWorks website: The Way of Humanity, second edition, presents a Confucian vision for personal and social transformation intended to bring about a worldwide social order of harmony, dignity, and justice for all peoples, beyond divisive sectarianism and nationalism. It is based on ideals for human flourishing gleaned from Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought as distilled by a highly respected elder philosopher in South Korea, Yi Dong Jun, PhD (Haengchon, literary name). He is Professor Emeritus of the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. This work is the first detailed presentation of a contemporary Korean philosopher’s perspective on Confucianism as grounded in daily life, its implications for personal spiritual development, and its potential to contribute to world development. The book holistically presents Master Haengchon’s insights through vivid stories, philosophical essays, numerous illustrations, audio recordings of Confucian chanting, recommendations for further reading, and, new to the second edition, poems inspired by Confucian classics about ideals for an opening of the world to wellbeing and justice for all peoples. There are two recordings of chants included as supplemental files in this record. Each has been made available in.wav format and.mp3 format. The files in the.mp3 format are much smaller and suitable for downloading in situations where bandwidth is restricted. The ebook is available here on ResearchGate. But for access to the ebook and associated audio files, search the University of Kansas Libraries ScholarWorks website. (shrink)

This article aims at showing the applicability of the Confucian Way in non-Confucian contexts, through referring to the inner connectedness between theory and practice in Confucianism. Its first part addresses the Confucian ideas of knowledge, learning, dialogue and self-realization. Its second part suggests an application of the ideas in a project with women who are looking for a way to “check out” from prostitution. The article suggests that treating these women as partners to the Confucian humanistic (...) Way brings to a new state of mind, which decriminalizes prostitution, and leads both teacher and students to a meaningful practice. (shrink)

The approach to analysing population ageing and its impacts on the economy has evolved in recent years. There is increasing interest in the development and use of products and services related to gerontechnology as well as other social innovations that may be considered as central parts of the "silver economy." However, the concept of silver economy is still being formed and requires detailed research. This article proposes a typology of models of the silver economy in the European Union at the (...) national and regional levels. This typology was created by comparing the Active Ageing Index to the typology of varieties and cultures of capitalism and typology of the welfare states. Practical recommendations for institutions of the EU and directions for further research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the philosophical underpinnings of current experimental investigation into animal affect-related decision-making. Animals’ affective states are standardly operationalised by linking positively valenced states with “approach” behaviours and negatively valenced states with “avoidance” behaviours. While this operationalisation has provided a helpful starting point to investigate the ecological role of animals’ internal states, there is extensive evidence that valenced and motivational states do not always neatly align, namely, instances where “liking” does not entail “wanting” (and vice versa). To address (...) this limitation, this paper proposes the (re-)integration of dominance as a dimension of affect. In particular, I argue that dominance, construed as a measure of organisms’ self-assessed behavioural control, can provide the necessary nuance to understand animal affect-related decision-making. Thus, after addressing the theoretical and methodological challenges related to incorporating dominance into a definition of “core affect”, this paper introduces the “Valence-Arousal-Dominance” model of animal affect. This model is explored for its potential applications in two domains. Firstly, in the study of animal affect-related decision-making under predation risk, and secondly, in the study of animal wellbeing. Through these applications, this model aims to bring experimental paradigms of animal affect-related behaviour closer to ecologically relevant scenarios. (shrink)

For several decades, public political discourses on ‘welfare dependency’ have failed to recognise that welfare states are not the source of economic dependence, but rather reconfigure economic dependencies in a specific way. This article distinguishes four senses of ‘economic dependence’ that can help to clarify what is missing from these discourses, and what is at stake in political and legal decisions about how we may economically depend upon one another. While feminist, republican and egalitarian philosophical work has examined (...) the problems of dependence on states, in families and in markets, the present approach adds a further dimension to our cultural and political concerns with economic dependence: it argues that it is reasonable and useful to consider the economic dependence of the economically powerful. Doing so requires a clarification of the ‘varieties of dependence’ that exist in contemporary societies and economies, and the recognition that legal and political choices regarding social and economic justice are often about choosing between varieties of dependence, not about escaping dependence entirely. (shrink)

It is argued that Nozick's experience machine thought experiment does not pose a particular difficulty for mental state theories of well-being. While the example shows that we value many things beyond our mental states, this simply reflects the fact that we value more than our own well-being. Nor is a mental state theorist forced to make the dubious claim that we maintain these other values simply as a means to desirable mental states. Valuing more than our mental states (...) is compatible with maintaining that the impact of such values upon our well-being lies in their impact upon our mental lives. (shrink)

There are two rival images often offered of the state. In one the state serves like a nanny to provide for the welfare of its members; in the other it requires people to look after themselves, providing only the service of a night-watchman. But this dichotomy, which is routinely invoked in debates about public health and welfare provision in general, is misleading. What the rival images turn on is not competing pictures of how the state (...) should function in people's lives but competing pictures of what it is to guard the freedom of its people. On the neo-liberal theory, which has been dominant over the last century or so, providing for people's freedom means leaving them to their own devices and fortunes. On the neo-republican theory, which answers to a much longer tradition, it means democratically identifying a common set of basic liberties in the exercise of which everyone should be protected by law and, if necessary, resourced. This older way of thinking about freedom has important merits missing in the newer and argues strongly against the nightwatchman state. (shrink)

In this issue, Ahmadi1 reports on the practice of hymenoplasty—a surgical intervention meant to restore a presumed physical marker of virginity prior to a woman's marriage. As Mehri and Sills2 have stated, these women ‘want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.’ Although Ahmadi's research was carried out in Iran specifically, this surgery is becoming increasingly popular in a number of Western countries as well, especially among Muslim populations.3 What are the ethics of hymen restoration?Consider the (...) role of the physician. Two of the doctors interviewed by Ahmadi reported being in ‘a perpetual state of guilt because of the surgery's inherent aim at deceiving the groom’ and noted their ‘personal conflict’ at being involved in this deception. Yet: "None of the doctors believed that the surgery was unethical, arguing that the girl could be ‘abused’ and ‘can even die’ if she is discovered not … ". (shrink)

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone discussions on vulnerability and precarity, she (...) discusses her approach to normative expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of someone else's agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of contemporary issues, such as the Men's Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state. (shrink)