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Social Philosophy Today

Volume 27, 2011
Poverty, Justice, and Markets

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Displaying: 1-18 of 18 documents


1. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Nancy E. Snow Introduction
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i: keynote address 2009 nassp conference
2. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
David Schweickart Reading Legitimation Crisis During the Meltdown
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ii: the 2010 nassp presidential address
3. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Alistair M. Macleod The Voluntary Transactions Principle and the Free Market Ideal
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iii: explorations in social justice
4. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Martin Gunderson Does the Human Right to Health Lack Content?
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The human right to health is crucial in the fight against global poverty. Health and an adequate standard of living are intimately connected. Poor health can make it difficult to overcome poverty, and poverty can make it difficult to attain good health. For the human right to health to be effective, however, it must have sufficient content to do the important normative work of rights. In the first part of this paper I give plausible arguments against the very existence of a human right to health based on its lack of content and extend this to other social rights such as the right to adequate income, housing and education. In the second part of the paper I provide a defense of human social rights, including the human right to health, by arguing that these human rights, though abstract, have enough content to function as rights.
5. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Sean Donaghue Johnston John Stuart Mill on Health Care Reform
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In this essay, I explore John Stuart Mill’s theory of government and its application to the issue of health care reform. In particular, I ask whether Mill’s theory of government would justify or condemn the creation of a public health-insurance option. Although Mill’s deep distrust of governmental authority would seem to align him with Republicans, Tea Partiers, libertarians, and others, who cast the public option as a “government takeover” of “our” health care system, I argue that Mill offers good reasons for seriously considering some form of government-operated health insurance. For Mill theorizes government as having a positive as well as a negative role to play in people’s lives, and he explicitly endorses “public options” in different areas of life. According to his theory of government, a public health-insurance option would be just as long as it would meet the following two conditions: (1) it would not invade the “reserved territory” of individual liberty; and (2) “the case of expediency is strong.” I argue that a public option would in fact meet both of these conditions, and that Mill would have likely endorsed it as an effective solution to the current health care crisis in the United States.
6. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Ryan Jenkins You’ve Earned It!: A Criticism of Sher’s Account of Desert in Wages
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Desert is a notion ubiquitous in our moral discourse, and the importance of its dictates is perhaps clearest when dealing with the distribution of material resources. George Sher has provided one account of desert in wages, answering the question, “How do workers deserve their wage?” Sher relies on the violation of preexisting “independent standards” that dictate how much of a certain good we think people are entitled to in general. When these standards are violated, they call for an offsetting response at a later point in time in order to restore the moral equilibrium. I argue that this formalization of desert is flawed at the theoretical level and that it has further difficulties when applied to wages in particular. Lastly, I offer some brief remarks about what I think are the criteria for establishing desert in wages.
7. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Ryan Long The Incompleteness of Luck Egalitarianism
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8. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Marilea Bramer Domestic Violence as a Violation of Autonomy and Agency: The Required Response of the Kantian State
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Contrary to what we might initially think, domestic violence is not simply a violation of respect. This characterization of domestic violence misses two key points. First, the issue of respect in connection with domestic violence is not as straightforward as it appears. Second, domestic violence is also a violation of care. These key points explain how domestic violence negatively affects a victim’s autonomy and agency—the ability to choose and pursue her own goals and life plan.We have a moral responsibility to respond to the problem of domestic violence as individuals. But the state also has a responsibility to respond. According to Kant in the Doctrine of Right, one of the purposes of the state is to secure just treatment for everyone. I argue that this includes an obligation to put in place policies and services that will promote the autonomy and agency of victims of domestic violence.
9. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Natalie Nenadic Sexual Abuse, Modern Freedom, and Heidegger’s Philosophy
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The sexual abuse of women and girls, such as sexual harassment, battery, varieties of rape, prostitution, and pornography, is statistically pervasive in late modern society. Yet this fact does not register adequate ethical concern. I explore this gap in moral perception. I argue that sexual abuse is conceptually supported by an ontology of women that considers a lack of bodily integrity as natural and by a sex-specific idea of freedom that considers sexual violations as liberating. This conceptual framework is pernicious because it supports abuse and interferes with our moral perception of harm, encouraging us to see harms as normal and as positive. I argue that Heidegger’s idea of philosophy and the resources of his epistemological and ontological project in Being and Time can help show the pernicious function of this conceptual framework and thus help us better understand this abuse.
10. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Matthew R. Silliman, David Kenneth Johnson Critical Thinking, Autonomy, and Social Justice
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In a fictional conversation designed to appeal to both working teachers and social philosophers, three educators take up the question of whether critical thinking itself can, or should, be taught independently of an explicit consideration of issues related to social justice. One, a thoughtful but somewhat traditional Enlightenment rationalist, sees critical thinking as a neutral set of skills and dispositions, essentially unrelated to the conclusions of morality, problems of social organization, or the content of any particular academic discipline. A second interlocutor, steeped in “critical” pedagogy of Paulo Freire, insists that the problem is the pose of neutrality itself. On this view, all honest and effective approaches to teaching must confront the hegemony of unjust relationships, institutions, and conceptual schemes. The third character attempts to resolve the tension between these two opposed camps.
iv: authors meet critics: jan narveson and james p. sterba, are liberty and equality compatible?
11. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Jan Narveson, James P. Sterba Précis of Are Liberty and Equality Compatible?
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12. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Alistair M. Macleod The Compatibility of Liberty and Equality: Sterba vs. Narveson
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13. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
James P. Sterba Putting Liberty and Equality Back Together Again: Responses to Alistair Macleod and Helga Varden
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14. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Jan Narveson Discussion of Helga Varden’s Review and Alistair MacLeod’s Comments
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v: nassp book award: amartya sen, the idea of justice
15. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Deen Chatterjee Reciprocity, Closed-Impartiality, and National Borders: Framing (and Extending) the Debate on Global Justice
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Liberal nationalists have been hard pressed to respond to the normative demands of human rights and global impartiality in justifying special redistributive requirements for fellow citizens in a democratic polity. In general, they tend to support disparate standards of distributive justice for insiders and outsiders by favoring a relational approach to justice that affirms co-national preferences while not denying the importance of global impartiality. Following Sen and critiquing Rawls, I re-frame the debate by re-configuring the notion of relationality with a globalist tilt, with the hope of rescuing the discourse on global justice from its current stalemate.
16. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Helga Varden Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice—Some Kantian Rejoinders
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17. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Amartya Sen The Idea of Justice: A Reply
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18. Social Philosophy Today: Volume > 27
Notes On Contributors
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