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While we like to think that our society gives everyone a fair chance to succeed--and, crucially, move up the social ladder--in reality, children are to an astonishing degree bound by their parents and the class into which they are born. The children of disadvantaged parents typically achieve less financially and die younger than their peers who are born into better-off families. This book reveals how seemingly ordinary aspects of family life, as small as reading bedtime stories and as consequential as inherited income, come together to alter children's life chances--and raise fundamental questions about social justice and opportunity.
When groups feature in political philosophy, it is usually in one of three contexts: the redressing of past or current injustices suffered by ethnic or cultural minorities; the nature and scope of group rights; and questions around how institutions are supposed to treat a certain specific identity/cultural/ethnic group. What is missing from these debates is a comprehensive analysis of groups as both agents and objects of social policies. While this has been subject to much scrutiny by sociologists and social psychologists, it has received less attention from a normative and philosophical point of view. This volume asks: what problems are posed to political philosophy by a collection of indiv...
This is a unique and timely survey of the evolving priorities of the British welfare state since its inception in the late 1940s, with an emphasis on how current and future aims and features of welfare provision compare with the ambitions of its original architects. In this book, 15 commentators, including prominent academic experts in the field, and also members of think tanks, charities and campaigning organisations – with a foreword by the BBC’s Huw Edwards, explore themes such as health, education, housing, gender, disability and ethnic diversity. The result of this study is a rich, critical and thought-provoking exploration of the legacy and prospects of the welfare state – worth reading by anyone with an interest in debates on how a modern society should meet the needs of its citizens.
Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are thus essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source for the key topics, problems and debates in this crucial and exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbo...
Richard Rorty is among the most cited, influential and notorious of recent philosophers. This work addresses Rorty's work in terms of social and political philosophy.
Combines comparison of historical models, from those of ancient Athens and the early modern Republican traditions, with a focus on contemporary trends and debates in political philosophy, addressing the relationship of democracy to key concepts such as liberty, equality and citizenship.
Do states have the right to prevent potential immigrants from crossing their borders, or should people have the freedom to migrate and settle wherever they wish? Christopher Heath Wellman and Phillip Cole develop and defend opposing answers to this timely and important question. Appealing to the right to freedom of association, Wellman contends that legitimate states have broad discretion to exclude potential immigrants, even those who desperately seek to enter. Against this, Cole argues that the commitment to the moral equality of all human beings - which legitimate states can be expected to hold - means national borders must be open: equal respect requires equal access, both to territory and membership; and that the idea of open borders is less radical than it seems when we consider how many territorial and community boundaries have this open nature. In addition to engaging with each other's arguments, Wellman and Cole address a range of central questions and prominent positions on this topic. The authors therefore provide a critical overview of the major contributions to the ethics of migration, as well as developing original, provocative positions of their own.
An accessible overview of the work of one of our most influential living philosophers, as part of the popular Great Philosophers series. Richard Rorty is often cited as the most prominent philosophical defender of postmodernism. Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy -- most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) -- Rorty has for some years now been a wide-ranging public intellectual, unwilling to be confined within the boundaries of academe.
Popular Great Philosopher's Series. An accessible overview of the work of one of our most influential living philosophers, as part of the popular Great Philosophers series. Richard Rorty is often cited as the most prominent philosophical defender of postmodernism. Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy - most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) - Rorty has for some years now been a wide-ranging public intellectual, unwilling to be confined within the boundaries of academe. There is no real school of Rortianism. But Rorty-bashing is almost an industry in itself. He is a renegade to purists, a reactionary to radicals and a subversive to conservatives. And yet he presents his ideas as the culmination and extension of many of the most familiar and fashionable trends in contemporary thinking.
This title was first published in 2000: Bringing oes liberalism have either the theoretical capacity or the political durability to provide for social justice, particularly given the challenges of the new millennium? From a diverse array of disciplinary, cultural and critical perspectives, the contributors to this timely and incisive collection of essays cover ground ranging from the philosophical adequacy of liberalism’s central tenets, to the treatment of minority and alternative cultures in contemporary Europe, to the future of welfare provision, to the continued tenability of traditional ideological distinctions and labels amid the social conditions and demands of the new millennium. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers, political scientists and social and legal theorists - and to anyone with a general interest in the present and future horizons of social justice in theory and practice.