Abstract

Political philosophers have generally viewed the moral issues posed by poverty as issues of distributive justice, that is, of the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social co-operation. This "distributive model" of what makes poverty morally important captures much of the moral experience of poverty in modern societies, and we could scarcely formulate many of the most prominent grievances and controversies surrounding poverty without recourse such a model. Nevertheless, the distributive model fails to reflect many of the concerns of those who view poverty not only as a maldistribution of resources but also as a failure to recognize publicly the standing of each citizen as a moral person. I develop an alternative way of analysing the wrongness of institutional arrangements affecting the poor, emphasising the symbolic value of being publicly recognised as a full member of the human community, rather than the instrumental value of gaining access to resources needed in order to pursue a conception of the good. I show that labels used to describe the poor, such as 'the disadvantaged,' 'the homeless,' 'the unemployed,' or 'the underclass' , raise a distinctive set of moral concerns because they ascribe normative roles to poor people, mediated by the imposition of statuses. These roles tend to have the function of authorizing demeaning or humiliating treatment, from which citizens would otherwise be presumptively exempted. They serve as the vehicles of what Harold Garfinkel called "status degradation." On the basis of this analysis, I argue that poverty is not one kind of injustice but two, affecting the poor both in their capacity as the authors of life-plans in need of resources with which to pursue their aims and in their capacity as bearers of a relation-to-self in need of acknowledgement of their full membership in the human community, without which they are denied the opportunity to establish and maintain a secure sense of their own moral inviolability as persons