When the brothers Hakob, 13, and Hasmik, 14, had lived in Sweden for 5 years, their applications for residence were rejected, and they were to be deported to Armenia (Dagens Nyheter March 8, 2007,...

Any liberal democratic state must honour religious and cultural pluralism in its educational policies. To fail to honour them would betray ideals of freedom and toleration fundamental to liberal democracy. Yet if such ideals are to flourish from one generation to the next, allegiance to the distinctive values of liberal democracy is a necessary educational end, whose pursuit will constrain pluralism. The problem of political education is therefore to ensure the continuity across generations of the constitutive ideals of liberal democracy, (...) while remaining hospitable to a diversity of conduct and belief that sometimes threatens those very ideals. Creating Citizens addresses this crucial problem. In lucid and elegant prose, Professor Callan, one of the world's foremost philosophers of education, identifies both the principal ends of civic education, and the rights that limit their political pursuit. This timely new study sheds light on some of the most divisive educational controversies, such as state sponsorship and regulation of denominational schooling, as well as the role of non-denominational schools in the moral and political development of children. Oxford Political Theory presents the best new work in contemporary political theory. It is intended to be broad in scope, including original contributions to political philosophy, and also work in applied political theory. The series will contain works of outstanding quality with no restriction as to approach or subject matter. The series editors are David Miller and Alan Ryan. (shrink)

Children develop language and communication skills through interaction with adults and other children. This study therefore focuses on two interdependent issues: the effect of philosophizing with children on children’s language development and the speech acts of teachers and children in philosophical enquiries. As part of a before-after test with the “Hamburger Verfahren zur Analyse des Sprachstandes Fünfjähriger” (Reich & Roth, 2004, Hamburg Procedure for Analysing the Language Level of Five Year-olds), weekly philosophical discussions were undertaken (...) with a test class over a period of six months. The central findings are that the philosophising children developed significantly higher language ability compared with a non-philosophising control class in two areas, namely general performance in discussion and the use of more sophisticated connectors. A further part of the study compared the speech acts of the children and their pre-school teacher in the context of philosophical discussion with their speech acts in a different dialogic situation (dialogic discussion of picture books). This showed that philosophical questions from the pre-school teacher led to the production of particularly complex language by the children. Complex speech acts involve the use of higher-level verb structures and connectors. These are necessary in order to reason and act as a citizen agent and are supported by philosophising with children, as this study shows. (shrink)

In vitro fertilization technology has been in use in Poland for over 25 years with success and social approval, but it is still not regulated under Polish law. The current debate over different non-medical aspects of reproductive technologies in Poland is extremely heated and highly politicized. Politicians on the right, Catholic clergy and some journalists use very radical language and criticize IVF as a technique that plays with the lives and deaths of thousands and thousands of children. The aim (...) of this article is to follow the Polish debate on IVF in the context of Poland’s transition, which is marked primarily by two events: the collapse of communism in 1989 and access to the European Union in 2004. The article shows that the IVF debate concerns not only moral choices or legal regulation, but also citizenship, nation, state, and the role of the Catholic Church within. Moreover, it creates new citizens: frozen embryos, which being independent persons, have the right to life, ‘dignity’ and care. The history of IVF in Poland reveals the different tensions in the Polish transition to liberal democracy and it can be used to view a ‘big’ history of the Polish transition. It is one of the micro-histories which make this big story about Poland after 1989. Analyses of both the abortion debate and the IVF debate in Poland show that the process of democratization is very much connected with limiting women’s reproductive rights, including the right to choose infertility treatment. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Fault Lines of Toleration in the Context of Education Toleration and Mutual Respect Toleration and an Autonomy Facilitating Education Appreciation Instead of Non‐Bigoted Acceptance Restrained Manifestation Limited Associational Liberty Implications Conclusion Notes References.

Do children have a right to be loved? An affirmative answer faces two immediate challenges: (i) a child's basic needs can be met without love, therefore a defence of such a right cannot appeal to the role of love in protecting children's most basic needs, and (ii) since love is non-voluntary, it seems that there cannot be a corresponding duty on the part of parents to love their child. In this essay, I defend an affirmative answer that overcomes (...) both of these challenges. First, I argue that the right of children to be loved is grounded in the value of children leading meaningful lives. Second, I argue that the right of children to be loved gives rise to a duty on the part of the state to do all that it legitimately can to ensure that procreation and parenting follows from a truly voluntary decision on the part of its citizens. -/- . (shrink)

This article considers the question of how much weight the infringement of children's right to bodily integrity should be given compared with competing considerations. It utilises the example of circumcision to explore this question, taking as given this practice's opponents' view of circumcision's harmfulness. The article argues that the child's claim against being subjected to circumcision is neither a mere interest nor a right so strong that it trumps all competing interests. Instead, it is a right of moderate strength. (...) Indeed, even the aggregate strength of children's rights against the practice of circumcision as a whole is not so weighty so as to always trump competing interests. The harms are not sufficiently serious to justify such a status. And the expressive wrongs associated with non-negligently benevolent harming are much less serious than those associated with intentional harming. The debate over banning circumcision thus cannot be conducted only in terms of competing rights. Competing interests, such as those that would be set back by the departure of religious citizens, should be considered as well and might plausibly justify allowing even a rights-infringing practice to continue. (shrink)

An important branch of neo-republicanism holds that freedom as non-domination is the supreme ideal that should be pursued in a polity. In this paper I set out to better specify what neo-republicanism has to say about education. I propose a series of reforms that ought to track the common avowable interests of children, focusing on two important dimensions: i) establishing a proper institutional framework through which children can effectively influence decisions that will in turn affect them; and ii) (...) how the civic education curricula should be modified so that the institutional framework will be upheld by virtuous future citizens. I then turn to showing how we can employ the neo-republican framework in order to criticise certain lacunae of educational systems and to improve upon these in a manner that would be in line with the desideratum of freedom as non-domination. The particular example that I focus on is that of Romania, a country whose educational legislation contains some minimal stipulations regarding civic education and pupils’ involvement in the decision-making process. Nonetheless, such stipulations either do not go far enough or are indeterminate, which might make them susceptible to implementation in a way that would be detrimental to the pupils’ common avowable interests. (shrink)

This article explores the values that should be promoted in civic education for democracy and also how the promotion of values can be non-coercive. It will be argued that civic education should promote the values of reasonableness, mutual respect and fairness, but also that only public, political reasons count in attempting to justify the content of civic education. It will also be argued that the content of civic education may legitimately be broader than this, including but not restricted to the (...) values of autonomy, integrity, magnanimity, truthfulness and generosity. At the same time, if civic education is seen merely as a means to shape and form future citizens, then the promotion of values in civic education will be a coercive imposition on children and young people. If the promotion of values instead is to be non-coercive it must be defended with reasons that children and young people should be able to accept. (shrink)

Most academic papers on ethics in pandemics concentrate on the duties of healthcare professionals. This paper will consider non-professional healthcare workers: do they have a moral obligation to work during an influenza pandemic? If so, is this an obligation that outweighs others they might have, e.g., as parents, and should such an obligation be backed up by the coercive power of law? This paper considers whether non-professional healthcare workers—porters, domestic service workers, catering staff, clerks, IT support workers, etc.—have an obligation (...) to work during an influenza pandemic. It uses data collected as part of a study looking at the attitudes of healthcare workers to working during a pandemic to suggest the philosophical arguments explored. These include: being in a position to do good, the ethics of work, competing obligations to family members and in particular to children and the obligations of citizens in a state of national emergency. We also look at whether compulsory measures are justified to support a national health service during a health emergency. We conclude that even if they are, compulsion should not be restricted to non-professionals who happen to be working in the health service at the time. Rather, compulsion involving a larger pool of people with the relevant skills and abilities is more equitable. (shrink)

The paper describes an innovative structured workshop methodology in garden-based-learning called “Nature in Your Face” aimed at provoking a change in citizens behavior and engagement as a consequence of the emotional activation in response to disruptive artistic messages. The methodology challenges the assumption that the change needed to meet the carbon targets can be reached with incremental, non-invasive behavior engineering techniques such as nudging or gamification. Instead, it explores the potential of disruptive communication to push citizens out of their comfort (...) zones and into creative modes of re-creating futures. This is done by confronting us with consequences of consumption by means of art and eco-visualizations. The aim being to achieve awareness, mental flexibility, and spurring debate. Thus, we invite them to react – and act upon these reactions by communicating their feelings or thoughts. This is used as an entrance point for broader and/or deeper engagement in a structured three-step methodology; Framing: A disruptive element is introduced into the local environment. This triggers an emotional reaction, which then is taken up in a process of framing the problem and working with solutions. Twisting: in a guided process, the initial energy from the emotional confrontation is twisted into a creative exploration of innovative solutions, from the perspective of the children. Using: The last stage is using the developed solutions in the local social system. The methodology is being applied in cooperation with a primary school, and is iteratively adjusted and evaluated in a formative, action-research based approach scenario. NiYF is to stimulate societal engagement through deliberately confronting stakeholders with unexpected and potentially upsetting appearances of nature, climate effects, or carbon-neutral lifestyle scenarios. We have verified the practical usefulness and potential of the methodology and found that NiYF triggers societal engagement and transition, negotiating responsibilities and unlocking action potentials. We also found that eco-anxiety, denial, self-efficacy and cognitive dissonance form children’s understanding of plastic. The project marks a paradigm shift from creating knowledge to using knowledge to create action, and a focus on learning from evaluating and adapting the approach in the field. (shrink)

Theorists of democratic politics have long noted the importance of citizenship to the realization of liberal norms. Citizenship provides an artificial identity to members so that they may meet as equals in the public domain. The constraints of equality dictate that this identity will have a unitary face: citizenship must be a single status if it is to serve its stated purpose. However upon examination, citizenship appears to take multiple forms that reflect a range of political statuses that exist within (...) the confines of democratic politics. The civil, political and social rights of citizenship as well as the status of nationality come unbound from one another in ways that create multiple forms of partial, or semi-citizenship. Semi-citizenships provide states with opportunities to organize and govern otherwise "illegible" or "irrational" sub-sections of the population. They also often offer individuals the chance to adopt identities that diverge from those referenced by classic notions of the citizen. ;This dissertation combines a theoretical inquiry into the realities of modern citizenship with focused case studies examining instances of semi-citizenship. Each case study demonstrates the degree to which semi-citizenship is inevitable in democratic politics both by looking at various national contexts and by recalling the presence of such statuses throughout the history of the modern state. The statuses held by non-nationals, GLBTs, children and convicted felons demonstrate a unique set of state responses to forms of membership that do not correspond to the categories of citizen or non-citizen. Each of these statuses has existed in a wide range of temporal and geographic circumstances. Deprived of nationality, civil rights and political rights, these groups exist in democracies without being governed democratically, yet in some cases they are able to turn such statuses to their advantage. States compensate in a variety of ways ranging from special or additional rights, to benign neglect, to paternalism. While vulnerable to critique, these compensatory measures indicate an acceptance of the fact that citizenship is composed of several distinct forms of membership and may also provide opportunities for tailoring citizenship to meet individual needs. (shrink)

This collected volume addresses issues pertaining to education and migration from a variety of philosophical and ethical perspectives. -/- It is high time to critically analyze ethical issues in education under conditions of globalization, not only because migration and globalization are topical issues, but also because dominant academic approaches in the ethics and political philosophy of education have a tendency to narrow their focus on the education of sedentary citizens. However, many learners and educators experience high levels of both voluntary (...) and constrained mobility. The contributions to Education and Migration address issues pertaining to migration-related education from a variety of ethical and philosophical perspectives, including analytic applied ethics, continental philosophy, care ethics, Hegelian philosophy, the capability approach and theories of distributive justice. Distinguished scholars, as well as younger researchers, from a variety of disciplines (educational scholars, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists and sociologists) tackle in these eight essays core issues in the ethics and political philosophy of education, such as citizenship education or justice in access to education, from a perspective that takes human mobilities into account. -/- The collection puts a special emphasis on the diversity of migratory experiences, on the significance of education for citizens and non-citizen migrants, long-term residents and undocumented children, immigrants and return migrants. (shrink)

This article defends the normative relevance of the representation of non-citizens in democracies. I argue that representation within nation-states constitutes a realistic institutionalisation of the All-Affected Principle, allowing justificatory practices towards non-citizens and establishing political institutions that can realise the ideal of inclusion of all externally affected individuals. I defend electoral, non-electoral and surrogate forms of representation of affected interests that satisfy both the cosmopolitan concern for the equal consideration of interests and the statist defence of the importance of a (...) territorially and civically bounded demos. I assess piecemeal implementations of representation practices, namely reciprocal representation, ombudspersons, self-appointed representatives and deliberative and advocacy groups. Gradual and pluralised means of representation constitute necessary and feasible first steps to consider affected interests and offer an alternative route to an all-or-nothing defence of inclusion as national enfranchisement. (shrink)

The fourth-century B.C. was a period during which a large number of Greek cities were affected by civil wars, military conquests, and destruction, with the displacement of large numbers of men, women and children as a result. This has implications for the modern debate on Athenian attitudes to immigration, which normally focuses on just two groups of free non-citizens: adult, able-bodied men who moved to Athens voluntarily to take advantage of the city’s economic opportunities and on the free non- (...) class='Hi'>citizen population who had come to Athens as slaves and who stayed on after their manumission. This article argues that refugees were likely to have constituted a considerable component of the migration to Athens during certain troubled periods in the course of the fourth century. This means that the size of Athens’s immigrant population was likely to have fluctuated considerably, that many of the refugees would have been destitute, that women and children may have made up an even greater proportion of the non-citizen population than normally assumed, and, thus, that a considerable number of these immigrants would not have been able to contribute substantially to Athens’s grain trade or military. The implications of this for our assessment of the Athenian motives for admitting groups of refugees are discussed, and it is argued that the requirement that all male and all unaccompanied female immigrants had to find an Athenian sponsor and pay a special metic tax may have constituted a certain level of control over immigrant numbers. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of why the non-citizenship of offenders poses an obstacle to their criminal punishment. Several proposals are rejected, including Antony Duff’s proposal. It is proposed, instead, that governments are not authorized to punish any offender who cannot be attributed with the norm he violates. The government cannot attribute the norm that a non-citizen violates to him, if the non-citizen can raise in his favor the fact that he has no say over the law. Under (...) certain circumstances, such as when they are visiting, non-citizens cannot raise this point, and so can be attributed with the norms they violate. (shrink)

Does the concept of domination cast new light on issues that arise in the context of migration and citizenship? If citizenship is a status that provides protection from domination, understood as subjection to arbitrary interference, are non-citizens - whether outside or inside the state - necessarily subject to domination by virtue of being non-citizens? Does domination provide a useful basis for considering the harms that migrants suffer? If non-domination is a value to be promoted in politics, what are the implications (...) for the treatment of migrants and resident non-citizens? This book addresses issues of migration and citizenship within the frame of freedom, in terms of domination, understood as being subject to the threat of arbitrary interference. Coming from a variety of perspectives, the chapters examine the issues of migration controls, differential resident statuses, including temporary workers, refugees and long-term residents, and the conditions for access to citizenship in the light of these concerns. This book was published as a special issue of the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. (shrink)

In Europe and other regions of the world public debate concerning how many immigrants should be admitted, which rights those admitted should have, and which conditions can be required for access to citizenship is intense and enduring, and these have increasingly become central electoral issues. On the one hand, the harsh treatment of migrants is often a matter of public criticism; on the other hand, states are concerned about problems of welfare, security and social unrest that they have come to (...) associate with large-scale migration. At its most fundamental level, this debate concerns the question of how best to balance particularist principles of democratic self-determination and state sovereignty and universalist principles of individual freedom and human rights. The articles in this special issue examine whether the concept of domination can cast a distinctive light on the normative issues arising in this tension between state sovereignty and universal principles with respect to migration and the position of non-citizens in contemporary liberal democratic states. These issues arise both externally insofar as foreigners are subject to migration controls, and internally insofar as migrants live in states of which they are not full members. The issue thus examines the potential of domination as a concept to bring to bear on issues of migration controls, differential residence statuses and access to membership. (shrink)

The non-citizen is the new ?other?. From popular discourse to political pronouncements and academic research, the non-citizen has become one of the subjects du jour. Among the ranks of the non-citizen, one finds a lesser-known category of people which has yet to be considered seriously by liberal political theory ? the stateless. Thus far, liberal political theory has either ignored this category of persons or subsumed them under the subjects of immigration or refugeehood. The present article challenges (...) this theoretical exclusion in two ways. First, it analyses the treatment of statelessness within the works of three prominent theorists on just membership ? Michael Walzer, Seyla Benhabib and William Barbieri, Jr ? and contends that these authors ignore the stateless as a unique category of non-citizen. Secondly, it explains why statelessness demands a distinct theoretical framework than is currently provided for within liberal political theory. The article contends that just membership questions necessitate not simply looking at who is let in and what naturalization procedures should be extended to them, but also entails examining who has always been on the inside and to whom we need to justify their continued exclusion. (shrink)

In recent years, the flow of undocumented labor from the global South to richer nations has increased considerably. Many undocumented women workers find employment as caregivers for the dependent elderly, whose numbers are burgeoning in affluent countries. Here we present a profile of undocumented non-citizen caregivers in the United States and delineate some of the key injustices they suffer. After identifying the causal factors responsible for the flow of undocumented labor from the global South to richer nations like the (...) United States, we discuss the criteria that a theory of transnational justice must meet if it is to address the problem of justice for this population. We argue that Iris Young's "social connection" model of responsibility is a promising approach for helping to correct the injustices suffered by undocumented, non-citizen caregivers. (shrink)

There have been ongoing debates as to how, or even whether, we should clinically classify gender diversity in children through clinical classification manuals. So‐called ‘depathologizing’ is argued as being vital to address the stigma that these children are somehow disordered or sick. Yet one argument in favour of continued clinical classification for transgender and gender non‐conforming children is that it better facilitates access to specialist psychological support. I argue that whilst continued clinical classification offers a seemingly pragmatic (...) solution to ensuring access, it does in fact obscure our understanding of the individual needs of these children. In this paper I address fundamental issues that aim to better our understanding of need and thus why a child may benefit from specialist support. I do so by critiquing a paper I nearly wrote, which argued for the ongoing continued classification of gender incongruence in children. Ultimately, I argue that specialist psychological support and care should be driven by the needs of the individual child, as determined by the child and those involved with their care. By bettering our understanding as to why specialist psychological support may be beneficial for some, we move past the focus of such specialist support being provided because of the child’s gender diversity. Methodologically the paper may be unusual, in comparison to traditional normative counter‐argumentative bioethical position papers, but by presenting an argument for depathologization of gender diversity of children in this way there is also an alternative insight into the methods of bioethics. (shrink)

Drawing upon a developmental perspective, we investigated the differences in power acquisition between only and non-only children as well as the mediating role of cooperative and competitive orientations and the moderating role of dependency on parents. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two field studies in 155 part-time Master of Business Administration students and 375 senior students. Results showed that: non-only children were more likely to achieve higher rank at work than only children; only children were (...) less likely than non-only children to acquire power in organizations because they scored lower in cooperative orientation; however, the mediating effect of competitive orientation was not significant; the difference in cooperative orientation between only and non-only children was smaller when dependency on parents was high, whereas it became larger when dependency on parents was low. Our research contributes to the understanding of how family structure influences individual power acquisition. (shrink)

This study examined psychopathological correlates of implicit and explicit shame and guilt in 30 clinical and 129 non-clinical youths aged 8–17 years. Shame and guilt were measured explicitly via two self-reports and a parent report, and implicitly by means of an Implicit Association Test (IAT), while a wide range of psychopathological symptoms were assessed with questionnaires completed by children, parents, and teachers. The results showed no differences of implicit and explicit shame and guilt between the clinical and non-clinical group, (...) implying that dysregulation of these self-conscious emotions is not per definition associated with psychopathology. Correlational analyses indicated that self-reported explicit shame was positively associated with a broad range of internalizing psychopathology, while self-reported explicit guilt was associated with higher levels of anxiety and to some extent lower levels of externalizing psychopathology. Correlations with parent-rated shame and guilt revealed the same pattern of results but were in general weaker. Furthermore, implicit shame and guilt did not show significant correlations with the various measures of psychopathology. It can be concluded that the link between shame and guilt and psychopathology is complex, and partly dependent on the disorder under study and context-related factors defining the maladaptive nature of these self-conscious emotions. (shrink)

Children's understanding of the human mind has been found to be related to many social and experiential factors such as interactions with peers (Astington & Jenkins, 1995), parental socioeconomic a...

The Code of Federal Regulations permits harmful research on children who have not agreed to participate, but I will argue that it should be no more permissive of harmful research on such children than of harmful research on adults who have not agreed to participate. Of course, the Code permits harmful research on adults. Such research is not morally problematic, however, because adults must agree to participate. And, of course, the Code also permits beneficial research on children (...) without needing their explicit agreement. This sort of research is also not problematic, this time because paternalism towards children may be justifiable. The moral problem at the center of this paper arises from the combination of two potential properties of pediatric research, first that it might be harmful and second that its subjects might not agree to participate. In Section 2 of this article I explain how the Code permits harmful research on non-agreeing children. Section 3 contains my argument that we should no more permit harmful research on non-agreeing children than on non-agreeing adults. In Section 4, I argue that my thesis does not presuppose that pediatric assent has the same moral force that adult consent does. In Section 5, I argue that the distinction between non-voluntary and involuntary research is irrelevant to my thesis. In Section 6, I rebut an objection based on the power of parental permission. In Section 7 I suggest how the Code of Federal Regulations might be changed. (shrink)

The debate between legal constitutionalists and critics of constitutional rights and judicial review is an old and lively one. While the protection of minorities is a pivotal aspect of this debate, the protection of disenfranchised minorities has received little attention. Policy-focused discussion—of the merits of the Human Rights Act in Britain for example—often cites protection of non-citizen migrants, but the philosophical debate does not. Non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ therefore provide an interesting test case for the theory of rights (...) as trumps on ordinary representative politics. Are they the ultimate success story of the human rights framework? Or was Michael Walzer correct to describe government of denizens by citizens as a modern form of ‘tyranny’? This paper argues that neither liberal rights theorists nor democratic republicans provide a coherent response to the existence of denizens. Liberal rights theorists overstate the extent to which a politically powerless status can secure individual rights, while democratic republicans idealise the political process and wrongly assume that all those affected by laws are eligible for political participation. The paper outlines an alternative model for assessing the accountability of states to their non-citizen population, informed by the republican ideal of non-domination. It identifies gaps in state accountability to denizens–such as where there is inadequate diplomatic protection—and argues that these gaps are particularly troubling if their exit costs of leaving the state are high. (shrink)

Traditional conceptions of citizenship have privileged individuals’ relationships to the state. However, recent emphasis on civil society as a terrain of democratic empowerment suggests a shift in our ideas about what citizens properly do and the arenas in which they do it. Jaggar argues that it would be a mistake to privilege activism in civil society over traditional state-centered political activity and she contends that democratic citizenship may—and must—be performed in multiple arenas. For example, some non-governmental organizations have come to (...) depend on governmental support. And governments in affluent nations may be better providers than civil organizations of the critical social services, such as nutrition, healthcare, and education, on which many women and children depend. Feminists need enriched understandings of citizenship that recognize the indispensability of both national and transnational civil society but still maintain a strong focus on the state. (shrink)

This chapter is an investigation of the morality of medical deportation, the practice of returning undocumented migrants, despite their ill health and/or injuries, to their countries of origin. In Sect. 16.1, I look more closely at the nature of medical deportation. In Sect. 16.2, I argue that understanding the morality of medical deportation requires nonideal theory. In Sect. 16.3, I outline contractualism as a nonideal theory. In Sect. 16.4, I apply contractualism to medical deportation and make the case that, first, (...) there are in principle some cases in which medical deportation is morally permissible but, second, the standards that must be met in cases of morally permissible medical deportation are very high. In Sect. 16.5, I consider stakeholders other than the patient and the medical care facility and examine the ways in which effects on them might render medical deportation morally impermissible. I conclude that real-world cases of morally permissible medical deportation are rare at best, and there is little prospect of this situation changing. (shrink)

If Kant's account of rights had continued the "early modern Natural Law tradition", basing rights on some notion of human flourishing, there would be no difficulty about including socio-economic rights for the needy in his theory. However, his division of moral philosophy into Rechtslehre and Tugendlehre limits Rechtspflichten to duties that a moral agent can be coerced to fulfill. If a state is to give the needy statutory rights, the justification for using coercion on its citizens cannot be that they (...) have a duty of virtue to assist the needy. In order to determine whether such a justification can be found, the one innate socio-economic right Kant admits, a child's right to be cared for and educated, is examined and found to be a right against its parents, not against the state. Kant does, however, hold that a state should establish institutions to provide for abandoned children and for the poor in general. His justification for a state's use of coercion with regard to such statutory rights is considered and a criterion is suggested for the possible consent of its non-virtuous citizens to proposed measures for assistance to the needy. It is suggested that if advocates of aid to the needy cannot justify their proposals by such a criterion they will have to provide a very different account of rights than Kant gives in his Rechtslehre , which is concerned with the moral permissibility of using coercion. Wenn Kants Lehre von den subjektiven Rechten nichts anderes wäre als eine Fortsetzung der "ihr vorangehenden modernen Naturrechtstradition" und die subjektiven Rechte infolgedessen auf das eine oder andere Konzept von menschlichem Wohlergehen gestützt hätte, dann wäre es nicht sonderlich schwierig, sozio-ökonomische Rechte für die Bedürftigen in diese Lehre einzubauen. Nun schränkt Kants Einteilung der Moralphilosophie in Rechtslehre und Tugendlehre den Begriff der Rechtspflicht allerdings auf diejenigen Pflichten ein, zu deren Erfüllung ein Mensch gezwungen werden kann. Deshalb kann, wenn ein Staat den Bedürftigen durch ein positives Gesetz irgendwelche Rechte auf Hilfe gewährt, die Rechtfertigung der Anwendung von staatlichem Zwang nicht darin gesucht werden, daß die dadurch in Anspruch genommenen Personen die Tugendpflicht haben, die Bedürftigen zu unterstützen. Um festzustellen, ob sich staatlicher Zwang in bezug auf solche Hilfspflichten überhaupt rechtfertigen läßt, erörtert der Beitrag das Recht des Kindes auf Fürsorge und Ausbildung als das eine und einzige angeborene sozio-ökonomische Recht, das Kant akzeptiert. Freilich ist das Recht des Kindes ein Recht gegen seine Eltern und nicht gegen den Staat. Gleichwohl nimmt Kant an, daß der Staat Einrichtungen schaffen sollte, die für verlassene Kinder und für die Armen im allgemeinen zu sorgen haben. Der Beitrag untersucht die Rechtfertigung, die Kant für die Anwendung von staatlichem Zwang zur Durchsetzung solcher positiv-gesetzlicher Rechte gibt, und arbeitet die Gründe dafür heraus, warum der nicht tugendhafte Staatsbürger in die vorgesehenen Hilfsmaßnahmen für die Bedürftigen einwilligen könnte. Wenn sich die Verfechter von Hilfsmaßnahmen für die Bedürftigen außerstande sehen, ihre Vorschläge auf Gründe dieser Art zu stützen, dann werden sie mit einem Konzept von subjektivem Recht aufwarten müssen, das sich von dem Konzept Kants von Recht und Rechtslehre , bei dem es allein um die moralische Erlaubtheit von Zwangsmaßnahmen geht, ganz erheblich unterscheidet. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ stresses the right of people to choose how they organize their personal lives and claim identities. Support and interest groups are seen as playing an important role in the pursuit of recognition for these intimate choices, by elaborating visible and positive cultures that invade broader public spheres. Most studies on intimate citizenship take into consideration the exclusions these groups encounter when negotiating their differences with society at large. However, much less attention is paid to (...) the ways in which these groups internalize the surrounding ideologies, identity categories and hierarchies that pervade society and constrain their recognition as full citizens. In contrast, this paper aims to emphasize the reproduction of otherness within alternative spheres of life, and to reveal the ambiguities and complexities involved in their dialectic relationship with society at large. To address this issue, the paper focuses on the role that ‘adoption cultures’ of Flemish adoptive parents with children from Ethiopia play in the pursuit of being recognized as ‘proper’ families and full citizens. The ethnographic research among adoptive parents and adoption professionals shows a defensive discourse and action that aims at empowering against potential problems, as well as a tendency to other the adoptive child by pathologizing its non‐normativity. By showing the strong embeddedness of adoptive families' practices of familial and cultural construction in larger cultural frames of selfing and othering, characterized by biologism and nativism, one begins to understand the limits of their capacity to realize full citizenship. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the features of only child status related to physical health, mathematics achievement, and school feelings and expectations from a different perspective. A representative sample of 91,619 Grade 4 students with an average age of 10.4 ± 0.7, among which 28,631 were only children, were assessed. We used propensity score matching and the average treatment effects on the treatment to analyze data. The treatment was the only child of a family. The results indicated that only (...) children have better academic achievement and school feelings, while non-only children have better physical status and anaerobic fitness. In addition, gender and rural vs. urban areas differences were also explored. The adverse situation for rural only boys is emphasized for families, researchers, and governments to focus on. Some suggestions are given under the Two- and Three-Child Policy. (shrink)

Most people have a sense of obligation to family members that is more powerful than the law in compelling compliance with its demands. When families dissolve, however, the power of such nonlegal norms often dissolves as well. The question then becomes what the law should require in their stead. This Article is part of a larger series of studies that have examined this question by asking what citizens believe the law should demand, using surveys of persons called to jury service (...) in Tucson, Arizona. Respondents are asked to imagine they are the judge charged with deciding a series of cases in which the facts are systematically varied so as to reveal the implicit principles that survey respondents employ in deciding them. Previously reported results in this project have examined studies of the amount of child support that people believe appropriate, and how they believe child custody disputes should be resolved. This study examines lay views about alimony. It finds considerable divergence between American law in practice and the views of American citizens as to what the law should be. Survey respondents were willing to award alimony considerably more often than the law now does. More clearly, in deciding whether to allow an alimony award, they care most of all about the claimant’s responsibility as primary caretaker of the couple’s minor children, to some extent about the partners’ marital status and their relational duration, and very little at all about the claimant’s history of having cared for the couple’s now-grown children. Moreover, the way these factors affect our respondents’ judgments about alimony are not very dependent on who they are. Our respondents did vary among themselves, of course, in the frequency with which they allowed alimony, but they varied relatively little in how factors such as marriage, relational duration, the presence of minor children or the history of care for now-grown children affected their judgments. The citizen consensus reflected by these patterns differs, however, from the prevailing legal rules, the views of many scholars, and the recommendations of the American Law Institute. This striking discrepancy is interesting although not always surprising. Our respondents’ willingness to award alimony to non-marital partners, for example, is consistent with the law of some other Western countries, even if not with American law, suggesting perhaps that it is American law, not our respondents, that is peculiar. Perhaps it is also understandable that our respondents seem more concerned with the welfare of the couple’s current minor children than with addressing perceived inequities in the current economic circumstances of the adult partners. In any event, the views of our respondents pose a challenge to policymakers. Given the dearth of theoretical justification for current American practice, its rejection by American citizens seems all the more telling. (shrink)

The main question is whether chemically induced mood enhancement is likely to make us happier, or whether it may rather have detrimental effects on our long-term happiness. This question is divided into three: What effects are mood -enhancing drugs likely to have on the long-term happiness of the person who takes these drugs? How would these drugs affect the happiness of the immediate environment of the people who take them, e.g. children or spouses? What effects would a wide-spread use (...) of mood -enhancing drugs have on society as a whole, and how would this affect the long-term happiness of its citizens? My answers to these questions are very tentative, partly because we know too little about what non-hedonic effects these drugs can be expected to have. It is possible that these drugs would have detrimental effects on some determinants of happiness, however, e.g. marriage and friendship, social and physical activity, rational problem-solving and mental effectiveness, political participation and interpersonal trust. But on the other hand, there are also a number of determinants of happiness that might be positively affected by a wide-spread and frequent use of mood -enhancing drugs. (shrink)

The deeper meaning of education, says Dewey in his Human Nature and Conduct (1922), which distinguishes the justly honored profession from that of mere trainer, is that a future new society of changed purposes and desires may be created by a deliberately humane treatment of the impulses of youth (p. 69). For Dewey, a truly humane education consists in an intelligent direction of native activities in the light of the possibilities and necessities of the social situation (p. 70). Student impulse (...) and interest are not to be suppressed nor continually vented in unrestrained expression. In view of the plasticity of youth, there is little danger that allowing the role of student interest will lead away from important objectives of the curriculum. Education which respects the integrity of the student is a prerequisite of the kind of educated public suited for fuller participation in the democratic processes which properly direct and reconstruct our social life. The citizen appropriate for a democratic society is neither the dull conformist nor the superficial, gushing, non-conformist or sensualist. Individual impulse and initiative is neither to be damned up nor frivolously expressed. Meaningful participation and fuller social reconstruction require that we respect the social conditions for the possibility of knowledge and its growth, and this is more easily achieved, and more broadly appealing, when we speak of plans for the school environment. Respect for the cognitive and developmental needs of our own children and young people is fundamental to the self-respect of any viable society. Education could be philosophical praxis for a better world. (shrink)

Can appealing to children’s rights help to solve the non-identity problem in cases of procreation? A number of philosophers have answered affirmatively, arguing that even if children cannot be harmed by being born into disadvantaged conditions, they may nevertheless be wronged if those conditions fail to meet a minimal standard of decency to which all children are putatively entitled. This paper defends the tenability of this view by outlining and responding to five prominent objections that have been (...) raised against it in the contemporary literature: the identifiability objection; the non-existence objection; the waiving of rights objection, the lack of legitimate complaint objection; and the unfairness objection. (shrink)

Since 2014, British schools have been required to ‘actively promote’ the value of ‘mutual respect’ to the children in their care. This is relatively unproblematic: liberals are agreed that good citizenship education will involve teaching mutual respect. However, there is disagreement over how ‘respect’ should be understood and what it should imply for norms of respectful classroom discussion. Some political liberals have indicated that when engaging in discussion in the classroom, students should provide only neutral reasons to defend their (...) views. This paper provides a number of arguments against this claim. For example, I argue that this norm relies on a distorted understanding of what it is to respect others and that it stifles the development of civic and epistemic virtue in the next generation of citizens. Even from within the perspective of political liberalism, there are good reasons to favour critical discussion of non-neutral reasons. Education policy should therefore accord greater priority to discussion of students’ actual motivating reasons than to discussion constrained by a norm of neutral discourse. (shrink)

The building and maintaining of a tolerant society requires both a general policy of toleration on the behalf of the state, as well as a minimal number of acts of intolerance by individual citizens towards their fellow citizens. It is this second area of citizen‐citizen relations that is of most interest for education policy. There are those who argue that the best way to achieve a tolerant society is by encouraging, or even requiring, the respect and appreciation of (...) difference amongst a citizenry. In this paper I argue that using education to encourage the respect and appreciation of difference is deeply problematic for both adults and children. I argue that it is a poor servant of those whose differences it is meant to protect, and crucially that it cannot be justified on the key liberal premise of protecting the freedom of individuals to live their (non‐harming) lives as they see fit. I conclude by putting forward the educational alternative of respecting the basic rights of citizens irrespective of your view of their differences. (shrink)

Modes of engagement. The reader may engage with this article in several different modes. It could be approached in straightforward, if quirky, sociological mode as an exploration of the idea that the literature on post‐divorce arrangements and step‐families, and especially literature, that attends to children's contact with their non‐resident fathers, can be re‐read in order to consider the issue of contact via communication technologies, a form of parent‐child contact not captured in the ways that ‘contact’ is measured in present (...) studies. Of interest in itself, perhaps, this point of entrance opens up onto further questions about the management of human affect, and how rearrangements in lines of affect have reverberations beyond those captured by an Oedipal model, insofar as they are not about contact and severance but are various kinds of displacement for all involved. In particular, I am concerned here with the rearrangement of affect for the fathers as their role becomes dispersed, shared and intermittent, a set of problematics that also includes the various ways in which the very body of the mother is removed or circumvented. On a second level the article speaks to a different literature, in that it is an elaboration of the notion of the network as a dispersed hybrid that entails both human and non‐human entities, within which any absolute distinction between human and non‐human is to be prob‐lematised but, I wish to argue, without losing the specificity of human interaction, that is, the questions of human emotion, human desire and human ethics. This elaboration moves toward a critique of the very ubiquity and endless utility of the network idea through the suggestion that its appeal may conceal moments and movements where more unexpected effects are taking place. Indeed, I suggest that there may be some twists in the familial dynamics of ‘households that no longer hold’, where some selected thoughts from a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically around the notion of ‘becoming’, may lead one to read other stories than that proffered through the master trope of the network, ones that are maybe closer to some of the original impulses behind actor‐network theory. And thirdly, the article may be engaged as a reflection on contemporary ways in which familial life is governed in contemporary Britain. The family as both a site of economic arrangements and a site of the arrangement of human affect‐sexuality‐reproduction, are held together and in tension through forms of contemporary government of the family. Contemporary rationalities of familial morality seek to make its members responsible parents without intervening to the extent that they would seek to make them responsible spouses, seen here in the implication that fathers' economic responsibilities for children are not co‐extensive with their emotional connections to women.1 As opposed to any other familial figure ‐ such as the pater familias or the mother of Donzelot's thesis ‐who may have been the link between family and government, it is through the promotion of the figure of the child that familial life is presently and predominantly governed. It is my contention here that it is through the promise of non‐government that a notion of an ethical parent is promoted, whose duties to his children and his nation‐state should mean that the former should not need to be dependent upon the latter. Alongside other policies that seek to simultaneously promote familial life and paid work‐life through the notion of the ethical citizen, and the attendant judgements of those dependent on welfare state provision, contemporary policies surrounding the household that no longer holds expose the various and contradictory modes by which families are ‘made up’ within contemporary regimes. (shrink)

Non-pharmaceutical interventions, including social distancing, quarantine, and isolation, are a potentially attractive means to limit the transmission of a pandemic virus. Many of these interventions are directed at children given children’s disproportionate role in amplifying epidemics. The ethics of non-pharmaceutical interventions can be analyzed using Nancy Kass’ ethics framework for public health. Such an analysis highlights the limited data supporting these interventions’ effectiveness. It also suggests the framework itself needs to be expanded to consider harms other than constraints (...) on liberty and to consider affirmative programs to mitigate these broader harms. (shrink)

Culturally diverse liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic are currently faced with serious questions about the education of their future citizens. What is the balance between the need for social cohesion, and at the same time dealing justly with the demands for exemptions and accommodations from cultural and religious minorities? In contemporary Britain, the importance of this question has been recently highlighted by the concern to develop political and educational strategies capable of countering the influence of extremist voices, (...) in both the majority and minority communities. Starting from recent debates in North America about possible accommodations to meet the concerns of non-liberal religious groups, the book goes on to examine several issues centered on education in culturally-diverse societies. Neil Burtonwood argues persuasively that the work of Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher and historian of ideas, has considerable potential for illuminating questions about a properly liberal response to pluralism, and the education of cultural minority children in a liberal democracy. This is the first book to bring his writing to bear on education. Berlin's liberalism is distinctive in attending to the benefits that individuals gain from their memberships of cultural identity groups and religious communities, while remaining committed to Enlightenment values based on individual freedom. Yet his need to find compromises to balance the claims of individuals and groups makes Berlin's version of liberal pluralism so relevant to many vital questions of education policy and practice that concern philosophers of education today. (shrink)

The claim that corporations are not people is perhaps the most frequently voiced criticism of the United States Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. There is something obviously correct about this claim. While the nature and extent of obligations with respect to group agents like corporations and labor unions is far from clear, it is manifest in moral understanding and deeply embedded in legal practice that there is no general requirement to treat them like natural persons. Group (...) agents may be denied rights to marry, vote, or run for public office. More generally the need to guard against discrimination, the core injustice in racism and sexism, has no direct application to the case of group agents. There is also something obviously incorrect about the claim that corporations are not people. The legal practice of treating some group agents as persons under law is ancient, found already in Roman law at the time of Justinian. In this essay I propose that reflection on this tension reveals that fundamental revision to the doctrine of legal personhood is needed. More specifically I propose that legal personhood be decomposed into at least two elements—standing and liability—and that legal systems reject the principle that an entity possesses one just in case it possesses the other. The import of this change ramifies broadly. Decomposing legal personhood not only enables a satisfactory account of the status of corporations and labor unions, who as such have liability but not standing, it also enables a satisfactory account of the status of those who as such have standing but not liability: severely mentally disabled persons, very young children, and non-human animals with phenomenal consciousness but lacking capacities to understand reasons and justifications. (shrink)

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Kevin McDonough’s essay, on multinational civic education, develops a conception of this that allows for both federal and minority national groups to reinforce conditional civic attachments. This ‘conditionalist’ view of civic education is necessary in multinational federal societies, he argues, because appeals to one set (...) of national attachments may exacerbate rather than alleviate particular injustices in particular circumstances. For example, McDonough argues that when aboriginal women and children are the victims of injustice at the hands of tribal institutions and leaders, they must be able to appeal to their fellow non-aboriginal citizens and federal institutions for assistance, although this is not possible unless citizens – aboriginal and otherwise – have come to regard attachments to the minority nation as conditional rather than absolute. Similarly, citizens whose primary identification is to the federal society must be able to recognize that some of their fellow citizens legitimately have a minority nation as the object of their primary loyalty – otherwise, efforts to support federal intervention in minority national affairs will be vulnerable to forces of cultural insensitivity and arrogance, rather than of liberal justice. (shrink)

The question of whether or not children may be used as subjects in non-therapeutic research projects has generated a great deal of debate and received answers varying from 'no, never' to 'yes, if societal interests are served'. It has been claimed that a Kantian, deontological ethics would necessarily rule out such research, since valid consent would be impossible. The present paper gives a deontological argument for allowing children to be subjects in certain types of research.

It may be that the appropriate demographic objective of Israel as a country in which the Jewish people realize their right to self-determination is the existence of a Jewish public in Israel in numbers sufficient to allow its members to live in the framework of their culture. It may also be that the appropriate demographic objective of Israel should be the existence of a Jewish majority within it. While I discussed this issue elsewhere; here I discuss the legitimate means for (...) the realization of these goals. Israel’s principal means for realizing these objectives thus far has been its Law of Return and its Citizenship Law. These laws afford every Jew anywhere in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen of the State of Israel. Many liberals and left-wingers consider these laws to be tainted with racism, because they regard any nationally-based preference with regard to immigration to be a form of racism. In the first part of my paper I argue against this position. I offer three justifications for nationality-based preferences in immigration. However, the fact that nationality-based priorities in immigration are not necessarily racist and that there are legitimate human interests justifying such priorities, does not entail that the specific priorities manifested by Israel’s Law of Return and its other immigration and citizenship policies are just. These policies in effect mean that all Jews and only Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel and to become fully integrated in Israeli life. In the second part of the paper, I argue that these two aspects of Israel’s immigration policies, namely, its almost categorical inclusion of all Jews and its almost categorical exclusion of all non-Jews, are somewhat problematic. In addition to the Law of Return, a number of additional ways to ultimately increase the number of Jews in relation to the number of Arabs have been proposed and even adopted in Israel in recent years. During the incumbency of the fifteenth Knesset, right-wing Member of Knesset Michael Kleiner tabled a draft bill intended “to encourage people that do not identify with the Jewish character of the state [i.e., Palestinian citizens of Israel C.G.] to leave.” The Israeli Government later tabled a bill—that was eventually passed—to amend the Israeli Citizenship Law in a manner that would deny Arabs who are Israeli citizens and have married Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories the right to live in Israel with their spouses and children. In the third part of the paper, I clarify why in contrast to granting Jews priority in immigration, both the aforementioned laws, namely, Kleiner’s law and the law pertaining to family unification are racist and are therefore morally unacceptable. (shrink)