Suchergebnisse

AbstractWelfare conditionality (WC) is a crucial ingredient of social policies around the world. Welfare conditionality demands that recipients meet specific behavioral goals to either access the benefit for the first time or retain the benefit's ongoing advantages. This article argues that any justification of WC must seriously consider procedural protections (PPs) and how they shape the policy's outcome. Procedural protections are institutional principles and mechanisms that guarantee fairness in the administrative decision-making process. This essay normatively evaluates appeal procedures—a key component of PPs—in the context of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) implemented during the last two decades in Latin America. It explains why CCTs often fail to provide their recipients with adequate appeal procedures to protect them against administrative errors and poor decision making. These plans can be unfair redistributive programs not because of the type of conditionalities they promote but, rather, due to the limited PPs they provide.

Essential services are commonly defined as those services whose interruption might inflict substantial harm on the population at large. Police, firefighters, and emergency medical professionals are paradigmatic examples of essential service providers. In recent years, some governments have resolved that formal primary education should be added to this list of essential services. The immediate practical implication of designating education as an essential service is that workers tasked with providing this service will face new limitations or even outright prohibitions on their freedom to strike. This paper analyzes the harm-based justification for declaring formal primary public education an essential service—that is, to consider if education is one service whose interruption might inflict substantial harm on the population at large. I argue that there is no compelling case to be made for changing the status of primary education from non-essential to essential and discuss why teachers' right to strike should be protected. On the one hand, it is unclear to what extent educators' participation in strikes can produce a type of harm that justifies limiting their right to strike. On the other hand, restricting that right has costs that must be weighed in any plausible harm-based account.

Political theorists affiliated with Latin American and Caribbean academic institutions rarely publish in flagship journals or other important outlets of the discipline. Similarly, they are not members of the editorial boards of high-ranking, generalist or subfield journals, and their research is not included in the political theory canon of what students from other regions study. The aim of this article is not to explain the origins of this silence—though some possibilities are considered—but to describe some of the ways in which it manifests and why it matters. I argue that the exclusion or omission of Latin American and Caribbean voices is a negative outcome not only for Latin American and Caribbean political theorist but for the political theory subfield at large. In response, I defend a context-sensitive approach to political theory, which has the potential to provide greater voice to Latin American and Caribbean scholars while improving theoretical analysis of Latin America and Caribbean.

In recent years, some cities and localities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere have adopted or intend to adopt one potential solution to the difficulties inherent in addressing the needs of street beggars: diverted giving schemes (DGSs). A DGS is an institutional response designed to motivate people to donate money in charity boxes or donation meters rather than directly to street beggars. Their advocates believe that DGSs are both more efficient and more ethically permissible than direct giving to individual beggars. This article asks whether and how a DGS can be justified. It offers a normative evaluation of the main idea behind this policy, namely, that anonymous and spontaneous donations to charity boxes are in themselves an adequate policy instrument to address the problem of street begging. Ultimately, the paper argues against this idea and develops the case that DGSs can potentially compromise our ability to act on our moral duties toward truly needy beggars. Moreover, it explains why and under which circumstances this kind of program can potentially and seriously interfere with the freedom and opportunities of individuals in the begging population.

AbstractIn this article, I argue that a participatory income (PI)—the proposal originally presented by Anthony Atkinson in 1996—can potentially perform better than an unconditional basic income (UBI) in terms of addressing unmet social needs. I explain why we should expect that unmet social needs can be better alleviated by the recipients of a PI rather than by the voluntary actions of UBI recipients. In particular, the argument presented here seeks to develop a particularly forgotten point in the PI debate—namely, the importance of using income transfer programmes as a policy tool to motivate people to engage in socially valuable activities.

Is mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients morally justifiable? This article argues that none of the three justifications typically offered in support of drug testing—that is, paternalist, contractualist, and harm-based justifications—are normatively persuasive. On the one hand, I claim that these normative justifications do not warrant the violation of welfare recipients' privacy. That is, I argue that they fail to make the case that the benefits of drug testing outweigh its costs in terms of welfare recipients' privacy. On the other hand, I argue that even if we accept any of these normative justifications for drug testing, current background conditions in the US make the implementation of this policy unfair in practice. First, the enforcement of drug testing can strengthen existing injustices. Second, under current circumstances, drug testing policies are likely to engender moral obligations which cannot be fulfilled.

AbstractThis article offers a novel defence of participation income (PI). It claims that there are pragmatic and normative reasons to prefer PI over alternative redistributive policies, such as an unconditional basic income and workfare programmes. In particular, it argues that PI should be conceived as a particular type of civic service programme designed to address a large number of unmet social needs that are not met by entrepreneurs in the marketplace. The article ends by addressing five objections that can be raised against its argument.

La idea de garantizar un ingreso incondicional y universal a cada miembro de la comunidad política puede ser rastreada algunos siglos atrás en los escritos de Thomas Paine o Joseph Charlier. En los últimos años este tópico se ha retomado en el debate normativo y político. Dentro de las nuevas iniciativas se destacan la propuesta de ingreso básico universal (Universal Basic Income) desarrollada principalmente por Philippe Van Parijs, y la propuesta de subsidio de capital único (Stakehoulder Society) presentada por Bruce Ackerman y Anne Alstott. Ambos planes redistributivos mantienen numerosas similitudes y diferencias tanto en el plano normativo como fáctico. En este trabajo realizo un análisis estrictamente normativo de ambas propuestas, centrado en los objetivos definitorios de cada una d