Gottfried Schweiger

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Text werde ich zwei Thesen entfalten: Erstens, dass romantische Liebe Teil einer guten Jugend ist. Liebe als Teil einer guten Jugend hat mehrere Bestandteile: Jugendliche sollten romantische Liebe erleben können, wenn sie es wollen. Sie sollten das Wissen und die Fähigkeiten erlangen, romantische Liebe zu verstehen und adäquat mit den positiven Potentialen und auch den Risiken umgehen zu können. Jugendliche sollten lernen, die möglichen Enttäuschungen, die mit romantischer Liebe verbunden sein können, adäquat zu verarbeiten und darin gegebenenfalls Unterstützung erfahren. Jugendliche sollten darin befähigt werden, die sozialen und kulturellen Normen und Praktiken, die die Vorstellungen romantischer Liebe prägen, zu reflektieren und zu hinterfragen. Zweitens ist zu klären, welche moralischen Rechte und Pflichten die Eltern und staatliche Institutionen haben. Ich plädiere dafür, diese so zu verstehen, dass sie Jugendliche in der Erlangung und adäquaten Auslebung romantischer Liebe unterstützen und ihnen bei der Entwicklung dieser Fähigkeiten die notwendigen Ressourcen zur Verfügung stellen sollten.

This volume contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary controversies about the moral, legal and political status of children and childhood. It comprises essays by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds on diverse theoretical problems and public policy controversies that bear upon different facets of the life of children in contemporary liberal democracies. The book is divided into three major parts that are each organized around a common general theme. The first part (“Children and Childhood: Autonomy, Well-Being and Paternalism”) focusses on key concepts of an ethics of childhood. Part two (“Justice for Children”) contains chapters that are concerned with the topics of justice for children and justice during childhood. The third part (“The Politics of Childhood”) deals with issues that concern the importance of `childhood´ as a historically contingent political category and its relevance for the justification and practical design of political processes and institutions that affect children and families.

This book brings together philosophical approaches to explore the relation of recognition and poverty. This volume examines how critical theories of recognition can be utilized to enhance our understanding, evaluation and critique of poverty and social inequalities. Furthermore, chapters in this book explore anti-poverty policies, development aid and duties towards the (global) poor. This book includes critical examinations of reflections on poverty and related issues in the work of past and present philosophers of recognition. This book hopes to contribute to the ongoing and expanding debate on recognition in ethics, political and social philosophy by focusing on poverty, which is one highly important social and global challenge. “If one believed that the theme of “recognition” had been theoretically exhausted over the last couple of years, this book sets the record straight. The central point of all the studies collected here is that poverty is best understood in its social causes, psychic consequences and moral injustice when studied within the framework of recognition theory. Regardless of how recognition is defined in detail, poverty is best captured as the absence of all material and cultural conditions for being recognized as a human being. Whoever is interested in the many facets of poverty is well advised to consult this path-breaking book.” Axel Honneth, Columbia University.

Unemployment is one of the greatest social problems all around the world including in modern capitalistic welfare states. Therefore its social critique is a necessary task for any critical social philosophy such as Axel Honneth's recognition approach, which understands social justice in terms of social conditions of recognition. This paper aims to develop an evaluation of unemployment and its moral weight from this perspective. I will lay out the recognition approach and present a moral evaluation of unemployment as socially unjust based on the knowledge of its negative consequences for those affected. I will then discuss two objections to this conclusion, namely that a mere correlation of suffering and moral wrongness is not enough and that there are legitimate differences in the experience of recognition which could justify the existence of unemployment as deserved. In the next section, I will then refute both objections and first show that unemployment can be understood as socially unjust based on the knowledge that it is involuntary and that the unemployed are not responsible for their condition. Then I will discuss the relationship between the idea of meritocracy and unemployment to examine the assumption of unemployment as being deserved. I will finally conclude that unemployment is not a necessary side effect of meritocracy and that there are good reasons to argue for a moral and justified obligation to provide an actual access to paid work for all who want to work. However, such changes face serious obstacles and are not likely to happen under the current interpretation of meritocracy and social esteem which are one-sided and flawed. Keywords: unemployment, recognition, meritocracy, social critique, Axel Honneth.

Although the philosophical literature on both poverty and childhood is certainly increasing, the status of children living in poverty has been largely ignored as a philosophical subject. The condition of children and the justice-related issues that derive from it compel us to look more deeply into the sources and responsibilities of and towards poverty during childhood. We highlight four challenges raised by studying child poverty, and the mechanisms through which philosophical analysis may aid in addressing them. Philosophy can work as an important tool to conceptualise what child poverty is, assess the limitations of current research on the subject, normatively evaluate how to address this condition, and offer guidelines for how society, law and the polity ought to act in response to it. Child poverty must be looked at from what it is in itself, and how it intersects with other features of the child’s life which may exacerbate it. The role of the family is fundamental in any evaluation of what child poverty is, and how to tackle it. Understanding child poverty in the vacuum omits fundamental sources of it, and solutions to it. Other intersecting conditions such as the social and cultural ethos, citizenship status, gender or disability may play a fundamental role also. The second section provides an overview of the volume.

As a matter of justice children have several claims and are entitled to a range of goods. In this paper I will argue that one of these goods is positive self-relations. Since poverty during childhood distorts the proper development and experience of these three self-relations it violates children’s claims to justice. I will defend this argument in three steps: I will introduce and examine three types of positive self-relations and argue that children are entitled to all of these; I will move on to examine the concept of humiliation and argue that acts of humiliating are unjust even if the victims do not experience them as humiliating; finally, I will provide six arguments as to why it is humiliating for children to live in poverty. The six arguments presented in the last section are: poverty is connected to other forms of injustice; poverty is undeserved and represents an arbitrary feature of affected children for which they cannot be held responsible; poverty is widespread among children; poverty is imposed on children because they are part of a larger social group; poverty is an enduring humiliation and not just an occasional incident; the humiliation caused by poverty targets the particular vulnerability of children as developing beings. Based on the humiliating nature of poverty, which violates children’s claims to the aforementioned types of positive self-relations, I can conclude that it is unjust for children to live in poverty.

Dieses Kapitel stellt die Frage, was gelingende soziale Beziehungen in der Jugend sind und wie sie unter den Bedingungen der Digitalisierung verwirklicht werden können. Den ethischen Hintergrund stellt dabei das Konzept einer guten Jugend dar, auf die Jugendliche einen moralischen Anspruch haben. Der Sinn der hier vorgestellten Überlegungen ist also, herauszuarbeiten, welche Rolle digitale Beziehungen für eine gute Jugend spielen und wie wiederum das Konzept einer guten Jugend genutzt werden kann, um einige aktuelle Entwicklungen des Umgangs mit Techniken unter die Lupe der Ethik zu nehmen. Damit ist dann auch angesprochen, was über die Verantwortung der direkt und indirekt involvierten Akteur:innen, insbesondere jener, die die (technischen, sozialen, rechtlichen) Rahmenbedingungen setzen, gesagt werden kann.

Den Sozialismus als Alternative zum Liberalismus in einem philosophischen Handbuch darzustellen, ist mit zwei gravierenden Schwierigkeiten verbunden. Erstens gibt es nicht den Sozialismus als einheitliche Denkschule, sondern eine Tradition, in der sich unterschiedliche Varianten herausgebildet haben, die sich teils heftig bekämpften. Es gibt einen „klassischen“ Sozialismus ausgehend von MarxMarx, Karl, aber auch anarchistische und religiöse Sozialismen genauso wie sozialdemokratische und liberale Strömungen, die sich noch dem Sozialismus und seiner Idee verpflichtet sehen.

In this short introduction, I highlight the relation between recognition and migration and explore the potentials of a critical theory of recognition. Migration in all its forms and its causes is by no means a new phenomenon, but it has become more intense in some parts of the world, and, especially in Europe, its perception by politics and the population has changed. Migration is also widely discussed in ethics and political philosophy. So what contribution can a critical theory of recognition make here? Recognition is an analytical concept, which can also be employed in empirical research to better understand the claims and living conditions of migrants. Recognition is also a normative and ethical concept, which helps to formulate what a just society owes migrants and to conceptualize their moral rights. Finally, I will also say a few words about the relation of recognition and migration before the background of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this paper, we aim to clarify two central assumptions, which allow to specify what justice for children implies in the Capability Approach. First, we argue that an adequate currency of justice for children consists in a bundle of functionings, which develops into a bundle of capabilities in the course of childhood; the currency of justice for children is dynamic, not static. Second, we discuss how the respective functionings and capabilities should be selected. In particular, we suggest four criteria. They imply that there is not only a change through time from a bundle of functionings to a bundle of capabilities as the currency of justice for children, but that the composition of the bundle itself gets modified.

ABSTRACT Based on Honneth's distinction of recognition in love, respect and social esteem, the social suffering of refugees is criticized in this contribution as an experience of disrespect. In the first part, I will address the fact that moral claims to recognition have a temporal dimension. Then I will ask what role the duration of their flight, the waiting in camps and until admission play for the social suffering of refugees. I will highlight the particular vulnerability of refugees during this time and distinguish different forms of disrespect - with regard to love, social esteem, and respect and rights - faced by them. In the final section, I pose the question which individuals and institutions are responsible for enabling conditions of recognition for refugees.

In Austria, foster parents are screened and selected by local child and youth welfare services, and then they are required to complete several weeks of training. This essay is a personal reflection on this training, which I completed with my wife in early 2022. However, I am also writing this personal reflection from an ethical perspective informed by my work as an ethicist and philosopher at the university. Topics that concern me are the understanding of child and youth welfare, the parental role of foster parents, the focus of the training on practical knowledge from experience, and the relationship between experts and foster parents.

The problem of poverty is global in scope and has devastating consequences for many essential aspects of life: health, education, political participation, autonomy, and psychological well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty presents the current state of philosophical research on poverty in its breadth and depth. It features 39 chapters divided into five thematic sections: Concepts, theories, and philosophical aspects of poverty research Poverty in the history of Western philosophy and philosophical traditions Poverty in non-Western philosophical thought Key ethical concepts and poverty Social and political issues The handbook not only addresses questions concerning individual, collective, and institutional responsibility towards people in extreme poverty and the moral wrong of poverty, but it also tackles emerging applied issues that are connected to poverty such as gender, race, education, migration, and climate change. Additionally, it features perspectives on poverty from the history of Western philosophy, as well as non-Western views that explore issues unique to the Global South. Finally, the chapters in the first part provide an overview of the most important aspects of social science poverty research, which serves as an excellent resource for philosophers and philosophy students unfamiliar with how poverty is empirically researched in practice. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty is an essential resource for students and researchers in philosophy, political science, sociology, development studies, and public policy who are working on poverty.

Im Anschluss an Überlegungen von Michael Zichy, dass Armut und Menschenbilder auf dreifache Weise verknüpft sind – (1) sie sind relevant für individuelle Überzeugungen, Gefühle und Handlungen, die Menschen gegenüber armen Menschen haben, (2) sie beeinflussen institutionelle Arrangements und (3) sie wirken auf Menschen in Armut und deren Selbstbild – sollen hier spezifische Aspekte, die für die individuelle, gesellschaftliche und staatliche Wahrnehmung – Charakterisierung – von Menschen in Armut und sozialer Ausgrenzung bedeutsam sind, nachgezeichnet werden. Zunächst geht es um die Verknüpfung von individuellen Eigenschaften von Menschen in Armut und sozialer Ausgrenzung mit ihrer sozioökonomischen Position, die ein Bild dieser Menschen als charakterschwach und kulturell deviant zeichnen. Im Anschluss wird der Einfluss von Menschenbildern in der Sozialpolitik nachgezeichnet. Schließlich wird im dritten und letzten Abschnitt auf das Verhältnis von Menschenbild und Kinderbild eingegangen, welches für die Wahrnehmung und den Umgang mit sozial benachteiligten Kindern und Jugendlichen wichtig ist.

Weltweit leben auch heute noch – je nach Messung – hunderte Millionen Kinder in Armut, und Kinderarmut ist sowohl in reichen wie auch armen Ländern zu finden. Gemäß der Zahlen der Weltbank mussten 2013 fast 400 Millionen Kinder weltweit mit weniger als 1,90$ am Tag auskommen, und die offizielle Statistik für die EU spricht für das Jahr 2016 von fast 25 Millionen Kindern, die in Europa in armutsgefährdeten Haushalten leben. Diese Zahlen zeigen ein ethisches Problem an, sie geben aber noch keine Auskunft darüber, welche Fragen Kinderarmut für die Philosophie und insbesondere eine Philosophie der Kindheit aufwirft. Obwohl Armut schon seit längerem innerhalb der Philosophie thematisiert wird, gibt es erst sehr wenige Arbeiten, die sich explizit mit Kinderarmut auseinandersetzen.

The problem of poverty is global in scope and has devastating consequences for many essential aspects of life: health, education, political participation, autonomy, and psychological well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty presents the current state of philosophical research on poverty in its breadth and depth. It features 39 chapters divided into five thematic sections: Concepts, theories and philosophical aspects of poverty research Poverty in the history of Western philosophy and philosophical traditions Poverty in non-Western philosophical thought Key ethical concepts and poverty Social and political issues The handbook not only addresses questions concerning individual, collective, or institutional responsibility towards people in extreme poverty and the moral wrong of poverty, but it also tackles emerging applied issues that are connected to poverty such as gender, race, education, migration, and climate change. Additionally, it features perspectives on poverty from the history of Western philosophy, as well as non-Western views that explore issues unique to the Global South. Finally, the first section of essays provides an overview of the most important aspects of social science poverty research, which serves as an excellent resource for philosophers and philosophy students unfamiliar with how poverty is empirically researched in practice. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty is an essential resource for students and researchers in philosophy, political science, sociology, development studies, and public policy who are working on poverty.

This book directly addresses the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. It does so by focusing on both the immediate effects during the pandemic and the lockdowns, as well as the issues related to the long-term social consequences that are likely to result from the economic crisis in the coming years. To date, most philosophical essays and books have focused on the health aspects of the pandemic, and in particular on the fields of medical ethics and public health ethics. Containing a truly international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, a unique and global perspective is offered on the rarely discussed social and economic consequences of the pandemic. This book is of great interest to academic philosophers, but also to researchers from the social sciences.

Anerkennung hat sich in den letzten Jahren als ein zentrales Konzept in der politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie etabliert. Ausgehend von seiner Verwendung bei Fichte und Hegel und insbesondere durch seine Aktualisierung im Werk von Axel Honneth, aber auch bei Denker*innen wie Nancy Fraser oder Charles Taylor, wird Anerkennung zur Analyse und Kritik sozialer Verhältnisse herangezogen. Das Vorhaben, soziale Verhältnisse als Anerkennungsverhältnisse sowie soziale Probleme und Konflikte als Kämpfe um Anerkennung zu verstehen und zu beschreiben, wird er auch in den empirisch arbeitenden Sozialwissenschaften vorangetrieben, in denen es detaillierte Studien zu unterschiedlichen Feldern wie Arbeit, Armut oder der Sozialen Arbeit gibt. Im Vordergrund dieses Kapitels aber steht Anerkennung als normatives Konzept, welches dazu geeignet ist, Elemente einer gerechten Gesellschaft festzulegen.