Colin Macleod

Equality is a fundamental but contested facet of justice. There are competing views about how the basic egalitarian character of justice should be conceptualized and about what practical implications ideals of equality have for the evaluation of political institutions, laws, and social practices. This volume brings together the reflections of some of today's leading political philosophers on the basic character and practical significance of equality as an ideal of justice. The topics explored are diverse and the essays offer challenging new perspectives on recent work about justice and equality. The collection features new essays by Elizabeth Anderson, Richard Arneson, Michael Blake, Colin Macleod, Sophia Moreau, Debra Satz and Kok-Chor Tan. The essays provide an excellent indication of the richness and diversity of contemporary egalitarian theory.

Inequalities that arise because of the influence of arbitrary factors of social or natural contingency, as opposed to choices, are unjust. But whilst liberals wish to preserve and protect the affective family, parental partiality to their own children can result in an inequality that is unjust on account of it being attributable to arbitrary factors. Children's access to resources and opportunities should not be significantly determined by parental entitlement to resources. Justice requires not the abandonment of the family, but it does impose constraints on the ways in which parents can permissibly express their partiality for their children.

In this article, I discuss the analysis of the feasibility of global justice developed by Pablo Gilabert in his recent book From Global Poverty to Global Equality: A Philosophical Exploration. Gilabert makes many valuable contributions to this topic and I agree with most of his analysis. However, I identify a distinction between strategic justification and moral justification that Gilabert neglects. I show how this distinction is useful in addressing objections to the feasibility of global justice. I also claim that Gilabert makes some problematic assumptions concerning the way in which global justice is morally demanding.

This book presents new findings that deal with different facets of the well-being of children and their relevance to the proper treatment of children. The well-being of children is considered against the background of a wide variety of legal, political, medical, educational and familial perspectives. The book addresses diverse issues from a range of disciplinary perspectives using a variety of methods. It has three major sections with the essays in each section loosely organized about a common general theme. The first section focuses on issues concerning the relation between children’s well-being and autonomy or agency. The second section deals with child well-being insofar as the limits of parental authority are concerned. The third section has a more applied orientation and addresses a variety of public policy controversies involving the interpretation of children’s well-being.