Gideon Calder

This article sets out and briefly explores three main contentions. One is that mobility is a crucial aspect of social stratification – such that “transport disadvantage” is intimately tied up with social exclusion more generally. A second is that insofar as there is a green case for basic income (BI), there seems also, for similar reasons, to be a green case for free public transport. The third is that even while such a step might be deemed necessary for social and environmental justice, it is (unsurprisingly) by no means sufficient to achieve either.

Liberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supra-national. Focusing on the case of the European Union, this paper aims to address a basic question: what kinds of value should inform the justification of political institutions facing a plurality of value systems? One route to an answer is provided by John Rawls, who famously distinguishes between comprehensive and political values, and defends the exclusion of the former from the foundations of a political theory of justice. This paper questions the tenability of the Rawlsian solution, and draws attention to an alternative twofold conceptual distinction: that between minimal and non-minimal and between substantive and procedural values. Minimal values are meant to be as independent as possible of controversial conceptions of the good and views of the world, regardless of whether these are comprehensive or purely political. It will be argued that their endorsement may thus further specify the nature of what should be shared in order to justify political institutions in conditions of pluralism. In order to further refine the account of such basis of justification, two variants of minimalism will be presented according to whether they invest substantive or procedural values. Substantive values qualify the property of an outcome; procedural values qualify the property of a procedure. The latter part of the paper consists of a ‘face-off’ between minimal proceduralism and minimal substantivism, considering reasons in favour of the adoption of each. The result, we suggest, is a helpful reorientation of the political dimension of the value debates to which the multiplicity of values amid contemporary European horizons give rise.

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life as it is a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: ¿ Being a child ¿ Childhood and moral status ¿ Parents and children ¿ Children in society ¿ Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults¿ rights? What gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disabilility in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children, and what values should inform such practices? What is a good school? How are children¿s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology.

The family poses problems for liberal understandings of social justice, because of the ways in which it bestows unearned privileges. This is particularly stark when we consider inter-generational inequality, or ‘class fate’ – the ways in which inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next, with the family unit ostensibly a key conduit. There is a recognized tension between the assumption that families should as far as possible be autonomous spheres of decision-making, and the assumption that we should as far as possible equalize the life chances of all children, regardless of background. In this article I address this tension by way of recent liberal egalitarian literature, and consideration of the different dimensions of class fate. I argue, firstly, that the tension may not be of the a priori nature which liberals have tended to identify – and secondly, that as well as distributive and recognition-based aspects, the notion of contributive justice provides a particularly illuminating way of analyzing what is wrong about class fate, and the role of the family in promoting it.

In this article I explore background questions with reference to two recent strands in anti-foundationalist theory: Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism, and Keith Jenkins's postmodernist treatment of historiography. Both approaches seek fresh perspectives on our relationship to history which reject the aspiration towards a perspective positioned at any kind of Archimedean point, beyond the clutches of time and chance. Both might be called 'historicist' in the sense that rather than seeking to play down or to escape the flux of contingency, they seek to embrace it. And both, it seems, seek a kind of 'zero point', as Adorno once called it: a plea to 'forget' the stain of past thinking and experience in order to begin on a new footing.4 They offer forms of therapy; a relief from anxieties to which only bad philosophical habits have made us subject.

Normative theory, in various idioms, has grown wary of questions of ontology-social and otherwise. Thus modern debates in ethics have tended to take place at some distance from (for example) debates in social theory. One arguable casualty of this has been due consideration of relational factors (between agents and the social structures they inhabit) in the interrogation of ethical values. Part 1 of this paper addresses some examples of this tendency, and some of the philosophical assumptions which might underlie it. Parts 2 and 3 discuss two issues of growing prominence-disability, and environmental concern-due attention to which, I argue, highlights strong reasons why severing ethics from social ontology is neither possible nor desirable. I conclude by recommending a qualified ethical naturalism as a promising candidate through which, non-reductively, to reunite these two areas of theoretical focus.

Political philosopher Richard Rorty’s influence on contemporary thought has increased in tandem with the controversy his outspoken views have provoked. His rejection of the grand, metaphysical questions of traditional philosophy has made him the most prominent living thinker in social and political theory. By declaring himself a pragmatist Rorty has attempted to shift the direction of modern philosophy toward the question of how to achieve a better, more humane, and more tolerant society. Redescription—a process through which we invent novel, attractive depictions of our current social situation as well as our future options—is the name that Rorty has given the means to achieve this goal. In Rorty’s Politics of Redescription, Gideon Calder scrutinizes Rorty’s writings in order to tease out their wider political and social implications, while also giving us an evaluation of Rorty’s entire body of work. Calder attempts to draw out inconsistencies in Rorty’s work by identifying where he has failed to escape the modern philosophical agenda that he opposes, and his astute appraisal will engross anyone interested in Rorty or philosophy’s impact on politics. (University of Wales Press)