Niklas Dummer

In Germany, the number of homeless people is increasing, as is the number of people living in deprived housing conditions. In the few philosophical contributions that focus on these worst-off people, the plight of their living situation is often conceptualised as a problem of freedom. In this paper, I argue that the different notions of freedom have little capacity to provide a precise guidance on how to determine the sufficiency threshold for adequate housing. Therefore, I propose an alternative approach based on the notions of humiliation, self-respect and decency as developed by Avishai Margalit. The sufficiency threshold can then be determined here in relation to society's housing standards. Adequate housing, I argue, is an essential social and material basis for the formation and maintenance of self-respect. Those who are deprived of such housing have good reason to consider themselves humiliated.

Housing studies often draw on what we will refer to as the capabilitarian assumption. However, this assumption – that the capability approach offers the right framework for analysing housing injustice – has received little to no philosophical scrutiny. In this article we aim to fill this lacuna. We examine the prospects of a capability approach to housing justice, focusing on Nussbaum's comprehensive list of basic capabilities. We argue that her list fails to capture fundamental concerns in housing justice and therefore requires further specification. An adequate capabilitarian view on housing justice must integrate relational egalitarian considerations. We draw on a relationally egalitarian informed conception of self-respect as a basic capability to integrate those relational aspects. In doing so we aim to provide the contours of a capabilitarian theory of housing justice.

The article discusses Hannes Kuch's critique of a prominent assumption liberal theories of justice make: norms guiding economic behavior and political-moral norms are to be considered separately. Against this assumption, Kuch argues in his study ‘Economy, Democracy and Liberal Socialism’ that the economic sphere plays a central role in enabling and realizing democratic justice. In doing so, Kuch problematizes the fact that the economic sphere in its current form has a predominantly negative influence on the moral education of subjects. Following on from this, Kuch ascribes a normative primacy to the political sphere, while he ascribes an empirical primacy to the economic sphere with regard to the moral education of subjects. The commentators criticize Kuch's position to the effect that it postulates a problematic contrast between an amoral economic sphere and an idealized moral political sphere. Besides an internal logical-argumentative problem, this contrast proves to be particularly problematic with regard to the analysis of real-political and global-economic power relations. The commentators therefore argue for a more differentiated analysis that recognizes the moral ambivalence of the two spheres and their morally formative and destructive potential.

Bereits mit Anfang Zwanzig, wohl zwischen 1829 und 1831, verfasst John Stuart Mill fünf Essays, die seine ersten ökonomischen Schriften darstellen. Mit der Ausnahme des fünften Essays werden diese allerdings erstmals 1844 veröffentlicht, zwei Jahre nach dem Erfolg von A System of Logic. Diese frühen Texte zeugen von Mills Fähigkeiten als Synthetisierer unterschiedlicher theoretischer Ansätze, aber ebenso von seiner oft verkannten Innovationskraft auf dem Feld der Ökonomie. Zudem zeigen sie ihn als Autor des Übergangs vom klassischen zum neoklassischen Paradigma. Mill ist offen gegenüber Ideen, die nicht ohne Weiteres mit der Klassischen Nationalökonomie zu vereinbaren sind. Entsprechend findet sogar Karl Marx, trotz aller berechtigten Kritik an den Essays, lobende Worte für das „Schriftlein, das in der Tat alle originellen Ideen des Herrn J[ohn] St[uart] Mill über political economy enthält“ (MEW 26.3, 190). Für John R. Hicks sind die Essays „perhaps the freshest of Mill’s economic writings“ (Hicks 1983, 60).