Rebecca Gutwald

In January 2014, seven‐year‐old Charlotte Benjamin wrote a letter to LEGO in which she described a lack of LEGO options for girls. Charlotte's letter has since gone viral. Many critics of the LEGO Friends theme have cited it in articles and blog posts about how this girls theme reinforces negative gender stereotypes. LEGO introduced the Friends theme in early 2012 explicitly as the "girls theme" to replace the unsuccessful LEGO Belville theme. Many fans of LEGO found the gender imbalance unfortunate, because, as studies indicate, playing with blocks, in particular in structural play, can significantly enhance spatial and mathematical skills. LEGO's solution was to create a theme in which purple and pink colors dominate the fictional place: Heartlake City. LEGO also introduced a new kind of figure: the mini‐doll. The mini‐doll is different from the traditional LEGO minifigures in being less blocky, more styled and taller; it is also a bit more feminine in appearance.

If a child’s well-being is at risk of considerable harm within their own family, state institutions usually intervene. In severe cases, the parents’ right to rear is suspended. Cases of risk assessment and potential state intervention are decided within a conflict between parents’ rights and claims of children for protection. There is, we argue, a standard model of normative assessment underlying these decisions: It rests on premises rooted in classic liberal political philosophy, which is prevalent in many Western societies, such as a strong commitment to individualism, a separation of private and public, or a conceptualization of children as lacking the status of full right holders. We proceed in three steps. Based on cases in social work and child welfare offices, firstly, the article proposes an inductive approach to describe the problem. Second, we point out the most critical problems and shortcomings of the standard model. On this basis, third, we develop an alternative, pragmatistic perspective on child welfare and state intervention. It argues that child welfare must be understood more broadly as a societal concern than merely as a matter of the legitimacy of state intervention. A practice-oriented section follows to show what conclusions can be drawn from our alternative model.

Resilienz wird in der Psychologie und Sozialpädagogik häufig als positiv angesehen. In der Armutsbekämpfung ist diese Sichtweise durchaus nachvollziehbar, insbesondere in der Prävention von Kinderarmut: wenn Resilienz das ist, was ein Kind in die Lage versetzt, die Risiken und negativen Folgen von Armut besser zu bewältigen, scheint es sinnvoll, diese Fähigkeit bei Kindern zu fördern. Mein Beitrag befürwortet diesen Befund, plädiert aber dafür, dass die Resilienzdebatte der Untermauerung durch Argumente aus der praktischen Philosophie bedarf, da das, was häufig als Resilienz bezeichnet wird, nicht immer positiv zu bewerten ist. Ziel meines Beitrags ist es, den Resilienzdiskurs im Rahmen der Kinderarmutsbekämpfung in einer normativen Theorie zu verankern: im Capability Ansatz von Amartya Sen. Resilienz wird damit, so meine These, zu einem fundamental normativen Begriff. Mein Beitrag gliedert sich in drei Teile: Zuerst wird auf die Grundideen des CA und die Stellung von Kindheit darin eingegangen. Im zweiten Teil wird der Resilienzbegriff im Kontext von Kinderarmutsprävention charakterisiert. Der dritte Teil widmet sich den Verbindungslinien zwischen der Resilienzdiskussion und dem CA. Leitgedanke ist dabei, dass der CA die menschliche Handlungsfähigkeit als normativ grundlegend auszeichnet. Auf dieser Basis lässt sich überzeugend beurteilen, warum Armut bei Kindern höchst problematisch ist und welches Ziel in der Resilienzförderung verfolgt werden soll. Wie ich argumentieren werde, ist die Bereitstellung von capabilities auch die gerechtigkeitstheoretische Basis von Resilienzförderung in der Praxis. Der Beitrag schließt mit Impulsen, welche, so meine Hoffnung, für eine weitere Diskussion der Normativität von Resilienz dienlich sein können.

The main purpose of our paper consists in establishing the idea that the negative consequences that result from child poverty can be mitigated if the government and social workers promote the resilience of poor children. We use Amartya Sen’s capability approach as an evaluative framework to argue for this thesis. By distinguishing different sources of vulnerability we assume that children are inherently vulnerable, because they are dependent and in need of care. Poor children are, however, even more vulnerable in specific ways. Following Catriona Mackenzie, we call these vulnerability “pathogenic”; they are caused by social arrangements like institutional settings. We claim that at least some of those vulnerabilities can and should be diminished by promoting children’s resilience. We proceed in three steps. In the first part of the paper, we develop our concept of vulnerability and explain how child poverty renders children vulnerable to specific harms. Here we also introduce the capability approach by asking which capabilities children need for coping with this situation. In part two we argue that the concept of resilience helps us to understand why capabilities are relevant for coping with the adverse effects of child poverty. We claim that promoting the capabilities of children is a matter of justice, and that implementing resilience is, too. It is also highly important to see that promoting resilience is mainly a social matter, not a task the individual child has to fulfil on its own. Hence, we argue that children are entitled to gain those capabilities that promote their resilience against the adverse effects of poverty. In part three we discuss several difficulties of our account, such as the danger that children will be burdened with coping with the effects of poverty instead of society fighting poverty.

Julian Nida-Rümelin’s philosophical approach to rationality is radical: It transcends the reductive narrowness of instrumental rationality without denying its practical impact. Actions exist which are carried out in accordance to utility maximizing or even self-interest maximizing. Yet not all actions are to be understood in these terms. Actions that are oriented around social roles, for example, cannot count as irrational just because no underlying maximizing heuristics are found. The concept of bounded rationality tries to embed instrumental rationality into a form of life to highlight limits of our cognitive capabilities and selective perceptions. However, the agent is still situated within the realm of cost-benefit reasoning. The idea of social preferences (e.g. Rabin, Fehr and Schmidt) or meta-preferences (Sen) is insufficient to reflect the plurality of human actions. According to Nida-Rümelin, those concepts ignore the plurality of reasons which drive agency. Hence, they try to fit agency into a theory which undermines humanity. His theory of structural rationality acknowledges daily patterns of interaction and meaning.