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- Birnbaum, Simon, 1977-
(författare)
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Just Distribution : Rawlsian Liberalism and the Politics of Basic Income
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Should liberal egalitarians endorse the idea of an unconditional basic income for all? This thesis defends a politics of unconditional universalism, offering a liberty-respecting and non-perfectionist basis for maximin-guided policies. The argument starts off from a Rawlsian justification of basic income in the context of institutional ideal theory. This view is based on the aim of maximising the prospects of the least advantaged in ways consistent with a robust protection of people’s effective freedom, the social bases of self-respect and access to meaningful activities at each stage of their lives.The thesis then moves on to specify such a position in response to objections based on ideas of fair cooperation and strong reciprocity. Linking John Rawls’ arguments on property-owning democracy to Philippe Van Parijs’ case for ‘gift-equalisation’, the study defends the view that a basic income is not inherently exploitative or beyond the scope of justice. To the extent that unconditional universalism is tied to the idea of sharing gift-like resources, it is just a matter of distributing wealth to which nobody has a justified prior claim, not an unfair redistribution of labour income.Introducing a problem of feasibility, however, the thesis also argues that unconditional wealth sharing may fail to meet liberal commitments and to counter structural exploitation unless constrained by other requirements of justice. The latter include a minimal autonomy constraint on maximin-objectives and the set of in kind transfers and social infrastructure needed to foster the activities and virtues on which the stability of this ideal relies. The thesis concludes with a study on the application of such standards to real-world conditions. It is argued that policy options combining a modest basic income with work-based social insurance and universal access to social services are more promising than strategies where a high basic income would replace core components of the welfare state.
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- Bremberg, Niklas, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Voluntary association, not state consent : why the EU's stance on secession rests on the wrong concept of legitimacy
- 2023
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Ingår i: Regional & Federal Studies. - 1359-7566 .- 1743-9434.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The EU's Prodi doctrine stipulates that a new state formed through secession from an EU member state will be treated as a third party vis-a-vis the Union. This article engages with debates on secessionism, self-determination, and democracy in the EU to discuss what the doctrine entails for the democratic legitimacy of the EU. We argue that the doctrine is only compatible with one source of political legitimacy that the EU partly depends on, the state consent model. However, it is not compatible with the voluntary association model which is a moral basis that is increasingly relevant for a supranational union of democratic states. The prevalent practice of organizing referendums on EU accession shows that securing popular support is today an important feature of the politics of legitimacy in the EU. We illustrate our argument with the case of Catalonia and contrast it with cases from the history of European integration.
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- Fonseca, Max, 1980-
(författare)
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Your Treatment, My Treat? : On Lifestyle-Related Ill Health and Reasonable Responsibilitarianism
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How should the costs of unhealthy lifestyles be distributed between individual citizens and the state? This study approaches this question by investigating the justifiability of the responsibilitarian idea that people who are responsible for their lifestyle-choices should also be held responsible for the costs that these lifestyle-choices generate.Two main conclusions come out of this investigation. The first is that the basic justification of responsibilitarian health policies can be found in what is called the Civic Blame approach to responsibilitarianism. This approach builds upon a moralized conception of responsibility, accountability responsibility. On this conception, the moral quality of contemporary imprudent people’s behaviour is the essential starting point for establishing that they ‘are responsible’. Consequently, what justifies responsibilitarian health policies on this approach is not that imprudent people cause their own ill health or that they exercise sufficient control over their lifestyle-choices, but that they breach reciprocity-based civic obligations through their health-risking behaviour.The second conclusion is that the emphasis on fairness of blame/differential treatment inherent in the Civic Blame approach imposes two important justificatory constraints. The first is that the response to the breaches of civic obligations must be properly proportional and context-sensitive in order to be fair. This constraint can most likely be handled however, since a response of the right kind can be found by holding imprudent people responsible via Sin-Taxes (rather than via harsher policies). More problematic for responsibilitarians is the second constraint: to show that contemporary imprudent people’s behaviour is morally problematic to begin with, and, thereby, to show that contemporary prudent people’s reactive attitudes to health-risking behaviour are fair.Thus, although the Civic Blame approach outlined in the study provides the basic theoretical building blocks for the justification of responsibilitarian health policies, this approach also provides the tools for critically questioning the justifiability of contemporary health policies of responsibilitarian kind.
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- Hamrén, Ellinor
(författare)
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A Nationalism of Good Intentions : Dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion
- 2021
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation analyses ethical aspects of nationalism and criticizes the nation-state paradigm. Based on theories that concern various forms of 'benign' nationalism, the dissertation explores fantasies of inclusion with the help of various 'positions'. The question is: How are national identities, which are able to include ethnic minorities, constructed to be ethically justifiable, and what do the fantasies that sustain these ideas look like? Empirically I have worked with media material and have conducted focus groups with various ethno-political activists in Sweden and Finland. These minority groups are discussed based on the positions they hold in relation to the idea of the nation, and also the positions they would hypothetically end up in if their ethno-political struggle were successful. The dissertation is based on a discourse theoretical approach, with specifically the concept of fantasy being utilised from the discourse theoretical framework. My conclusion is that what I call the 'Fantasy of Inclusion', that is, a fantasy that the discourse of nations has taught us to desire, is based on ignoring the ethnic character of different groups in cases where it becomes "uncomfortable" in order to maintain the idea of inclusion as 'benign'.
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| 7. |
- Lanefelt, Lily Stroubouli, 1962-
(författare)
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Multiculturalism, Liberalism and the Burden of Assimilation
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Should a liberal state meet claims for accommodation of cultural difference with a liberal multicultural approach that grants cultural rights to minorities? The present thesis tries to answer this question by investigating if a liberal state may adopt a multicultural approach and still remain liberal. The purpose of the thesis, more specifically, is to study whether the accommodation of multiculturalism through cultural rights can be based on liberal values or not. The inquiry focuses on three influential liberal multicultural approaches which claim that cultural rights are congruent with equality, toleration and autonomy respectively. The coherence of these models is, however, questioned in the thesis. These models may neither be claimed to promote liberal values in a coherent and unambiguous way, nor be described as the adequate response to the type of burden of assimilation that members of minority cultures experience in liberal states. The main conclusion of the study is that liberal multiculturalism does not follow consistently from liberal premises and that the possibility of a normative conjunction between multiculturalism and liberalism therefore should be characterized as an open question in political theory. From liberal premises, a liberal neutralist model of integration based on anti-discrimination and equality of opportunity, in fact, still seems to be the most promising basis for a multicultural policy. It is argued in the thesis that this model can be developed if combined with a liberal scheme for deliberation on multicultural issues based on the principle of equality of opportunity.
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| 9. |
- Millares, Matilde, 1984-
(författare)
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Att välja välfärd : Politiska berättelser om valfrihet
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Welfare, and the role of social democracy in defining its content and meaning, is often described as one of Sweden’s distinguishing features. However, in the quest for liberalization and marketization, reforms in past decades have substantially changed the political landscape. These developments have led many to question the viability of describing the main political actors and their attitudes towards the welfare state in terms of left or right. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of ideological convergence and past and current political cleavages by analysing the welfare debate on freedom of choice between the two main political opponents in Swedish politics over three decades. Using a morphological approach, where ideologies are viewed as distinctive configurations of political concepts creating specific conceptual patterns depending on how they are combined, the analysis focuses on the content of the concept of choice by examining the conceptual relationships between political concepts such as choice, the public and the private, equality, equity and need. The analysis reveals a convergence suggesting that the parties have united around a narrower concept of freedom of choice that relates to how it is implemented in welfare services, that is, the choice between different providers of welfare services. However, important differences remain, which are expressed in the parties’ differing conceptions of the power resources citizens need to become truly free individuals. These findings suggest that, while freedom of choice has become a central concept in the political debate, it is not central to the parties’ ideologies. Instead, the core of the parties’ ideologies appears to be articulated in e.g. the political cleavages that remain, which can be described as differing views on the role of politics and competing conceptions of need and equality. It is how these cleavages are translated into policies that will determine possible welfare choices in the future.
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| 10. |
- Reinikainen, Jouni, 1965-
(författare)
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Initial Citizenship and Rectificatory Secession
- 2012
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Ingår i: Territories of Citizenship. - London : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9781349345014 - 9781137031709 ; , s. 146-169
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Secessions that are justified by rectificatory justice — that is, by the fact that they rectify a previous unjust incorporation into another state — very often seem to confront us with a moral dilemma when it comes to the delimitation of the initial citizenry. In non-rectificatory secessions, all legal residents of a seceding unit have legitimate expectations to retain the equal citizenship status that they possessed in the old state. This means that the unconditional inclusion of all inhabitants becomes a requirement of justice. However, what justice requires in the delimitation of the initial citizenry seems more uncertain if the seceding unit has first been unjustly incorporated into another state and then also subjected to settlement of new residents from the incorporating state during the period of incorporation. This is the situation that the Baltic States faced in 1991 and — to some extent — that East Timor experienced in 2002. Moreover, it is a situation that Palestine, Tibet, and Western Sahara would also face if those political units would become independent states in the future. The question called forth in these cases is if justice really requires the unconditional inclusion of all legal residents in the initial citizenry or if the rectification of the injustice does not, in fact, require the exclusion of the settlers.
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