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This book defends a particular liberal conception of justice and legitimacy, and applies it to certain issues concerning the upbringing of children. It begins by offering an account of liberal political morality that draws on the work of Rawls and Dworkin. It then defends the claim that the distribution of childrearing rights should be sensitive to the interests of both children and parents. With respect to the issue of whether it is permissible to impart controversial values to children, a distinction is drawn between shaping children’s political motivations and enrolling them into disputed conceptions of the good. Whereas there is a requirement of liberal legitimacy to foster liberal virtues of civility and reciprocity, the widely held view that the enrolment of children into particular ethical or religious practices is rejected as illegitimate. Finally, the practice of age-based discrimination in the case of the allocation of certain rights, such as the right to vote, is defended and criteria for determining the appropriate age of majority are discussed.

Ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in either liberal or civic republican terms. It is, rather, an example and an inflection of ‘post‐cosmopolitan’ citizenship. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and its conception of political space is not the state or the municipality, or the ideal speech community of cosmopolitanism, but the ‘ecological footprint’.

Ecological citizenship contrasts with fiscal incentives as a way of encouraging people to act more sustainably, in the belief that the former is more compatible with the long‐term and deeper shifts of attitude and behaviour that sustainability requires. This book offers an original account of the relationship between liberalism and sustainability, arguing that the former's commitment to a plurality of conceptions of the good entails a commitment to so‐called ‘strong’ forms of the latter.

How to make an ecological citizen? The potential of formal high school citizenship education programmes is examined through a case study of the recent implementation of the compulsory citizenship curriculum in the UK.

This book attempts to answer the challenge of showing that morality is not a confidence trick or a fetish. It does so by arguing that moral norms are those that rational, self‐interested people could accept. The problem is approached by asking by what right some people punish others, and by comparing recent developments in theories of distributive and retributive justice. The first part of the book considers retributive, utilitarian, and mixed theories of punishment. In the second part, recent theories of distributive justice, especially those of Rawls and Gauthier, are examined. It is argued that these theories cannot give an adequate account of punishment. In the final part, an argument is offered for a genuinely constructivist account of morality—constructivist in that it rejects any idea of objective, mind‐independent moral values and seeks instead to construct morality from non‐moral human concerns; genuinely constructivist in that, in contrast to Rawls, it does not take as a premise the equal moral worth of persons. The conclusion is that a genuine constructivism will show the need for, and justification of, punishment as intrinsic to morality itself.

This book develops a new theory of the obligations to future generations, based on a new Rule Consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. The result is a coherent, intuitively plausible moral theory that is not unreasonably demanding — even when extended to cover future people — and that accounts for a wide range of independently plausible intuitions covering individual morality, intergenerational justice, and international justice. In particular, it is superior to its two main rivals in this area: person-affecting theories and traditional Consequentialism. The former fall foul of Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem, while the latter are invariably implausibly demanding. Furthermore, many puzzles in contemporary value theory (such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion) are best solved if strict Consequentialism is abandoned for a more moderate alternative. The heart of the book is the first systematic exploration of the Rule Consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. This yields a strong commitment to reproductive freedom, and also provides the best foundation for a liberal theory of intergenerational and international justice. The final chapters argue that while it will include a Rule Consequentialist account of the morality of reproduction, the best overall moral theory is likely to be a composite one, such as the Combined Consequentialism the author developed in The Demands of Consequentialism.

When policies of or activities within one country and generation cause deleterious consequences for those of other nations and later generations, they can constitute serious injustices. Hence, anthropogenic climate change poses not only a global environmental threat, but also one to international and intergenerational justice. The avoidance of such injustice has been recognized as a primary objective of global climate policy, and this book aims to comprehend the nature of this objective–to explore how climate change raises issues of international and intergenerational justice and to consider how the design of a global climate regime might these aims into account. Enlisting conceptual tools from ethics as well as legal and political theory, it treats justice as concerned with equity and responsibility and considers how each is undermined by climate change but might be incorporated into climate policy. Various theoretical problems in applying norms of equity and responsibility across borders, over time, and to nations for their greenhouse emissions are considered, and responses are given to these challenges. Finally, an outline for a global climate policy that adequately incorporates norms of justice is articulated and defended, along with a case for procedural fairness in policy development processes. Demonstrating how political theory can usefully contribute toward better understanding the proper human response to climate change as well as how the climate case offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, the book offers a case study in which the application of normative theory to policy allows readers to better understand both.

Contributors to this edited book consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is ‘sustainability’ an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible with justice within generations? Is environmental sustainability a luxury when social peace has broken down? The contested nature of sustainable development is considered––is it a useful concept at all any longer? Is it reconcilable with capital accumulation? Liberal––particularly Rawlsian––and socialist notions of justice are tested against the demands of sustainability, and policy instruments for sustainability––such as environmental taxation––are examined for their distributive effects.

In rich countries, environmental problems are seen as problems of prosperity. In poor countries, they are seen as problems of poverty. This is because the environmental problems in poor countries—such as lack of clean drinking water or decent sanitation—are problems that affect them here and now, whereas in rich countries the environmental problems that people worry about most—largely as a result of current prosperity and economic growth—are those that seem likely to harm mainly posterity and hence violate our obligations to future generations.

But what exactly are our obligations to future generations? Are they determined by some sort of ethical system, such as the ‘rights’ of future generations, or justice between generations, or intergenerational equity, or sustainable development? The first part of this book is addressed to these questions. It is argued that while ethical ‘systems’ do not provide much help, we still have moral obligations to take account of the interests that future generations will have. But an appraisal of these interests in the light of probable future developments suggests that, while environmental problems have to be taken seriously, our main obligation to future generations is to bequeath to them a more decent society in which there is greater respect for basic human rights than is the case today throughout most of the world.

Furthermore, it cannot serve the interests of justice if the burden of protecting the environment for the benefit of posterity is born mainly by poorer people today. More resources devoted to the environment means fewer are devoted competing claims for, say, health care or education or housing, not to mention plain private consumption. And in poor countries millions of people suffer from acute lack of sanitation, clean drinking water, shelter, and basic infrastructures to prevent or cure widespread disease. Neither generations nor nations are homogeneous entities. The later chapters of this book, therefore, are addressed to the ethical aspects of the way that resources ought to be shared out between environmental protection and competing uses in all countries, and how the burden of dealing with global environmental problems ought to be shared out between rich and poor nations.

Defends a theory of social justice for education from within an egalitarian version of liberalism. The theory involves a strong commitment to educational equality, and to the idea that children's rights include a right to personal autonomy. The book argues that school reform must always be evaluated from the perspective of social justice and applies the theory, in particular, to school choice proposals. It looks at the parental choice schemes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in England and Wales, and argues that they fall short of the requirements of justice, but that not all such schemes must do so. It elaborates an abstract voucher scheme that would combine choice with justice, and offers ways by which actual choice‐based reform can be modified to meet the requirements of justice.

The problem of education in liberal democracies is to ensure the intergenerational continuity of their constitutive political ideals while remaining open to a diversity of conduct and belief that sometimes threatens those ideals. Creating Citizens addresses this problem. The book identifies both the principal aims of political education—liberal patriotism and the sense of justice—and the rights that limit their public pursuit. The public pursuit of these educational aims is properly constrained by deference to the rights of parents, and these are shown to have some independent moral weight underived from the rights of children. The liberal state's possible role in the sponsorship and the control of denominational school is discussed, as are the benefits and hazards of moral dialogue in morally diverse educational environments. The book draws heavily on John Rawls's theory of justice.

This book is a collection of 11 essays written from a perspective that is at once sympathetic towards, and critical of, liberalism and liberal political philosophy. The essays explore the capacity of liberal thought, and of the moral traditions on which it draws, to accommodate a variety of challenges posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world. Scheffler considers how, in an era of rapid globalization, we can best conceive of the responsibilities of individual agents and the normative significance of people's diverse commitments and allegiances. Some of the essays are primarily concerned with the role of individual desert in liberal theory. Others focus on the nature of people's special responsibilities to their families, communities, and societies, and assess the compatibility of such responsibilities with liberal ideas of justice and equality. Still others deal with the possibility of developing a liberal conception of justice that acknowledges the normative significance of social and global interdependencies, while reaffirming the values of personal life and the continuing importance of ideas of individual responsibility.

In a capitalist economy, taxes are the most significant instrument by which the political system can put into practice a conception of economic justice. But conventional ideas about what constitutes tax fairness--found in the vigorous debates about tax policy going on in political and public policy circles, in economics and law--are misguided. In particular, the emphasis on distributing the tax burden relative to pretax income is a fundamental mistake. Taxation does not take from people what they already own. Property rights are the product of a set of laws and conventions, of which the tax system forms a central part, so the fairness of taxes can’t be evaluated by their impact on preexisting entitlements. Pretax income has no independent moral significance. Standards of justice should be applied not to the distribution of tax burdens but to the operation and results of the entire framework of economic institutions. The result is an entirely different understanding of a host of controversial issues, such as the estate tax, the tax treatment of marriage, “flat” versus progressive taxes, consumption versus income taxes, tax cuts for the wealthy, and negative income taxes for the poor.

When liberal political philosophers talk of equalizing, increasing or maximizing freedom (or liberty), they implicitly assume freedom to be a measurable attribute. Freedom is one of the currencies of a liberal theory of distributive justice, and is therefore assumed to be something that individuals can possess in varying degrees. Yet it is rarely clear what is meant by claims about degrees of freedom. To make sense of such claims, we need to clarify the concept of overall freedom and ask whether its measurement is theoretically possible. This concept is important because freedom has, for liberals, non-specific (or content-independent) value–i.e. value that is independent of the value of being free to do specific things. Liberals prescribe not only that individuals have certain specific freedom-types but also that they have a measure of (overall) freedom. Attempts to make sense of the concept of overall freedom by weighting particular options in terms of their values are erroneous, as these do not account for freedom’s non-specific value. On the other hand, a closer examination of the problems of the individuation of actions and of the various types of constraints on freedom shows overall freedom to be measurable in a way that reflects its non-specific value. To this end, actions need to be individuated in spatio-temporal terms and constraints on freedom need to be characterized in terms of the physical compossibility of actions. The comparative judgements about freedom implied by this analysis (with reference both to individuals and to groups) are more coherent with our intuitive judgements than might at first be expected.

The desirability, or lack thereof, of bills of rights has been the focus of some of the most enduring political debates over the last two centuries. Unlike civil and political rights, social rights to the meeting of needs, standard rights to adequate minimum income, education, housing, and health care are usually not given constitutional protection. The book argues that individuals have social rights to adequate minimum income, housing, health care, and education, and that those rights must be entrenched in the constitution of a democratic state. That is, the democratic majority should not be able to repeal them, and certain institutions (for instance, the judiciary) should be given the power to strike down laws passed by the legislature that are in breach of those rights. Thus, the book is located at the crossroads of two major issues of contemporary political philosophy, to wit, the issue of democracy and the issue of distributive justice. It stems from the perception that there may be conflicts between the demands of democracy and the demands of distributive justice, both of which are crucially important, and from the resulting recognition that the question of the relationship between these two values cannot be ignored.

These days, arguments about distributive justice—i.e. arguments about who should get what—often centre around two ideas. One is that goods should be distributed equally. The other is that how people fare in life should depend on what they are responsible for. In a wide‐ranging discussion, the author asks what it is that draws us to these two ideas and whether they lend themselves to being combined, in the way contemporary egalitarian thinkers seek to combine them, or whether they necessarily pull in different directions. Along the way, he examines how arguments about responsibility and natural talents bear upon the standing of market rewards and he looks at recent theoretical attempts to show that the recipients of social benefits should be willing to engage in contributive activity in return. The conclusion is clear—there is no natural tendency for a commitment to equality to support an attachment to responsibility nor for an attachment to responsibility to support a commitment to equality.

The dispute between impartialists and partialists dominates much modern moral and political philosophy. This book is an attempt to investigate what is at stake between impartialists and their opponents, and to suggest a possible reconciliation. It begins by noting that, in political philosophy, impartiality is normally taken to reflect a belief in the equality of all human beings. However, in a world characterized by plural and competing conceptions of the good, not everyone accepts that all human beings are equal. Belief in equality is part of a comprehensive, and contested, conception of the good. Therefore, if liberal impartiality is to gain support, it must provide an alternative foundation: one which can demonstrate the priority of justice, but which does not depend upon acceptance of a particular conception of the good. I suggest that this foundation is to be found in a form of impartialism that gives centrality to the partial concerns we have for particular others. The fact that we care for particular others can provide a justification for impartialism and can also explain its motivational force.