Search Results

As we continue to address the aftermath of our racial history and the racialization that has developed from it, we must find solutions that unite rather than divide us. Solutions that appear to benefit one group at the expense of other groups will not produce the consensus needed to address racism in the United States. This book advocates solutions that are not based exclusively on attributing responsibly to either whites or non-whites. A balanced solution entails finding common ground between majority and minority groups so that more practical recommendations can be advanced. These recommendations will thus become part of a self-sustaining approach because they are accepted by majority and minority groups alike. This concluding chapter explores what a mutual-obligations approach might look like in practice. It provides a step-by-step description of a mutual-obligations model and uses affirmative action as an example to illustrate this approach. Finally, it considers possible public policy suggestions to support this approach toward race relations, paying special attention to the educational and governmental sectors.

This second part of the book turns to an examination of the conditions under which it is morally justifiable to exercise political power to enforce international law in the pursuit of justice. Ch. 5 develops a justice‐based conception of political legitimacy, where “political legitimacy” is defined as follows: An entity has political legitimacy if and only if it is morally justified in exercising political power, where the exercise of political power may, in turn, be defined as the (credible) attempt to achieve supremacy in the making, application, and enforcement of laws within a jurisdiction. It is argued that an entity that exercises political power is morally justified in doing so only if it meets a minimal standard of justice, understood as the protection of basic human rights. The conception of political legitimacy offered is meant to be perfectly general, and applies to any entity that wields political power, whether at the state, regional, or international level; it is used again in Chs 6–8. The eight sections of the chapter are: I. Political Legitimacy and the Morality of Political Power; The Irrelevance of the Idea that We Owe Compliance to the Government; III. Explaining the Preoccupation with the Government's Right to be Obeyed; IV. Toward a Theory of Political Legitimacy; V. Why Should Some Persons Rather than Others Wield Political Power?; VI. Democracy and Mutual Obligations among Citizens; and VIII. Conclusions.

This chapter discusses a theme for a variety of relationships of mutuality and obligation in early modern England. Relationships of mutual obligation are discussed, and are described as being ‘the most fundamental of all the bonds in medieval society’. Sometime between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries however, these bonds went through a fundamental change, via a process of erosion and dissolution. The chapter examines these processes of change, concluding with an attempt to characterise the overall process of change.

This book is about the fact that most of the proposed solutions to racial issues in the United States do not work. More importantly, it is about proposing an alternative way to think about addressing such issues, what it calls the mutual-obligations approach. Its one main goal is to work toward a solution to racial division, racial inequality, racial alienation, and the racialized society. To be white in America does come with privileges. Scholars who study what it means to be white describe that privilege in three dimensions: white structural advantage, white normativity, and white transparency. These three dimensions of whiteness work together to sustain white hegemony; that is, whites' position at the top. On the other hand, scholarship shows, repeatedly, that the negative effects of the racialized nature of the United States are experienced most forcefully by African Americans.

Groups have their own personalities and ways of doing—what we call culture. For distinct groups to come together, they must share a core and they must have distinctions. Our students in race and ethnicity classes intuitively recognize this fact. For most of U.S. history, one form or another of assimilation has been the de facto model of “unity in diversity.” Most bluntly, achieving unity relied on attempts to squeeze out group distinctiveness. This effort began in the highest office in the land—that of the U.S. president. What might cultural uniqueness look like? We can think of the distinction between thin ethnicity and thick ethnicity. Many people in the United States who are assimilated practice thin ethnicity. This chapter argues that we must create a society that has both a common cultural core and acknowledges our mutual obligations, and we must have cultural and individual distinctiveness. That is the model of e pluribus unum that we must now strive for.

This chapter focuses on social assistance recipients’ evolving views on the fairness of being summoned to do volunteer work by Dutch local authorities. This ‘workfare volunteering’ is often considered the best alternative to – but also route towards – paid employment. Building on Nancy Fraser’s work on recognition and redistribution as well as Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘worlds of justification’ framework, this chapter reveals how social assistance recipients’ perceptions of ‘workfare volunteering’ change over the course of their involvement as volunteers. While many social assistance recipients initially judged the obligation to do volunteer work as unfair, the meaning many found in their voluntary positions reversed their initial judgements. But over time – especially as the lack of sustained guidance left them as far away from the paid labour market as ever – they came to see workfare volunteering as deeply unfair. The chapter aims to further our theoretical and empirical understanding of social justice from the perspective of the subjects of welfare-to-work policies.

Shared intentional activity frequently involves forms of assurance, promising, induced reliance, and the like, and these frequently ground mutual obligations. Such obligations can help support the stability of already existing shared intentions. And the persistence interdependence involved in shared intention can sometimes be realized by structures of recognized mutual obligations. Nevertheless, it is best to provide a model of shared intention and modest sociality that does not see such mutual obligations as essential constituents of shared intention and modest sociality. This diverges from Margaret Gilbert’s appeal to “joint commitments” that essentially involve mutual obligations. Given the claimed success of the basic thesis in providing plan-theoretic sufficient conditions for modest sociality, there is an Ockham’s Razor argument against introducing at the ground level of the model of modest sociality fundamentally new practical elements such as Gilbert’s “joint commitments.”

This chapter provides a broad overview of contemporary minimum-income transfers in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. It starts out by proposing a simple typology for situating different types of minimum-income benefits as elements of the overall redistribution system. The third section summarizes the generosity of benefit payments and the structure of health care-related support measures that complement them. The fourth section describes the limited available comparative data on the number of benefit claimants and considers to what extent they matter when assessing the relevance of social assistance measures as safety nets. The fifth section provides a condensed overview of the “mutual obligations” debate, discussing, in turn, the rationale of back-to-work and other activation measures and the main results from the evaluation literature. The last section concludes by highlighting some challenges for minimum-income programs posed by the recent economic downturn.

This chapter shows how Douglass's experience as an abolitionist led him to articulate his philosophy of mutual responsibility, and examines the sorts of arguments he offered in defense of the claim that free men have obligations to liberate slaves. Because the liberal language of rights offered only a limited explanation of why individuals ought to feel responsible for one another's well-being, Douglass infused it with a strong case for interconnection and mutual responsibility. His arguments are thus based on his reliance on the idea of human brotherhood, a commitment to natural rights, an appeal to self-interest, and his hope that a stronger sense of sympathy might emerge as a result of respect for virtuous action. From this discussion of the mutual obligation in Douglass's thought, the chapter proceeds to a discussion of the consequences of these ideas for the behavior of individuals and institutions.

This chapter focuses on the question of colonial reform in interwar Algeria, asking how political actors sought to redefine their place within the imperial polity in the wake of the war. Through a close reading of the debates that surrounded the two major moments of prospective colonial reform, the Jonnart reforms (1919) and the Blum-Viollette Project (1936), it shows how activists across ideological and ethnic divides mobilized the memory of the war to reimagine the system of colonial rule in Algeria. Underlining the limited appeal of Wilsonian rhetoric in the colony, this chapter explores the dominance of arguments grounded in concepts of the ‘moral economy of wartime sacrifice’ and ‘mutual obligation’. It considers how political actors sought to legitimize their visons of a just post-war colonial order by maximising their contribution to the war effort while minimising the wartime participation of their opponents, thus undermining their rival claims on the post-war state.