Justice and Egalitarian Relations

This chapter introduces the key features and motivations of liberal relational egalitarianism. It notes that social justice and social equality have mostly been treated as separate values in the history of modern Western political thought, and that contemporary liberal egalitarianism is traditionally thought to require a form of distributive equality. It then argues that weaving social justice and social equality together in an account of relational equality as an urgent and stringent demand of liberal social justice is therefore a novel project worth attempting. It goes on to outline the overall argument of the book and the contribution of each chapter, as well as the different literatures and rival theories it draws on, and concludes by delineating the social scenario it is a theory for: primarily, for a society characterized by a reasonably well-functioning institutional structure capable of organizing social cooperation by enabling and sustaining a complex division of labour.

The Family and Intergenerational Justice

This chapter explores the implications of a liberal egalitarian conception of justice for our understanding of intergenerational justice in matters concerning the family. It provides an overview of a cosmopolitan conception of liberal egalitarianism with specific focus on the goods for children, parents, and other members of society to which such a conception of justice should be sensitive. It considers how an ideal of liberal equality should address issues of intergenerational wealth and procreative liberty under both favorable and unfavorable conditions. The chapter also considers how intergenerational injustice in the past affects our understanding of the entitlements of current families to resources and opportunities.

Gender Attitudes in Africa: Liberal Egalitarianism Across 34 Countries

This study provides a first descriptive mapping of support for women’s equal rights in 34 African countries and assesses diverse theoretical explanations for variability in this support. Contrary to stereotypes of a homogeneously tradition-bound continent, African citizens report high levels of agreement with gender equality that are more easily understood with reference to global processes of ideational diffusion than to country-level differences in economic modernization or women’s public-sphere roles. Multivariate analyses suggest, however, that gender liberalism in Africa may be spreading through mechanisms not typically considered by world-society scholars: Support for equal rights is largely unrelated to countries’ formal ties to the world system, but it is stronger among persons who are more exposed to extra-local culture, including through internet and mobile phone usage, news access, and urban residency. Forces for gender liberalism are conditioned, moreover, by local religious cultures and gender structures.

Doctrines and Dimensions of Justice: Their Historical Backgrounds and Ideological Underpinnings

Justice can be approached from many angles in ethical and political debates, including those involving healthcare, biomedical research, and well-being. The main doctrines of justice are liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, luck egalitarianism, socialism, utilitarianism, capability approach, communitarianism, and care ethics. These can be further elaborated in the light of traditional moral and social theories, values, ideals, and interests, and there are distinct dimensions of justice that are captured better by some tactics than by others. In this article, questions surrounding these matters are approached with the hermeneutic idea of a distinction between “American” and “European” ways of thinking.

Liberalni odgovori na problem uskraćivanja zdravstvene skrbi djeci i maloljetnicima iz religijskih razloga

Medical experts, both in Croatia and in the world, are facing nowadays an increasing number of cases where the parents refuse, because of certain religious reasons, medical care and certain medical treatments for their children, even though those treatments could preserve the children’s health or even save their lives. The parents are convinced that they are acting with good intentions and in child’s favour, which leads to certain problems regarding the regulation of these cases, as well as to disagreements regarding the rights of parents and their children, or the legitimacy of state interventions in this sphere. This paper puts forward four possible liberal solutions to the above described problem (liberal archipelago, liberal multiculturalism, liberal egalitarianism and liberal feminism), specifies the scope of legitimate interventions by the state that these theories allow, and reviews the advantages of each position, as well as the most important objections directed toward each.