Egalitarian Principles Research Articles

From Love to Justice: Families’ Interrogation of Racial State Violence

This paper explores how love, grief and kinship operate in families’ struggles for truth and justice following a death in custody of a racialised person in England and Wales. Racialised people are disproportionately vulnerable to dying in police custody. Family experiences following a custodial death are characterised by difficulty in obtaining information, delays in processes, a lack of responsiveness from authorities and an absence of resolution. Love, grief and kinship form the initial springboard for families’ legal battles for justice, with women often taking leading roles in demanding state accountability through legal action and community-based campaigns. While kinship ties have traditionally been understood in mainstream scholarship as closing off family units and mitigating against principles of egalitarianism and solidarity, families’ justice campaigns challenge this narrative. Families can become politicised in the course of struggle, forming alliances with groups proclaiming broader antiracist goals. This paper reveals the subversive potential of love, grief and kinship in struggles for justice in racialised death in custody cases.

Вычислительный эксперимент в оптимизационном моделировании процесса мультимодальных грузоперевозок на основе эгалитарных принципов

Purpose: To build an optimization model of multimodal cargo transportations in a port-side transport and technological system with the participation of rail and sea kinds of transport based on egalitarian principles, the model allows manipulating the values of parameters characterizing a transportation process and taking into account interests of transportation process participants within the frames of being considered cost indicators. Methods: An algorithm has been developed for planning the shipment and delivery of cargo flows to port station address in view of routing, time and cost parameters of transportation process which under, cost optimal values of being transported cargo and complex time indicators of transportation process are provided. One of the limitations in the optimization task is the volume of a ship batch that’s expected at any port unloading stations. The built mathematical model is a multi-criteria and multi-extreme task of nonlinear stochastic integer programming. The research theoretical and economic basis is the synthesis of the classical concepts of utilitarian and egalitarian approaches in a welfare theory that makes it possible to build sounded theoretically and demanded in practice the optimization models of multimodal freight transportation railway component. Results: Developed in analytical computing system environment the optimization algorithm provides opportunities along with Pareto optimal transportation plans for to find plans embodying “just in time” logistic concept, so at these plans, it is also achieved the balance of interests of transportation considered participants. Practical importance: An approach is proposed for to study freight transportation organization on a railway landfill wherein transportations are pursued within the framework of multimodal port-side transport and technological system. The developed models and algorithms can be recommended for practical use during the formation and analysis of logistic supply chains with rail and sea transport kind participation.

A Global Society of Reciprocity

This essay concerns the claim that egalitarian principles of distributive justice apply within states but not between them. The analysis will rely primarily on the arguments made in Andrea Sangiovanni’s article. Due to the limit of words and attention, I shall only discuss issues of inequality of resources/wealth and focus only on Sangiovanni’s arguments on relational claims.I will first demonstrate his arguments, in relational account, how Globalist Egalitarian does not justify an obligation of distributive justice and how Internationalism, in accordance to his idea of Reciprocity, does. Later I will demonstrate, with his logic, why global distributive justice is justified and desirable. Thus, proves the claim above wrong.

Should Political Leaders Be Highly Educated?

ABSTRACTMany liberal philosophers view elite education as a virtue of political leaders and, in addition, hold that an important role of a just education system is to create better elites. A compelling and influential articulation of this view has been offered by Elizabeth Anderson. However, this view is in conflict with a commitment to substantive democracy, given the background conditions of the United States today. This article will argue, contra Anderson, that having the highly educated disproportionately represented in political leadership is incompatible with egalitarian principles of democracy. The key reason for this is that it systematically shuts out the working class from full political participation. Therefore, in order to satisfy the constraints of democracy, we must sever the connection between elite education and political office.

Accessibility and equity: A conceptual framework and research agenda

This discussion paper proposes a conceptual model for the factors influencing ethical concerns regarding accessibility, building on the idea that people should have a minimum level of access to some destinations (founded in the ethical principle of sufficientarianism), and secondly from the idea that differences in levels of accessibility between (groups of) people could be relevant from an equity perspective (founded in the ethical principle of egalitarianism). The four components of accessibility introduced by Geurs and van Wee (2004) – the land use system, the transport system, the individual, and the temporal component – are included in the conceptual model which additionally disentangles the individual component, includes context factors (such as culture/religion), digital access options, perceived accessibility and normative judgments. In addition, this paper proposes a research agenda suggesting several types of quantitative and qualitative methods to study the complex relationships proposed in the model, and research to address those parts of the model for which limited knowledge is currently available.

New Environmental Approach Based on a Combination of Planetary Boundaries and Life Cycle Assessment in the Wood-Based Bioadhesive Market

The role of the bioeconomy based on the use of renewable resources and also on the valorization of bio-based waste could contribute to a higher degree of sustainability. In this sense, biobased processes and products should exhibit values for indicators that demonstrate and outperform their competing counterparts. To this end, it is essential to apply a methodology to conduct the assessment of environmental impacts and potential damages at a global level. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has proven to be a suitable method to study the environmental profiles and damage scores of products and/or processes within their life cycle. In this regard, LCA impact scores are transformed into planetary boundary (PB) values, for which a threshold has been previously established. This has been the focus of this article, in which the environmental sustainability ratios of different bioadhesive scenarios have been evaluated under the combined framework of PBs and LCA for wood-based bioadhesives following different allocation approaches based on egalitarian, utilitarian, and grandfathering principles. In this way, it has been possible to assess the potential of bioadhesives to replace synthetic resins in the wood-based panel production chain. The results obtained show some variability in the environmental profiles and indicators, but it is possible to conclude that the bioadhesives selected can be considered as sustainable alternatives. However, improvements are required in certain PB categories, such as climate change or biogeochemical flows, as in some cases, the threshold value is exceeded. Future research should focus on two strategic lines: the application of guidelines for the evaluation of environmental sustainability at the planetary level and the optimization of bio-adhesive production to reduce their impact with the aim of achieving a more adequate sustainability ratio.

Value choices in European COVID-19 vaccination schedules: how vaccination prioritization differs from other forms of priority setting.

With the limited initial availability of COVID-19 vaccines in the first months of 2021, decision-makers had to determine the order in which different groups were prioritized. Our aim was to find out what normative approaches to the allocation of scarce preventive resources were embedded in the national COVID-19 vaccination schedules. We systematically reviewed and compared prioritization regulations in 27 members of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Israel. We differentiated between two types of priority categories: groups that have increased infection fatality rate (IFR) compared to the average for the general population and groups chosen because their members experience increased risk of being infected (ROI). Our findings show a clear trend: all researched schedules prioritized criteria referring to IFR (being over 65 years old and coexisting health conditions) over the ROI criteria (eg occupation and housing conditions). This is surprising since, in the context of treatment, it is common and justifiable to adopt different allocation principles (eg introducing a saving more life-year approach or prioritizing younger patients). We discuss how utilitarian, prioritarian, and egalitarian principles can be applied to interpret normative differences between the allocation of curative and preventive interventions.

Ethical principles of renal therapy rationing in Senegal

BackgroundSince 2012, Senegal has conducted a national program to cover renal therapy (dialysis) expenses in public hospitals and social security-approved centers. Given the increasing demand for dialysis, national guidelines recommend explicit rationing through waiting lists, and hospitals have committees to determine whom to enroll. While national recommendations are known, criteria applied in hospitals to register patients remain unclear. Our study analyzes social justice principles used to ration renal therapy in government-owned centers and highlights inequalities caused by low access to treatment.MethodsWe conduct a multivariate logit regression analysis using data collected from patients in public and private centers to identify which socioeconomic or sociodemographic factors determine enrollment. Based on the average marginal effects of these factors on program enrollment, we hypothesize the justice principles applied (or not) in hospitals.ResultsWe find that the duration of illness, insurance distribution, age, education, and involvement in patient associations influence program access. The duration of illness is the most robust predictor regardless of socioeconomic factors, which suggests the predominant application of egalitarian principles, notably the first-come-first-served rule. However, our findings indicate that the most impoverished patients do not have access to free dialysis.ConclusionsAlthough the national dialysis program aims to improve access to costly life-sustaining treatment, the first-come-first-served strategy is designed to suit patients who live longer, that is, those who can seek dialysis care in a private center. The program does not address inequalities in access, especially for the most impoverished patients recently diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease.

The settler-rights backlash: understanding liberal challenges to Indigenous self-determination

ABSTRACT In the archetypal settler-colonial states of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous peoples have joined the ‘rights revolution’, pressing for self-determination. They have been met by a ‘settler-rights backlash’, contraposing settler and Indigenous rights. This article makes two contributions. First, it presents a scoping study of settler-rights challenges in Anglo-settler states, revealing the extent and means of the settler backlash. Second, working within mainstream Anglo-settler political theory, it theorizes settler-rights challenges, exploring what liberal principles settlers invoke, what Indigenous protections they impugn, and what contrapositions of rights ensue. This article shows settlers invoke the liberal principle of universalism to impugn Indigenous sovereignty, the liberal principle of individualism to impugn differentiated citizenship, and the liberal principle of egalitarianism to impugn Indigenous decision-making and territorial control. In doing so, this article reveals the normative dynamics and internal contradictions of settler-rights challenges. By showing the extent, dynamics and contradictions of such challenges, it is hoped to help public decision-makers better understand and resolve them.

Understanding the allocation and use of street space in areas of high people activity

The allocation of street space is strongly contested in many cities, particularly in areas where there is a high level of people activity. In these areas, movement and place objectives are often in conflict with one another. The allocation of street space involves a range of governance, political and ethical considerations, yet efforts to reallocate street space should also be informed by empirical evidence of street space allocation and use. This can help to ensure that street space is distributed more equitably to users and support broader goals for increasing the uptake of more sustainable forms of transport. Using a case study of Melbourne's activity centres, this research aimed to understand how much street space is allocated and used by each mode of transport. It also explored factors that are associated with the use of each mode of transport. Multi-modal observational person counts and street measurements were undertaken at 57 different locations within 36 activity centres across Melbourne during 2020. For each site, data related to street and activity centre characteristics were compiled. Key results showed that on average, based on the principle of egalitarianism, pedestrian space in the form of footpaths is significantly undersupplied, while bicycle lanes, car parking and shared general traffic/bus lanes were oversupplied. When viewed across individual sites, considerable variability was found in street space allocation vs. use. Results also showed a number of street/activity centre characteristics that were associated with use of the street space for different modes. Among others, these included footpath width, clearways, movement and place classifications, distance to the Central Business District (CBD), presence of car sharing, car ownership, income and age. The research findings can be used to better inform decision-making on street space reallocation efforts through identifying locations where street space could be allocated more equitably to users.

Public opinion on global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines: Evidence from two nationally representative surveys in Germany and the United States

Despite ongoing calls for a more even global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, there remains a great disparity between high- and low-income countries. We conducted representative surveys among the adult populations in the United States (N = 1,000) and Germany (N = 1,003) in June 2021 to assess public opinion in these countries on the distributive justice of COVID-19 vaccines. We conducted two instances of analytic hierarchy processes (AHP) to elicit how the public weighs different principles and criteria for vaccine allocation. In further discrete choice experiments, respondents were asked to split a limited supply of vaccine doses between a hypothetical high-income and a hypothetical low-income country. AHP weights in the United States and Germany were 37.4% (37.2–37.5) and 49.4% (49.2–49.5) for “medical urgency”, 32.7% (32.6–32.8) and 25.4% (25.2–25.5) for “equal access for all”, 13.7% (13.6–13.8) and 13.3% (13.2–13.4) for “production contribution”, and 16.3% (16.2–16.4) and 12.0% (11.9–12.1) for “free market rules”, respectively, with 95% CI shown in parentheses. In the discrete choice experiment, respondents in the United States and Germany split available vaccine doses such that the low-income country, which was three times more populous than the high-income country, on average received 53.9% (95% CI: 52.6–55.1) and 57.5% (95% CI: 56.3–58.7) of available doses, respectively. When faced with a dilemma where a vulnerable family member was waiting for a vaccine, 20.7% (95% CI: 18.2–23.3) of respondents in the United States and 18.2% (95% CI: 15.8–20.6) in Germany reduced the amount they allocated to the low-income country sufficiently to secure a vaccine for their family member. Our results indicate that the public in the United States and Germany favours utilitarian and egalitarian distribution principles of vaccines for COVID-19 over libertarian or meritocratic principles. This implies that political decisions favouring higher levels of redistribution would be supported by public opinion in these two countries.

The inviolateness of life and equal protection: a defense of the dead-donor rule.

There are increasing calls to reject the dead-donor rule and permit organ donation euthanasia in organ transplantation. I argue that the fundamental problem with this proposal is that it would bestow more worth on the organs than on the donor who possesses them. What is at stake is the basis of human equality, which, I argue, should be based on an ineliminable dignity that each of us has in virtue of having a rational nature. To allow mortal harvesting would be to make our worth contingent upon variable quality-of-life judgments that can be based only on properties that come in degrees. Thus, rejecting the dead-donor rule comes at the expense of egalitarian principles with respect to the value each individual human life has in relation to the protections against killing.

WHAT DOES EGALITARIANISM REQUIRE?

AbstractRawlsian theory notoriously claims that basic principles of justice apply to the design of a society’s basic structure. G. A. Cohen found it disturbingly convenient to treat fundamental principles as merely political rather than personal—that is, as applying exclusively to questions of institutional design and saying nothing about how to live. Instead, to Cohen, a sincere champion of egalitarian principles would, as they say, “walk the talk.”

Protestant Christian Supremacy and Status Inequality

In the United States, Protestant Christian identity is the dominant religious identity. Protestant Christian identity confers status privileges, yet also creates objectionable status inequalities. Historical and contemporary evidence includes the unfair treatment of Mormons, Native Americans, Muslims, and other religious minorities. Protestant Christian supremacy also plays a significant role in bolstering anti LGBTQ prejudice, xenophobia, and white supremacy. Ways that Protestant Christian identity correlates with objectionable status inequalities are often neglected in contemporary political philosophy. This paper aims to make a modest contribution towards filling that gap. Some forms of inequality linked to Protestant Christian supremacy can be characterized as domination and oppression. Other instances include barriers to fair equality of opportunity for self-determination. Adapting ideas from egalitarian political philosophy I propose an analysis of objectionable status inequality rooted in Protestant Christian supremacy. Alan Patten’s defense of an egalitarian principle for assessing the effects of law and policy is helpful for this task.

Evening out the divide between rights and culture: a case for mobilising positive culture in state responses to gender-based violence in Kenya

The main focus of the article is on the inadequacy of state responses in eliminating gender-based violence in its structural and direct expressions. The article departs from the premise that gender, sexuality, and identity are cultural constructs and argues that culture and social constructs are dynamic and changing, hence state responses to eliminate gender-based violence must engage the positive and egalitarian aspects of African culture for social legitimacy. While acknowledging that constitutional and legal frameworks lay a normative foundational basis for protection against gender-based violence, the effectiveness of these frameworks must be measured through implementation. It is in the implementation of the constitutional and legal norms that cultural contestations emerge, for instance, in the context of structural forms of gender-based violence such as female genital mutilation and marital rape. The main question that the article seeks to answer is how states can bridge the gap between norms and implementation which arises out of cultural contestations. Focusing on Kenya as a case study, the article examines state responses to structural forms of gender-based violence, specifically, female genital mutilation and marital rape. The Kenyan constitutional framework recognises culture as the foundation of the nation and the right to culture in the Bill of Rights, and on equal footing embraces egalitarian principles which place dignity, freedom, and equality at the core of societal relations. Applying doctrinal research methodology, we analyse case law on female genital mutilation and legislative initiatives in the prohibition of marital rape to identify and distil the judicial and legislative approaches on the interplay between the prohibition of gender-based violence norms and culture. Based on this, the article suggests proposals on how the progressive aspects of African culture that resonate with the egalitarian constitutional structure can be engaged in state responses to gender-based violence.

Ambedkar and the Buddha's Sangha: A Ground for Buddhist Ethics

The saṅgha is one of the three jewels of the Buddhist tradition. While undervalued in many other Anglophone iterations of Buddhist modernism, Ambedkar’s approach to Buddhism placed a reconceptualized saṅgha at the center. Where traditional accounts often limit the boundaries of saṅgha to ordained monks and nuns, Ambedkar sought to include all lay Buddhists within its frame. He suggests that the role of the saṅgha is not, as many traditional accounts might suggest, the personal liberation of the monks and nuns who join it, but instead social service directed toward the community at large. Ambedkar’s commitment to the development of a religion that champions egalitarianism naturally lead to his inclusion of women as full participants in his image of the saṅgha, despite the historically patriarchal limits placed on them in many traditional Buddhist settings. This wide-tent approach to the saṅgha, along with its emphasis on service and egalitarian principles, are defining features of Ambedkar’s unique approach the Buddhist tradition.

Mathematical experiment as a tool for modeling the freight transportation process

The process of multimodal freight transportation on a railway loop is investigated, for which a multicriteria optimization model with time indicators is created, which is a nonlinear integer programming problem. The developed approach is based on egalitarian and utilitarian principles in the welfare theory and allows (along with Pareto optimal transportation plans) to find other plans that can be considered rational from the point of view of maintaining the balance of interests of the transportation process participants. A mathematical experiment is an effective heuristic tool in research. The algorithm for solving the optimization problem is implemented in the environment of a computer algebra system and brought to numerical results.

Failure of Ujamaa in Modernising Wataturu Community in Igunga from the Early 1970s to the the Mid-1980s

Abstract Tanzania’s Rural Development Policy which encompassed, among other things, establishment of well-planned Ujamaa villages across the country, was a nation-wide agenda implemented immediately after the Arusha Declaration of 1967. The Arusha declaration marked the actual beginning of Ujamaa, a socio-economic policy based on egalitarian principles of traditional African societies practiced in Tanzania from 1967 to the mid-1980s. Contrary to government’s intentions, the Wataturu negatively responded to this programme since it conflicted with their socio-cultural set-up. Scholarships on this subject converge on the failure and success of the programme, its ecological impact as well as land disputes and social unrest resulting from the implementation of the policy. Yet, little is known about the extent to which the socio-cultural life, perceptions, beliefs, and cattle economy determined the responses, participation and mobilization among the Wataturu (brediga) - Datooga of Igunga. This paper exploits ethno-historical accounts from Igunga district and archival materials collected as part of a PhD project to fill this gap. The paper establishes that modernisation through the resettlement scheme and establishment of Ujamaa villages were never a reality for the Wataturu who uphold their traditional socio-cultural set-up with great pride.

For more United Nations rule-of-law “win-win” technical assistance outcomes amid migration


 
 
 This article focuses on the universal and time-honored Golden Rule, collo- quially known as “win-win”– a technical cooperation strategy, pursued in crime prevention and other fields. In particular, the article ventures into John Rawls’s difference principle for the United Nations-inspired Rule- of-Law cooperation for crime prevention to meet sustainable development goal 10 of the 2030 United Nations Agenda (“Reduce inequality within and among countries”). His liberally egalitarian principle regards inequality as reasonable (justice as fairness) as long as it would make the least advantaged in society materially better off than they would be under strict equality. In line with the United Nations Charter establishing the duty to cooperate, the author looks into the principle’s Global North-South applicability, relevant especially for the Rule-of-Law impact on the benefactors and beneficiaries of the two major economic development initiatives: the 2019–2021 Blue Dot Network/Built Back Better World (BDN/B3W) and the 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), both prone to migration flows. In their context he offers intercultural rationale and suggestions for a North-South crime prevention technical cooperation glocal86 approach that should be programmatically driven by universally relevant anti-corruption. Finally, the author alerts to the need of bringing into the North-South technical cooperation relationship people’s regard of Mother Earth (“triple wins”) and strategize that cooperation accordingly for a truly better world.
 
 

Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

AbstractWe analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.