Substantive Freedoms Research Articles

Citizenship education and human capabilities: lynchpin for sustainable learning environment and social justice

The paper builds on and contributes to literature in citizenship education studies in higher education. Many studies in this field have explored the history, development and implementation of various forms of citizenship formation as an advancement of social justice. However, little has been written on how the formation of critical democratic citizens 2 links with the notion of sustainable learning environments and how it relates to social justice. Studies by McKinney (2007); Waghid (2007; 2009), Lange (2012); and Leibowitz, Swartz, Bozalek, Carolissen, Nicholls &Rohleder(2012) are among those on citizen formation in the South African higher education context. Thisconceptual paper argues that the formation of critical democratic citizens through higher education relates not only to social justice, but also to the advancement of sustainable learning environments (SLEs) beyond physical spaces. The paper explores the normative value of a democratic education theory, Marion Young’s (1990) theory of justice and the politics of difference, and human development principles in advancing citizenship education. These foster both sustainable learning environments and social justice. A democratic education theory lays the foundation for an inclusive and deliberative form of education, while a theory of justice and politics of difference advances better justice and an environment that is non-oppressive. Human development principles set the tone for a sustainable human development, which becomes a framework through which asustainable learning environment is built in pursuit of social justice. Drawing on a Capabilities Approach framework and the philosophy of Ubuntu, with emphasis on substantive freedoms, opportunities, and the thriving of the common good, the paper illustrates how citizenship education advances a conception of sustainable learning environments and social justices not necessarily limited to physical spaces, distributive justice or economic motives, but inclusive of institutional arrangements, policy issues and relational justice.

Extreme Poverty and Development: The Role of State in the Assurance of Minimal Existence Conditions

This paper follows the idea of Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of economic, about the role of State in the assurance of minimal existence condition, and aim to answer how countries of Latin America (specifically Brazil) and countries of Europe (specifically United Kingdom) deal with the assurance of this minimal existence conditions. According to Amartya Sen’s view, development must be seen as a process of expanding substantive freedoms, such expansion being the primary purpose of each society and the main mean of development.Substantive freedoms can be considered as basic capabilities allocated to individuals whereby they are entitled to be architects of their own lives, providing them conditions to “live as they wish”.These basic capabilities are divided by Amartya Sen in 5 (five) kinds of substantive freedoms, but for this article’s purpose, we will consider just one of this 5 (five) kinds, specifically the Protective Safety capability.Protective Safety capability may be defined as the assurance of basic means of survival for individuals who are in extreme poverty, at risk of starvation or hypothermia, or even impending famine. Among the means available that could be used to avoid such situations are the possibility of supplemental income to the needy, distributing food and clothing to the needy, supply of energy and water, among others.But how countries deal whit this protective safety? Aiming to answer this question, we selected the problem of “fuel poverty” and how Brazil and United Kingdom solve it (if they solve), in order to assess how the solution found impacts development. The analysis and the comparison between these countries will allow an answer to the question proposed.

Bulgakov's Economic Man—Re-thinking the Construction of Capitalist Economic Ethics Theory

An economic man, i.e., the leading role in economic ethics, has been deeply investigated in our study considering a human being’s economic behavior and the hypotheses for an economic man in traditional economics based on M. Weber’s and S. N. Bulgakov’s Christian economic man. Among various channels to study business ethics and economic ethics, we chose the definition of an economic man given by Weber and Bulgakov to review a hypothesis about a rational economic man in economics and discussed L. von Mises’s and A. Sen’s contentions for an economic man’s substantive freedom and innermost being. The issue deserved to be further investigated by scholars who concern business ethics and economic ethics consists in reconciling egotism and altruism commonly embedded in an economic man’s heart and boosting more altruistic economic men.

Human Rights and National Poverty Reduction Strategies: Conceptual Framework for Human Rights Analysis of Poverty Reduction Strategies and Reviews of Guatemala, Liberia and Nepal

Poverty is an important human rights concern. Human rights are claims that people have for social arrangements to guarantee their substantive freedoms; poverty reflects failures in these social arrangements and in the actions of duty bearers. It is the poorest people in society --- those with low incomes, education, insecure health, and political power --- who are most vulnerable to severe abuse of their human rights in multiple areas. At the same time, it is lack of human rights protection that leaves people vulnerable to falling into economic and social destitution. Poverty is both a cause and consequence of human rights abuse and lack of protection. Yet human rights agendas are rarely explicitly built into national strategies for poverty reduction. This paper is a consolidated report of a study commissioned by OHCHR on developing a conceptual framework for integrating human rights into national strategies for poverty reduction and identifying operational priorities. It builds on and takes further the 2003 OHCHR conceptual framework on human rights and poverty reduction strategies authored by Hunt, Nowak and Osmani. It incorporates a human rights analysis of poverty reduction policies of Guatemala, Liberia and Nepal. The paper argues that human rights perspectives contribute new approaches in normative, analytical and instrumental dimensions of poverty reduction strategies. First, it brings a strong and explicit normative framework legitimized by the backing of international law that emphasize principles of equality, non-discrimination and concern for the most vulnerable, and a social justice agenda to policy priorities. Second, human rights perspectives introduce new analyses to the causes of poverty - focussing on institutionalized discrimination, lack of political voice, institutional failures to guarantee human rights including weak protection for civil and political rights. Third, human rights have instrumental (not just intrinsic) value for poverty reduction; human rights empower poor people through the power of legal protection for human rights --- civil, political, economic, social and cultural --- of poor people as well as through the power of ideas that legitimize the claims of poor people to surmount obstacles in their lives.

Rethinking Antiracist Education in the Light of the Capability Approach

In anti-racist education, it is important to reflect on the pitfalls of the ideal of equality in order to obtain greater social justice. Too narrow an understanding of equality without an acknowledgment of the individual's ethnic identity provides fragile grounds when dealing with the social and cultural recognition of minority pupils. The capability approach contributes to discussing theoretically the anti-racist dialectical aim of equality and difference. In assessing the individual's capability to combine his/her own substantive freedoms within his/her specific living, it also gives the possibility to evaluate the concrete social arrangements and resources available to minority pupils. If considering the curriculum as a resource, French and Norwegian school discourses in civic education offer too few conversion possibilities for minority youth to expand their capabilities in the multicultural society and to use their own voice in order to build self-governance based on self-mobilization and self-articulation of concrete cultural and social aspirations.

What Do Poor Women Want? Public Employment or Cash Transfers? Lessons from Argentina

The literature on public employment policies such as the job guarantee (JG) and the employer of last resort (ELR) often emphasizes their macroeconomic stabilization effects. But carefully designed and implemented policies like these can also have profound social transformative effects. In particular, they can help address enduring economic problems such as poverty and gender disparity. To examine how, this paper will look at the reform of Argentina’s Plan Jefes into Plan Familias. Plan Jefes was the hallmark stabilization policy of the Argentine government after the 2001 crisis. It guaranteed a public sector job in a community project to unemployed male and female heads of households. The vast majority of beneficiaries, however, turned out to be poor women. For a number of reasons that are explored below, the program was later reformed into a cash transfer policy, known as Plan Familias, that still exists today. The paper examines this reform in order to evaluate the relative impact of such policies on some of the most vulnerable members of society; namely, poor women. An examination of the Argentine experience based on survey evidence and fieldwork reveals that poor women overwhelmingly want paid work opportunities, and that a policy such as the JG or the ELR cannot only guarantees full employment and macroeconomic stabilization, but it can also serve as an institutional vehicle that begins to transform some of the structures and norms that produce and reproduce gender disparities. These transformative features of public employment policies are elucidated by turning to the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and elaborated by Martha Nussbaum — an approach commonly invoked in the feminist literature. This paper examines how the access to paid employment can enhance what Sen defines as an individual’s “substantive freedom.” Any policy that fosters genuine freedom begins with an understanding of what the targeted population (in this case, poor women) wants. It then devises a strategy that guarantees that such opportunities exist and removes the obstacles to accessing these opportunities.

‘Operationalizing’ the Capability Approach as a Basis for Equality and Human Rights Monitoring in Twenty‐first‐century Britain

This article examines a new capability‐based measurement framework that has been developed as a basis for equality and human rights monitoring in twenty‐first‐century Britain. We explore the conceptual foundations of the framework and demonstrate its practical application for the purposes of monitoring equality (in terms of the distribution of substantive freedoms and opportunities among individuals and groups) and human rights (in terms of the achievement of substantive freedoms and opportunities below a minimum threshold) in England, Scotland and Wales. The article challenges the sceptical position by suggesting that ‘operationalizing’ the capability approach is both ‘feasible’ and ‘workable’. A new two‐stage procedure for deriving a capability list is proposed. This combines human rights and deliberative consultation and strikes a balance, we contend, between internationally recognized human rights standards and principles on the one hand, and direct deliberation/participation on the other, in the development and agreement of capability lists.

Aquinas & Sartre: On Freedom, Personal Identity, and the Possibility of Happiness (review)

Reviewed by: Aquinas & Sartre: On Freedom, Personal Identity, and the Possibility of Happiness Eileen C. Sweeney Stephen Wang. Aquinas & Sartre: On Freedom, Personal Identity, and the Possibility of Happiness. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Pp. xxv + 298. Cloth, $79.95. This well-written volume consists of paired chapters on human being, understanding, freedom, and happiness on Aquinas and Sartre. Stephen Wang's project is to use Sartre to reveal the more "radical" aspects of Aquinas's thought and to use Aquinas to "unlock the meaning" of Sartre's more radical claims (xiii). There is a great deal that is fresh and illuminating in this rapprochement between two thinkers most would not join together. Because the aim is to bring the thinkers into conversation, Wang avoids any temptation merely to repeat their technical language. Overall, his account is helpful as a counter to distorted readings of Aquinas that overemphasize the determination of human ends and actions by nature, as well as his intellectualism and realism. Similarly countered are extreme readings of Sartre as an irrationalist and radical voluntarist. In the account of understanding, Wang points out that Sartre eschews both idealism and realism, arguing that, on the one hand, "consciousness adds nothing to being" but, on the other, it "reveals what is there through negation" (113). Aquinas occupies similar ground, Wang contends, holding that reason can observe the present reality in a number of different ways, not just one (211). The will decides which of the many ways something might be considered or ignored, choosing what to attend to. For both Aquinas and Sartre, then, what we know is prompted by human concerns and purposes. In the account of freedom, Wang rightly resists the conclusion that for Aquinas, scope for freedom is created only by our lack of knowledge (that we simply do not know which path is the best) combined with the imperfection of any of the goods we choose, arguing for a more substantive freedom. However, it is hard to equate even this more libertarian version of Aquinas's position with Sartrian anguish at human existence undetermined by essence. Sartre would surely not accept Aquinas's claim that the will would be determined to choose the universal, perfect good, retaining only the option to will nothing at all (Summa Theologiae IaIIae, q.10, a.2). The point at which the connection between Aquinas and Sartre becomes the most tenuous is in the discussion of happiness. While it is crucially true for both Aquinas and Sartre that true and complete human happiness cannot be found within the bounds of human life, Wang emphasizes this common ground to the detriment of the diametrically opposed conclusions they reach about what this means. Wang nudges Sartre toward Aquinas in two ways on the topic of happiness. First he argues that the freedom Sartre asserts is impossible without postulating some sort of transcendent goal (268); and further, he suggests a friendly [End Page 130] amendment to Sartre's claim that "we have an existential goal that cannot actually exist" to "we have an existential goal without understanding how it can exist" (269). What one must affirm about this amendment is that it pushes Aquinas towards the second formulation as well, over and against the all-too-common claim that for Aquinas we do understand how it exists. However, Wang tends to take the darkness out of Sartre's view. While we can say, with Aquinas, that the "human world only makes sense if there is something beyond the totality of the world," we have to admit that Sartre tried to think exactly the world as not making sense. And to howl in protest at its absurdity. Thus, Sartre's "philosophical melodrama" (42) is absolutely essential to him. Focusing on the common ground between Aquinas and Sartre tends to take the drama out of Sartre and produce anodyne claims to which they and many others could assent, e.g. that we are in time "choosing to become through free acts what we are not by nature" (57) and that "we are free to act because we are free to understand the world in different ways" (151). In this sense, the project...

Time, income and substantive freedom: A capability approach

This article offers a conceptual model of how resources, including time and human and social capital, interact with responsibilities, including personal care, childcare and other unpaid work, to produce a range of feasible time allocations. Each allocation generates a combination of disposable income and free time. This set of feasible income—time combinations provides a measure of the individual’s capability set or his/her substantive freedom. The approach is illustrated empirically with data and simulations based on the UK Time Use Survey 2000. The results show that having low educational qualifications (reflecting limited command over resources), having more or younger children (implying greater caring responsibilities), being single and being disabled (both of which adversely affect the rate at which resources can be converted into valuable outcomes) are each independently associated with having a small capability set, defined in terms of the level and range of combinations of disposable income and free time that can be achieved. The paper concludes that the range of combinations of disposable income and free time that a person can achieve provides a useful metric for assessing inequality in individuals’ substantive freedom to pursue their goals in life — a key target for liberal egalitarians.

Rights and Regulation: The Freedom of Health in Economic Perspective

Particularly since 2006, when a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found that patients have a fundamental liberty interest in access to experimental drugs (later overturned en banc), health law scholars have debated the usefulness and propriety of recognizing a constitutional liberty interest in healthcare autonomy. Unlike the international human right to health, the proposed constitutional rule would be a so-called “negative” right - a “freedom of health” rather than a “right to health,” which would operate much like the freedom of speech. This paper proposes a welfare-economic justification for recognizing individual substantive freedoms of this kind and for extending such a freedom to protect healthcare markets. The justification centers on two core characteristics of constitutionally protected domains: Knightean uncertainty and moral ambivalence. The three basic claims that make up the justification are: (1) that uncertainty and ambivalence are predominant characteristics of healthcare markets, just as they are predominant characteristics of markets for other constitutionally protected activities - - amely speech, religion, association, reproduction, and parenting; (2) that high degrees of uncertainty and ambivalence preclude regulatory success according to all standard metrics and that we should therefore avoid and discourage regulation in such markets; and (3) that recognition of an individual substantive right (of the kind typically enforced in American constitutional law) is an elegant means of addressing this problem because it creates a barrier to regulation that can be surmounted if a particular regulatory intervention corrects a known harm or enacts a moral consensus - if it is “tailored to serve a state interest.”

A Battered Women’s Movement Perspective of Coercive Control

In Coercive Control, Evan Stark calls on battered women's activists to reorient their understanding of abusive relationships. Rather than being primarily about physical violence, he maintains, domestic violence is better conceptualized as men's attempts to destroy women's autonomy and reinstate patriarchy in intimate relationships. His analysis suggests important changes to defending battered women in court, modifications to the kinds of support services the movement provides for battered women, and changes in the laws and law enforcement regarding battering. Stark also maintains that, to end coercive control, the battered women's movement must renew its commitment not only to ensuring the safety of individual women but also to attaining the feminist goal of substantive freedom and equality for women in both public and private life. I contend that Stark's reframing of woman abuse is useful for battered women's advocates and may, in some cases but not in others, lead to more effective practices in battered women's programs. At the same time, it is likely to complicate activists' efforts to mobilize public opinion, resources, and public policy to address the problem of woman abuse.

Skill Flow: A Fundamental Reconsideration of Skilled-Worker Mobility and Development

Large numbers of doctors, engineers, and other skilled workers from developing countries choose to move to other countries. Do their choices threaten development? The answer appears so obvious that their movement is most commonly known by the pejorative term “brain drain.” This paper reconsiders the question, starting from the most mainstream, explicit definitions of “development.” Under these definitions, it is only possible to advance development by regulating skilled workers’ choices if that regulation greatly expands the substantive freedoms of others to meet their basic needs and live the lives they wish. Much existing evidence and some new evidence suggests that regulating skilled-worker mobility itself does little to address the underlying causes of skilled migrants’ choices, generally brings few benefits to others, and often brings diverse unintended harm. The paper concludes with examples of effective ways that developing countries can build a skill base for development without regulating human movement. The mental shift required to take these policies seriously would be aided by dropping the sententious term “brain drain” in favor of the neutral, accurate, and conciseterm “skill flow.”

The Lion, the Fox and the Workplace: Fundamental Rights and the Politics of Long-Term Contractual Relationships

This paper analyses the political role of fundamental rights in European case law concerning long-term contractual relationships between parties holding unequal bargaining positions (e.g. employer and employee). The central question is what can be the added value of argumentation based on these rights in respect to pure private law reasoning for the resolution of disputes arising from the contract. In order to answer this question, inspiration is taken from the work of ‘Lions and Foxes’ in legal theory, Ronald Dworkin and Duncan Kennedy respectively. It is argued that the application of fundamental rights reveals the legal-political stakes in German, Dutch and Italian cases concerning long-term (employment) contracts. These stakes can be depicted on a continuum, either putting a relative emphasis on party autonomy (e.g. by upholding the contract, since parties were in formally equal bargaining positions when concluding it) or leaning more towards the protection of the weaker party (e.g. by avoiding a clause because it infringes the weaker party’s substantive freedom to contribute to a balanced relationship with the other party). It is submitted that fundamental rights tend to bring questions of legal policy to the surface, because of their mediation between public values and private interests. The introduction of fundamental rights in contract law adjudication can thus make judges more aware of the policy choices expressed in their decisions. For this reason, it is suggested that further study of relevant contract cases in light of fundamental rights can prove worthwhile for defining common questions of policy in the law concerning long-term contracts in Europe. This may provide inspiration for a further harmonisation of contract law in this field.

Marriage Against Their Will

This article addresses the regulatory regime governing the relationships between unmarried cohabitants. In the article I challenge the conventional divide between conservative and liberal approaches: on one hand, moral condemnation of non-marital conjugal relationships and public policy in favor of marriage lead conservatives to reject the application of marriage law to cohabitating partners. On the other hand, drawing on principles of freedom, tolerance and equality, liberals tend to equate the mutual legal commitments of cohabitants with those of married partners. I break with conventional analysis by offering a novel liberal model that separates between the mutual obligations of cohabitants and married partners. The proposed model is based on a pluralist constitutional theory that underscores the responsibility of the liberal state to create a range of social institutions that offer meaningful choices to individuals. The article thus argues that the law should develop two distinctive legal regimes-one for marriage and another for cohabitation - and provide couples with substantive freedom to choose between them. The article offers arguments rooted in morality and efficiency to support the proposed bipolar default systems and the role of marriage as screening mechanism. It further delineates the refinements and limitations necessary to address liberal objections to the distinction between marriage and cohabitation within the pluralist approach. Hence, the article offers a detailed and comprehensive legal model that unlike existing all-or-nothing approaches, selectively applies marriage law to cohabitation and distinguishes between different types of cohabitants.The article further illustrates how the pluralist theory goes well beyond standard cohabitation law to provide a framework for an innovative spousal relationship regulation. It demonstrates the potential contribution of such a framework by analyzing three publicly disputed topics: same-sex marriage and civil unions; covenant marriage; and secular regulation of religious marriage.

Agency Goals, Adaptation and Capability Sets

‘Agency goals’ play an important role in Sen's capability approach. They are an acknowledgement that individuals aspire to achieve objectives other than their own immediate well‐being. This article argues that using agency goal achievement as a basis for evaluating inequality or disadvantage is problematic. In particular, one of the principal charges against utilitarianism made by capability theorists — that based on adaptation or conditioned expectations — can be made with equal force and validity against a metric based on agency goals. The argument is illustrated using survey data on the educational and occupational aspirations of a cohort of young people in Britain. The article concludes that the conventional cross‐sectional, objective, definition of a capability set needs to be broadened. Only if the capability set from which agency goals are formed and the capability set within which they are pursued are evaluated can we begin to properly assess substantive freedom.

Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia

This essay focuses on Aimé Césaire's post–World War II commitment to colonial emancipation without national independence. It examines how his constitutional initiatives to enact a future with France in an age of decolonization may be read as politically untimely and strategic utopian engagements with the complex problem of freedom. It suggests that they can be grasped as such only if we recognize that Césaire's 1946 program to transform Antillean colonies into French departments and his subsequent attempt to reconstitute France as a federal republic were mediated by the spirits of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher and the legacies of the 1790s revolution in Saint-Domingue and the 1848 abolition of slavery. At these crucial turning points, imperial conditions had created the possibility of nonnational colonial emancipation even as certain kinds of instituted liberty themselves obstructed the prospect of substantive freedom. For subsequent generations, such failed initiatives then became futures past that condensed not yet realized but ever-available emancipatory potentialities.

An Anthropology of ‘The Good Life’ in the Bolivian Plateau

This paper addresses my understanding of well-being as harmonious relations in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. My approach shows the complexity of issues emerging when dealing with social relations. First of all, I analyse a specific case study showing the moral obligation involved among household members. Then I attempt to provide an insight into other aspects of social life to realise that the same degree of moral duty can be found when people participate in religious festivities or social protests. Collaboration, unity and co-operation often coexist with conflicts and moral obligation. The paper argues that this picture of complex coexistence is rather different from the substantive freedom described by Sen (Development as freedom. Oxford University Press, 1999) in his capability approach. By taking Sen’s theoretical framework as a point of departure for this investigation, it aims to emphasise the value of ethnography and other qualitative methods to the study of well-being. In the field of well-being, social interaction may greatly affect people’s capabilities to choose the lives they have reason to value, obliging them to follow certain models based on shared values and preferences. The paper contributes to debates on this specific issue, trying to shed light on the picture emerging when engaging with ethnographic research.

No Democracy without Justice: Political Freedom in Amartya Sen's Capability Approach

Amartya Sen has critiqued theories of justice in the liberal tradition for not focusing on actual human living and failing to be truly egalitarian. However, in the absence of a theoretical approach of his own that comprehensively links capabilities and social justice, others have criticised him for not telling us exactly which capabilities should be guaranteed for all citizens in a ‘just’ society. Sen's ‘silence’ on the substantive content of an account of justice is due in large measure to his stringent emphasis on plurality, agency and choice; he turns to democratic processes that allow for public reasoning and social choice to attend to judgements about justice. Yet this critical role for democracy is undermined in Sen's elaboration in the absence of requirements of justice that would protect democracy's fair and effective functioning in a manner consistent with capability egalitarianism. There is need for a fuller account of justice concerning actual opportunities for political participation than is available so far in Sen's work, one that protects equality of substantive political freedom seen properly in the perspective of capabilities, not merely civil liberties and political rights.

The Thirteenth Amendment and American freedom: a legal history

1 Slavery and Its Social Penetration A. Slavery and the Founding Generation B. Slavery as a Cultural Institution C. Centrality of Slavery in Sectional Con?icts 2 On the Road to Rati?cation A. Emancipation by Statute and Proclamation B. Congressional Debates on the Thirteenth Amendment's Meaning C. The Immediate Aftermath of Liberation 1. What Sort of Freedom? 2. Legal Protections 3 End of Radical Ideals and Judicial Response A. Political Abandonment of Reconstruction B. Supreme Court Abandonment of Reconstruction 1. Early Opinions 2. Relinquishment of Thirteenth Amendment Principles C. A Ray of Hope: Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer D. Summing Up 4 Summing Up and Looking Ahead 5 Theoretical Foundation A. Abolition and Natural Rights B. Thirteenth Amendment and Universal Liberty 6 Thirteenth Amendment and Constitutional Rights A. Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment FreedomsB. Source for Substantive Freedom C. Commerce Clause and Thirteenth Amendment 7 Contemporary Settings A. Confederate Symbols 1. National Symbolism 2. Peculiarities of Confederate Symbols 3. Revival of Confederate Symbolism 4. Federal Authority B. Hate Crimes C. Contemporary Instances of Peonage Conclusion

Capacity and Capability in European Contract Law

So far, the concept of legal capacity is absent in the acquis communautaire on contract law. This article argues that a common frame of reference and an optional European code of contracts cannot do without rules on legal capacity. In the national contract laws of the Member States the main aim of the invalidity of contracts for incapacity has been the protection of persons against the consequences of a misjudgment of their own interests. This raises the question why the law should only protect persons who belong to a limited number of categories who are presumed not to be able to take proper care of their own interests. This article argues that under European contract law a person who has concluded a contract which is actually (extremely) unbalanced deserves equal protection. Such a ?fair price? rule would contribute to substantive freedom of contract as it would facilitate access to the market. Finally, this article questions whether European contracts should be enforceable if they contribute to severely undermining the capabilities of other people (e.g. child workers in sweatshops) to choose the lives they have reason to value.