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Despite negative effects on their health and social lives, many informal carers of people living with dementia claim to be acting in accordance with a moral obligation. Indeed, feelings of failure and shame are commonly reported by those who later give up their caring responsibilities, suggesting a widespread belief that professional dementia care, whether delivered in the person’s own home or in an institutional setting, ought always to be a last resort. This chapter, however, suggests that this common intuition gets things the wrong way around. The most serious injustices engendered by present-day dementia care services are contingent on broader societal structures – they can thus be ameliorated relatively easily (if resource intensively). Informal dementia care, on the other hand, carries similar risks of injustice and is much more resistant to structural reform. While there may be moral obligations to provide informal dementia care in present-day societies, then, they arise because of the deficiencies of professional care, not the virtues of its informal counterpart.
Carers often interfere with the choices of people living with dementia. On neo-republican and (most) relational egalitarian views, interference can be justified if it tracks a person’s interests: if it does not lead to a relationship of domination. The kind of environment-shaping interventions carers often choose to pursue, however, would be considered infantilising or objectionably paternalistic in other cases. This chapter defends what it calls the indirect-first approach to dementia care, arguing that it offers the best prospects of avoiding domination.
The framework set out in this book reconceptualises the problem of dementia care as a problem of power and social exclusion. At every stage, the goal should be to empower recipients of care to meet their own needs and participate fully in social life as equals, necessitating restrictions on the power of carers and radical changes to our cultural assumptions about and depictions of dementia. Though few would disagree that Western dementia care services are in need of reform, the book’s emphasis on social equality means that the depth and character of the proposed reforms differ significantly from many of those under public discussion. Indeed, as demonstrated in this chapter, significant changes would be needed to the way the UK treats people living with dementia under the law in order to support the reforms recommended in this book.
Georas analyzes different dilemmas that arise when we use robots to serve humans living in the digital age. She focuses on the design and deployment of carebots in particular, to explore how they are embedded in more general multifaceted material and discursive configurations, and how they are implicated in the construction of humanness in socio-technical spaces. In doing so, she delves into the "fog of technology," arguing that this fog is always also a fog of inequality since the emerging architectures of our digitized lives will connect with pre-existing forms of domination. In this context, resistive struggles are premised upon our capacity to dissent, which is what ultimately enables us to express our humanity and at the same time makes us unpredictable. What it means to be human in the digital world is thus never fixed, but, Georas argues, must always be strategically reinvented and reclaimed, since there always will be people living on the “wrong side of the digital train tracks” who will be unjustly treated.
Chapter 2 theorizes the relationship between culture and politics in a manner that explains the Turkish case and can also be applied more generally. I begin by discussing scholarly approaches to the role of culture in contentious politics before offering my conceptual framework for furthering these approaches. How does culture matter in the creation of oppositional identities and political mobilization? Most often, scholars have answered this question by emphasizing structural conditions, movement frames, or personal narratives. Instead, I focus on dispositions. I draw from practice theory to rethink issues of consent and social movement resistance, and I draw from the concept of "practice" to study the processes through which powerful actors cultivate symbolic oppositions within individuals in the form of dispositions. But the implications of this process for movement mobilization have been undervalued. The chapter makes the case that shared dispositions between mobilizing agents and their constituencies produce collective practices among otherwise dispersed individuals and secure consent on the alternative cosmology. While laying the groundwork to establish specific dispositions may take quite some time, once this groundwork has been completed, mobilizing agents can more easily convince people to "hear" insurrectionary messages as well as act on them.
Humility is neither a virtue of caring nor an enkratic virtue, but consists in an absence or dearth of concern for the pseudo-good of self-importance, the kind of personal “importance” that people seek in being envious, vain, domineering, conceited, and arrogant. Self-importance is not the same as the true importance of persons, the kind that is affirmed in people’s loving and respecting others. The vices of pride are important because they spoil or exclude the virtues of caring. Their absence purifies and liberates the personality to love the good, and that is the moral value of humility. Proper pride is a sense of one’s importance as a person where ‘importance’ refers to the real dignity and excellence of oneself as expressed in one’s concern for the good. The absence of the vices of pride that are expressed in self-display – for example, vanity and pretentiousness – is sometimes called modesty, but the more general term for this virtue is ‘humility.’
This article develops the problem of divine domination. Classical theism describes God as essentially all-powerful, sovereign, personal, omnipresent, and a se. If such a being exists, then he dominates humans in virtue of his essential properties. Since dominative relationships are unjust, the divine-human relationship is unjust. I reject solutions to this problem that appeal to humanity’s childlikeness or divine goodness, justice, or greatness. I conclude by gesturing towards what a solution to the problem might require.
This Element analyses how Kant's practical philosophy approaches social suffering, while also taking into account the elusiveness of this concept in his work, especially when viewed through a contemporary lens. It claims that Kant's theory of human dignity is a vital tool for detecting social structures in need of improvement, even if the high demands it imposes on the subject show a propensity to conceal situations of domination and oppression. In his writings, Kant investigated various societal challenges such as widespread poverty, duties towards animals, care for the mentally ill, and motherhood out of wedlock, suggesting that the state should solve most of these through financial support from the wealthier segments of society. Although the direct testimony of victims of social suffering does not play a role in Kant's approach, the author holds that he views social interdependence – including, notably, non-humans – as a fundamental commitment underpinning human development.
Freedom in a choice does not just requires the absence of interference by another, whether with a preferred option or with any option; it requires the absence of domination: the absence of vulnerability to a power of interference on the part of another. Law and only law can guard citizens equally against the domination of others by identifying a common set of basic liberties and by providing intuitively adequate resourcing and protection against others to enable people to exercise those choices. But the state that imposes law will itself dominate all or some of its citizens if it is not subjected to a system of intuitively adequate, democratic control over its imposition of law. Such a system should enable people to shape the framework of government, to impose operational checks, constitutional and contestatory, on officials in government, and to appoint or oversee the appointment of such authorities.
This article addresses Kant’s account of domestic labour from the standpoint of social philosophy. First, I examine the case of the domestic household servant as a paradigm of the legal legitimation of social domination in Kant’s legal philosophy. Second, I explore the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in the outsourcing of care tasks available to wealthy European women in Kant’s theory of labour. Third, I bring Kant’s theory into a critical dialogue with some contemporary challenges of a democratic and equal society. Finally, I draw some conclusions about concrete forms of intersectional domination and exploitation underpinning Kant’s republicanism, before proposing that they are clearly inconsistent, insofar as they exclude large groups of people from the republican demos, even if they essentially contribute to its social reproduction.
Nepotism is a way to organize ecclesiastical power relations, in particular those of the papacy, under the conditions of celibacy on the basis of family relations. In the long run, however, the micro-policy of family was replaced by the micro-policy of bureaucracy, the cardinal-nephew by the secretary of state. But for more than a thousand years, family networks were the most reliable foundation of papal domination. On the other hand, therefore, massive maintenance of the pope’s family interest was a necessary consequence. For some time between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman nepotism even became an established quasi-institution, halfway between loosely structured family network and neutral Church bureaucracy. The papal system of government was stabilized through circular dependency of electors and elected heads, of cardinals and popes.
What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? This book surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.
This chapter examines the nature of slavery, and particularly chattel slavery, in the trans-Atlantic region in the modern period in order to structure the analysis of freedom to follow in subsequent chapters.
Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.
Discussions of the liberal international order, both inside and outside the academy, tend to take its necessity and desirability for granted. While its specific contours and content are left somewhat open in such debates, the idea that this international order is essential for global peace and stability is left largely unquestioned. What is more, the potential loss or end of this order is often taken to mean a return to anarchy, chaos, and disorder. In this essay, I question the presumed necessity and desirability of the liberal international order that most discussions of it seem to share. By rethinking the international order as processual, emergent, and grounded in the social and political contexts that shape its constitution and operation, I suggest that fears about the crisis of international order are less about international order itself and more about the loss of a specific order. This specific order, I argue, constituted in part through processes of racialization, is not so much a rules-based order of sovereign equality but rather an international order of White sovereignty that secures the domination and rule of some over others, of Whiteness over non-Whiteness. Recognizing the role of White sovereignty in the contemporary international order points toward a need to take seriously calls for abolition. Rather than signifying a return to chaos and disorder, the prospect and promise of abolition represents a call to break free from the constraints of the present order and reach into an as-yet-unimaginable future.
Examining the normative foundations of US antitrust and EU competition law, Elias Deutscher argues that the idea of a competition-democracy nexus rests on a commitment to a republican understanding of economic liberty. The book uses this republican concept of economic liberty to analyse how US antitrust and EU competition law embodied a competition-democracy nexus and explains how the turn of competition law toward a more economic approach has led to its decline. The book offers proposals for how the nexus can be revived to allow competition law to address contemporary concerns about the concentration of corporate power.
In Homelessness, Liberty and Property, Terry Skolnik establishes a novel theory about the government's duties to end homelessness, maintain public property's value, and legitimize laws that regulate public space. In doing so, Skolnik provides new insight into how the property law system and the regulation of public space limit unhoused persons' freedom and political equality. The book deepens our understanding of how various areas of law, such as constitutional law, legal philosophy, criminal law, and property law, approach the reality of homelessness and advances original arguments to provide new justifications for the right to housing. Skolnik concludes by offering a set of concrete proposals for how the government can reduce the incidence of homelessness and treat unhoused persons with greater concern and respect. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Democracy is about collective self-rule under conditions that afford everyone political standing and consideration in matters of common concern. But in today’s globalized world, democratic states must respond to a growing number of demands for inclusion from beyond their borders, on issues ranging from migration, to trade, to human rights and the environment. Under these conditions, there is an urgent need for a principled means of determining who is entitled to inclusion, and on what basis. Defenders of the All-Affected Principle claim that inclusions should track the impacts that decisions can have on people’s lives. Defenders of the All-Subjected Principle adopt a similar strategy but use a narrower threshold for inclusion. My argument is that neither principle entirely satisfies. The problem is that both principles are too backwards looking. I offer an alternative formula for democratic inclusion that captures the underlying wrong to which complaints about undemocratic exclusion are seeking to draw our attention. One complaint is about domination: being exposed to the arbitrary and one-sided power of others. Another complaint is about usurpation: having your judgement displaced, without your consent. Using these two complaints as a guide does a much better job explaining when inclusion is justified and the appropriate institutional response.
In an isolate-free graph G, a subset S of vertices is a semitotal dominating set of G if it is a dominating set of G and every vertex in S is within distance 2 of another vertex of S. The semitotal domination number of G, denoted by $\gamma _{t2}(G)$, is the minimum cardinality of a semitotal dominating set in G. Goddard, Henning and McPillan [‘Semitotal domination in graphs’, Utilitas Math.94 (2014), 67–81] characterised the trees and graphs of minimum degree 2 with semitotal domination number half their order. In this paper, we characterise all graphs whose semitotal domination number is half their order.