This chapter gives a thorough introduction to sufficientarianism as a distributive theory. It begins by presenting the enough intuition as the intuitive idea at the core of the sufficientarian view and unfolding it as a distributive ideal. The chapter then defines sufficientarianism, accounts for some early instantiations of the view, and compares the sufficientarian framework with other principles of distributive justice to better understand how it is distinct from competing ideals. The chapter then provides three arguments in favour of sufficientarianism. The first argument relates to the advantage in capturing the moral primacy of eliminating deficiency. The second argument refers to sufficientarianism’s elegant handling of the problem of individual responsibility. The third argument emphasize the advantage of the rejection of the value of distributive equality. The chapter ends by giving an overview of different contemporary strands of sufficientarian theory, including headcount sufficiency views, basic minimum views, and multiple-threshold views. This lays the foundation for the development of sufficientarian theory in later chapters.

The arguments of this book are intended to tackle the social injustices faced by people living with dementia, yet reflecting on the author’s social position reveals a tension. As the author is not a member of the social group this book concerns, they are engaging in an act of speaking for others: a practice that has received significant criticism, given the risks of contributing to oppression and stigma through misrepresentation. With this concern in mind, this chapter engages in a reflective exercise about the content of the book, highlighting ways in which the author’s social position may have negatively influenced its content and setting out the steps the author has taken to try to address this.

In both philosophical research and public discourse around dementia, issues of power and social status receive insufficient attention. The Introduction sets out how this book is aimed at filling this gap.

In medical ethics, there is a well-established debate about the authority of advance directives over people living with dementia, a dispute often cast as a clash between two principles: respecting autonomy and beneficence toward patients. This chapter, in highlighting underexplored issues of power and social status, argues that there need be only one principle in substitute decision-making: determining authenticity. This principle favours a substituted judgment standard in all cases and instructs decision-makers to determine what the patient would authentically prefer to happen – based not merely on the patient’s decisions but also on their present settled dispositions. Adhering to this principle entails that, in a significant range of cases, an advance directive can (and indeed ought to) be overruled.

The introductory chapter outlines the book’s central premise: disabled people have as much right to live in the world as the non-disabled. It introduces the human rights and critical disability studies methods used to interrogate the problem of disability discrimination throughout the life cycle, especially at the beginning and end of life. Along with providing an overview, the introductory chapter argues that the book is particularly needed because disability equal rights struggles remain marginal in mainstream bioethics and law.

Miscarriages of justice encompass more injustice than wrongful convictions or proven innocence. Proven innocence is the most severe rationing of justice, but it is popular, especially for non-lawyers and in mass imprisonment societies such as China and the United States. Originally used as a rationale for compensation in the United States, it now also rations post-conviction relief. It has been used to ration compensation in England since 2014 but was rejected in the 2024 Canadian reforms, creating a Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission. Some Australian states have been attracted to it in recent legislation, but the Chamberlain and Folbigg wrongful convictions have properly been corrected because of reasonable doubts about the guilt of the two women. Following Ronald Dworkin, there needs to be greater concern about inequality in the distribution of the risks of injustice. The danger of wrongful conviction reforms providing justice for a few while legitimating injustices for many is most acute in authoritarian societies such as China, but not absent in democracies. Comparative law, legal process and historical analysis can contribute to richer understandings of miscarriages of justice. Two different future scenarios, one that provides justice for less and another that provides justice for more, are outlined.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

Inter-Asian Law is starkly absent from constitutional accounts of reproductive rights in Asia. Instead, Asian jurisdictions tend to draw from the Global North, with the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade occupying norm status. To explicate the potential of Inter-Asian Law in transforming reproductive rights, an act of imagination is required, suspending Roe as the central comparative frame and introducing alternate, hypothetical referents from Asia. This chapter conducts this task at two stages. First, it develops imagination as a method of comparative constitutional law. Second, applying the imaginative method, it hypothesizes what reproductive rights might look like if Nepal served as a referent for India and India as a referent for Bangladesh. In documenting explicit shifts in the constitutional construction of these rights, the chapter cements the place of Inter-Asian Law.

The use of the different terms “miscarriages of justice,” “wrongful convictions,” “innocence” and “exoneration” in different countries is examined. The book’s research methodologies are explained. A comparative law methodology is used to highlight similarities and differences in different jurisdictions. Many of the immediate causes, such as mistaken eyewitness identification, false confessions and false forensic evidence, are basically similar. At the same time, remedies, including what is remedied, and some structural factors, such as prejudice and discrimination, often differ. A legal process methodology is used to examine the different contributions that courts, the executive and legislatures can make to the creation, prevention and remedying of miscarriages of justice. A historical approach is used to illustrate the longstanding role of racism and prejudice and to explore whether wrongful conviction reforms are a means of legitimating unjust systems. The normative values at stake in miscarriages of justice are outlined with a focus on equality and fair trial rights, including the presumption of innocence. The issue of balancing the risks of wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals is discussed. Finally, a detailed outline of subsequent chapters is provided.

This book makes a number of theoretical contributions to the legal and political philosophy of dementia care, which have important public policy implications. This conclusion serves as both a summary of the book and a final statement of the urgency of addressing the issues raised. It must be appreciated that contemporary Western societies, including the UK, face funding and legislative barriers to achieving the just, dementia-inclusive society. Nevertheless, by identifying an ideal to aspire to, it is hoped that this book can play some role in rectifying the severe injustices people living with dementia face.

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.

As part of the major premise of the Declaration’s syllogism and of a general theory of rightful government, it is unlikely that the main ideas in the Declaration’s second paragraph exist as separate, free-floating nuggets of indeterminate meaning. My task in this essay is to reconstruct the theory of rightful government contained in that paragraph in order to progress toward fixing meaning for those ideas – equality, rights, liberty, and others – that have been so important to the self-understanding and political aspirations of Americans from 1776 on.

On a standard relational egalitarian framework, social justice is achieved through eliminating intolerable inequalities of power and social status. From this point of view, injustice is not simply a matter of what institutions or individuals do but of how they do it. If they fail to challenge, reinforce, or create paradigm social injustices such as domination, stigma, and oppression, citizens remain socially unequal whatever their distributive positions. As this chapter demonstrates, the case of dementia clearly illustrates the value of this approach, as purely distributive views cannot fully capture the severity nor the character of the injustices those that live with this condition face.

The concluding chapter summarises the book’s central argument that laws, policies, and practices which privilege the birth and survival of the non-disabled fundamentally challenge the notion that people with impairments have an equal right to live in the world. It also discusses avenues for further research, before closing with some final remarks.

Chapter 6 uses this new understanding of chilling effects to elaborate the dangers of chilling effects both on an individual level and societal scale. The chapter elaborates the two dimensions of chilling effects – repressive and productive. The former speaks to how chilling effects today can repress speech and other rights on a mass scale; the latter speaks to how chilling effects are conforming effects, and thus produce conforming and compliant behavior on a societal scale, which has critical implications for individual identity, development, autonomy, and equality, but is also corrosive to democracy and democratic societies.