Chapter 3 discusses the concepts of discrimination, sexism and childism. It firstly presents the concept of discrimination under international law. Secondly, it explores the notions of sexism and ‘childism’. It discusses paternalism, child liberationism and the challenge of protecting the girl child while promoting her autonomy rights. It studies theories concerning the interests of children as well as the common vulnerability approach, Arnstein and Hart’s ladder of participation, and the possibility of granting autonomy rights to girls at adolescence. Thirdly, it examines the public/private divide at the international and domestic levels and how it impacts the girl child globally. Chapter 3 thereafter explores the notions of universalism and cultural relativism, as well as the evolving meaning of culture, and their significance for the girl child. In this context, the chapter also analyzes the conceptual division between the Global South and the Global North.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) in democratic theory holds that everyone who is affected by a decision has a claim to participate in making that decision. Authors who invoke the principle usually restrict its scope and argue only for enfranchising affected interests within formal political decision-making procedures. In other words, the AAP would expand the demos (e.g. by including people affected by decisions taken in other countries), but need not expand the sites of formal politics to which democratic norms apply. Against these scope restrictions, we argue that the AAP applies to some extra-governmental actors and, in particular, to big philanthropists. We make this argument without endorsing an expansive reading of the AAP as applying to all kinds of decisions, public and private. Rather, we argue that the reasons we have for endorsing the AAP—for thinking that it is wrong for people to be denied influence over exercises of power that affect them—do not pick out formal political decision-making as a uniquely important site of inclusion. We also challenge, on anti-paternalist grounds, the assumption that it is primarily the risk of negative impacts that grounds claims to inclusion.

This chapter will explore how the provisions governing best interests assessments ought to be reformed so as to better ensure that an agent’s authentic desires are being prioritised in decisions being taken about them. The starting point should be that the assessor ascertains ‘so far is reasonably practicable’ the individual’s wishes, feelings, beliefs, and values. This should then be supplemented by a presumption that the agent’s wishes and feelings will be determinative of what is in their best interests, except when giving effect to them will expose the person to a risk of significant harm. Even where the harms are significant, however, there will still be occasions where the agent’s wishes and feelings should nonetheless take precedence; where to do otherwise would involve frustrating their deeply and authentically held beliefs, values, or commitments. This chapter will highlight some of the potential considerations which ought to guide assessors in these circumstances. It will propose that assessors be provided with a list of factors that they must take into account when determining the degree of weight to be ascribed to the agent’s wishes, which reflect these considerations.

The foregoing discussion has highlighted the fundamental fragility of assessments of capacity, which hinge on a series of complex yet unavoidable clinical judgements about the person’s cognitive capacities and the origins of the beliefs or values that motivate their decision. This chapter will explore the implications of this for best interests assessments and, in particular, the extent to which due weight is currently being given to the person’s authentically held values and beliefs in the assessment of their best interests. Drawing on case law, interviews, and post-legislative scrutiny of the Mental Capacity Act, it will conclude that despite a number of empowering court decisions, the lack of direction contained in the Act on how to apply the MCA has still resulted in different weight being attributed to the agent’s wishes. Moreover, the trend towards greater empowerment has not yet trickled down to decisions being taken on the ground by doctors and care workers, which still remain characterised largely by paternalism and risk aversion. Those undertaking best interests assessments could therefore benefit from a more unified starting point and greater clarity on the factors which ought to influence the degree of weight accorded to the individual’s wishes.

This chapter will explore a key problem with the current law’s approach – namely, that it is impossible to assess a person’s capacity to ‘use or weigh’ the information relevant to a decision without engaging with the values that underpin their decision. It will suggest that while some recourse to the person’s values is unavoidable, the current approach gives assessors ample room to invoke other values when assessing the person’s capacity, thus creating space for paternalistic judgments to go unchecked. Despite this risk, it will be claimed that in many of the cases in which this occurs, underpinning the assessment is in fact a concern that the values or beliefs that motivate a person’s decision have been affected by an illness or impairment, such that the decision reached is not one that the agent would have made, but for that disorder or impairment. The current law cannot account for this, and so assessors are forced to manipulate the test for capacity instead. While this prevents unnecessary harm, it has the effect of obscuring the value-laden and highly controversial claims that may underpin such decisions, which remain insulated from scrutiny or challenge.

The aim of this chapter is to show how the relationship between education and freedom is informed by the ethics of authority. Freedom is a central human value. Education contributes to our humanity. If human freedom is something valuable for all, and education is necessary for the promotion of this value, then we need an agent – an authority – that can direct our efforts in support of this educational goal. The chapter describes two different justifications of political authority over education that are (plausibly) compatible with an education for human freedom. Each offers a different view on the necessity of educational institutions – and institutional authority more generally – in realizing worthwhile educational goals.

This chapter introduces the theoretical literature concerning children’s rights. Although there is now widespread international agreement that children possess human rights, the theoretical underpinning of those rights is often said to be under-theorised. Further, sceptics have questioned whether children’s rights undermine their interests and the central place of the family in protecting those interests. This chapter addresses these debates, considering the theoretical basis on which children hold rights, the content of those rights and the connection between moral rights and international human rights law.

This chapter examines the duties of states to insiders (people living within a state’s physical territory) and outsiders (people in other states). It is argued that states have, provided the initiation of securitization is otherwise justified and that must cause is satisfied, an overriding duty to secure insiders from objective existential threat via securitization. Regarding morally mandatory other-securitization, the picture is more mixed, a range of costs to the self, including (1) the risk of death, disease, and disability; (2) the risk of instability and insecurity; and (3) financial costs can override an individual state’s obligation to secure and – where necessary – securitize outsiders from threat. This chapter goes on to examine what happens to pro tanto duties if states are liable for threat creation abroad. Moreover, it suggests a ranking of different triggers for remedial responsibility derived from common-sense morality, enabling the pinpointing of specific states as primary duty-bearers for morally mandatory other-securitization.

Chapter 8 takes up what the subjectivity of socially embedded individuals involves. On the externalist view of individual autonomy, subjectivity is an embodied subjectivity because institutions and social relationships affect people’s choices and actions. To explain this idea, the chapter reviews the situated cognition and the embodied and distributed cognition literatures in cognitive science and psychology to explain the connection between social embeddedness and subjectivity. It then returns to the capability conception of individuals and what individual and personal identity involves. Using a two-level view of people’s capabilities, it argues that socially embedded individuals develop first-order capabilities regarding specific kinds of things that they can be and do and also a second-order self-concept or self-narrative capabilities in conjunction with one another, and rely on the latter to evaluate themselves in relation to their capability development. This discussion draws on the thinking of developmental psychologist Carl Rogers. How, and the extent to which, this understanding of individuals allows us to explain them as distinct and re-identifiable individuals closes the chapter.

Drawing on Putnam’s famous fact–value entanglement argument, Chapter 7 shows how economics is inescapably value-entangled, and argues that while economics is an inherently value-laden discipline it may still be an objective one. It describes economics’ value structure as being anchored by its main normative ideal shared across different approaches, individual realization – what most people in the discipline believe is most valuable and good about human society and characteristic of human nature. It compares two competing interpretations of what that ideal involves – one in mainstream economics and one in capability economics – distinguishing them according to the different additional values regarding what well-being involves, they adopt to give content to the individual realization ideal. It then evaluates these two approaches according to whether their different value structures are consistent – an analysis I characterize as value disentanglement. After this, the chapter turns to a general framework for ethics and economics – or ethics in economics – distinguishes four different forms of disciplinary relationships between economics and ethics, and argues that while cross-disciplinarity best describes the current status of economics and ethics, transdisciplinarity represents an aspirational conception of what an objective, value-laden economics ultimately requires.

This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”