1st Edition

Deprivation and Freedom A Philosophical Enquiry

By Richard J. Hull Copyright 2007
    172 Pages
    by Routledge

    172 Pages
    by Routledge

    Deprivation and Freedom investigates the key issue of social deprivation. It looks at how serious that issue is, what we should do about it and how we might motivate people to respond to it. It covers core areas in moral and political philosophy in new and interesting ways, presents the topical example of disability as a form of social deprivation, shows that we are not doing nearly enough for certain sections of our communities and encourages that we think differently about how we should best organize our societies in the future.

    The book develops a comprehensive yet accessible account of human freedom, which shows how the ability to realise our freedom is partly definitive of freedom itself. That account conclusively illustrates how many deprivations represent remediable inequalities of important and very basic human freedoms, posing the question as to why societies continue to do so little about them. In answering that question, Richard J. Hull shows how the idea of social exclusion is misleading and, instead, tackles the far more pertinent and challenging issue of societies' failure to include. The moral seriousness of non-inclusion, the failure to provide for freedom, is evaluated via critical discussion of a variety of central themes and distinctions in ethical and political theory. The author shows how such themes and distinctions comprise a framework for evaluating a raft of social issues, in turn providing a unique resource for students of moral, political and applied philosophy. The book concludes with an innovative, challenging and effective combination of analytic and continental styles, so to address the critical question of how we might actually motivate constructive social change. In doing so, it shows how a variety of approaches can work successfully together to provide an emphatic case for greater social inclusion.

    Deprivation and Freedom shows how even fairly modest claims about social provision illustrate that we should be doing a lot more about social deprivation than we are now. It should be of interest to anyone who is concerned with questions about the type of society in which they live, what it says about us to continue as we are – and how we might motivate realistically achievable social change.

    Acknowledgements Introduction 1 PART ONE: DEPRIVATION AND FREEDOM 10 Chapter 1 Relative Social Deprivation 10 Chapter 2 Disability as Social Deprivation 31 Chapter 3 Deprivation as a Restriction of Freedom 50 PART TWO: METHODS OF EVASION 93 Chapter 4 The Doing/Allowing Distinction 95 Chapter 5 Knowledge and Intention 105 Chapter 6 Consequences, Duties and Rights 126 Chapter 7 Applications 143 Chapter 8 Nozick’s Retort: Natural assets and arbitrariness 157 Chapter 9 An Argument from Democracy 175 PART THREE: AUGMENTING REASON 191 Chapter 10 Nietzsche’s Thought Experiment: The idea of eternal 195 recurrence Chapter 11 The Role of Genealogy 215 Chapter 12 Other Ways of Seeing 231 Bibliography 252

    Biography



    Richard J. Hull is Lecturer in Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway.