The Social Science Library » Unconditional Welfare Benefits and the Principal of Reciprocity

Unconditional Welfare Benefits and the Principal of Reciprocity

Author(s)	Lowry, Christopher
Abstract	The neutrality debate deals not only with the question of whether substantial evaluation of the good has a place in the political domain, but also with the question of whether political philosophy should have an aspirational commitment, as opposed to confining its attention to conditions of legitimacy. The influence of Amartya Sen’s capability approach extends across a number of academic disciplines and political contexts. Within political philosophy, the capability approach is principally regarded as an important contribution to the metric of advantage debate, alongside such other metrics as Rawls’s social primary goods, Dworkin’s resources, Cohen’s access to advantage, and Arneson’s opportunity for welfare, among others. This paper demonstrates that Sen’s arguments and position also bear on the liberal debate about neutrality versus perfectionism. Once the implications of Sen’s views for liberal neutrality are spelled out, the capability approach yields a distinctive alternative in-between the standard versions of neutrality and perfectionism, which I will refer to as public value liberalism. (The paper was first published in: Les Ateliers de l’ÃƒÂ©thique, vol. 4 no. 2, summer 2009.)
IssueNo
Pages	1-15
Article	Access to Article
Source	Social Science Research Network
VolumeNo
PubDate	2008
ISBN_ISSN

Unconditional Welfare Benefits and the Principal of Reciprocity