Rebuilding society from the ground up: Contextual justice, fellow citizenship, and United States welfare policy.

Abstract

In this dissertation I develop and explore a contextual approach to political philosophy that focuses on actual, concrete problems currently faced in the public sphere. This sort of contextual approach is minimalist, in that it involves addressing large theoretical questions of justice only as necessary to solve the problem at hand. This is an alternative to more typical approaches to political philosophy in which the central task is to develop an account of the ideally just state or formulate a set of principles of justice that can later be applied to particular problems. On the approach I advocate, the primary aim is to identify ways to improve the current situation. The resulting conclusions are therefore incremental; once the recommended changes are implemented they may give rise to further instances of injustice, some of which may have been difficult or impossible to foresee, which will then require additional improvements and modifications. After describing my preferred approach and defending it from several theoretical objections, I spend the remainder of the dissertation investigating welfare policy in the United States. I argue that the recent set of welfare reforms are best understood as growing out of an implicit commitment to an ideal of fellow citizenship. I go on to defend the obligations of reciprocity owed between fellow citizens as a sound basis for welfare policy in the United States, although I claim that careful attention to these obligations reveals significant shortcomings in our current policies. For instance, although I support the use of work requirements, I argue that publicly funded jobs of last resort ought to be available to potential welfare recipients, that time limits on the receipt of welfare benefits ought to be eliminated, and that total benefits from welfare and other earnings support programs ought to be high enough to ensure that all who fulfill their obligations of fellow citizenship are able to earn a socially recognized sufficient income. I close by pointing out that any success I have had in my contextual analysis of welfare policy vindicates the contextualist approach to political philosophy advocated in the beginning of the dissertation.Ph.D.PhilosophyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyPublic administrationPublic policySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125338/2/3192616.pd