1,720,958 research outputs found
Structural injustice and self-development
No full textPublished online: 22 September 2025Since the publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), Iris Young's thought has had a big impact on how social and political philosophers understand social justice. Young is known for arguing that injustice should be primarily defined in relational and structural terms of oppression and domination, rather than in terms of the unfair distribution of goods or resources, and for the arguments that claims within egalitarianism require group, rather than individual, comparisons on measures of well-being, thus providing an influential way of thinking about equality, difference, and justice (Young 1990, 192, 2001). A burgeoning literature on structural injustice is especially indebted to Young's work on structures of oppression.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Wiley Transformative Agreement (2024-2027
Human flourishing and structural injustice
No full textDefence date: 03 June 2024Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Sangiovanni (King's College London, Former European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Anton Hemerijck (European University Institute); Prof. Serene Khader (The City University of New York); Prof. Maeve McKeown (University of Groningen)In this thesis I argue that we should think of human flourishing in terms of the development of human capacities and that we should understand oppression in terms of the structural obstacles to such development. My overarching aim is to bring the analysis and critique back together by showing that thinking more carefully about well-being can help us think better about the web of interrelated psycho-social and political phenomena such as internalised oppression, personal autonomy, structural oppression, and ideology. My arguments thus contribute to a broader discussion on the nature of justice by providing an analytic normative framework for the critical theory of oppression. The thesis consists of three parts. In the first part, I argue against the prevailing theory of subjective well-being in moral philosophy and in public policy, by subjecting to critical analysis its philosophical foundations. I then defend an objective developmental theory of well-being that can be traced to an idea of Eudaimonia. I argue that we flourish because we realise a range of human capacities rather than because we satisfy our preferences or experience positive mental responses. I propose to understand well-being in terms of self-development – as a process of development of one’s human capacities in the pursuit of one’s projects for their own sake. I answer some of the most important objections to the proposed view. In the second part, I start with problematizing the phenomenon of internalised oppression – or adaptive preferences – in such a way as to show its key relevance for a successful theory of oppression and personal autonomy. I discuss various theories of adaptive preferences, but find them unsatisfactory, proposing a developmental view that improves our understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that adaptive preferences should be defined by their inconsistency with human flourishing and their causal relationship to flourishing-incompatible formative conditions. I introduce the notion of structurally imposed constraining preferences to signal what I think is normatively important in cases of internalised oppression, namely the material conditions of class-divided social systems that thwart the universal and free realization of people’s developmental capacities. In the third part, I call for a widening of our analytic tools to include the theory of subjectivation, critical phenomenology, and ideology critique. I claim that constraining preferences represent a form of internalised enclosure, a distinct type of psychic and corporeal oppression that thwarts well-being understood as self-development. I then argue that this is a form of structural oppression because it affects individuals depending on how they are structurally positioned in a society. To fully understand the mechanism of perpetuation of such structural oppression I suggest that we need an account of ideology that focuses on the habitus of agents rather than on distorted cognitive beliefs. I then propose a concept of ideology as a practice encoded into cognitive and corporeal responses to the world; it stabilises oppression by erasing its effects through the creation of distinctive life-worlds that constrain the horizon of one’s well-being. I think that highlighting this dimension of oppression clarifies the goals of emancipatory struggles
Adaptive preferences as constraints on self-development
No full textPublished online: 05 August 2025The problem of adaptive preferences (APs) played a central motivating role in the Capability Approach, since these internalised preferences were seen as one of the causes of the perpetuation of the unjust conditions that gave rise to them. A number of different theoretical frameworks were proposed to understand what unites such preferences and why they warrant our moral concern. Scholars are mostly divided between broadly “content-neutral” approaches that focus on the authenticity of the procedural formation of a preference, substantive approaches that apply normative restrictions on the content of the preference in relation to how it affects a person’s well-being, or a variation of a hybrid approach among them. In this article, I critically examine several recent accounts that incorporate substantive features into a content-neutral procedural framework; I argue that although they can successfully deal with certain pressing issues, they still face unresolved challenges. Building on a more substantive accounts, I propose to conceptualise APs as constraints on self-development, suggesting how we can understand the internal dynamic of such a deficient “constraining” relation to a self
Stepping-stone solidarity : the normative foundation of the social investment welfare state
No full textPublished online: 14 March 2025In this article, we explore the normative foundations of the social investment welfare state. Social investment welfare enhances ex ante individuals’ opportunities and capabilities to resolve the social risks typical of post-industrial societies – via early childhood education and care, vocational training over the life course, active-labour-market capacity-building and policies for work-life balance, such as paid parental leave, lifelong learning and long-term care. Social investment transcends, while not replacing, the compensatory rationale of mid-20th-century social security. We begin by lamenting the prolonged disconnect between social policy research and normative political theory since the 1990s, which is worrisome against the background of significant welfare state change. We address the shortcomings of a purely Rawlsian-distributive reconstruction of the social investment policy turn, while rejecting the ‘luck egalitarian’ interpretation and its tacit conflation with Third Way welfare reform. Our normative framework for social investment takes heed of Elizabeth Anderson's relational understanding of justice and work by Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit on ‘secure’ capabilities and ‘fertile’ functionings, which builds on Amartya Sen's critique of John Rawls. Finally, we delineate our concept of stepping-stone solidarity as the normative anchor of social investment welfare
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
- …
