Global Justice for Children : A Capability Approach

While global justice is a hot topic in political philosophy, the place of children and children as a particular group of agents has been largely ignored. This book explores global justice for children from the perspective of the capability approach.

The capability approach provides a fruitful normative foundation for exploring the issue of global justice for children. To spell this out, it is necessary to address the questions of the currency of justice, its principles, and the allocation of responsibility, and to show that all children have a moral claim to the capabilities and functionings they require for a sufficiently good life. The first chapters are devoted to the status of children in political philosophy and to methodological considerations. The next chapters then argue that developing capabilities and functionings constitute the appropriate currency of global justice. The discussion then turns to the question of the principle of global justice, advocating a sufficiency principle that recognizes different thresholds in order to secure a sufficiently good life for all children. Finally, the concluding chapters address the question of responsibility for justice. Here, the book develops a theory of differentiated responsibility, which distributes responsibilities among various agents.

Global Justice for Children will be of interest to researchers and students working in social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of childhood and development studies.

Gottfried Schweiger works as a Senior Scientist at the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research at the University of Salzburg. He is, among other roles, Associate Editor of The Journal of Ethics and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. His publications include the monographs A Philosophical Examination of Social Justice and Child Poverty (with Guner Graf) and What is a Good Childhood? A Philosophical Approach (with Johannes Drerup), as well as the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty (co-edited with Clemens Sedmak).