Vulnerability, Equality, and the State

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christine Straehle
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509480936

Few philosophers have developed a theory of justice that combines the key tenets of liberalism, i.e. the promise of equality and liberty, with a serious consideration of the fact of human vulnerability as a demand of justice. To remedy this lack is the motivation of our project. Building on the critique of the atomistic model of the person, this project will provide an analytically rigorous account of the obligations that the state has towards individuals qua equal members of society and in light of their human vulnerability. We will develop a vulnerability-based liberal theory of justice to help determine what resources vulnerable persons qua equal members of society should have access to, and to define the institutional responses that should be adopted in order to address the issue of vulnerability. In a second step, we will examine what kind of public policies would be best suited to lessen, ameliorate, and compensate for the vulnerability of persons in view of realizing the principles of justice and the ideal of moral equality. We will make three distinct contributions: 1) Conceptual: we will investigate and define the core concepts of vulnerability, moral equality, social equality, and how these concepts define the parameters of social justice. 2) Normative: our aim is to formulate principles of justice for a society of equals by reflecting on the duties of the state arising from different kinds of vulnerability. 3) Applied: we will investigate what public policies are more appropriate to ensure that citizens are able to stand in relations of equality to others in society. In this part of the project, we will analyse the implications that our theory of justice has for the kinds of social arrangements that the state ought to put in place in order to discharge its obligations towards its citizens.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants