Gideon Calder

Swansea University | SWAN · Department of Public Health and Policy Studies

Prevention is becoming ever more central in UK care policy for older people, though precisely what this entails, and how it works most effectively in social care and support, remains ambiguous. Set against the “newness” of recent social care legislation in Wales, this article explores the perspectives of professionals on prevention and community de...

This is the final report of the evaluation of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act. The evaluation was made up of different stages, all of which resulted in different reports. These have been used to inform the final report, which makes overall conclusions from the evaluation. It makes recommendations for the social care sector to take fo...

The inequalities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic have had particular implications for the wellbeing of family carers. This article considers these impacts from a social justice perspective, drawing on elements of the ethics of care and the capabilities approach, as well as findings from interviews with 30 family carers in Wales, UK, during the i...

Introduction Age was central to how the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, right from the start. In its initial responses in the early spring of 2020 – through the Coronavirus Act 2020 and surrounding measures – the UK government deployed chronological age as a marker, with the whole of the UK population over 70 identified as particularly vulnerable to th...

We address why the neoliberal context is relevant to how person-centred care and co-production play out in social institutions such as those characteristic of the contemporary UK. In the following section, we set out what we call the ‘promises’ of person-centred care, via an influential recent depiction of four core principles and offer a brief acc...

This chapter looks at the place of discretionary judgement in ethics, both in theoretical terms and at the level of practice in the social professions. Addressing ethics as one dimension of the space in which we act (e.g. in professional life), the chapter looks at the equivocal and under-theorized relationship between ethics and discretion, arguin...

Gary Craig (ed.) (2018), Handbook on Global Social Justice, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, £180,00, pp. 528, hbk. - Volume 48 Issue 4 - GIDEON CALDER

This case study illustrates the experiences of a young caregiver. The case is emblematic of wider questions of distributive justice: the sharing of resources and caring responsibilities in society, and the impact of this on the life chances of children (and indeed their parents). To what extent, for example, should the situations in the case be reg...

The aim of this collection is to develop new theoretical and practical approaches to address the responsibilities created by new forms of healthcare practice. In particular, the authors examine the significance of people’s key relationships, such as family and community, and how they deliberate and make decisions about their responsibilities. Each...

An increasingly widely used term in recent decades, the central place of ‘life chances’ in UK policy has been confirmed by the retrospective renaming of the Life Chances Act 2010 (formerly the Child Poverty Act 2010). Alongside this, the notion that we should promote fairer life chances has gained purchase across the political spectrum. Yet this no...

Gideon Calder’s intersecting themes of political contestation, care and the temper of the country examine the public good less as a fixed entity but rather as an evolving conversation taking place across a wide range of social settings, not least in the flux and informality of everyday life. Drawing on Marquand’s belief that progressivism was as mu...

Amidst ‘Brexit’, a divided and out of power Labour Party, and the wider international rise of populism, contemporary British social democracy appears in a state of crisis. This book, a collection of essays by some of Britain’s leading academics, public intellectuals and political practitioners, seeks to engage with the ‘big picture’ of British soci...

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are thus essential for a...

The notion of ‘life chances’ is frequently invoked in political rhetoric and debate about social mobility and equality of opportunity. Typically, it is only loosely defined. This article considers the relationship between the ‘life chances’ agenda and persistent questions about the relationship between childcare and social justice. It unpacks the n...

Introduction In recent years the notion of ‘life chances’ has been moving ever closer to the centre of UK talk about social mobility and equality of opportunity. With the Welfare and Reform Act 2016, its official status was confirmed by the retrospective renaming of the Child Poverty Act 2010 as the Life Chances Act 2010. As a term it has been high...

The book contains invaluable research, including discussions on modern slavery, childcare and social justice and welfare chauvinism, as well as a chapter centred on the Grenfell Tower fire. Bringing together the insights of a diverse group of experts in social policy, this book examines critical debates in the field in order to offer an informed re...

This article provides an analysis of recent evidence on the circumstances of single parent families, in relation to key conceptual debates on social justice. It explores this relation via four different angles: (i) the position of single parents in relation to other parents; (ii) the position of single parents in relation to their children; (iii) t...

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea...

The need to understand ethical and moral issues in sport is at an all-time high. This latest edition of Ethics in Sport presents readers with the challenges involved when working in the field. This new third edition retains many of the previous editions’ thought provoking pieces, which are still applicable to today’s current issues. These are enhan...

This title was first published in 2000: Bringing oes liberalism have either the theoretical capacity or the political durability to provide for social justice, particularly given the challenges of the new millennium? From a diverse array of disciplinary, cultural and critical perspectives, the contributors to this timely and incisive collection of...

This chapter explores the relationship between climate change and contemporary philosophy. I distinguish between two main routes by which philosophers approach the environment, which I identify respectively as: (1) philosophy applied to the environment; and (2) environmental philosophy. While the first regards topics such as climate change as ways...

Definitions of "family" will routinely include the term "group" - and for most individuals, the family represents a primary affiliation. Meanwhile the family occupies a prominent place in analysis of society and policy. Yet the family barely features in political and normative debates about groups. This article addresses whether families are indeed...

Round table discussion discussing the prospects for social democracy in Wales and elsewhere in the wake of the Corbyn leadership victory. Was it a game-changer? Do political horizons remain much as they were? What are the prospects for progressive alliances, for example across Labour, Plaid and the Greens? Support for Labour more or less held up in...

The family poses problems for liberal understandings of social justice, because of the ways in which it bestows unearned privileges. This is particularly stark when we consider inter-generational inequality, or 'class fate' - the ways in which inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next, with the family unit ostensibly a key conduit....

Most people agree that every child deserves an equal chance to flourish. Most also value family life. Yet the family plays a surprisingly crucial part in maintaining inequality from one generation to the next. The children of disadvantaged parents typically achieve less and die younger. Early in their school careers, even the most able among them f...

The family disrupts equality while also, think many, providing goods of unique value. In Family Values, Brighouse and Swift tackle both of these tendencies, offering a refined and distinctive liberal egalitarian account both of the value of family life, and the limits of what may be done in its name. It builds up from an account of children's speci...

It is banal to say that different beliefs provide the basis for different conceptions of the good and diverse ways of life, the protection of which will seem to many to be paramount as a matter of justice. But what happens when those beliefs are about global processes of the magnitude of those involved in climate change, with the scale of their imp...

Ethical practice has a complex and ambiguous relationship to notions of ‘competence’. Both, of course, seem vital elements of suitability to practise in professional roles across the settings of health and social care. But exactly how they relate is less self-evident. Is there such a thing as ‘ethical competence’? This article argues that there is,...

If care matters, how we talk about care matters—and we should care about how such talk takes place. Dialogue about institutional and informal practices of care is widely recognized as an important part of shaping such practices and holding them to account. But what kinds of dialogue and what kind of work should they do? This article considers the r...

Demands on healthcare systems are increasingly complex and diverse. Consumerism, multiculturalism and regulation challenge practitioners and policymakers. This has led to urgent debate about the value and purpose of healthcare as people seek to make serious, well-thought through decisions. This book helps readers to make rational decisions about he...

In any profession, standards of practice matter – and one way of gauging such standards is by way of concepts such as ‘competence’ and ‘expertise’. Such terms help mark out stages of graduation between the states of complete novicehood and being a seasoned professional. Any such process will have an ethical dimension. To progress along it, practiti...

Democracy is crucially about inclusion: a theory of democracy must account for who is to be included in the democratic process, how, and on what terms. Inclusion, if conceived democratically, is fraught with tensions. This article identifies three such tensions, arising respectively in: (i) the inauguration of the democratic public; (ii) enabling e...

Is liberalism adaptable enough to the ecological agenda to deal satisfactorily with the challenges of anthropogenic climate change while leaving its normative foundations intact? Compatibilists answer yes; incompatibilists say no. Comparing such answers, this article argues that it is not discrete liberal principles which impede adapatability, so m...

This article sets out and briefly explores three main contentions. One is that mobility is a crucial aspect of social stratification – such that “transport disadvantage†is intimately tied up with social exclusion more generally. A second is that insofar as there is a green case for basic income (BI), there seems also, for similar reasons, to...

Citizenship acquisition has an ambiguous texture, both in theory and practice — an ambiguity informing and borne out in the different contributions to this book. ‘Becoming a citizen’ has a formal, legalistic sense: the point at which one is counted, by relevant authorities and institutions, among the citizenry of a country. It also has a more subst...

Liberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supranational. Focusing on the case...

Normative theory, in various idioms, has grown wary of questions of ontology-social and otherwise. Thus modern debates in ethics have tended to take place at some distance from (for example) debates in social theory. One arguable casualty of this has been due consideration of relational factors (between agents and the social structures they inhabit...

abstract Using as a background the ongoing crisis afflicting the international cricket scene over whether or not to boycott Zimbabwe, this paper seeks to explore the moral complexities surrounding the case of the sporting boycott in general as a response to morally odious regimes. Rather than attempting to provide some easy formula by which to dete...

Recent critiques of normative universalism have helped entrench a dichotomy between formalist universal egalitarian claims (typical of the liberal tradition) and particularist attention to cultural difference (in contemporary communitarianism, and in more or less postmodernist approaches). Focusing on the work of Richard Rorty and Iris Marion Young...

edited by Doris Schroeder, welcomes contributions on all health topics related to human rights and relevant generic contributions from the human rights debate. To submit a paper or to discuss suitable topics, please e-mail Doris Schroeder at dschroeder@uclan.ac.uk. a

In this article I explore background questions with reference to two recent strands in anti-foundationalist theory: Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism, and Keith Jenkins's postmodernist treatment of historiography. Both approaches seek fresh perspectives on our relationship to history which reject the aspiration towards a perspective positioned at any...

Without Abstract

This article explores ideas from Richard Rorty and Nancy Fraser on the justification of democracy. It considers both as exemplary of what, following Michael Walzer, we can call philosophizing "in the city" – eschewing any aim to adopt a generalised, metaphysical perspective on questions of social justice, and seeking instead to locate these, in the...