Abstract
There are two striking features of the politics of liberal democracies. The first is that, with the qualified exceptions of Japan and the USA, they are all developed welfare states, within each of which there is a widespread consensus about there being a social responsibility for such contingencies as unemployment, old age, sickness, education, housing and social welfare. The second feature is that, despite this consensus, there exists within these countries significant controversy about the exact scope of social responsibility, the form it should take and its consequences for social, economic and political life more generally. This mixture of controversy and consensus presents a problem. How can we reconcile this agreement on basics with so much disagreement about specifics?
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Notes and References
W. Beckerman (ed.), The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–1970 (London: Duckworth, 1972);
Graham Hallett, The Social Economy of West Germany (London: Macmillan, 1973);
J. Leruez, Economic Planning and Politics in Britain (London: Martin Robertson, 1975).
For the latest state of the art in these matters see the papers by Geoffrey Stephenson, Michael O’Higgins and Chris Pond in Cedric Sandford, Chris Pond and Robert Walker, Taxation and Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1980).
The results reported there are in some respects depressingly similar to those in T. Barna, Redistribution of Incomes Through Public Finance in 1937 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945).
Compare Edgar K. Browning, Redistribution and the Welfare System (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1975)
and Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) pp. 925–6.
Department of Health and Social Security, Prevention and Health: Everybody’s Business (London: HMSO, 1976);
Marc Lalonde, A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975). In this connection it is worth noting David Reisman’s acute criticism of Titmuss, to the effect that, because Titmuss saw social policy as compensating for the diswelfares of an industrialised economy, he ignored the possibility of regulating industry to prevent those diswelfares arising.
See D. Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society (London: Heinemann, 1977) p. 102.
Compare Robert Pinker, The Idea of Welfare (London: Heinemann, 1979).
David Easton, The Political System (New York: Knopf, 1953) pp. 129–34.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Public Expenditure Trends (Paris: OECD, 1978) p. 25.
Compare Harold L. Wilensky and Charles N. Lebeaux, Industrial Society and Social Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1965).
The best defence of functional explanation as involving more than a heuristic device is to be found in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) chs 9 and 10. Cohen’s claim (pp. 261–2) is that a eufunctional effect can be cited as the explanation of its cause because it allows us to infer that society has some disposition giving rise to the effect. But this seems to ascribe no more than heuristic status to functional modes of discourse. Either the inference is validated, in which case the disposition is the true explanation of the effect, or it is invalidated, in which case it is clear that the eufunctional effect cannot be the explanation. Moreover, is it not a priori implausible to hold that functional discourse can be transferred from the explanation of the behaviour of numerous, relatively shortlived biological populations to the limited number of relatively long-lived societies there have been in the world?
For a good introduction to problems of functional explanation, see the following: Dorothy N. Emmet, Function, Purpose and Powers (London: Macmillan, 1958) chs 3 and 4;
Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) pp. 520–35;
Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1970) ch. 8.
Compare, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Public Expenditure on Income Maintenance Programmes (Paris: OECD, 1976).
For good examples in this mode see, Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1981)
and Gaston V. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialisation in Europe, America and Russia (Chichester: Wiley, 1971).
See, for example, Ted Honderich, Punishment: The Supposed Justifications (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
Compare Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1970), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 152: ‘very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions … it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes’.
Compare Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962).
For an introduction to cost-benefit analysis, see Robert Sugden and Alan Williams, The Principles of Practical Cost-Benefit Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1978).
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (London: Athlone Press, 1970) ch. 1;
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism in H. B. Acton (ed.), Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government (London: Dent, 1972) ch. 4;
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics 6th edn (London: Macmillan, 1901) book IV;
J. C. C. Smart, ‘An Outline of a Utilitarian System of Ethics’ in J. C. C. Smart and B. A. O. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973);
J. C. Harsanyi, ‘Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility’, Journal of Political Economy, LXIII 4 (1955) pp. 309–21.
As well as the literature cited in the above note, see also: D. H. Hodgson, Consequences of Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967);
David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965);
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
The following articles are also relevant and are reprinted in Phillippa Foot (ed.). Theories of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1967);
J. O. Urmson, ‘The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill’, Philosophical Quarterly, III (1953) pp. 33–9;
J. D. Mabbott, ‘Interpretations of Mill’s “Utilitarianism”’, Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955) pp. 3–32;
J. C. C. Smart, ‘Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism’, Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1956) pp. 344–54.
For historical accounts of what follows, see: Walter Lord, The Past That Would Not Die (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966);
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965) ch. 35,
Robert Kennedy and His Times (London: Andre Deutsch, 1978) pp.317–27.
Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 320.
As the Governor himself said, ‘Must it be over one little boy’, quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 319.
One way of putting this point is to say that, not only does utilitarianism respond to preferences in an anonymous fashion, it also fails to give special weight to the preferences of the worst-off under alternative social arrangements. For the formal results underlying the informal presentation in the text, see R. Deschamps and L. Gevers, ‘Leximin and Utilitarian Rules: A Joint Characterization’, Journal of Economic Theory, XVII 2 (1978) pp. 143–63,
and E. Maskin, ‘A Theorem on Utilitarianism’. Review of Economic Studies, XLV 1 (1978) pp. 93–6.
Contrast this with Meredith’s own understanding of the events: ‘The question always arises — was it worth the cost? … I believe that I echo the feeling of most Americans when I say that “no price is too high to pay for freedom of person, equality of opportunity, and human dignity”.’ (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 325).
Compare T. M. Scanlon, ‘Preferences and Urgency’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII (1975) pp. 655–69.
H. L. A. Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955) pp. 175–91,
reprinted in A. Quinton (ed.), Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 53–66.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
For other uses, see in particular: G. R. Grice. The Grounds of Moral Judgment (Cambridge University Press, 1967);
G. Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford University Press, 1977); J. C. Harsanyi, ‘Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility’.
Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965) pp. 3–8, 35–8;
Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) p. 6;
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969);
David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
See also W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977) ch.6.
H. B. Berrington, How Nations Are Governed (London: Pitman, 1964);
Robert A. Dahl, After The Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970);
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969) esp. pp. 167–72.
Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).
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© 1983 Albert Weale
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Weale, A. (1983). Social Policy and the Scope of Political Theory. In: Political Theory and Social Policy. Studies in Social Policy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17144-6_1
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