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Social Policy and Social Justice*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Robert Pinker
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Extract

In this review of the changing relationship between social policy and social justice I will be concerned with three main areas of debate. Firstly, I wish to attempt a clarification of the moral ideals of social welfare which find expression in those criteria of social justice by which people in similar states of need are treated differently. My second concern is to review and redefine what constitutes the social division of welfare in Britain today. Thirdly, I wish to explore the extent to which these ideals of social welfare complement or conflict with one another.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 Titmuss, Richard M., Essays on ‘The Welfare State’, London: Allen and Unwin, 1958, p. 8.Google Scholar

2 Donnison, David, ‘Ideologies and Policies’, Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 1, 1972, p. 100ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 It can be argued that we find it much easier to agree on what counts as an injustice than to agree on the nature of the just society. Ginsberg suggests that since the ‘central, core’ of justice is the ‘exclusion of…arbitrary power’, the ‘sense of injustice is historically a more p tent drive than any positive conception of what constitutes justice’ Ginsberg, Morris, On the Diversity of Morals, London: Mercury Books, 1962, p. 137.Google Scholar

4 As François Lafitte observes, ‘With one voice we will press for equalization through communal services obliterating social distinctions, with another for unequal economic rewards to mark occupational differences and differentially sanctify our measurements of men's social worth.’ ‘Social Policy in a Free Society’, Birrell, W. D. et al. (eds), Social Administration: Readings in Applied Social Science, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, p. 60.Google Scholar

5 Titmuss, , op. cit., pp. 34–55.Google Scholar

6 See, for example, Income Distribution and Social Change, London: Allen and Unwin, 1962Google Scholar; Commitment to Welfare, London: Allen and Unwin, 1968Google Scholar; and especially The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, London: Allen and Unwin, 1970.Google Scholar

7 See Berlin, Isaiah, Two Concepts of Liberty, London: Oxford University Press, 1958.Google Scholar

8 Spencer, Herbert, The Study of Sociology, London: Williams and Norgate, 1894, pp. 345–6.Google Scholar

9 This view was succinctly expressed by Vivie Warren in ‘Mrs Warren's Profession’ when she remarked: ‘People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and, if they can't find them, make them’. In Miss Warren's philosophy, however, not even mothers were permitted to improve their ‘circumstances’ by immoral methods. Shaw, George Bernard, Plays Unpleasant, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946, p. 243.Google Scholar

10 In negative terms at least it seems to be more demoralizing and offensive to popular notions of justice to be without work than to be without welfare. Insofar as the assertion of the right to work was one of the first popular manifestations of democratic sentiment, we may say that the most fundamental idea of welfare inheres in the status of work itself. It is also inherent in another and complementary form which runs as a continuing theme through the history of English social policy – namely, the moral obligation to work.

11 Social Insurance and the Allied Services, Report by SirBeveridge, William, London: HMSO, Cmd. 6404, 1958 edition, p. 12, para 21.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 13, para 26.

13 Ibid., p. 12, para 21.

14 Ibid., p. 160, para 440.

15 Ibid., p. 119, para 296.

16 Ibid., p. 108, para 273.

17 op. cit., p. 364.Google Scholar

18 Dickens, Charles, Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Chapman and Hall, n.d., p. 95.Google Scholar

19 See the two white papers, National Superannuation and Social Insurance, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 3883, 1969Google Scholar and Social Insurance, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 4124, 1969Google Scholar; see also Lynes, Tony, Labour's Pension Plan, Fabian Tract 396, 1969, especially p. 21ff.Google Scholar

20 Proposals for a Tax-Credit System, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 5116, 1972, p. 29, para 117.Google Scholar

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22 Beveridge, , op. cit., p. 107, para 272.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 116, para 288.

24 Beveridge suggested that it might be ‘dangerous to shift too many burdens from the citizen as consumer on to the citizen as taxpayer because that may lead to extravagances. All men know of themselves as consumers but do not always realize themselves as tax payers.’ Ibid., p. 115, para 287.

25 Strategy for Pensions: The Future Development of State and Occupational Provision, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 4755, 1971.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 13, para 40.

27 Ibid., p. 4, para 9.

28 Ibid., p. 9, para 27.

29 Ibid., p. 4, para 10.

30 Edmonds, John and Radice, Giles, Low Pay, Fabian Research Series 270. 1968, p. 9.Google Scholar

31 ‘It is by personal enterprise and foresight, and not by reliance on an ever widening extension of state commitments, that better living standards for our people in the later years of life will be secured.’ Strategy for Pensions, p. 27, para 87.Google Scholar

32 Beveridge, , op. cit., p. 50, paras 111 & 110 and p. 52, para 117.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., p. 53, para 117.

34 See Land, Hilary, ‘Women, Work and Social Security’, Social and Economic Administration, Vol. 5, 1971, pp. 183–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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38 Eliot, George, Felix Holt the Radical, London: Panther Books, 1965, p. 420.Google Scholar

39 Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labour in Society, London: Free Press of Glencoe, Collier-Macmillan, 1964, pp. 203–4.Google Scholar

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43 Beveridge, , op. cit., p. 6.Google Scholar