A Decent Social Minimum as a Matter of Justice
The chapter is devoted to exploring a decent social minimum as a set of guarantees aimed at protecting persons from extreme poverty; enabling them to lead a decent life; ensuring their involvement in society and access to shared material and intellectual
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A Decent Social Minimum as a Matter of Justice Elena Pribytkova
Abstract The chapter is devoted to exploring a decent social minimum as a set of guarantees aimed at protecting persons from extreme poverty; enabling them to lead a decent life; ensuring their involvement in society and access to shared material and intellectual values; and, in the final analysis, providing the opportunity for their moral and intellectual flourishing. Guarantees of a decent social minimum represent an important instrument of poverty and inequality alleviation. My chapter intends to clarify the most controversial issues surrounding a decent social minimum: its content, scope, elements and relation to principles of social justice and equality. I develop an idea that it is necessary to distinguish between two interpretations of equality – distributive equality and equality of status – and analyze their interdependence. I argue then that it is equality of status that is the key idea of the demand for a decent social minimum and show that the following distributive guarantees necessarily derive from equality of status and form essential components of a decent social minimum: minimum political conditions of a decent life (equal citizenship), minimum socio-economic conditions of a decent life (decent standard of living), and guarantees of protection from extreme inequality (non-dominance and nondiscrimination). Finally, while applying the principle of sufficiency conformable to equality of status, I examine the scope of a decent standard of living. Keywords Poverty • Human rights • Social minimum • Decent life • Equality
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Introduction
My chapter is devoted to exploring a decent social minimum as a set of guarantees aimed at protecting persons from extreme poverty; enabling them to lead a decent life; ensuring their involvement in society and access to shared material and intellectual values; and, in the final analysis, providing the opportunity for their moral
The research is supported by the SNSF Ambizione grant (No. 142547). E. Pribytkova (*) Faculty of Law, University of Basel, Peter Merian-Weg 8, 4002 Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 H.P. Gaisbauer et al. (eds.), Ethical Issues in Poverty Alleviation, Studies in Global Justice 14, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41430-0_3
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and intellectual flourishing. Guarantees of a decent social minimum are globally recognized as an important instrument for alleviating poverty and inequality and have gained acceptance in international and regional human rights law as well as in legal orders of particular states. Nevertheless, there is still no agreement in contemporary legal and political philosophy, as well as in human rights law, on a set of complex issues concerning the social minimum principle. What are the content, scope and elements of a decent social minimum? How can one formulate its key idea and a justifying basis? What kind of inequality and injustice does a decent social minimum aim to combat? What measur
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