My
teaching and research agenda focuses
generally on analytic
ethical and political
philosophy, and more
specifically on contemporary
theories of justice,
global ethics, and
theories of social
and economic citizenship. Further
interests include democratic theory, and gender and its intersection with
social psychology.
The focus of my dissertation
corresponds with a growing interest within social theory in the concept of
citizenship. Although the discursive field of citizenship lacks a unifying
theory, one notable development is that the notion of citizenship as a passive
legal status has been fiercely criticized and supplemented by citizenship as a
“desirable activity” that entails responsibilities. Among these citizenship
obligations, much of the contemporary literature on socio-economic citizenship
singles out a civic duty to do socially useful work. My dissertation offers a
novel counterargument to this general view on active and virtuous citizenship,
one that does not, however, allow for passive idleness (therefore
differentiating itself from left-libertarian welfare state philosophy). Because
it justifies freedom from employment on the basis of a right to access
opportunities for self-realization, my dissertation relies on a novel line of
reasoning to argue for unconditional welfare. Importantly, my work challenges
conceptions of justice that are based on the ideal of social reciprocity via
employment, conceptions that are the cornerstone of contemporary defenses of
workfare ( i.e., social assistance in exchange for
some sort of contribution). By focusing
on the distribution of self-realization opportunities outside the sphere of
economic usefulness, my arguments further interrogate the premises of French
and German socialist and romantic philosophy -- which still influence
contemporary accounts of social citizenship that reify socially necessary work
as an inherent feature of the human condition. For references on this project
contact Professors Jon Elster, Thomas Pogge, Brian Barry and David Johnston