The claims of injustice: poverty and opression

• Grant number: 17/21346-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2018
• End date: February 28, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra
• Grantee: Lucas Cardoso Petroni
• Host Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 19/11988-3 - Regarding people as subordinates: inequality and social subordination, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The overall intention of this research is to contribute to the current debate on the normative bases of egalitarian justice. In its current stage, the project aims to answer the following question: what is the wrong of poverty from a normative point of view? My working hypothesis is that, in spite of other kinds of problems associated with it, poverty (or material deprivation in general) constitute a distinctive type of oppression in societies based on private property ownership and that such oppression can be formulated along the lines of a constructivist-based morality. The research is organized into a two-step argument. First, I take side on two recent debates in political philosophy: (i) the contemporary division between distributive and relational views of egalitarian justice and (ii) the debate regarding the proper normative definition of poverty. The first stage attempts to give absolute and relative poverty a better normative conceptualization, stressing out how the lack of control over economic resources typifies a case of structural coercion. The second step tries to show how instances of economic injustice can be accessed through their impairment of interpersonal relations between free and equal persons. The research brings poverty to the context of constructivist theories of morality, particularly, the second-personal standpoint morality as it has been carried out recently by Stephen Darwall. Its argued that constructivist accounts of interpersonal morality allow us to show that the social claim of poverty, on one side, and the poor's claim, on the other, constitute two kinds of entangled, but irreducible, normative dimension of economic injustice.