Welfare Rights

WELFARE RIGHTS ARE natural or civil rights to particular services and material goods. These entitlements are understood to potentially and typically go beyond what individuals own within a strict private property order. In theorizing welfare rights, some standard is employed to determine what constitutes the core-material supports for individual flourishing. Such supports may be conceived of as universal or as specific to a given historical context.

Additional sets of judgments are then made concerning what can practically be achieved in ensuring that individuals receive these supports. For example, a given conception of welfare rights may include the notion that all individuals require an extensive bevy of healthcare services to support their flourishing. At the same, it might be judged by the proponents of this conception that the material resources available are not adequate [Page 1168]to the provision of the full set of health services, so that the rightful authorities in the community ought to aim to provide a more limited set of services. As such, there is typically an inherent ambiguity in what is meant by welfare rights: a bifurcation between what we might call “ideal rights” and “real rights.”

One might think that this ambiguity could be resolved by casting the ideal rights as natural rights—that is, rights coming out of physics that are, as such, universally applicable to all members of the human species—and real rights as civil rights. And this certainly is one way to approach the issue. However, many theorists are wary of the notion of natural rights or otherwise wish to turn to a communicatively derived set of rights that are other than those that could practically be guaranteed at the present time.

Another approach here would be to deny that there are any natural welfare rights or any ideal welfare rights, and cast welfare rights as pure civil rights, totally the creature of government. But, again, many theorists resist this notion, on the grounds that it impoverishes rights-based moral theory and attending notions of justice.

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice provides the most important theoretical grounding for conceptions of welfare rights, with its “difference principle” account of the need for socioeconomic equalities to be abolished if they do not serve the interests of the lesser party in the unequal relation. More solidly Marxist-inspired thinking has also turned to the notion of “rights” in attempting to flesh out the conception of socioeconomic justice seen in Marx's works.

In recent years, both Marxists and others have offered severe criticism of the Rawlsian approach on the grounds that it does not adequately address the material supports of social recognition and identity-formation in pluralistic and multicultural societies. At the same time, a growing body of republican theory has emerged that understands welfare rights as reducible to negative freedoms, such as freedom from “domination,” as phrased by Philip Pettit. Also, “real libertarian” theory has sought to reduce welfare rights to the right to a basic income.