A Social Philosophy of Housing

Peter King

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351752275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2003. This text seeks to show the importance of housing to individuals and in the broader context of social welfare. It offers a universal philosophical justification for housing provision based on a detailed theoretical consideration of need, choice, rights and responsibility. The implications of basing housing policies on these concepts are considered. Dr Peter King suggests that we should see housing as, above all, a pre-requisite for human flourishing. As such it is an essentially private activity. As a consequence, he argues, housing policy should be limited to a consideration of the enhancement of the personal fulfilment of individuals rather than seeking to further collective or utilitarian ends. Dr King's purpose in this book is to explore housing using the techniques and methods of social philosophy. He seeks to combat relativist approaches to housing discourse with a theoretical appreciation of housing based on universalist principles derived from Kant and Nozick. The book therefore addresses housing issues with a philosophical rigour, but without ignoring key policy debates.

Chapter 1
Housing and Philosophical Justification

Justifying Philosophy and Justifying Housing

This book is primarily concerned with social philosophy. It deals with housing issues through philosophical analysis and critique. My aim is to develop a philosophical discourse for housing, in which housing is defined in terms of the relationship between the state and individuals. For some involved in housing, particularly those in practice, a philosophical discussion of housing might be seen as an unnecessary luxury or as a conceit undertaken by someone distanced from the reality of housing practice. Instead, it is argued, we should concern ourselves with building 'homes' and meeting housing need. We should concentrate on meeting government policy, maximising our ability to help the needy and maintaining the housing stock. A philosophical discussion adds nothing and is merely a distraction. Is it not possible merely to argue that we have to help others because of their needs and then just get on with it? Do we have to explain why we do things, beyond pointing to people sleeping in shop doorways and subways?

I shall try and answer these questions by posing some others. In answer to those who suggest that they are too busy housing people, I would say, how do you know that what you are rushing around doing is correct? How do you know that you are really helping people by your undoubtedly sincere and concerned activity? Can you justify what you are doing? In short, do you know what housing is for?

My aim nere is not to insult anyone. I am not questioning anyone s sincerity or integrity, nor am I necessarily saying that what is being done should not be. What I am seeking to do is explore why it is done and what it means to do it. The task of philosophical analysis need not be antagonistic to housing practice. Indeed I would hope that ultimately they are complementary. The purpose of this book is to suggest how philosophical analysis might support housing practice (even though many practitioners might disagree with my conclusions). In any case, it is not a case of either philosophy or practice. Philosophical analysis does not prevent housing practice from continuing and vice versa.

What philosophical analysis can help us to do is to ground our actions in some rational purpose. It can help us understand why we do the things we do, whether they are rational and thus ultimately justifiable. To explore this more clearly, let me return to the idea of helping those with an imperative state. For many, social housing is justified because it helps those with acute needs that they are unable to fulfil by personal means. Yet social provision in all advanced western democracies caters only for some, normally a minority. Indeed, in practice, social housing resources have to be rationed by some allocative mechanism that purports to judge one applicant against another. Yet just how do we come to determine that some applicants are in need, but others are not? And how do we decide between those who are in need when resources are particularly scarce? Are the outcomes merely arbitrary or is there some properly grounded reason?

I would hope that those practitioners involved in housing allocations would feel that there are some principles and rules upon which their decisions are based. These rules are public and open to scrutiny. They are thus, one hopes, defendable, having been developed after considered debate.

But these rules embody moral judgements, and these judgements can be traced back to our conceptions of the roles of the state and individual citizens. These judgements are articulated through notions such as rights and responsibility, individual competence - through which we can understand the apparent dichotomy between needs and choices (King and Oxley, 2000) - as well as our common understanding of what is just and fair within our society.

In this sense we can say that the allocation of housing tells us something about the society we live in. The process is demonstrative of the values we place on individual citizens and the decision-making processes within society. We should therefore seek to understand what these values are and, in doing so, we might further appreciate something of the purposes that housing has. This does not imply we have to stop allocating housing, nor does it necessarily mean that we will allocate housing better as a result. What it might do, however, is help us to understand why we are doing it and whether it is justified.

The Need for Foundations

What I am suggesting is that housing needs a foundation or grounding. What is required is some principled understanding of the importance of housing as an existential activity. Housing is clearly of fundamental importance to human flourishing, yet, in political terms, it fails to register on the popular consciousness in the same manner as other welfare services such as health and education. Part of any foundational argument will be to try and understand the disparity between housing and other welfare goods, but it will also go beyond this to provide a justification for housing. I am not suggesting that housing is more, or even as, important as health care. What I wish to suggest, however, is that housing is fundamental but different from other welfare services, and an understanding of this difference will help us to place housing properly as a political entity.

But even though I shall stress the difference between housing and health care, my aim is to try and develop a universal explanation for housing that can hold regardless of particular institutional arrangements. My aim is not to suggest a total explanation for housing, or to try and claim that any particular form of social organisation is always to be preferred. What I am aiming for rather is a universal foundation for the significance of housing in both public and private spheres.

I cannot claim that this is the most pressing issue facing housing practitioners and policy makers and nor should it be. The role of practitioners is to practise, but as I have stated above, there is some need for a rationalisation for what we are doing and why. In response to this practitioners may respond with what could be called a common sense objection, believing that the purpose of housing is obvious. It is to ensure households have secure shelter that allows them to get on with their lives, bring up their families and live how they please. The role of housing organisations and housing professionals is therefore clear.

This view is entirely laudable as far as it goes. But it does not explain the particular forms of social organisation in the UK for instance. Nor why this form of organisation differs from other countries such as Germany or the USA. Why have the structures of provision altered in the UK over the last two decades, with a greater reliance on private provision at the expense of social landlords? More fundamentally, if the purpose of housing is so clear, why do we need housing professionals to manage change in housing; why are housing professionals so busy if the reasons for provision is so clear; and why should successive governments see the need to regulate and intervene in markets? Clearly matters are not as simple as common sense would admit.

Indeed much has altered in housing over the last two decades and it is not clear that practitioners and academics have fully understood the reasons for this. My belief is that by clearly defining the foundational principles for housing we may be able properly to explain these changes.

There is though a more theoretical objection to foundational arguments and I want briefly to consider this. This challenge is posed by postmodern theory, which contends that foundational arguments are implausible. All texts - be they housing policies or social relations - rest merely on their own internal contingency rather than a universal essence. It is where we no longer believe in the notions of progress or certainty, but in a decentred and autonomous existence. We can no longer cling to the metaphysical certainties of modernism, but merely rely on influences from a contingent environment (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1988). One can best see postmodernism in this context as a means of critique. It is a form of understanding through the unpacking of the purportedly false beliefs in universal and metaphysical certainties.

According to Lyotard (1984) the postmodern can be seen as a move away from an intrinsic characterisation of things towards an understanding of what the things do in the lives of those who own or use them. It is where we stop asking ourselves, 'is it true?' and instead ask, 'what use is it?'. This functionality, however, cannot be abstracted into a universal question, but can rather only be determined serially and personally. No external agent can determine the usefulness or significance of things to an individual or group. Thus a postmodern description would be to stress difference and anti-essentialism. There is no necessary essence to a thing, and what something means will differ according to time, place and culture. There is therefore no such thing as a foundational argument for housing that will hold in all circumstances.

Lyotard has stated that postmodernism can be presented as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' (1984, p. xxiv). It is where the totalising visions of modernity metanarratives such as Marxism or enlightenment liberalism that purport to offer the complete answer or foundation for social action - are seen as absolutely implausible. Therefore, for Lyotard, there is no universal or necessary condition, merely options that individuals can take according to their constraints, perceptions and expectations. There is no such thing as human nature which we can use as the frame for human actions. This means that the talk of natural rights or universal needs is simply implausible.

In political terms, at the centre of the postmodern is the recognition of otherness or alterity. This is a recognition of the needs and perceptions of others who are different and perhaps irreconcilable to us. It is to recognise that others may not be categorised according to our criteria; that to universalise is to impose our view on the unwilling other. Thus a postmodern conception is to be aware that, in as much as we have personal needs and perceptions which give our life meaning, then so do others. We thus have a responsibility to the other (Levinas, 1969), even when we are faced by those who are foreign to us (Derrida, 1993). It is through the significance of our personal environment to us that we recognise its significance to the other.

These arguments have some resonance, and previously I have made some use of them in order to understand housing further (King, 1993, 1996). However, increasingly I have found these arguments implausible, in that they tend actually to denude one of any means with which to engage in a political situation. The problem with postmodernism, it seems to me, is its extreme relativism. It is interesting that there have been a number of critiques that question the relativist and anti-universalist nature of postmodern discourses, of which perhaps the most well known is Habermas (1987). However, other thinkers such as Badiou, Finkielkraut and Zizek have made significant critiques of postmodern modes of discourse. The importance of these thinkers is that they have taken the debate beyond postmodernism and into a new realm seeking to unite a scepticism of essentialism with universalism. These thinkers are not harking back to modernist or premodern arguments; they do not seek a return to implausible grand narratives. However, they are instead seeking some means of retaining the scepticism of postmodernism, but within a universal istic basis.

These criticisms come from a number of quarters. Neo-Marxists such as Badiou (2001) and Žižek (1999, 2000, 2001) are critical of the concentration on difference and otherness at the heart of postmodernism. Whilst postmodernism may appear to be a benign and potentially transformative position, in that it respects the meanings which individuals place on local cultural practices, it is in actuality reactionary, as it prevents any sense of universal solidarity from developing. Instead they call for a return to a form of universal politics that places ends above means (I discuss Badiou and Žižek arguments in more detail in chapter 2). Likewise Habermas (1987) has also seen postmodernism as inherently reactionary as it places emphasis on the antirational and the traditional. It thus disavows a fundamental social transformation. In relation to this it is noticeable that the prominent Counter-Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also stressed precisely the same values. Indeed, as is shown in the work of Berlin (1993, 2000), key anti-Enlightenment thinkers such as de Maistre, Hamann and Herder prefigure the key notions of subjectivity, anti-rationalism, localism and (in the case of Hamann) the importance of language.

It is the relativism of postmodernism that leads to these criticisms of reactionary politics. The problem with postmodern political discourse is that it leaves one without any means for adjudicating between ideas and regimes. Therefore, on what grounds could postmodernists condemn apartheid or the abuse of human rights in Eastern Europe, when they explicitly reject the notions of moral absolutes? It is difficult for postmodernists - who refute the idea of centred individuals - to use universal human rights.

This is, of course, almost a standard criticism of postmodernism. As Benton and Craib (2001) have stated:

If we adopt post-modern or post-structuralist conceptions of truth or morality, then the paradoxical result seems to be that we cannot argue that the hierarchies we condemn are worse or more oppressive than the absence of hierarchies we propose: they are just different, (p. 170)

This is indeed somewhat paradoxical because most postmodern theorists would claim to be concerned with the liberation or empowerment of excluded groups. Yet this theory lacks the necessary discrimination with which to validate why the existence of such minorities matters other than on grounds that are merely arbitrary.

Finkielkraut (1995, 1997, 2000) offers a similar type of argument. He suggests that universal notions such as human rights, personal responsibility and collective moral notions of right and wrong can offer much sounder grounds for solidarity. Finkielkraut (2000) argues that it was the politics of difference that allowed some twentieth century Europeans to see other Europeans as sub-human and commit them to gas chambers or use them as expendable slave labour. Likewise he suggests that the 'construction' of national identities in the Balkans led to disastrous effects (Finkielraut, 1999). Thus instead of difference we should emphasise similarity and reactivate the Enlightenment idea of 'humanity'.

The effects of political relativism can be demonstrated with an example given by Nussbaum (1999). She disputes the view of those postmodern anthropologists who support certain cultural practices in India on the grounds that they are examples of 'the embedded way of life'. One such practice is to view menstruating women as unclean and thus debarred from their workplace. To reject this embedded perception, the postmodernists argue, would be essentialist and a form of cultural imperialism. Another example quoted by Nussbaum is of an academic criticising the eradication of smallpox because it has led to the demise of certain forms of religious observance. When challenged on this remark, the academic apparently remarked that if we cast off the binary oppositions of Western essentialist medicine - 'life is opposed to death, health to disease - we will begin to comprehend the otherness of Indian traditions' (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 35). The postmodern views expressed, despite being presented from someone ostensibly on the left, merely support existing power relations, and of course, could be used to justify cultural practices which discriminate against women or other groups. The exclusion of women may be 'culturally embedded', but then so would genocide have been if the Nazis had won. Merely because a practice is traditional does not validate it. Nor can the apparent arbitrariness of a situation be the sole criterion for its vindication.

What Nussbaum is concerned with then, is that postmodernism allows no external means of adjudication. Postmodernism leaves us with no practical mechanisms to determine good and evil, right from wrong and positive from negative that cannot be gainsaid on grounds of cultural difference. Thus on what grounds can we oppose apartheid if we cannot use rights and other universal notions of value? It is therefore not surprising that other commentators such as Habermas (1987) have seen postmodernism as inherently reactionary.

The purpose or Nussbaum's discussion in her work Sex ana Social Justice (1999) is to justify some universal capabilities she suggests all women will need, regardless of culture and circumstance. These include, amongst other things, bodily health and integrity, and the control over one's political and material environment (Nussbaum, 1999). What she is seeking to do then, is to validate certain capabilities as justificatory foundations for social action. She argues that postmodernism offers no grounds upon which we can base social policies other than what currently exists. These practices might indeed 'work' in the sense of being sustainable and reproducible. Yet, from Nussbaum's position, these may not be justifiable and this is precisely because they violate some universal principles. These 'embedded practices' can therefore be seen as discriminatory and unjustifiable in that they treat some individuals as inherently less worthy than others.

But as Benton and Craib (2001) point out, one need not be a postmodernist to be an anti-racist or condemn colonialism. Indeed the very Enlightenment ideas, such as rights and autonomy, criticised by postmodernists can be and are used to condemn totalitarianism, racism and apartheid. It is not clear how a politics based on difference rather than, say, rights can argue for change.

So, what would happen if we reject foundations? I believe we would have no basis upon which to judge policy and have no means to determine whether what we are doing is right. It makes it impossible to state whether housing policy has any positive or negative effects, because it is arbitrary and entirely dependent on the particular context. More fundamentally, it can leave us reliant on a simple instrumentalism - we do 'what works' - which is a recipe for instability, flux and uncertainty. The problem is that we have no means for deciding when something has worked because we are not allowing ourselves any external means of adjudication. Of course, postmodern theorists may relish this, and in some circumstances academics of various political and theoretical affiliation might concur (creative destruction, the idea of progress, and so on). Yet housing operates as a place of permanence and security — it functions as home and thus insecurity, flux and contingency are precisely those things that the home seeks to secure us against. I would suggest therefore that the central importance of housing to us - an issue that we accept intuitively, but perhaps take for granted - itself necessitates a sound and secure foundation.

Social Philosophy

In this book I wish to develop a philosophical justification for housing provision and explore what implications this has for policy and current institutions. But looking for a philosophical justification is worthwhile for another reason, in that it will allow us to explore in what ways housing is different from other welfare goods and services. Are the justifications for comprehensive health care and education the same as for housing, and if the arguments are different - or if some arguments are stronger in some cases than others - why is this?

Answering both these questions will allow us to come to some conclusions about what housing is for. It will allow us to see what key principles and priorities housing (or rather certain types of housing provision) is meant to fulfil. We also might be able to demonstrate that there are certain purposes that only housing can fulfil. Indeed it may be that these purposes can only be fulfilled by certain particular types of housing provision. In this preliminary chapter I wish to consider briefly why it is important to try and justify housing philosophically at all (although it is hoped that the discussion in the following chapters will off...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Housing and Philosophical Justification
• 2 Theorising Housing Policy
• 3 From Need to Choice
• 4 A Right to Housing
• 5 Being Responsible
• 6 Individual Autonomy
• 7 What Housing is For
• Bibliography
• Index