Deprivation and Freedom

A Philosophical Enquiry

Richard J. Hull, Richard Hull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415803007
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135197315
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Deprivation and Freedom investigates the key issue of social deprivation. It looks at how serious that issue is, what we should do about it and how we might motivate people to respond to it. It covers core areas in moral and political philosophy in new and interesting ways, presents the topical example of disability as a form of social deprivation, shows that we are not doing nearly enough for certain sections of our communities and encourages that we think differently about how we should best organise our societies in the future.

The book develops a comprehensive yet refreshingly simple account of human freedom, which shows how the ability to realise our freedom is partly definitive of freedom itself. That account conclusively illustrates how many deprivations represent remediable inequalities of important and very basic human freedoms, posing the question as to why societies continue to do so little about them. In answering that question, Hull shows how the idea of social exclusion is misleading and, instead, tackles the far more pertinent and challenging issue of societies' failure to include. The moral seriousness of non-inclusion, the failure to provide for freedom, is evaluated via critical discussion of a variety of central themes and distinctions in ethical and political theory. The author shows how such themes and distinctions comprise a framework for evaluating a raft of social issues, in turn providing a unique resource for students of moral, political and applied philosophy. The book concludes with an innovative, challenging and effective combination of analytic and continental styles, so to address the critical question of how we might actually motivate constructive social change. In doing so, it shows how a variety of approaches can work successfully together to provide an emphatic case for greater social inclusion.

Deprivation and Freedom shows how even fairly modest claims about social provision illustrate that we should be doing a lot more about social deprivation than we are now. It should be of interest to anyone who is concerned with questions about the type of society in which they live, what it says about us to continue as we are - and how we might motivate realistically achievable social change.

Part One
Deprivation and freedom

1 Relative social deprivation

This book is about deprivation, in many forms and with complex causes. In the next chapter, we will look at the more specific case of the deprivations faced in society by people with impairments. However, prior to that the more general case will be explored, that people without impairments can find themselves socially, economically and professionally isolated to a large extent. Rather than using the contentious word ‘poverty’ I am going to describe what can be claimed to be relative deprivations. Different severities of deprivation will be described with the presumption that, at the very least, we will agree that people are deprived in the most severe cases. That the deprivations discussed are, in the main, both social in nature and remediable will also be established and it will be argued that we really ought to worry a lot about the continuation of such deprivations in society.

Many people who live in what we consider to be advanced industrial societies could be described as poor. However, what should and should not count as poverty is a rather contentious issue. Thus, taking the UK as a case study and before looking at the limitations of ability and opportunities that are faced by many people, we must investigate just how they can be legitimately described. While calling them instances of poverty might be contestable, describing them as relative deprivations is more accurate and uncontentious. This has a bit to do with the so-called paradox of relative poverty, which will also be addressed.

The term poverty is commonly used in two ways. It is used to describe a state of affairs in an absolute sense or to describe a state of affairs relative to another. When one is described as poor in the absolute sense, one is said to be living at or below the level of subsistence.¹ The emphasis here is on biophysical survival: if one is poor, one’s needs that make living possible are not met.²

absolute poverty is seen as including a nutritionally inadequate diet, and not one inadequate in terms of some socially approved standard that may be influenced by fashion and culture. Rather a povertystricken diet is one inadequate to sustain life, or sustains life only, leaving little in reserve for work, never mind the positive enjoyment of life. Clothing and shelter are also necessities for the maintenance of life … Our biological nature requires warmth; therefore, fuel supplies are an additional necessity for life.³

The idea is, then, that we can define a minimum standard of living based on a person’s needs for food, water, clothing and shelter and, if we live below it, we can legitimately be said to be poor.⁴ It should be noted that this conception of poverty cannot be as absolute as it would like to be, for what it would cost to sustain life in the UK would obviously be more than in a developing world country, given the disparity in food prices. One would hope that an absolute poverty theorist would not recommend that people in the UK should only be given the resources necessary to sustain life in the country with the lowest food prices. Some relativity must be conceded. Indeed, Oppenheim argues that an absolute minimum must itself be defined by what is socially acceptable.⁵ In principle, our needs for survival could be met on the absolute model without providing, for example, modern sanitation or electricity. This would not seem to be acceptable in a modern advanced society, yet it must be acceptable to an absolute poverty theorist unless he or she concedes Oppenheim’s point. Nevertheless, the absolute conception of poverty does describe an intuitively appealing baseline. We can be said to be poor only when we have inadequate means to survive. To cry poverty when we do have adequate means for survival is both to misuse the word and to demean the predicament of those who do not have such means.

If the absolute conception of poverty emphasises the needs for survival, the relative conception of poverty tends to emphasise the needs for living in a more substantive or qualitative sense. This is because it tends to pinpoint the gap, or gulf, between those who enjoy a high standard of living and those in the same society who do not, even if they cannot be said to be poor in an absolute sense. If they could be said to be poor in an absolute sense, it would seem superfluous, even if accurate, to invoke the concept of relative poverty. The concept, then, becomes meaningfully operative only after subsistence has been achieved. It is quality of life that is the currency of the relative poverty theorist rather than life itself.

The idea behind the concept of relative poverty is that comparisons with others help to define what is counted as unfortunate.⁶ So, while I may have been content to have eaten a baked potato washed down with home-made carrot juice in my tent every evening without fail for the past twelve years when everybody else did the same, I may justly feel relatively unfortunate now that most others laugh at my tent as they scooter past with burgeoning shopping baskets en route to three square meals with fine wine in their sparkling maisonettes, when I have no such opportunity. Indeed, in comparison with others, my life is impoverished. Poverty exists, then, under this conception ‘if people are denied access to what is generally regarded as a reasonable standard and quality of life in that society’.⁷ So, now that society has moved on and has a ‘sufficiently rich resource and capital base’,⁸ it would not be unreasonable for me to want out of my tent and to be speedily rehoused.

To define poverty as relative to the living standards prevailing in a society seems to make a lot of sense.⁹ That is to say, while I may not be needy in terms of subsistence, it would be reasonable to feel impoverished if the lives of those around me were radically different and qualitatively superior. However, Shaw argues that to entertain the concept of relative poverty is to entertain a paradox. Her example runs as follows:

Society A is poorer than society B. In A subsistence may be taken for granted as the poverty line, yet many people or perhaps the majority may be for most of their lives just somewhat above it. In contrast in society B there is more wealth and no one is living below the subsistence line or even on it, at least judged by international standards. Yet in society B many people may come to believe they are poor if they cannot match up to a socially approved standard of living. Thus we arrive at the paradox that wealthy societies are more poverty-stricken than poor societies.’¹⁰

Although at first sight this may seem to be a paradox, it need be nothing of the sort. It would be paradoxical (in more than one sense) if, in accepting the idea of relative poverty, we rejected that of absolute poverty. This, however, is far from inevitable. Granted, there may well be more relative poverty in wealthy societies than in poor societies, but to stop there would be to neglect the fact that people in poor societies are absolutely poor or very close to it. If we run the two conceptions of poverty together, with the proviso that the moral claim of the absolute poor must take precedence over that of the relative poor,¹¹ then it is not true that ‘wealthy societies are more poverty-stricken than poor societies’. That claim can only hold if either we adopt a conception of relative poverty at the expense of a conception of absolute poverty, or we forget the moral claim of the absolute poor as soon as they creep ‘just somewhat above’ the subsistence line. The former is unnecessary and the latter contradicts any concern for the subject at hand, namely, the hardship of others around us.¹² So, we need not be troubled by Shaw’s somewhat creative accounting of the concept of poverty.

Both of the concepts described above articulate important intuitions with regard to different sources of human hardship. Moreover, they need not be mutually exclusive. Rather obviously, it is perfectly consistent to run the two concepts together. We can concede that, given the greater severity of hardship, the claims of the absolutely poor should outweigh the claims of the relatively poor. However, this is not to deny that relative poverty exists and, while its alleviation is less urgent than the alleviation of starvation and death, it is urgent nonetheless. Indeed, if we were unconcerned with what quality of life human beings can and should enjoy, saving life itself would seem to lose much of its motivation.

Although I have argued that it is not paradoxical to use the term relative poverty, in what follows I would like to leave room to describe instances of hardship where it could be seen to be inaccurate or a little excessive to describe them as instances of poverty. In the interests of not making the concept of poverty too elastic, such instances will be described as relative deprivations.¹³ To describe a situation as one of relative deprivation both avoids the perceived contentiousness of invoking the term poverty and allows for situations where one could not be said to be poor but could be said to be deprived. Henceforth, we will see the ways in which and the degrees to which people in the UK could be said to be relatively deprived.

Setting some levels¹⁴

If the level at which we should be unconcerned with deprivation were to be set at physical subsistence, one need not read on – ‘For judged by the notion of absolute poverty there are no or few people in poverty in Britain.’¹⁵ However, hardship of a considerable magnitude does exist in the UK and, while it is rarely on a par with absolute poverty, it is hardship nonetheless. This is especially accentuated given the prosperity of modern society. We have a ‘sufficiently rich resource and capital base’ to eradicate a lot of deprivation. This in effect makes the following material contextual. In another society or another world, certain deprivations might not be seen as deprivations. The more ambitious we become with regard to classifying deprivation, the more prosperity must be about so as to generate that classification and to make doing something about it an option. It is obvious, then, that, if matters were otherwise, so might be what follows.¹⁶ I do not see that this poses a theoretical problem. What I suggest that we should be concerned with does not supersede concern at absolute poverty. Nor might I be suggesting that we be so concerned if things were different. However, things are not different – and it is not very contentious to claim that the more affluence and prosperity is enjoyed by human beings, the less we should tolerate the following states of affairs.

Homelessness

Nearly all of us take for granted the fact that we have enough to eat and will continue to have enough to eat. Many of us also take for granted the fact that we will have somewhere to eat; somewhere secure where we choose to be. Some sort of shelter is vital to survival. What sort of shelter that should be is open to negotiation. In what follows, some people will be defined as homeless who do have a roof over their heads. However, what we should bear in mind is that there is an enormous difference between having a roof over one’s head and having a home and that those who have a home tend to see it as something that it would be indecent for them to be without.

Even if sleeping in a shop doorway could be described as having shelter, it would be in poor taste to describe it as having a roof over one’s head. The agency Shelter estimated that in 1992, for example, 8,000 people were sleeping rough in Britain.¹⁷ Indeed, 1991 census data suggests that there were 10,000 rough sleepers and squatters.¹⁸ Moving up the scale of luxury, on census day in 1991 there were approximately 100,000 single people in hostels and 22,000 families living in hostels or bed and breakfast hotels. Furthermore, there were 110,000 concealed families (such as those having to live with parents), 50,000 would-be couples living apart and 140,000 sharing households. This is not an inconsiderable sum of people who, although they could be said to have a roof over their heads, could not be said to have a home to speak of. Data is obviously open to interpretation but, even if we were to take the most conservative figure (the number of households accepted as homeless by local authorities, which largely excludes single homeless people and misses many others) in 1991, 151,720 households were accepted as homeless by local authorities.¹⁹ At the other end of the scale, Shelter estimated in 1992 that, in addition to the ‘official homeless’, approximately one-and-three-quarter-million people were homeless in Britain.

Whichever statistic we accept as an indicator, there is not one small enough here to extinguish our concern. Waldron²⁰ encourages that concern by pointing out that the only salvation for those sleeping rough is collective property.

The homeless are allowed to be – provided they are on the streets, in the parks, or under the bridges. Some of them are allowed to crowd together into publicly provided ‘shelters’ after dark (although these are dangerous places and there are not nearly enough shelters for all of them). But in the daytime and, for many of them, all through the night, wandering in public places is their only option. When all else is privately owned, the sidewalks are their salvation. They are allowed to be in our society only to the extent that our society is communist.²¹

Waldron goes on to argue that the increasing regulation of public places, the formalisation of the distaste we feel when seeing homeless people, is ‘one of the most callous and tyrannical exercises of power in modern times by a (comparatively) rich and complacent majority against a minority of their less fortunate human beings’.²² That society has a choice in this matter is abundantly clear. Homelessness in a wealthy society is the offspring of that particular social set up. It simply need not follow from a condition of prosperity that people go without a roof over their heads. Likewise, it is not inevitable that families be cramped together in bed and breakfast hotels that do not meet minimum local authority standards and where it is often impossible to lead a normal family life.²³

There can be no doubt, then, that being without shelter, being without a roof over one’s head and being without any semblance of a home constitute severe disadvantages. Indeed, having a home is a precondition for all other aspects of life.²⁴ The security that it affords is essential for health, access to services and employment²⁵ and the ability to take part in the life of the community on any level with others, let alone on an equal one. So, to the extent that we value our homes and the sorts of lifestyles they facilitate, we should be gravely concerned that many people are without a home and, as a result, are physically, socially and economically isolated. Furthermore, if we concede that people should be able to take part in the life of their community, at least on some level, the question arises as to what we think is an appropriate level below which no one should be allowed to fall.

Living below income support level / below 50 per cent of average income

Homeless people aside (they are ignored in the following statistics), there are many other people in the UK who could be said to be deprived. One way of measuring that deprivation is in terms of income. People with very low incomes go without lots of commodities and cannot explore opportunities that many of us take for granted. That they are relatively deprived will become clear in what follows.

Income support is set by the government and defines a level of income below which people could not be reasonably expected to live. If we think of what we earn and calculate the lowest income that we could foreseeably live on, we might be su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part one: Deprivation and freedom
• Part Two: Methods of evasion
• Part Three: Augmenting reason
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index