As far as I am concerned, the firing by the University is an independent matter. The university authorities could have kept him even if the City council fired him. But they decided not to do so. The grounds which they give is that by working for Press TV, a broadcasting company funded by Iran, he was legitimising the oppressive authoritarian Iranian regime, independent of his intentions, and independent of the actual content of the talk show he was hosting on Press TV. They fired Ramadan two days after they found out that he worked for Press TV. In an interview with Dutch TV, professor Lamberts, who represents the university authorities, said that they did not want to wait 3 weeks till Ramadan came back from holidays and had time to discuss the matter with them. The university authorities fell there was an urgency – an urgency that Ramadan didn’t acknowledge (he was unwilling to interrupt his holidays to go to Rotterdam to discuss these matters). Lamberts said that the university wanted to give a clear signal that Ramadan’s work for Press TV was morally incompatible with his affiliation at the university. There are several Dutch news shows on this affair, with this NOVA programme probably being the most instructive – those of you who understand Dutch can watch the first 7.36 minutes where the university authorities defend themselves; Ramadan responds to the whole affaire in English from 7.36-17.05 minutes.

So I think there are (at least) two questions to be asked: (1) was Ramadan legitimising the Iranian brutalities by continuing to work for Press TV after the bloodsheds in April? (2) Is doing work that is (directly or indirectly) paid by an oppressive regime a sufficient reason to fire someone on the spot? The university authorities answered ‘yes’ to both questions. But is this the only possible way to judge this case?

I doubt it. I have two concerns: the danger of using the notion of ‘legitimacy’ as a valid ground to fire someone, and the failure by the university authorities to recognise the ‘dirty hands’ character of Ramadan’s situation.

The notion that legitimising an oppressive regime is enough to fire someone on the spot can be quite a dangerous principle, since who is to decide when one is legitimising an oppressive regime? Is my university legitimising the Chinese government (which is also violating human rights on a large scale) by supporting student and staff exchanges with Chinese universities? ‘Legitimising’ is such a subjective notion, that one would need to be vary careful before concluding that someone is legitimising an unacceptable actor and its unacceptable behaviour. Only when there is very little evidence for alternative interpretations, could one draw this conclusion.

So, is Ramadan, by working for Press TV, where he claims that he can work independently and is not censured, legitimising the killing and oppressing of the demonstrators? I don’t see how this necessarily follows. It would follow if he would make claims in support of the Iranian rulers in his programme on Press TV, called Islam and Life. Yet I watched a few of these programmes, and did not see anything in this category. On the contrary, what I saw was a very careful, and often indirect, putting on the table of topics that are not openly debated in all sections of Islam. Ramadan has said in interviews that he has repeatedly condemned the brutalities by the Iranian rulers, and that one shouldn’t forget that the Iranian regime is not homogenous and thus one should try to support the democratic and more liberal streams within it. In an interview he gave the day after he was fired on Dutch TV, he said that he was trying to create openings, open up space; that was indeed what I saw in his shows. Reform from within, so to speak. Admittedly, he has to discuss ‘liberal’ topics in a very indirect way, but what if that is the only way to start making any changes? It is a very pragmatic approach, but what other approach is there? Forcing new ideas on people doesn’t work; one has to gradually open up debate to make things first debatable – one step at the time get the ideas out of the taboo sphere into the sphere where it is debatable, then into the sphere where one tolerates certain views and ideas, and, perhaps, finally move it into the sphere where people will accept the ideas. But jumping from taboos to forced toleration or to forced endorsement doesn’t work, since socio-cultural change has to start from within.

If the claim that pragmatism is the only viable strategy is true, or at least one very important strategy that we cannot do without, then it implies that anyone who wants to work on social change in morally difficult circumstances will often get dirty hands. I think this is precisely what happened to Ramadan. His decision to work for Press TV can be explained as using a powerful media that was offered to him for trying to open up discursive space for social change. He could use the air-time he had with Press TV to contribute to reforming Islam; and when the Iranian regime committed the bloodshed, he had to choose between two evils – either giving up his airtime and thus his media-power to work on social change, or else to run the risk of legitimising an oppressive regime. The University authorities, on the other hand, have not acknowledged the possible ‘dirty hands’ character of Ramadan’s situation, and have not given Ramadan the benefit of the doubt. Quite to the contrary, they have said that there cannot be any doubt that continuing to work for Press TV after the bloodsheds on the Iranian streets is unacceptable since it legitimises these brutalities and the regime, independent of Ramadan’s intentions.

The university authorities do have another argument to their defence, though – but again I think it is playing the legal card and is not a very strong argument. They have argued that according to university regulations, each academic staff member has to declare their public activities outside the university, whether remunerated or not. I think that for paid staff this is a fair and good rule. But for guest professors, or ‘extra-ordinary’ professors who work (paid or unpaid) for one day a week sponsored by a company or organisation (religious or otherwise), this seems an unacceptable requirement. Through these ‘extra-ordinary professorships’ the university gets some extra funds and/or free teaching, and a company or organisation gets (more) research or teaching in their area of interest. Since they generally work only one day a week for the university, and are not always paid for that work, it seems unfair to me to put the same requirements on these people. In any case, it is very likely that a significant number of full professors at the Erasmus University do not declare to their deans all their non-university public activities; so if this were the only reason left to fire Ramadan, then (a) it would be hugely out of proportion, and (b) we could fire a significant percentage of the University staff.

Note that nothing in my argument has ruled out that Ramadan has written horrible things. But if that’s the case, than either he should not have been hired by the City Council and offered a guestprofessorship by the University in the first place, or else he should be fired because he himself has unacceptable views that conflicts with human rights and democratic principles or the Dutch constitutions or something similar. But that’s not the reason that has been given. Quite to the contrary, the University has stated that he has done excellent work as a professor.

Ramadan is gone, there has been a public meeting in the university where the University authorities restated and confirmed their views and the critics (which include virtually all academic staff and student who spoke up) could voice their protests and arguments, and then… all went back to normal. At least, that’s how it looks like on the surface. But if my analysis is right, then this affair should really trouble us deeply. If one can get fired on such weak grounds, and if it is not recognised that academics too sometimes are confronted with dirty hands dilemmas, then which professor with inconvenient views will be next?

Sometimes you make a picture that you feel like sharing. Quiet Sundays are a good time to do so. Here’s one. It’s a wall painting, taken in a small street in Utrecht, with a row of bicycles in front of the wall painting. I love wall paintings – I prefer poetry on walls and windows rather than in libraries, and art outside in public spaces rather than in musea (the metal flowers carved in the pavement around St. John’s College in Cambridge are another example that makes me happy). Enjoy.

According to the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Standaard, Belgian politicians have decided that the best qualified candidate for the position to lead the Belgian National Office for Pensions will not be appointed. The reason? He is Dutch-speaking, and it was decided that appointing him would bring the balance of francophone versus Dutch speaking high office public servants in danger.

Strictly speaking this is not the case, since the official parity rule (that the positions of General Director are 50/50 split between the Flemish and francophone language groups) is respected. But apparently if one takes the Adjunct-General Directors of all Belgian Departments and Offices into account, a francophone needs to be appointed in order to have a 50/50 balance at these two levels taken together.

The obvious solution would be to require all top-level public officials to be bilingual, as private firms in Belgium tend to do too; but apparently a proposal to that effect in a major set of federal reforms in 2000 didn’t pass.

Apart from the obvious comment that 50/50 may not be needed since the Belgian population is not 50/50 francophone/Flemish but rather roughly 40/60, it is simply mindblowing that such an important position in a crucial welfare state institution is not given to the best qualified person. Surely the financial sustainability of the state pensions must matter to francophones as much as to the Flemish, so they have an equal stake in the best person making sure that the system remains viable. No francophone candidate passed the selection procedures, so the solution one has chosen for is to start searching again, and only francophone candidates can apply.

I tried to search in francophone Belgian newspapers (Le Soir, La Libre Belgique, la Derniere Heure) to read the views ‘from the other side’. I couldn’t find a single mentioning to this affair. No surprise that the two language communities have such different understandings of the eternal Belgian political crisis if such news is only reported in one part of the country.

The Faculty of Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where I teach, has a Research Master in Philosophy and Economics. In the Netherlands, and I suppose all over the EU, Research Masters are postgraduate programmes similar to the British MPhil system – a 2 years master programme resulting in a shorter PhD track for those who continue. My contribution to the programme is to teach the economic issues within normative political philosophy. This year I thought a course on Justice and Egalitarianism, yet I’ve decided that I want to rotate that course with a course that’s (even) more focused on economic questions, hence something like ‘Ethics and Economics’.

Despite having Masterdegrees in both economics and philosophy, I have never had a course in Ethics and Economics myself. And despite having studied at four universities in three European countries, I cannot recall ever having been at a university where a course on Ethics and Economics was offered, certainly not an entire graduate course. And in contrast to ‘Justice and Egalitarianism’, where google provides within one hour at least a dozen different course outlines which may be used as sources of inspiration or as reminders of papers one had long forgotten about but should indeed be on the reading list, this is not the case for ‘Ethics and Economics’. I have a number of ideas, but it does feel like starting more or less from scratch (which, I must admit, is in a certain way also a pleasantly adventurous feeling).

So this brings me to two questions. First, if anyone has, at a graduate level, taught a course on Ethics and Economics, and would like to share information or experiences, than that would be brilliant and much appreciated. A more modest question is about books. I want to fill in the gaps in our University library, so that students taking this course will have all the books they need to write a term paper on a topic of their choice. In general I’m not ordering books that belong to history of economic thought since that’s been taken care of by our professor in the history of economic thought. I have already ordered many books, mainly based on literature that I already knew and references taken from relevant entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia, but more book references are also very welcome. Self-promotion is encouraged, if on-topic. I will merge all that I already have together with new suggestions, and post them as a separate post next week, which should hopefully be useful for any philosopher (or philosophically-inclined economist) setting up a new course or starting research in Ethics and Economics.

Here’s one. A few weeks back I joined the Friends of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). For philosophers, but also for other academics or thinkers/writers/readers who sometimes want to check out a philosophical theory, term, subfield or canonical thinker, this is a true gift. I use it in my teaching and have so far only had positive remarks from students. The SEP contains high quality refereed entries, generally well-written and enlightening, and always freely available to anybody on Earth with access to the internet. Anybody supporting the Open Access movement, or anybody seriously concerned about educational equality of opportunity on a global level, should therefore support the SEP if they can (the membership fees are $5 for students and $10 or 25 for professionals – much less than the fees of most academic associations). So now there is an easy way to support the SEP, and you’ll get something in return for your membership – nicely formatted PDFs of the entries. I hope many thousands worldwide will join, and that the people working hard at creating and maintaining the SEP will take it as a big ‘thank you’ for their work.

There is now empirical evidence supporting this line of reasoning, coming from Namibia, where in 2004 a coalition of churches, trade unions, NGOs and AIDS organisations decided to run a pilot project to figure out what a small BIG would do to the lives of the extreme poor.

The BIG Coalition raised money which allows them to give a BIG of 100 Namibian Dollars to each individual which was registered in July 2007 as living in the Otjivero-Omitara area, about 100 kilometres east of Windhoek (pensioners were excluded as they get an unconditional state pension). The amount is small, since the food poverty line stands at 152 Namibian dollars per capita, whereas the poverty line counting “the severely poor” stands at 220, and the official poor are all those living on less than 316 Namibian dollars per month.

As the study of the effects of the BIG after one year clearly demonstrate, the effects are strikingly positive. The percentage of those falling below the food poverty line has dropped from 76% to 37%. The percentage of those being able to get a job or become successfully self-employed has increased from 44 to 55%, and the amount of non-BIG income per capita rose from N$ 118 to N$ 152 (indicating a virtuous economic growth cycle). The number of underweight children has dropped from 42 to 10%. School attendance has gone up, and teachers report that the children are better able to concentrate. The health clinic receives many more patients (for illnesses that would otherwise not have been treated). Average household debt fell from N$ 1,215 to N$ 772. Crime rates fell by 42%, and there is no evidence that alcohol-abuse (which is a serious problem in many poor areas) has worsened. (Further details are in the report, together with interviews documenting the experiences of the people who have been given the BIG).

The authors claim that the funds needed to implement this across Namibia could be raised within the existing fiscal constraints, and that thus the only remaining question is one of political will. To me their story made complete sense and I found the empirical evidence compelling. Yet am I overlooking something? Some to-be-expected unintended negative consequences when this would be implemented on a larger scale, for example?

Here’s an example. In the Netherlands there is no distinction between research-intense and other universities. With a few exceptions, every university lecturer is also supposed to be an active researcher (we do not make the distinction between those who do research, and those who teach, except for people who are hired as postdocs for projects). Where I am based (faculty of philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam), a standard teaching load for someone with a full time appointment is 4 courses a year. Most courses are 10 weeks, 2 hours a week; graduate courses are 15 weeks. All teaching staff supervise a few (roughly 3-5) BA and one or two MA dissertations annually, and mark an equal number of dissertations supervised by others. Class size varies between 10 students (MA courses) and about 100 students (some first year courses). We tend not to have teaching assistants, hence all the marking of essays/exams, course preparation, etc. is done by the teachers (there are rare exceptions to this rule). PhD ‘students’ are not regarded as students but as staff, and in any case most lecturers supervise one or two of them, with a few professors supervising half a dozen. I’d be curious finding out where this load is situated on an international and interdisciplinary comparison. My suspicion is that it’s an average load, but I may well be wrong.

According to Wikipedia, yesterday was the 100th International Women’s Day (I started writing this post yesterday, but spent most of that day at a feminist meeting and having a women’s night out. Sorry. But here it is – better late than never). Last year, here at CT, we discovered that in some countries this is not celebrated as a social or political event (as it is in Europe) but rather as a day to give your wife or girlfriend chocolates or flowers. So I felt it’d be good to post an old-fashioned political poster, stolen from the very same wikipedia site. Isn’t it awesome?

International women’s day originated from political activism related to women’s rights, especially their rights as workers. With the current economic crisis, several of women’s concerns, such as wage discrimination and gender segregation, or parental concerns that in reality often boil down to mothers’ concerns, such as family-friendly working hours, paid maternity leave etcetera, are probably not very high on the agenda of labour unions and other types of workers’ interests groups. Yet why should we keep considering care issues as luxury issues, or as complicating factors – rather than the core business of politics? So yesterday, on international women’s day, I thought that what we really need is to put the world on its head, and ask how the relevant policies and sciences would look like if, when we are theorizing and designing policies and reflecting on life and society, we would start from care and than add what is now standardly conceived as the core issues of policies and the socio-economic system, namely the formal economy in which money goes around and GDP is measured.

Of course, care issues are not synonymous with women’s issues – there are enough women who try to make their lives as carefree as possible, and there are men whose interests would also be better served if we were to put care central. Moreover, there are many women’s issues that are not care issues – problems such as domestic violence and sexual aggression may be somewhat linked to care, but are in large part about other issues.

Perhaps all these musings reflect my own shift in research interests from issues of gender to issues of care. Not that I think the former are any less important than I felt when I wrote my PhD dissertation on gender inequality around the turn of the century. Yet they are of a different nature. In the case of gender, one could reasonably argue in favour of abolishing gender as a system of social stratification. But we will never be able (or willing!) to abolish care. So it’s a fundamental issue, and we need to take it much more seriously than we do. Perhaps we could also start celebrating an International Carers Day, if that doesn’t exit yet?

As with other chapters in this book, this chapter is also more or less a reprint, from his 1997 article ‘Where the Action is: on the site of distributive justice’. So the claims Cohen makes here are not new, and have already been debated. So let me just pick up a few points (hopefully not too idiosyncratic) that either struck me or particularly interested me.

Cohen’s ‘fundamental concern’ is ‘the pattern of benefits and burdens in society: that is neither a structure in which choice occurs nor a set of choices, but the upshot of structure and choices alike’ (p. 126). He believes that ‘there is scope for relevant personal justice and injustice within a structure, and, indeed, that it is not possible to achieve distributive justice by purely structural means’ (127). So far I agree. My own interest in issues of gender justice fuel my concern here, since as feminists have said for decades (and as Cohen reminds us in the opening of this chapter), ‘the personal is political’. Harry’s recent post about gender injustice makes it very vivid that the distribution of burdens and benefits, and the distribution of valuable opportunities, are to a considerable extent affected by how other people, and within households in particular one’s partner, behave. Rather than just focussing on institutions, we should also focus on people’s choices, and thus we also need an egalitarian ethos.

Cohen argues his case by developing what he regards as a fatal ambiguity in Rawls’s specification of the basic structure. Which institutions are part of the basic structure? Do only legally coercive institutions belong to the basic structure, or can noncoercive institutions also be part of it? Is the basic structure just about formal structures or are informal structures also included? Cohen believes that we should have a broader interpretation of the basic structure, since Rawls’s argument for his restricted focus on the basic structure is that “it’s effects are so profound and present from the start” (TJ Rev ed p. 7). Then the family should clearly be part of it (we have had many posts on CT about this issue over the years, most recently this one). Yet if we endorse this broader specification of the basic structure of society, then we must include personal choices that are not legally prescribed, since noncoercive choices are the sustances of these noncoercive institutions that would be included in a broader specification of the basic structure.

I am definitely sympathetic to Cohen’s point that the site of justice should not be restricted to the basic structure, but should also include choices and individual actions. I am not entirely sure how much Cohen wants to say about the place of social norms in Rawls’s work—- I can only observe that I have been rather confused trying to find out to what extent social norms and their effects are part of Rawls’s work on justice.

Yet Rawlsians have of course responses to Cohen’s type of argument. They argue that there are good reasons to restrict our focus to the basic structure. One possible response is that Rawls aims to develop an account of political justice, hence does not talk about justice within what Rawls calls ‘voluntary associations’ (such as the family) (the word ‘voluntary’ seems rather unfortunate, since for children it certainly is not voluntary, and if a partner gradually moves into a positon of dependency, it also no longer can be regarded as voluntary, since there is no way out. But I’m putting that quible aside now). So Rawls does say, in later work, that his principles of justice would need to be supplemented with accounts of ‘local justice’, which would apply to these ‘voluntary associations’. Rawls holds that the principles for the basic structure may not be the principles we choose for those ‘voluntary associations’, so that we would first have to work out those principles of local justice (I can find the exact references in Rawls’s work tomorrow if anyone wants to have them). If the Rawlsian principles of justice that apply to institutions, and these accounts of local justice, taken together, would be consistent, it remains to be seen how much of Cohen’s critique would still bite.

Second, Rawls’s notion of justice is less ‘pure’ than Cohen’s; for example, Rawls is concerned with constraints such as not having to monitor or judge the pattern that emerges (in his discussion of pure procedural justice). This is a good reason to focus on institutions, since once they are set up, and delivering the most just outcome, we only have to administer the working of the institutions, and not the actions and levels of well-being/advantage of all individuals. Rawls is also concerned with other issues which for Cohen are no longer about justice but about considerations that do not reflect fundamental principles. So a Rawlsian could argue that Cohen may be right as far as his project is concerned—the search for the notion of pure justice, uncontaminated by other values and feasibility considerations—, but that the Rawlsian project is a different project.

There is much more to say about the basic structure objection, but I’ll trow this in the virtual group since I’ve been holding up this discussion already for too long by taking too long to write this post.

The number of places is strictly limited – please register early.

Confirmed speakers:
Joel Anderson (Utrecht University)
Samantha Brennan (University of Western Ontario)
Harry Brighouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Daniel Engster (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Anca Gheaus (University College Dublin)
Eva Kittay Feder (SUNY-Stony Brooke)
Pauline Kleingeld (Leiden University)
Ingrid Robeyns (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Adam Swift (Oxford University)
Joan Tronto (CUNY-Hunter College)
Daniel Weinstock (University of Montréal)

Conference description:
This conference aims to reconsider and deepen theoretical work within political and moral philosophy on questions of care and justice in and between families. The speakers explore and/or reconsider some of the following questions: What is the nature of justice and care within families? To what extent are there conflicts between care and justice within families, and between families? When and how do such conflicts arise, and are they inevitable? Are conflicts of interest between different family members inevitable, and if not, how they can be avoided? What do family members owe to each other, especially with respect to care?
Are there normative issues about these relationships that go beyond duty? Which questions have been relatively neglected when thinking about justice and care in and between families? What are the gender, race/ethnicity and class dimensions to these issues? How does a proper appreciation and understanding of disability make a difference to these questions? Do these issues differ for different types of families, and how can we prevent our theories from leading to misleading generalisations? Which policies or other forms of social change are normatively recommendable to deal with some of the related moral problems?

Time and Venue:
The conference will be held at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), Campus Woudestein.
The conference will take place on Friday 26 June (10 am – 5.30 pm) and Saturday 27 June (9.30 am – 5pm).

Registration:
The number of places is strictly limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

Fees:
Full Registration fee (including refreshments and lunches on both days): Euro 100.
Reduced registration fee for students (including refreshments and lunches on both days): Euro 50.
Optional conference dinner on Friday: Euro 35.

How to register:
Please send an e-mail to conferences@fwb.eur.nl with your name, title/position, institutional affiliation, address, telephone number, e-mail address, the type of fee that is applicable and whether or not you want to join the conference dinner. Please let us know if you have any special requirements such as dietary constraints or special needs.

After registration you will receive information regarding payment, accommodation, and other practical issues.

Contact: Queries can be sent to Ingrid Robeyns at conferences@fwb.eur.nl

This conference is financially supported by the NWO VIDI programme ‘Social Justice and the New Welfare State.’

Is this morally problematic? Perhaps it is: shouldn’t parenthood and caring responsibilities be considered a normal state of affairs? (‘normal’ not in the sense that everybody has to pass through this stage, but rather that those who are in this stage should not be severely penalised for being parents or carers). Shouldn’t we design social institutions, including the labour market, in such a way that parenthood and other states of large caring responsibilities shouldn’t prevent us from also having labour market aspirations and opportunities?

On the other hand one should also try to look at this issue from the point of view of those who are childless (whether voluntarily or not). If you compare two job applications, and the nonparent has a stronger CV than the parent, then why should we hire the parent? After all, the nonparent could also have spent her time mountain climbing or watching TV; so should she now be penalized because she doesn’t have children?

So I think we’re in a dilemma. On the one hand parents should not pay too high a professional price for the fact that they are parents; on the other hand people who have chosen to devote their lives to their research should not be penalised for not being parents. It seems that the source of this little tragedy lies in the comparative principles of job allocation on the academic labour market. This is one thing that makes academia a worse labour market for parents and other carers than some other labour markets, especially for early-career people since they are the ones that need to be hired. I’m not sure I see a way out of this dilemma (if it really is a dilemma, that is).

Is this a women’s issue? In the current gender unjust world – yes, to a large degree. It is women who don’t have wives. It is women who bear and breastfeed the children and are paying the opportunity-cost-price for that. It is women who are subjected to stereotypes (including ‘unconscious’ ones) that discriminate against female professionals and that unjustifiably favour male professionals (Evidence? start with Valian). But gender egalitarianism wouldn’t solve this dilemma completely. Even in a truly genderegalitarian society, the parent-academic would not have what a nonparent-academic would have: lots and lots of time to passionately spend on their research – or be a workoholic, as some would say. There would be some redistribution of time between the two parents of the genderegalitarian household, but since they are parents they would still have much less noncare time at their disposal compared with nonparents and other noncarers. So gender structures are ‘gendering’ the dilemma and making it much worse for women than for men – but taking gender structures away would still not solve the moral tension between parents and nonparents on the academic labour market.

I guest-edited this issue and, as I wrote in the introduction (which also summarises the papers), apart from Barbara Bergmann’s contribution, I genuinely did not know what the other contributors (John Baker, Anca Gheaus, Jacqueline O’Reilly, Almaz Zelleke, and Julieta Elgarte) would argue. So although these authors are all either feminists or generally supportive of feminist views, I was truly surprised to find out that they strongly disagreed on the desirability of a basic income for feminists. On the one hand this is due to the different kinds of feminism which they endorse. Bergmann is a ‘Total Androgyny, Male Style’- type of feminist, whereas Baker and Zelleke, for example, are much more concerned about the short-term interests of carers and those who do not want to or cannot take on large paid jobs, which are often mothers and female carers. Yet the other source of disagreement is the predicted effects of a basic income on the gendered division of labour. Gheaus thinks it will become more unequal (a view I share based on an empirical literature survey of similar policy instruments or financial changes, which I did as a graduate student). Elgarte thinks we need to make policy space for an ‘avantgarde’ who is practicing a more egalitarian gender division of labour while at the same time protecting those who are living in more gendertraditional households, whereas Zelleke doesn’t think the gender division of labour will worsen if a basic income would be implemented.

How is all this possible? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that these papers argue at a high level of generality and without specifying what the level of the basic income will be and what other elements of the welfare state (public goods, merit goods, etc.) will be kept and/or implemented. Of course, this critique is not true for Bergmann, who has done some interesting calculations and argues that if we have a Swedish-style welfare state with targeted transfers and subsidized public and merit goods, there is no fiscal room left to increase taxation rates for a basic income; and it is also not entirely true for O’Reilly, who compares existing social policies aiming at gender equality, and concludes that she is sceptical about what a basic income can do better.

So my conclusion? “…the main merit of this debate in Basic Income Studies is that it provides evidence of the consolidation of the conflicting feminist views about basic income proposals when analysed at a general level. Therefore, I believe that it is time to move to a second stage of feminist analyses that needs to focus more on the details of the entire package deal of a basic income society, in an empirically grounded fashion.” (introduction, p. 5)

Basic Income Studies is one of those wonderful Open Access Journals, so anybody interested can read it all here.

Luckily 2008 also had some wonderful moments of hope. For many Americans the election of Obama has been such a moment. One of the most touching Obama-related things I saw was when I visited South Africa during the second half of November. I am involved in a research-action project in Capetown in a township called Khayelitsha. My input in that project is merely philosophical/theoretical, and has so far been from a (physical) distance, so one of the main purposes of my visit was to get to know the women in the townships that are part of this project. One of them, Vivian Zilo has founded the Iliso Care Society which serves nutritious soup to the poorest, and especially to those who need to eat so that they can take their TB or HIV medication. Inside the house of Iliso were several newspaper clips on the walls, some about Iliso, some about local events. But in a prominent central place were a few about Obama, taken from South African Newspapers. Editorials in those newspapers wrote optimistic columns about the significance of Obama’s election not just for the US but for the prospect of a better world, and of course also for the position of black people. Parallels were drawn with what South Africans could do to make their country a better place to live.

Enough Bloggers here and elsewhere have warned us to be realistic about what Obama will be able to deliver – still it was really heart-warming to see how people can be inspired by an event that takes place thousands of miles of where they live, and even if they live in a situation in which many of us would have lost all hope for a significantly better life altogether. The strength and energy and optimism of some of these women from Khayelitsha were striking. So I hope 2009 will bring us more of such hopeful events, more than in 2008, and more than those events where many have lost all hope to reach a just and sustainable solution. Happy new year!

I think such concerns are in many instances justified. Nevertheless from time to time I am struck by the intensity of the violence against women and girls by some groups or leaders in the world (and clearly this is by no means just a Muslim issue). Moreover, it would be hard to deny that it is of a different order than the disadvantages or hampering social structures experienced by mainstream groups of women in Europe or North America.

Take the latest one from the Taliban: they have warned that in North-West Pakistan they will kill all girls who still go to school on January 15th, and that they will blow up schools who will enrol female students after that date. Now one would hope they wouldn’t have the capacity to execute such a threat, yet surely they will be able to kill some girls, just as they’ve killed so many other targets. It is just very sad that these things continue to happen when we are entering 2009. It reached the newspapers and the 8 o’clock news here in the Netherlands – but then, what else is going to happen now? As far as I can tell nothing much – except what must be a terrible decision to be made by these girls and their parents.