Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms

255 Pages·2020·1.835 MB·English

by  Kimberley Brownlee

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/03/20, SPi
Being Sure of Each Other
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/03/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/03/20, SPi
Being Sure of
Each Other
An Essay on Social Rights
and Freedoms
KIMBERLEY BROWNLEE
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/03/20, SPi
1
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© Kimberley Brownlee 2020
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Social Beings 7
2. Social Deprivation 39
3. Sustaining Others 75
4. Interactional Freedom 95
5. Dilemmas of Sociability 116
6. Associational Freedom 135
7. Moral Messiness 154
8. Segregation 172
Notes 195
Bibliography 231
Index 241
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/03/20, SPi
Acknowledgements
Six years ago, James Nickel, a well-known philosopher of human rights,
kindly told me that there might be a book in my thoughts on a human right
against social deprivation. I am very grateful to him for that suggestion,
and for the support he gave me while I tried to find out if he was right.
My heartfelt thanks also go to Anca Gheaus and an anonymous referee for
serving as OUP readers for this book, and providing wonderfully detailed,
helpful, and challenging comments on the entire manuscript. I also thank
Clare Chambers, Rowan Cruft, Fay Niker, Thomas Parr, and Jim Nickel
for commenting on the manuscript at a workshop in 2016, funded by
the Independent Social Research Foundation, the Warwick Humanities
Research Centre, and the Warwick Philosophy Department. I am grateful
to the other participants at that workshop for their valuable feedback, and
I am particularly grateful to Fay Niker for her organizational work.
Many people kindly commented on specific parts of this work, including
Firat Akova, Adrian Blau, Christopher Bennett, Emanuela Ceva, David Coady,
Chiara Cordelli, Adam Cureton, Michelle Dempsey, Sarah Fine, Jonathan
Floyd, John Gardner, Stuart P. Green, Daniel Groll, Jules Holroyd, Jeffrey
Howard, Robert Jubb, Jeff King, Matthew Kramer, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen,
Christopher Mills, Virginia Mantouvalou, Tim Mulgan, Christoph Ortner,
Avia Pasternak, Jon Pike, Andrea Sangiovanni, Henry Shue, Walter Sinnott-
Armstrong, Adam Slavny, Matthew Soteriou, Zofia Stemplowska, James
Stribopoulos, Steven Swartzer, François Tanguay-Renaud, Kartik Upadhyaya,
and Laura Valentini. Laura deserves additional thanks for engaging
thought-provokingly with me in a symposium on social deprivation at the
2016 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association. I also
wish to thank the students in my Ethics of Sociability module at the
University of Warwick, who provided very useful feedback on several
themes in the book.
I thank the Warwick Law School, Philosophy Department, and Centre
for Ethics, Law, and Public Affairs for providing a perfect academic home in
which to write this book. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for a Philip
Leverhulme Prize, and to the Independent Social Research Foundation for a
Fellowship which relieved me from teaching to do the necessary armchair
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viii Acknowledgements
thinking for the book. I am grateful to Monash University, the University of
British Columbia, and UCLA for being excellent homes away from home
in which to occupy an armchair while on research leave. I thank Patrick
Emerton, Jeff Goldsworthy, Dale Smith, and Fleur Morgan for being won-
derful hosts during my time in Melbourne.
Ideas in several chapters first came to life in journal articles, but since
then have been spliced, bent, reconfigured, and interwoven with new
material to form parts of this book. Complete details for the articles that
underlie sections of the book are provided in the Bibliography. I am grateful
for permission to use this material.
While writing the book, I benefited from the excellent research assistance
of Tom Parr, Fay Niker, Kartik Upadhyaya, and Simon Gansinger. I thank
them all for their invaluable work. I also thank Simon for his assistance in
proofreading the book and producing the index.
Like many other philosophers, I am indebted to Peter Momtchiloff and
his editorial team at OUP for patiently shepherding my work into the light.
I thank them for supporting me once more.
I thank my dad for painting the cover image and my mom for prodding
him to paint four different versions of it to get it right. I thank all the
members of my loving family for showing me daily how vital, and wonder-
ful, it is that we can be sure of each other. I dedicate this book to them.
Kimberley Brownlee
December 2019
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/04/20, SPi
Introduction
In  A.  A.  Milne’s House at Pooh Corner, Piglet and Pooh have this
heart-warming exchange while they are lost in the woods,
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. ‘Pooh?’ he whispered.
‘Yes, Piglet?’
‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’1
This small scene is the inspiration for the title of this book. Piglet and Pooh
are the anthropomorphized creations of the imaginative and lonely little
boy, Christopher Robin. They are his social surrogates and his social practice
partners, as stuffed animals and dolls often are for children. The ‘just’ in
Piglet’s expression of relief—‘I just wanted to be sure of you’—belies how
important such assurance is. Being sure of each other—being securely
connected—is vital to social creatures like us. We need to be persistently
sure of at least one other person not just to flourish, but to survive. We also
need to be sure of our acceptance within the wider social world, again not
just to flourish, but to survive. This book focuses on the survival end of our
sociability. A companion book, which I aim to write in the medium term,
will consider the flourishing end of our sociability.
Several philosophers, including notably Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan
Wolff, and Avner de-Shalit among others, have done important work to
demonstrate that a capability to form and enjoy meaningful interpersonal
relationships is a fundamental requirement of basic justice.2 This book con-
tributes to this justice-oriented discussion of our sociability by analysing
our core social needs in the politically potent language of human rights. Too
little attention has been paid in human rights theory to our social rights
independent of our economic-welfare rights and civil and political
rights.3 This book goes some way toward rectifying this by arguing that we
have a human right against social deprivation. In a nutshell, we have a right
to have minimally adequate access to decent human contact and connec-
tion. In defending this right, this book takes aim at a familiar thought in
Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms. Kimberley Brownlee, Oxford University
Press (2020). © Kimberley Brownlee.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198714064.001.0001