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Gaisbauer, Helmut P.; Schweiger, Gottfried; Sedmak, Clemens
Book title
Ethical Issues in Poverty Alleviation
Publisher
Springer
Place of publication
Cham
Pages
43-56
ISSN/ISBN
978-3-319-41428-7
Series title
Studies in global justice
Number
14
Abstract
The chapter is devoted to exploring a decent social minimum as a set of guarantees aimed at protecting persons from extreme poverty; enabling them to lead a decent life; ensuring their involvement in society and access to shared material and intellectual values; and, in the final analysis, providing the opportunity for their moral and intellectual flourishing. Guarantees of a decent social minimum represent an important instrument of poverty and inequality alleviation. My chapter intends to clarify the most controversial issues surrounding a decent social minimum: its content, scope, elements and relation to principles of social justice and equality. I develop an idea that it is necessary to distinguish between two interpretations of equality - distributive equality and equality of status - and analyze their interdependence. I argue then that it is equality of status that is the key idea of the demand for a decent social minimum and show that the following distributive guarantees necessarily derive from equality of status and form essential components of a decent social minimum: minimum political conditions of a decent life (equal citizenship), minimum socio-economic conditions of a decent life (decent standard of living), and guarantees of protection from extreme inequality (non-dominance and nondiscrimination). Finally, while applying the principle of sufficiency conformable to equality of status, I examine the scope of a decent standard of living.
