Unit name | Theorising Social Welfare 1 |
---|---|
Unit code | SPOL31001 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Professor. Bridge |
Open unit status | Open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | School for Policy Studies |
Faculty | Faculty of Social Sciences and Law |
The unit will serve as an introduction to philosophical reasoning by examining different philosophical perspectives on welfare. Students will be encouraged to critically assess these different perspectives both as stand-alone arguments and in terms of their implications for contemporary social policy. The core theme of the unit is that differing normative positions on welfare produce substantially different prescriptions for social policy. The unit will cover influential philosophical approaches including utilitarianism, variants of liberalism; types of egalitarianism through to feminism and deliberative reasoning and post-structuralism. Is welfare about giving happiness to the greatest number of people, or about equal shares or fair shares or about maximising individual freedoms? These and other questions will be addressed in this unit.