Danielle Zwarthoed

Creating frugal citizens: The liberal egalitarian case for teaching frugality

According to Agenda 21, the United Nation’s action plan for sustainable development, ‘Governments and private sector organisations should promote more positive attitudes towards sustainable consumption through education, public awareness programmes and other means’. But some could wonder whether the cultivation of frugal consumption habits in schools is compatible with basic liberal principles. This article argues that, in societies like ours, liberal egalitarian theories of justice should permit and even advocate teaching frugality in educational institutions. Liberal egalitarianism expects educational institutions to equip children with the abilities and virtues needed to live well by their own judgment and in compliance with just institutions. The article examines how frugality could be one of these virtues. First, frugality is conducive to better compliance with our distributive obligations towards the current poor and future generations. Second, frugality enables prospective adults to live well with their fair share of scarce resources, and even with less. Third, frugality increases autonomy and facilitates its exercise. The article thus concludes that liberal egalitarian institutions should encourage schools to teach frugality.

Introduction: education and migration

ABSTRACT This introduction expounds educational problems that arise from transnational migration. It argues that it is high time to critically analyze normative issues of and in education under conditions of globalization because dominant approaches in normative philosophy of education tend to suffer from both a nationalist bias and a sedentary bias. The contributions to this special issue address normative problems pertaining to migration-related education from a variety of ethical and philosophical perspectives, including analytic applied ethics, continental philosophy, care ethics, Hegelian philosophy, the capability approach and theories of distributive justice. They discuss the education of both citizens and migrants in the receiving society as well as in the country of origin, focusing on ethical issues pertaining to access to education as well as to the content of educational programs.

Why Sustainability Principles should integrate Global Justice Concerns

Abstract Curren and Metzger develop a normative account of sustainability without prejudging the relationships between sustainability and global justice. This commentary propounds an alternative methodology whereby sustainability principles are determined in conjunction with principles of global justice. I suggest this methodology is better equipped to address two issues Living well raises. First, the authors’ sufficiency view involves an inescapable tension between permitting a generation to consume more than the threshold of opportunities to live well and securing an equivalent threshold for other generations. Addressing this tension requires an account of how much is owed to the current generation. Second, their third principle of sustainability ethics establishes a duty to ‘seek fair terms of cooperation conducive to sustainability’. Fleshing out this principle requires an account of the fair distribution of the burdens of transitioning to a sustainable world and of the extent to which the existing distribution of goods falls short of justice.