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Notions of masculinity have played a central role in social and cultural research on men’s drinking events. Within this context, masculinity is regularly called on to explain the problematic disparities that mark men’s alcohol consumption, including men’s disproportionate involvement in drinking and a range of alcohol-related harms. More recently, however, researchers have begun to emphasize men’s drinking events as sites of care and support, leading some to suggest that men’s drinking masculinities are evolving in affirmative and health promoting ways. While unsettling the tendency of scholars to problematize men’s drinking masculinities, foregrounding the possibilities of men’s care potentially obscures its complexities and constraints. In this paper, we are concerned to critically re-examine the relationship between masculinity, care, and events of men’s alcohol consumption. Where some authors have positioned men’s care as an innate or uncomplicated good, we draw on a feminist ethics of care approach to explore its complexities, constraints, and exclusions. Through focus group discussions with 101 men, our analysis describes how ideals of masculine autonomy emerged through men’s accounts of drinking events, fundamentally shaping the constitution, practice, and possibilities of care. For the men in our study, the valorization of autonomy fostered ambivalence and tension around care, hindering their capacity as care givers and receivers. In turn, opportunities and accountability for care were overlooked, avoided, or displaced onto women. By highlighting the complexity of men’s care, our account complicates existing scholarship on men’s drinking while also gesturing toward new avenues for public health practice. We conclude by outlining how a more concerted focus on care may be integrated into public health policy, research, and programming and, in the process, contribute to the promotion of more health affirming and ethical modes of masculinity.

The poet Sikhamani is a teacher and a Dalit poet who writes in Telugu. His contribution to the corpus of Dalit poetry in Telugu is significant. Sikhamani’s poetry exposes the hypocrisy, inhumanity, exploitation, atrocities, discrimination, etc., of the caste Hindu society. The Black Rainbow: Dalit Poems in Telugu (2000), a collection of Sikhamani’s poems, portrays the problems of Dalit lives. His use of mythological figures, metaphors, similes, allusions, etc., enrich his poetry. Every poem reflects a protest/rebellious attitude from which the identity of Dalits emerges. He attacks the physical, cultural, social and even literary atrocities perpetrated over Dalits and interrogates Brahmanism.

Gentrification is a global and highly controversial issue. This article develops an account of what can be troubling, specifically, about state support for gentrification processes. Recent research points to the fact that gentrification processes are being used by policy-makers in many parts of the world as tools for urban ‘renewal’ or transformation. However, it is claimed that this is often at the cost of badly off residents of these areas. I argue that where the state supports or encourages gentrification processes that either (a) impose non-trivial costs on badly off residents of gentrifying areas or (b) fail to benefit these residents in certain ways, the state disrespects these residents by failing to show due regard for their interests. In doing so, it threatens their self-respect. Having made this argument, I also consider how certain kinds of state investment once gentrification processes have occurred can threaten the self-respect of original residents.

Modern Indian nationalist thought has dealt with political ideas such as freedom, equality, liberty, democracy, so on and so forth. The idea of freedom received enough attention on the part of most of the modern Indian political thinkers. However, the idea of freedom as envisaged by the nationalist thinkers did not receive positive response from the other stream of modern Indian thought. Dalit-Bahujan political thinkers questioned the narration of freedom as propagated by the nationalist thinkers. Nationalist thinkers aspired for universal values and at the same time reaffirmed ancient religious principles. Such effort was questioned and doubted by the other thinkers of modern India. Thus, one can find different narrations of freedom, such as social, economic and political. The social categories such as caste, class and gender became bases for their narration on the idea of freedom. The ideas and arguments of B. G. Tilak, M. K. Gandhi, Pandita Ramabai, Jyotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar E. M. S. Namboodripad and others would help in larger understanding of the idea of freedom.

This article adapts John Rawls’s writings, arguing that past injustice can change what we ought to publicly affirm as the standard of justice today. My approach differs from forward-looking approaches based on alleviating prospective disadvantage and backward-looking historical entitlement approaches. In different contexts, Rawls’s own concern for the ‘social bases of self-respect’ and equal citizenship may require public endorsement of different principles or specifications of the standard of justice. Rawls’s difference principle focuses on the least advantaged socioeconomic group. I argue that a historicized difference principle (i) considers the relative standing of racial, gender, and other historically stigmatized groups; (ii) provides their members assurance by weakening incentives to manipulate justice to another group’s advantage; and (iii) may result in policies resembling reparations, though justified by forward-looking considerations of self-respect and public assurance. I then examine how disrespectful justifications were historically used to forcibly include indigenous peoples as citizens. While Rawls thinks providing citizens one package of basic liberties signals respect, indigenous self-government could better support self-respect. I invoke Rawlsian international justice, which calls for mutual respect between peoples. Indigenous peoples’ status should reflect their past and persisting peoplehood, providing assurance by weakening incentives to unjustly transform international into domestic contexts.

This article is primarily concerned with stigmatization resulting from public information campaigns such as public health information campaigns. Stigmatization as a concept has received much attention from social scientists but conversely little from the legal world, including the European Court of Human Rights. Stigmatization can be distinguished from other similar concepts, e.g. discrimination, stereotyping and marginalization, by its ability to induce a sense of “self-loathing.” The court’s limited discourse thus far raises questions as to whether it recognizes stigmatization as being capable of engaging human rights principles where no other engaging factors are present. Even if the court is willing to find engagement in such cases, it is likely that in most instances the court would find any incidental stigmatization justified given the potential benefits available. The lack of judicial engagement with such cases thus far may reflect the possibility that stigmatization occurring through expressive acts of public officials is located within a “nexus of non-justiciability” whereby the European Convention on Human Rights is generally not applicable.

In Cohen’s vision of the just society, there would be no need for unequalizing incentives so as to benefit the least well-off; instead, people would be motivated by an egalitarian ethos to work hard and in the most socially productive jobs. As such, Cohen appears to offer a way to mitigate the trade-off of equality for efficiency that often characterizes theorizing about distributive justice. This article presents an egalitarian challenge to Cohen’s vision of the just society. I argue that a society where all internalized the egalitarian ethos would be one lacking equal respect among its members, in which certain groups lacked the grounds of self-respect. Section 1 defends equal respect and a form of equality of self-respect as values with broad-based appeal to egalitarians, and argues that a particular form of hierarchy would undermine both equal respect and the grounds of self-respect. Sections 2 and 3 reveal that just such a hierarchy would emerge in a society in which all had internalized the egalitarian ethos, in the case of both carers and the untalented. Thus, Cohen’s proposed society is shown to fail to unite equality and efficiency. Instead, Cohen’s society would be characterized by a lack of equality.

John Rawls's claim to have demonstrated the superiority of his own two principles of justice to the principle of utility has generated fairly extensive critical discussion. However, this discussion has almost completely disregarded those of Rawls's arguments that are concerned with practicability, despite the significance accorded to them by Rawls himself. This article addresses the three most important of Rawls's objections against the practicability of utilitarianism: (1) that utilitarianism would generate too much disagreement to be politically workable, (2) that a utilitarian society would be vulnerable to social instability, and (3) that publicly adopting the principle of utility as the ultimate criterion of right and wrong would undermine the self-respect of some citizens. It is argued that Rawls's objections are either exaggerated or mistaken, and that this may have an impact on the assessment of `justice as fairness' as well as the utilitarian doctrine.

The article begins by reconstructing the just distribution of the social bases of self-respect, a principle of justice that is covert in Rawls’s writing. I argue that, for Rawls, justice mandates that each social basis for self-respect be equalized (and, as a second priority, maximized). Curiously, for Rawls, that principle ranks higher than Rawls’s two more famous principles of justice - equal liberty and the difference principle. I then recall Rawls’s well-known confusion between self-respect and another form of self-appraisal, namely, confidence in one’s determinate plans and capacities. Correcting that confusion forces Rawls to accept objectionable and illiberal politics. Surprisingly, a consistent Rawls must endorse absolute economic equality, deny liberty any priority whatsoever, or sponsor still other illiberal political views - evidence of a flaw in the ethical basis of Rawls’s politics.

Patients in nursing homes sometimes give accounts of episodes in which they feel their autonomy and/or self-respect are violated as a result of the care they receive from nursing staff. In these ethically difficult care situations nurses use strategies such as negotiation, explanation and, in some cases, restraint. This study investigates how nurses apply these strategies to resolve ethical dilemmas in such a way that patients experience respect rather than violation. Critical issues that will be discussed include the definition of ethically difficult care situations in nursing homes and the identification of strategies for resolving such situations. Examples of the use of three strategies are presented. The use of negotiation, restraint and explanation are discussed in order to ensure respect for patients’ autonomy and thus to optimize health care outcomes.

This essay provides a detailed and critical analysis of Rawls' notions of respect and self-respect from the vantage point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It demonstrates that Rawls' empirical and normative claims concerning respect and self-respect are pivotal to his theorizing on psychology and politics. It considers the extent to which processes and developments in Israeli-Palestinian relations can be said to be compatible with – or even corroborate – some of Rawls' empirical hypotheses concerning the interdependence of respect and self-respect. It establishes where the values entailed in Rawls' perspective on respect and self-respect would place a Rawlsian vis-à-vis some aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian question.