School of Social Sciences (ETDs)

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Browsing School of Social Sciences (ETDs) by Department "Department of Philosophy"

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    Classical Liberalism and the Distribution of Benefits and Burdens with respect to Health-Care
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-08) Tsengiwe, Siyabulela Thomas; Allais, Lucy
    The South African government is proposing major health policy reforms, the National Health Insurance (NHI), in response to extreme inequalities in healthcare, where the middle and upper classes have access to quality healthcare in the private sector and the majority is subjected to poor healthcare in the public sector. The debate is fierce among South Africans as to what should be the appropriate healthcare policy for the country. Fundamentally, healthcare is an ethical issue of how benefits and burdens should be distributed in society and can better be understood through moral reflection. At the heart of this study is a critical review of one of the influential theories of justice, namely, classical liberalism that normally finds its expression in social and economic policies and in this case the focus is on healthcare. The question that this study seeks to answer is: can classical liberalism produce the right distribution of benefits and burdens with respect to healthcare? The suggestion of this study is that classical liberalism gives an inadequate account of how to distribute benefits and burdens with respect to healthcare. For more coherent accounts, the study proposes that we need to look in the direction of John Rawls and social equality. Government’s approach seems to borrow from elements of Rawls and social equality.
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    Eliminating Potentiality from Pure Powers
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Oswald, Matthew Egon Marshall; Coates, Ashley
    I work to eliminate potentiality from the essences of pure powers, dispositions, by developing and defending a Megarian Actualist framework. I argue that the manifestations of fundamental natural powers are totally actual fields and that this enables me to avoid the Meinongian problem which affects traditional dispositionalist accounts. I adopt and defend Molnar’s view of manifestations and contributions and later I defend against criticisms against Megarian Actualism by Aristotle, Molnar and Bird. Finally, I conclude by demonstrating that Megarian Actualism can still preserve modality at large, despite endorsing a strict necessity relation between manifestation and disposition.