social Science

Thank you for the email. 

The draft was not meant to be submitted to Turnitin but rather emailed to me. The Turnitin submission is for your final essay on the 8th of January. I have deleted your draft and kept a copy so that you can submit your final essay.

Your topic on distributive justice and intelectual disabilities is a very good title.  I like that you are drawing upon both Rawls and Moyn’s ideas in your essay.

However, given that this is quite a short essay you might not have the space to include all the issues that you want to address.  I would exclude much of the historical background, and just given an outline of distributive justice, and then focus on a few key values you identify such as distributive justice in Rawls, and sufficiency and equality in Moyn. I think there might be enough to discuss in your essay there. Therefore you may not need to work on the issue of emotions in social policy that looks at the work of Nussbaum.

My suggestion is to identify a key social policy document that relates to intelectual disability in Ireland, and also a key policy from Saint John of God’s that details their strategy. Then identify their vision, values and principles, and from that point see if they address concerns for distributive justice as proposed by Rawls and Moyn.

So for instance focus on National Disability Inclusion Strategy 2017-2021　

http://justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/WP15000115

You can see that it mentions a list of agreed themes (p. 7).  Education; Employment; Health and well-being; Person-centred disability services; Housing; Transport and accessible places; Equality and choice; and Joined-up services.  However, even though these themes were agreed though public consolation there is no defintion or argument why these particular themes are included. We do not see a concern for explaining the values or underlying principles in the document. Instead the policy moves on quickly to identifying objectives.

What you might do is to evaluate these themes in relation to social justice values and see how well they accord to them. You might be able to argue that while health and well-being, person-centred disability services, and equality and choice are social justice based values the others are not, so is this a good approach? And there is no clear justification or underlying argument from a social justice perspective for their inclusion. So why is this the case and are there other values from your reading that are important to people with intelectual disabilities that absent in the national policy?

Remember that law and social policy are two different fields of specialisation separate from social justice. Social justice will look at the underlying value system and see if they relate to the concerns of the those engaged in the service.  So it is better to weigh up if there is a true and fair account of issues like inclusion or equality or access, respect etc when considering people who experience intelectual disabilities.  After you have done that analysis then you can move on to evaluate practical service provision issues and objectives. You could ask if distributive justice is used how might it shift the concerns of adults with intellectual disabilities.  

So to compare and contrast the approaches, see what is working and where this might policy might better reflect the concerns and needs of adults with intelectual disabilities would be well worth working on as an essay. You could then look forward and suggest new paths for the future policy for instance based on your observations, and the impact this might have on people with intelectual disabilities.

All the best,