The Topic
As humans, we have deep needs for care and connection, including direct human contact, decent interactions with strangers, acceptance by a community, affiliation, supportive associations, loving bonds, and physical closeness. Through relationships, we access some of the greatest goods in life: love, intimacy, meaning, purpose, joy, education, moral guidance, and interdependency. Interaction and relationships also support other goods, such as health and self-esteem. We need meaningful control over our social environment but, equally, we need assurance of adequate social inclusion. These needs ground human rights claims. The state has phenomenal power to fulfil these claims, to help or hinder us in our efforts to interact with and care for one another.

Speakers will investigate the state’s role from a variety of perspectives, asking how it exercises this power and how it should. One key way that it does is through interpersonal legal rights. Which kinds of relationships does it legally recognize and with what legal protections? What legal rights do older adults have against offspring? What rights do children have against their carers? Given the importance of relationships and evidence that chronic loneliness leads to poor health outcomes, should the state concern itself with loneliness and social isolation? How do the built environment, educational system, healthcare system, and other public institutions shape our opportunities for connection?

A second, related way that the state has power over interpersonal relations is through economic and social priorities. How much parental leave and work flexibility does it guarantee and for whom? What provisions does it make for families and friends to enjoy common rest periods? Are political and social institutions and public spaces designed to facilitate interpersonal connections and social integration – and, if so, at what cost?

A third way that the state has power over interpersonal relations is through what it models. What approach does it take to its most vulnerable members, to homelessness, to migration, to disability, to sexuality, to different experiments in living, to crime and punishment, to religious and cultural diversity, to tensions among communities? Speakers in the series will address these questions from a range of perspectives in moral and political philosophy.