ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how welfare conditionality can be understood and evaluated using a range of normative frameworks, i.e. frameworks that explicitly engage in questions of values, morals and ethics. As a moral code, utilitarianism has a strong intuitive appeal and has been hugely influential in welfare economics and in other public policy spheres across the Western world. Communitarians, or in Deacon's terms 'mutualists', share with contractualists an emphasis on people's obligations to contribute to society. Some justifications of welfare conditionality take a quite different tack, arguing that these measures are in best interests of the welfare claimants themselves, with such 'paternalistic' justifications said to be motivated by 'a beneficent concern for welfare'. The pluralist social justice framework offered here establishes a fairly high bar for welfare conditionality to pass in order to be ethically justified. The chapter argues for a pluralistic approach to normative social policy analysis rather than monist emphasis on rights, utility maximisation or any single ethical perspective.
