Alina Pfleghardt

Project

Responsibility in the Welfare State. A Study on Three Levels.

Due to a set of developments the welfare state in the wealthy industrialized nations comes under pressure and its tasks are being questioned. The citizen's individual responsibility is increasingly emphasized. Against this background, the PhD project aims at determining in a moral-normative perspective the welfare state's tasks, its scope and boundaries. The study is carried out on three levels: the level of the justification of the welfare state, the level of its more detailed construction and the level of its concrete measures. All three levels are being dealt with under the guiding question of the appropriate relationship between collective and individual responsibility. A special focus lies on the analysis of the effects of welfare state regulations, on the incentives of beneficiaries and economic actors as well as on the mediation between normative claims of justification and the pluralism of moral convictions.