Free and Equal Quotes

“As we have seen, a commitment to universalism is at the heart of Rawls’s philosophy; it also provides an alternative to divisive forms of “identity politics” on both left and right.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“While the basic liberties principle shows us how we can reimagine liberal democracy, the combination of fair equality of opportunity, the difference principle and the just savings principle, set us on the path to transforming, or even transcending, capitalism as we know it.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“The challenges that cooperatives face in getting started are not simply the result of inertia or a lack of familiarity with the cooperative model—they reflect some inherent challenges faced by worker-owned businesses.[76] As a result, they do not represent a viable wholesale alternative to the conventional shareholder-owned firm, despite their many advantages.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Whatever the details, for co-management to work well, a few safeguards would need to be in place. Since the primary aim is to democratize the workplace, worker representatives on boards and in works councils should be elected on a “one worker, one vote” basis.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“with works councils we could immediately establish a body in every workplace with a legal mandate to represent employees’ interests in discussions and negotiations with their management”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“There are two key aspects of the European model of co-management. First, it gives workers the right to elect a certain share of seats on the board of directors, which as we have seen is responsible for setting a company’s overarching vision and strategy—what to produce and where, how much to invest in new machinery, whether to pursue mergers and acquisitions, and so on—and which appoints the CEO and other executives who are responsible for implementing this strategy.[”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Although we cannot create meaningful work by government diktat, we can achieve this by empowering employees to shape their workplaces so that they better reflect their priorities.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Instead, we must reinvent the internal structure of companies themselves, so that workers have the legal right to participate in decision-making on much more equal terms.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“But with the right regulations in place, we can not only ensure that markets operate within safe ecological limits, but also harness their dynamism and efficiency to help bring about this transition.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Inequality has increased in most advanced economies since the 1980s, and in the UK, U.S.A. and Canada has reached highs not seen since before the Second World War.[2]”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Inequality is even more extreme in America, where the top 10 per cent receive 39 per cent of national income, compared to just 19 per cent for the bottom half.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“If we are committed to fair equality of opportunity, then rights to parental leave should be gender-neutral.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“But whereas calls for reparations tend to focus on cash payments alone, fair equality of opportunity demands a much wider set of policies to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racial inequality today, from housing to education and employment. Although fair equality of opportunity is not the same as compensating for the racial injustices of the past, it would remove the socio-economic burdens that racial minorities continue to shoulder because of that history.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Stronger enforcement may be part of the solution—we should do more to make sure that victims can access legal support, and we should impose tough penalties on guilty individuals or companies. But the inherent difficulty of proving that a particular decision is the result of racial discrimination means this punitive approach can take us only so far.[75] We should combine these laws with other”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“The most basic priority for achieving genuine racial justice is to ensure that our public institutions actually treat citizens from ethnic minorities with the same dignity and respect as everyone else.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“In Norway, a major expansion of subsidized childcare in the mid-1970s is estimated to have reduced the link between parental and child incomes—already among the lowest in the world—by a further 10 per cent.[21]”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“There is also an increasingly urgent discussion about why inequality has increased so much in recent decades, and how we can reduce it.[2”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“The system that would get us closest to political equality is to put funding directly into the hands of citizens, in the form of a “democracy voucher”—an annual allowance of, say, £50, that each citizen could contribute to the party or candidate of their choice.[”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“If we want to restore faith in democracy, we need to redesign it from the bottom up.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“So, for example, whether transgender women should be housed in women-only prisons should depend not on an abstract debate about how to define the term “woman,” but on an evidence-based assessment of how best to protect the safety of all inmates.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“While this debate is driven by valid concerns about racist, homophobic and misogynistic abuse, in seeking to prevent insult and offence more broadly, many hate speech laws already go beyond what can be justified by the basic liberties principle.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Rawls endorsed the so-called “Brandenburg test” that has been at the heart of American constitutional law since a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1969.[20] According to this test, the state should intervene only where speech is intended and likely to lead to imminent violence.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“fraud and libel, this has little value in developing and exercising our capacities as citizens. This means that, at least in principle, the state can limit false information even where this does not pose a direct threat to other basic liberties, as long as this serves an important public purpose, like the need for shared facts in facilitating democratic debate.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“Things are more complicated in the case of misinformation. Whereas political and moral speech are protected as basic liberties, this protection does not necessarily extend in full to false or misleading speech since, like”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“But the problem with this argument is that it depends on a moral belief that some citizens won’t share, in this case, the idea that there is nothing wrong with”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“One way we can argue for these rights is to engage directly with the moral question at hand, namely whether homosexuality is morally right or wrong.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“These disagreements often seem intractable, and framed in this way they probably are. Rawls’s theory offers a way to reframe them and defuse the sense of irreconcilable conflict.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

“In these situations, the freedom for LGBTQ+ citizens to walk into a shop or apply for a job without fear of discrimination should take priority, since this is an essential precondition for their civic equality and self-respect.”
― Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society