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Offences against Status

Letsas, George; (2023) Offences against Status. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies , 43 (2) pp. 322-349. 10.1093/ojls/gqac033. Green open access

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Abstract

Philosophical accounts of status understand it either pejoratively, as social rank, or laudatorily, as the dignity possessed by all in virtue of our shared humanity. Status is considered to be something either we all have or no one should have. This article aims to show that there is a third, neglected, sense of status. It refers to the moral rights and duties one holds in virtue of one’s social position or role. Employees, refugees, doctors, teachers and judges all hold social roles in virtue of which they have distinctive obligations, rights, privileges, powers and the like. This article aims to do two things: first, to distinguish the role-based notion of status from ideas of social rank, and to identify the various ways in which it constitutes a distinct category of moral wrongdoing; and second, to show that status, thus understood, is justified on egalitarian grounds even though, unlike dignity, not everyone has it. The moral point of status, I argue, is to regulate asymmetrical relations in which one of the parties suffers from background vulnerabilities and dependencies. Status as a moral idea vests both parties with a complex set of rights and duties, whose aim is to restore moral equality between the parties.

Type: Article
Title: Offences against Status
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/ojls/gqac033
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqac033
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Laws
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10155383
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