Walls and Bridges

Social Justice and Public Policy

By Anthony J. Cortese

Subjects: Political Science
Series: SUNY series in Public Policy
Paperback : 9780791459089, 206 pages, January 2004
Hardcover : 9780791459072, 206 pages, January 2004

Alternative formats available from:

Table of contents

Preface

1. A Social Ethics Approach to Social Problems

2. The Crisis and Denial of Access in Education

3. Welfare, Poverty, and the Legitimization of Social Inequality

4. Sidewalk Stories: The Forgotten Homeless People

5. Medical Apartheid: The Unequal Distribution and Quality of Health Care

6. Crime and Prison: The Social Control of Deviance

7. Social Ethics and Implications for Public Policy

Appendix: Implications for Social Policy

References

Index

A fresh and easy-to-understand examination of some of America's most challenging social issues.

Description

Winner of the 2004 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association

This useful classroom resource for professors wishing to incorporate notions of justice into their courses examines a variety of America's most challenging social issues (education, poverty, homelessness, crime, and health care), interwoven with racial and ethnic themes. Anthony J. Cortese illustrates how the tension between moral relativism on the one hand, and universal ethics on the other, makes concrete policy discussion difficult. He illustrates how, through a synthesis of justice, law, and power, a social ethics approach to public policy could resolve various intergroup conflicts and social problems. Included at the end of each chapter are "What You Can Do" exercises and activities that encourage students to apply what they have learned to their own lives.

Anthony J. Cortese is Professor of Sociology at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Ethnic Ethics: The Restructuring of Moral Theory, published by SUNY Press, and Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising.