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What a home does Jenkins, David; Brownlee, Kimberly
Abstract
Analytic philosophy has largely neglected the topic of homelessness. The few notable exceptions, including work by Jeremy Waldron and Christopher Essert, focus on our interests in shelter, housing, and property rights, but ignore the key social functions that a home performs as a place in which we are welcomed, accepted, and respected. This paper identifies a ladder of home-related concepts which begins with the minimal notion of temporary shelter, then moves to persistent shelter and housing, and finally to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meeting our social needs including, specifically, our needs to belong and to have meaningful control over our social environment. This concept-ladder enables us to distinguish the shelterless from the sheltered; the unhoused from the housed; and the unhomed from the homed. It also enables us to decouple the concept of a home from property rights, which reveals potential complications in people’s living arrangements. For instance, a person could be sheltered but unhoused, housed but homeless, or, indeed, unhoused but homed. We show that we should reserve the concept of home to capture the rich idea of a place of belonging in which our core social needs are met.
Item Metadata
Title |
What a home does
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Creator | |
Date Issued |
2022-01-22
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Description |
Analytic philosophy has largely neglected the topic of homelessness. The few notable exceptions, including work by Jeremy Waldron and Christopher Essert, focus on our interests in shelter, housing, and property rights, but ignore the key social functions that a home performs as a place in which we are welcomed, accepted, and respected. This paper identifies a ladder of home-related concepts which begins with the minimal notion of temporary shelter, then moves to persistent shelter and housing, and finally to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meeting our social needs including, specifically, our needs to belong and to have meaningful control over our social environment. This concept-ladder enables us to distinguish the shelterless from the sheltered; the unhoused from the housed; and the unhomed from the homed. It also enables us to decouple the concept of a home from property rights, which reveals potential complications in people’s living arrangements. For instance, a person could be sheltered but unhoused, housed but homeless, or, indeed, unhoused but homed. We show that we should reserve the concept of home to capture the rich idea of a place of belonging in which our core social needs are met.
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Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
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Notes |
Open access funding provided by the UBC Open Access Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Research.
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Date Available |
2023-05-31
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
Attribution 4.0 International
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0432765
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URI | |
Affiliation | |
Citation |
Jenkins, David, and Kimberley Brownlee. "What a Home does." Law and Philosophy, vol. 41, no. 4, 2022, pp. 441-468.
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Publisher DOI |
10.1007/s10982-021-09414-w
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Peer Review Status |
Reviewed
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Scholarly Level |
Faculty
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Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International