Homelessness and Community

Jeremy Waldron contends that exclusionary public space arrangements targeted against homeless people cannot be adequately justified on communitarian grounds. For the most part, this article takes the form of a detailed critique of Robert Ellickson’s influential article “Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces”, and relies on the philosophical works of John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Richard Dworkin. Waldron elaborates two main arguments. According to the “Appropriate Distress Argument”, the distress occasioned by the spectacle of someone else’s suffering – such as the abject poverty of a homeless individual on the street – should not be considered a harm that is justified to be alleviated in itself and not through alleviating the suffering to which the distress responds. Furthermore, such distress should not be considered a harm at all, given that members of a society should be assumed to have an interest in not being sheltered from the true state of affairs of their society. Social stability should not depend on any comprehensive misunderstanding of social reality on the part of citizens. According to Waldron’s second main argument, the “External Preference Argument”, if pedestrians are irritated by homeless people’s violation of certain rules of conduct in public spaces, this irritation in itself is not an adequate argument for any exclusionary arrangement, as we need to ask what these rules are and how are they justified: the popularity of any rule or the fact that some might be distressed by its violation does not in itself tell us anything about whether that rule is legitimate or just. The article concludes that we are not entitled to insist that the homeless abide by community norms, or that those norms be enforced against her, if the norms are constructed in an image of community whose logic denies in effect that homelessness exists, and which does not include the homeless themselves as members of that community.