Caring
Citizen —
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Excerpts
from Mark Kingwell's,
'The World We Want - Virtue, Vice and the
Good Citizen',
Penguin, 2000.
"Citizenship is
a way of meeting one of our deepest needs, the need to belong; it
gives voice and structure to the yearning to be part of something
larger than ourselves. page 5
"Citizenship is
a way of making concrete the ethical commitments of care and respect,
of realizing in action an obligation to aid fellow travellers -
in short, of fostering justice between persons. page
5
"
the willingness
to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens. page
8
'What we need is a new
model of citizenship based on the act of participation itself, not
on some quality or thought or right enjoyed by its possessor. This
participatory citizenship doesn't simply demand action from existing
citizens; it makes action at once the condition and task of citizenship.
page 12
"Citizenship, if
it means anything, means making our desire for justice active. It
is not something we can do alone. page 19
"The idea of citizenship
is not the only way we can pursue our commonalities and needs, not
the only way to entertain our longings and dreams. But it is a crucial
one; and, when linked to the deep insight that we owe a duty of
justice to our fellow citizens, the concept of citizenship sheds
its dark origins in the project of keeping people out and, reversing
the field, becomes a matter of bringing people in - not loving them
or liking them or even agreeing with them, much of the time, but
making room for them to be at home too. page 22
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