A few sentences from a book that I was just reading:
" It could be claimed that modern society exists somewhere
between two extremes, two dreams of perfection.
On the one hand there is an 'environmental' utopia where
social problems are explained in terms of social conditions;
on the other, there is a 'pathological' utopia where social
problems are attributed to the supposed failings and
immorality of individuals. At their most general level,
social policies are a means by which society moves itself
in one direction or the other: some policies address the
social injustice of underlying conditions, some are concerned
with improving the behaviour and habits of individuals.
Of course it might be claimed that we must always fall short
of either extreme [...], meaning that we should always factor both
the 'social' and the 'individual' into our decision-making."
Tony Fitzpatrick (2001): Welfare Theory: An introduction.
Referring to Thomas More's Utopia (1516): "If you allow young folk
to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted,
little by little, from childhood; and if you then punish them as
grownups for committing the crimes to which their training
has inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them
thieves and then punishing them for it?"
