Chapter 3: Social Goals
Article 41 consists of a list of "social goals" which the confederation and the cantons "shall strive to ensure". They include the availability of social security, health care, housing and public education.
These goals are of a programmatic nature, and are declared not to be directly enforceable. They are also counterbalanced by a reference to individual responsibility in article 6. This means that, contrary to many other Western constitutions, so-called positive or second- and third generation rights are mostly absent from the constitutional text, although they are more widely recognised in legal doctrine and practice. Even so, the inclusion of this provision in the constitution was strongly contested on grounds of economic policy and cantonal autonomy.
Read more about this topic: Title 2 Of The Swiss Federal Constitution
Famous quotes containing the words chapter, social and/or goals:
“Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Play is a major avenue for learning to manage anxiety. It gives the child a safe space where she can experiment at will, suspending the rules and constraints of physical and social reality. In play, the child becomes master rather than subject.... Play allows the child to transcend passivity and to become the active doer of what happens around her.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)