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The proposal to drug test welfare recipients keeps on bouncing back. The most recent attempt, announced last week, is now the third proposal since 2017. But the tenacity with which the government is pursuing this agenda reflects, not necessarily a fixed policy position, but rather a moral stance. And this moral stance conflicts with that of the proposals' critics. Are we doomed to countless repeats of the same policy proposal? Or, as the Australian Social Policy Conference heard in Sydney this week, can we use philosophical arguments to help break the deadlock?

Exhorted by President Trump, federal administrators and many Republican state officials are drafting rules requiring people to work in exchange for Medicaid, housing aid and food assistance. But what happens when the poor live where work is hard to find? In Michigan, the state's Senate has passed a proposal that would exempt Medicaid recipients from a work requirement partly on the basis of geography - if they live in a county where unemployment exceeds 8.5 percent. Michigan's approach, critics point out, would mean that poor, mostly white rural counties are exempted, but not the predominantly black, economically troubled cities of Detroit and Flint.