This book is about helping to rearticulate traditional ideas of social justice in terms of what I will be calling “moments of mutuality.” That is, the mortal situations of many utterly destitute persons in affluent societies and, especially, the mortal situations of destitute children in these societies, may, figuratively speaking, exercise a force on the attentions of some reflective persons. In turn, some of these persons may fruitfully turn towards the destitute and interact with them so as to endow them with new, basic powers while discovering in themselves unsuspected capacities of their own.

In particular, the book is about social justice when partly re-articulated in terms of “mutualities” with respect to the legally, politically, socially, and ethically unacceptable situations of destitute street children barely surviving amid unprecedented resources in many extraordinarily affluent European Union capital cities today like Paris.

When critically reconsidered from such a reflective standpoint, social justice becomes much less a matter of a “mutualistic” ethics of reciprocity, which is symmetrical.