We have, for now, completed our inquiries here into some only of the many major resources and limitations of four outstanding bodies of contemporary work in political and social philosophy. We have considered this work particularly in view of its manifold suggestiveness for helping in the re-articulation of the nature of social justice in the face of continuing widespread children's destitution in affluent EU countries today.

Our main objective has been to open up a better understanding of, and thereby help to better motivate the alleviation of, the extremely severe and persisting health, shelter, nutritional, and educational situations of utterly destitute Paris street children today and children like them elsewhere in the EU. We need now in concluding to bring into sharper focus our successive suggestions.

A Certain Idea of Mutuality

The guiding idea throughout this reflective essay has been a certain understanding of mutuality. We need first to confirm the main outlines of this guiding idea and then, in a final section, articulate in more perspicuous form the four moments of mutuality that we have but provisionally formulated at the end of each of this essay's four major parts.

The Mutual

Return for a moment then to the larger lexicographical contexts of the initial notion of mutuality we first noted at the beginning of the Preface to this essay. For when we look in more detail at the authoritative full entry on the word, “mutual,” in the two volume Oxford Shorter English Dictionary (SOED), we find that the sense that we highlighted is but one only of several other senses that the family of words settled around the core English word “mutual” actually includes.