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Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) confers on the human person, the right to free education in society. This implies that the human person is morally empowered and therefore justified to demand an access to education. By insisting that education be made free, Article 26 of the UDHR has made access to education a matter of right, since human rights are free conferment of nature. However, the education that Article 26 tried to justify here using the traditional moral rights arguments is the basic or elementary and fundamental stages of education. Postbasic education which includes technical and professional education and other advanced institutional learning, and which contributes more to a person's socio-political, economic and technological development, would according to Article 26 "…be made generally available…and accessible to all on the basis of merit". This caveat, the paper contends, places this level of education in need of further justification, so as to provide a moral basis for the citizens' claim and indeed access to education generally, beyond the level of basic education. To achieve this, the essay deploys arguments from the pragmatic and utilitarian theories to philosophically justify professional and technical education, as well as advanced institutional learning, as a way of validating the citizens' right to education in modern human society, beyond the level of basic education.

In this essay, we examine the philosophical debate between advocates of liberal welfarism and communitarian paternalism on the role of the individual and the state in actualising the Aristotelian quest for the good society. The paternalistic implications of a state imposing a general conception of the good on individuals' personal and subjective inclinations were examined, against the welfarist's exaltation of the private preferences of individual citizens as the only justifiable platform for the legitimacy of government decisions, legislations and policies. While admitting with the subjective welfarists that each individual has his/her own autonomous vision of a good society and the good life, the essay contends that such autonomy can only be formulated within the ambit of state protectionism and that this provides the basis for government's regulation and intervention in the processes of preference formation. Resolving the controversy between subjective welfarism and communitarian paternalism on the role of the individual and the state, in the quest for the good life and the good society would, the essay concludes, require more empirical arguments than what both the subjective liberal welfarists and the communitarian paternalists have so far felt disposed to provide.