Online research in philosophy

This senior honors thesis, submitted to the Department of Government at Harvard University on March 13, explores the conditions that dictate when distributive justice might apply. In the first chapter, the author challenges so-called "relational" approaches to global justice, represented by Michael Blake, Thomas Nagel, and Andrea Sangiovanni, who each argue that justice can only apply when individuals share an institutionally-mediated relationship. The second chapter explores the possibility of a "non-relational" approach. This particular approach seeks to find a political basis for justice that is nevertheless not institutionalized. Physical interdependence among individual persons, the author argues, is sufficient to ground concern for global justice. The third chapter weighs in on the agents of justice, emphasizing the role of the basic global structure in parsing out associative and general duties.

A review essay of Gillian Brock Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Discusses issues of Global Justice, Global Wrongs and Private Law remedies.

This paper presents a reconstruction of and some constructive comments on Thomas Pogge’s conception of global justice. Using Imre Lakatos’s notion of a research program, the paper identifies Pogge’s “hard core” and “protective belt” claims regarding the scope of fundamental principles of justice, the object and structure of duties of global justice, the explanation of world poverty, and the appropriate reforms to the existing global order. The paper recommends some amendments to Pogge’s program in each of the four areas.

The article explores the fundamental difference between two aspects of justice: international and global. It is then argued that for the sake of global justice, the difference can be overcome by taking a closer look at the basic human right of self-preservation in relation to moral agency, human well-being and social/distributive justice at both global and national levels. In an endeavour to attain global justice, the article defends an absolute moral right to a human minimum.

In this article, I investigate actions that the United States took against Costa Rica during the 1980s in order to argue that current discussions about global justice and its foundations are flawed in three ways. First, it misidentifies the parties of global justice as individual citizens. Second, it conceptualizes global justice as exclusively a distributive justice concern and, as a result, it misidentifies what constitutes a global injustice as being the adverse fate of individuals who live in a poor nation. Finally, the current debate provides no guidance in what must be considered to identify the specific obligations one nation may have to another nation. Given these three problems, I maintain that we conceptualize global injustice as an issue of social justice rather than one exclusively of distributive justice. This will require identifying nations as the parties to global justice, at least in certain cases, and realizing that our goal is to remedy oppressive global structures of power. Utilizing the social justice I propose will put us on the road toward achieving justice across the Americas.

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: The complexity of the debate on global justice -- Part I: Beyond Global Poverty -- 2. Basic positive duties of justice: A contractualist defense -- 3. Negative duties and the libertarian challenge -- 4. The feasibility of global poverty eradication in nonideal circumstances -- Part II: Toward Global Equality -- 5. Humanist versus associativist accounts of global equality -- 6. A humanist defense of global equality -- 7. The feasibility of global equality -- 8. Conclusion: Exploring responsibilities of global justice -- Bibliography -- Index.