This chapter contains section titled: Justice as Fairness Rawls and the Cosmopolitan Egalitarians The Puzzle of Rawls's Rejection of Global Egalitarianism Rawls's Fundamental Norm of Legitimacy Why Rawls is not a Cosmopolitan Why Rawls is not a Global Egalitarian The Impossibility of Pure Cosmopolitanism Conclusion Notes.

The twentieth century saw a vigorous debate over the nature of rights. Will theorists argued that the function of rights is to allocate domains of freedom. Interest theorists portrayed rights as defenders of well-being. Each side declared its conceptual analysis to be closer to an ordinary understanding of what rights there are, and to an ordinary understand- ing of what rights do for rightholders. Neither side could win a decisive victory, and the debate ended in a standoff.

forthcoming in Philosophy & Public Affairs [2008].

This is a new analysis of rights, particularly of the paradigm: the claim-right. The new analysis makes better sense of rights than the leading alternatives do. The new analysis handles all of the well-known counterexamples to the Will and Interest theories; it seems not to generate counterexamples of its own; and it solves many long-standing puzzles in the theory of rights. Moreover, the central concepts of the new theory are as salient and forceful as are rights themselves.

Rights dominate most modern understandings of what actions are proper and which institutions are just. Rights structure the forms of our governments, the contents of our laws, and the shape of morality as we perceive it. To accept a set of rights is to approve a distribution of freedom and authority, and so to endorse a certain view of what may, must, and must not be done.

justice as fairness envisions a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights cooperating within an egalitarian economic system. His account of political liberalism addresses the legitimate use of political power in a democracy, aiming to show how enduring unity may be achieved despite the diversity of worldviews that free institutions allow. His writings on the law of peoples extend these theories to liberal foreign policy, with the goal of imagining how a peaceful and tolerant international order might be possible.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, Page 195-233, Summer 2023.

All of these claims for reparations have mobilized popular support, and all share a degree of intuitive plausibility. The challenge to the theorist is to judge whether and which of such demands are grounded in sound principles of political normativity, so as to be able to select out the valid claims and to measure how the urgency of these claims compares with other demands on the public agenda. The most basic question for those considering the justifications of reparations is how (...) to orient their theories within the space of reasons. Do valid claims for reparation rest at the deepest level on reasons we have for redressing a past injustice? Or do they rather rest on reasons we have to improve our current relations so that we can get along better in the future? Are valid reparative demands backward- or forward-looking? (shrink)

What morality requires of us in a world of poverty and inequality depends both on what our duties are in the abstract, and on what we can do to help. T.M. Scanlon's contractualism addresses the first question. I suggest that contractualism isolates the moral factors that frame our deliberations about the extent of our obligations in situations of need. To this extent, contractualism clarifies our common-sense understanding of our duties to distant others. The second, empirical question then becomes vital. What (...) we as individuals need to know is how to fulfil our duties to the distant poor. Moral theorists tend to base their prescriptions on simple assumptions about how the rich can help the poor. Yet a survey of the empirical literature shows how urgently we need more information on this topic before we can know what contractualist morality — or any plausible morality — requires of us. Key Words: Scanlon • contractualism • global justice • global poverty • aid effectiveness. (shrink)

In GIVING WELL: THE ETHICS OF PHILANTHROPY, an accomplished trio of editors bring together an international group of distinguished philosophers, social scientists, lawyers and practitioners to identify and address the most urgent moral questions arising today in the practice of philanthropy.

This article evaluates what Scanlon has written on contractualism from the perspective of the theory of rights. It asks: where are the rights within contractualism? And: where is contractualism within the space of rights? Scanlon’s discussions and omissions show the urgency of aligning contractualism with an adequate analysis of rights. Topics include what rights are, how to tell who has them, and the importance of thinking about the power to change them.

Concerns over aid effectiveness have led to calls for greater accountability in international development aid. This article examines the state of accountability within and between international development agencies: aid NGOs, international financial institutions, and government aid ministries.

The resource curse impedes core interests of importing states, while the policies of these states drive the resource curse. These policies violate importing states' existing international commitments.

This article examines Rawls's and Scanlon's surprisingly undemanding contractualist accounts of global moral principles. Scanlon's Principle of Rescue requires too little of the world's rich unless the causal links between them and the poor are unreliable. Rawls's principle of legitimacy leads him to theorize in terms of a law of peoples instead of persons, and his conception of a people leads him to spurn global distributive equality. Rawls's approach has advantages over the cosmopolitan egalitarianism of Beitz and Pogge. But it (...) cannot generate principles to regulate the entire global economic order. The article proposes a new cosmopolitan economic original position argument to make up for this lack in Rawls's Law of Peoples. (shrink)

A Northern Ireland politician declared not long ago that the British people had a right not to believe the IRA’s latest statement on disarmament. Therefore, he said, the British government had no right to allow the IRA further representation at the talks. Rights assertions like these are quite common in everyday talk, even if pronouncements linking epistemic and legal rights are less so.

This article presents a unifying interpretation of Rawls’s major works. The interpretation emphasizes the parallels in Rawls’s theories of justice and legitimacy for domestic and global institutions.

Leif Wenar examines the impact on takings scholarship of the redefinition of "property" early in the twentieth century. He argues that the Hohfeldian characterization of property as rights (instead of as tangible things) forced major scholars such as Michelman, Sax, and Epstein into extreme interpretations of the Takings Clause. This extremism is unnecessary, however, since the original objections to the idea that "property is things" are mistaken.

Beyond Blood Oil expands on the themes and proposals laid out in Leif Wenar’s previous book and engages a distinguished group of scholars to explore philosophical arguments, assessing the prospects of his practical policy proposal. The book addresses how oil resources can undermine democracy and discusses moral obligations of those who consume oil.

This book traces the life's work of a man now widely regarded as one of the greatest economists, political philosophers and social theorists of the century. The result is the most alive and accessible introduction to Hayek to date.

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” (Blackstone, p.

One third of the human species is infested with worms. The World Health Organization estimates that worms account for 40 per cent of the global disease burden from tropical diseases excluding malaria. Worms cause a lot of misery.In this article I will focus on one particular type of infestation, which is hookworm. Approximately 740 million people suffer from hookworm infection in areas of rural poverty: more than one human in ten, a total greater than twenty-three times the population of Canada (...) or twice the population of the United States. The greatest numbers of cases occur in China, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa- that is, mostly in the places in the world where poverty is most severe.Hookworm larvae pierce the skin, enter the bloodstream, work their way into the heart and then into the lungs, where they climb the bronchial tree into the throat and are swallowed. (shrink)

The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond ed. B. Shain (University of Virginia Press, 2007): 280-302.

What morality requires of us in a world of poverty and inequality depends both on what our duties are in the abstract, and on what we can do to help. T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism addresses the first question. I suggest that contractualism isolates the moral factors that frame our deliberations about the extent of our obligations in situations of need. To this extent, contractualism clarifies our common-sense understanding of our duties to distant others. The second, empirical question then becomes vital. What (...) we as individuals need to know is how to fulfil our duties to the distant poor. Moral theorists tend to base their prescriptions on simple assumptions about how the rich can help the poor. Yet a survey of the empirical literature shows how urgently we need more information on this topic before we can know what contractualist morality — or any plausible morality — requires of us. (shrink)

Explains how a contractualist moral theory can explain the moral phenomena commonly called rights, although it does not appeal to the notion of a right as a basic element of moral thinking, or explain the difference between rights violations and wrongs of other kinds. Argues that the latter failure is not an important fault.