ABSTRACTIn the face of widespread poverty, Peter Singer argues that the best response is giving money to charitable organizations that give aid to the poor. In response, much criticism has been leveled by cosmopolitan philosophers that philanthropy is unable to effectively combat poverty for many reasons: such funds fall prey to corrupt bureaucrats, the poor will waste the money, or become dependent upon donations rather than providing for themselves. In this paper, I argue that the work of the organization GiveDirectly (...) offers an approach that can overcome the criticisms leveled against philanthropy. GiveDirectly works by providing direct cash transfers to the poor; by adopting such a straightforward method, GiveDirectly provides practical benefits to the poor, and overcomes key philosophical critiques. The poor are empowered to make choices to meet their own needs, and do not become dependent upon donations. While GiveDirectly does not constitute the solution to the problem of global poverty, it does pro... (shrink)

So far, recognition theory has focused its attention on modern capitalism and its formation in richer Western societies and has neglected issues of global poverty. A brief sketch of Axel Honneth's recognition theory precedes an examination of how the theory can contribute to a better understanding of global poverty, and justice in relation to poverty. I wish to highlight five ways in which recognition theory can enrich our inventory of theories dealing with global poverty and justice: It emphasizes the importance (...) of giving victims of poverty due weight in theorizing about poverty. It provides a vocabulary to conceptualize the experiences of suffering by poverty in terms of misrecognition. It highlights the importance of legal recognition and of actually having certain rights in order to be respected. It bases its critique of poverty on a particular idea of justice and how it should unfold. Finally, recognition theory demands that the poor must be involved in decision-making processes and their agency has .. (shrink)

With advances in medical science, the concept of agency has received increasing attention in biomedical ethics. However, most of the ethical discussion around definitions of agency has focused either on patients suffering from mental disorders or on patients receiving cutting-edge medical treatments in developed countries. Very little of the discussion around concepts of agency has focused on the situation of patients suffering from common diseases that affect populations worldwide. Therefore, the most widely-used definitions of agency may be not appropriate to (...) analyse common diseases among large populations. The branch of social sciences known as development studies draw on their own definitions of the term agency that may provide a more applicable and accurate way of referring to common and general cases than the definitions currently used in bioethics. Moreover, the psychological Self-Determination Theory may improve the usefulness of these definitions in common situations. This article explains the characteristics and the shortcomings of current bioethical definitions of agency when they are applied to common medical conditions worldwide. A new, value-based concept of agency, informed by development studies, is proposed as more accurate and useful for biomedical ethics. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a descriptive and normative analysis of the requirements for effective transnational solidarity between southern NGOs and their northern partners. Drawing on interviews conducted with staff members of Senegalese women’s rights NGOs and a private international development foundation, I contend that existing theories of feminist transnational solidarity cannot allow us to properly acknowledge the power asymmetries and obstacles to solidarity that these NGOs are facing. After assessing the divisions related to gender interests and limited resources that (...) characterize this NGO-ized development landscape, I develop a partial theory of transnational solidarity that would center power asymmetries in order to address practical and political obstacles to solidarity. I argue that an effective account of transnational solidarity must include a commitment to disrupting global hierarchies of power as well as to building practices of accountability and attentiveness to power structures. (shrink)

This paper focuses on examining the right to development. More specifically, the paper examines two questions relating to the right to development. The first focuses on the issue of justification: can the right to development that appears in the UN Declaration on the Right to Development be provided an adequate philosophical justification? The second question focuses on the function of the right to development: If the right to development simply ‘repackages’ duties correlative to other existing human rights – as it (...) may be argued to be the case with the right enshrined in the Declaration on the Right to Development – does it serve any meaningful function? In answering the first question, the paper argues that the right to development enshrined in the Declaration on the Right to Development is essentially a derivative right, and ultimately its philosophical justification is dependent on whether or not the legal human rights the realisation of which it seeks to enable can be provided an adequate philosophica.. (shrink)

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 263-275, December 2013.

Development ethicists see reducing intrahousehold gender inequality as an important policy aim. However, it is unclear that a minimalist cross-cultural consensus can be formed around this goal. Inequality on its own may not bring women beneath a minimal welfare threshold. Further, adherents of complementarian metaphysical doctrines may view attempts to reduce intrahousehold inequality as attacks on their worldviews. Complicating the justificatory task is the fact that familiar arguments against intrahousehold inequality, including those from agency and self-esteem, depart from premises that (...) complementarians reject—premises about the value of independence or the moral irrelevance of gender. I propose that development ethicists should offer complementarianism-compatible arguments against the norms and practices constitutive of intrahousehold inequality. I develop arguments against two intrahousehold inequality-supportive practices that depart from complementarian premises. Specifically, I argue that patriarchal risk and gender schemas that devalue women's labor prevent men from discharging complementarian duties to promote women's welfare. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las convergencias, complementariedades y diferencias entre la noción de desarrollo humano de Amartya Sen y el PNUD con el pensamiento de Benedicto XVI y Francisco. Las distintas nociones de desarrollo humano incluyen la integralidad o multidimensionalidad de las personas, así como la inclusión y la sustentabilidad. Cada noción de desarrollo supone una visión del ser humano, de la libertad, de la responsabilidad y de la agencia. Se discute acerca de la relevancia de las (...) instituciones, la eficiencia y la complejización de índices que consideren tanto lo social como lo ambiental. Finalmente, se postulan los aportes de la ética social cristiana a las políticas públicas en esta materia. (shrink)

The Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations related to reduced inequalities calls for greater economic inclusion of the poor. Yet, how business leaders grant economic opportunities and development to the poor is significantly under-researched. Extending burgeoning responsible leadership theory that promotes paradox-savvy leadership for building inclusive ventures through various actors, this study introduces new concepts of inclusive leadership that foster the economic inclusion of the poor from Amartya Sen’s capability approach perspective. By studying how leaders include the poor in (...) social businesses, we provide a fresh perspective of inclusive leadership as a personalized empowering cycle of economic–social–economic inclusion to close the gaps between the rich and poor in business and society. This perspective provides new territories of diversity and inclusion research for reduced inequality. (shrink)

What began in 2004 as a peace education program anchored in the Ciwara community school in the town of Kati just outside the capitol city of Bamako has become a longer-term peacebuilding project now located in camps for internally displaced persons in Mali. This project has been led by students and faculty from the Institut Universitaire pour Technologie of the Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako, in partnership with students and faculty in the Residential College in the (...) Arts and Humanities of Michigan State University. Together they have created Cours Collaboratifs Éducation à la Paix whose primary activity thus far has been a peace building project through photovoice. The project in these camps for internally displaced persons is designed to empower Malian university student mentors and their young mentees. Mentors and mentees are assisted by professional Malian photographers, staff from several national and international non-governmental organizations, and Michigan State University students and faculty using a video conferencing software. This essay describes the evolution of the CCÉP photovoice project, some of the ethical and political challenges we have encountered, and its potential for future everyday peacebuilding dialogs. (shrink)

Adoption of the Millennium Development Goals triggered much discussion among donor states, multilateral institutions, and developing countries towards changing dysfunctional patterns of interaction that seemed to put the MDGs at risk from their inception. Initially in these high-level discussions, accountability was understood in a state-centric way, primarily as accountability to donors. This needed to be modified with the shift towards developing-country ownership of development strategies and programs. Yet an even greater change was in store when civil society organizations were included (...) in the discussions, since their focus was on accountability to project-affected persons and communities. Hence a new and irreducible conception of accountability came on stage. I characterize this as accountability to the subjects of development and show how it is required and justified by development ethics, based on values of agency and justifiability. This results in a dual standard for accountability: reducing stakeholders’ vulnerability to harmful and inequitable outcomes, and ensuring the justifiability of development projects to affected persons and communities. (shrink)

In this paper’s first section, I briefly discuss the Journal’s Global Ethics Forum and various ways development ethics has been related to global ethics . Regardless of which of these three conceptions of DE and GE one adopts, I believe that we should avoid two partial views of the causes of injustice: “explanatory nationalism,” which “makes us look at poverty and oppression as problems whose root cause and possible solutions are domestic” ; and “explanatory globalism” in which local and national (...) problems are ultimately due to global factors . In the second section I identify five topics and argue that development and global ethicists should emphasize them and their relations in future work. These future foci should be the following: inequality of power, agency and empowerment, democracy and development, corruption, and transitional justice. A final section concludes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSustainable Development Goals will guide the global development agenda for the coming years. Under this premise, this article explores the role which higher education has been assigned in contributing to sustainable human development, and concludes that the vision of HE offered is too narrow and unable to capture the essence and full meaning of sustainable human development. Moving away from problematic indicators and thresholds that understand HE as a producer of human capital, the article proposes placing the concept of human (...) development at the centre of HE. Particularly, the article argues that its main elements can provide a valuable and sound footing for a more transformative institution. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s groundbreaking call to action in 1972, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” drew philosophical attention to the topic of famine and the associated suffering or preventable death of many throughout the world. Yet despite the volume of philosophical work Singer’s paper inspired, it would still be easy to suppose that global poverty is not a problem for philosophers to take seriously in itself but is rather a particularly stark illustration or instance of a more general problem, whether in ethics or (...) in political philosophy. The aim of this paper is to argue that the philosophical landscape of global poverty is both sui generis and sufficiently complex that the topic should be considered not as an instance of a more general philosophical problem but as a distinct area of normative inquiry. (shrink)

Child poverty is one of the biggest challenges of today, harming millions of children. In this book, it is investigated from a philosophical social justice perspective, primarily in the context of modern welfare states. Based on both normative theory (particularly the capability approach) and empirical evidence, the authors identify the injustices of child poverty, showing how it negatively affects the well-being of children as well as their whole life course. But child poverty is not 'given by nature'. It is avoidable (...) and there is certainly the moral duty to alleviate it. Therefore, Graf and Schweiger develop a normative theory of responsibilities, which clarifies the moral role of different agents in the poor child's environment: the family, the state and many others, that have so far been neglected in philosophical theories. They conclude their book by sketching how their theory can be extended to global child poverty and what it means to show equal respect and concern for every child - no matter where and in which context they were born. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of the “windows into reality” that are used in theories of global justice with a focus on issues of epistemic injustice and the powerlessness of the global poor. I argue that we should aim for a better understanding of global poverty through acknowledging people living in poverty as epistemic subjects. To achieve this, we need to deepen and broaden the knowledge base of theories of global justice and approach the subject through methodologies of (...) “thinking small” and “thick descriptions”, which are ways to give people living in poverty sufficient room to express themselves and have their voices heard, leading to “small” and “thick” knowledge claims. (shrink)

(Conference proceedings 2014) This presentation (International Development Ethics Association, July 2014) considers economic vulnerability, exploring the risk of deprivation of necessary resources due to a complex and rarely discussed vulnerability that arises from hope. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological account of French petit-bourgeois aspiration in The Social Structures of the Economy has recently inspired Wendy Olsen to introduce the term “aspiration paradox” to characterize cases wherein “a borrower's status aspirations may contribute to a situation in which their borrowings exceed their capacity to (...) repay,” leaving the individual much the worse, due to an aspiration to betterment. If such financial opportunities were not made available to these people – if some were denied loans due to a careful assessment of their vulnerability – would they be better off? We should seriously consider that they might be. I will hazard the straightforwardly paternalistic suggestion that limiting access to lending to those who are vulnerable to their aspirations can be a just policy. Because aspiration paradox is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and because lending frequently involves asymmetries in mathematical education between borrowers and lenders, I hope to elude at least some of the charges of colonialism that have gained a stronger purchase on adaptive preference arguments. (shrink)