Half of the working poor in developing countries are informal entrepreneurs – they make a living by engaging in commercial activities in the shadow economy. A series of government and market failur...

The current philosophical debate on just international trade has moved away from purely idealistic theorizing into the direction of non-ideal theory. At the same time most philosophical thought on just trade is still rather idealistic and the main argument of the paper is that some philosophical reasoning about international trade justice should be more realistic. The paper develops in three steps. In a first step I will give a short overview over normative questions that arise with respect to international trade. (...) I will then highlight a proposal brought forward by Leif Wenar, because he is aware of the realist challenge and tries to counter it. In a second step I will discuss why it is important to integrate a realist perspective into philosophical considerations of international trade justice. Trade agreements are embedded in political contexts that influence the normative perspective one should take on trade justice. This leads to the third part of the article, where I will explore how a realist approach can go along with more idealistic perspectives, which leads to a weakly realist perspective on trade justice. (shrink)

This essay asks what it is about the practice of trade that grounds duties of justice between states as trade partners. The answer advanced is that such duties are grounded in the dependence that trade generates. The essay puts forward four conditions that a plausible account of grounding in trade must meet: it must admit of degrees, explain the distinctly international character of trade justice, ground both procedural and distributive duties, and it must be a necessary feature of all trade (...) relationships which generate duties of justice. A dependence account of grounding meets all four conditions, and does so in an intuitively compelling way. While other accounts of what grounds duties of trade justice can meet some of the conditions, none can meet all of them. Relative to rival candidates, then, the dependence account provides a firmer foundation for the ongoing attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of trade justice. (shrink)

Is there a human right to health? If so, what are its grounds? Can a legal or moral human right to health provide any practical guidance when it comes to making decisions about, for instance, the allocation of scarce health resources? There are many possible answers to these questions in the literature. This article surveys some of these replies. First, however, it examines the distinctions between legal and moral human rights and rights to health vs. health care. It then surveys (...) the literature on potential grounds for a moral human right to health. It concludes by considering replies to several common objections to the existence of a human right to health. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What kind of basic minimum do we owe to others? This paper defends a new procedure for answering this question. It argues that its minimally good life account has some advantages over the main alternatives and that neither the first-, nor third-, person perspective can help us to arrive at an adequate account. Rather, it employs the second-person perspective of free, reasonable, care. There might be other conditions for distributive justice, and morality certainly requires more than helping everyone to (...) secure a basic minimum. Still, if the minimally good life account is correct, and we owe everyone a basic minimum, we must ensure that everyone lives well enough. (shrink)

What does global justice or charity requires us to give to other people? There is a large theoretical literature on this question. There is much less experimental work in political philosophy relevant to answering it. Perhaps for this reason, this literature has yet to have any major impact on theoretical discussions of global justice or charity. There is, however, some experimental research in behavioral economics that has helped to shape the field and a few relevant studies by political philosophers. This (...) paper reviews this research. Moreover, it argues that the little work that has been done can offer some methodological lessons to empirically engaged philosophers of many kinds. Finally, it suggests that there is reason for those interested in global ethics and charitable giving to consider doing new kinds of experimental and other empirical work in addition to traditional experimental philosophy. (shrink)

All people have human rights and, intuitively, there is a close connection between human rights, needs, and autonomy. The two main theories about the natureand value of human rights often fail to account for this connection. Interest theories, on which rights protect individuals’ important interests, usually fail to capturethe close relationship between human rights and autonomy; autonomy is not constitutive of the interests human rights protect. Will theories, on which human rights protect individuals’ autonomy, cannot explain why the nonautonomous have (...) a human right to meet their needs. This paper argues that it is possible to account for the close connection between human rights, needs, and autonomy if human rights at least protect individuals’ ability to live minimally good lives. It argues that people need whatever will enable them to live such lives and autonomy is partly constitutive of such a life. This argument also has importantimplications for some other key debates in the human rights literature. (shrink)

Rising powers like India and Brazil have recently been gaining considerable economic and political power. This has led to the emergence of a nascent multipolarity in global affairs. Theorists of global distributive justice, however, continue to focus almost exclusively on the responsibility of the established powers for combating global poverty and neglect whether there is a similar responsibility of rising powers. That focus neglects that great shifts have occurred in the distribution of the economically severely poor over the past three (...) decades. According to recent work by Andy Sumner, 74% of those who live in extreme economic poverty resided in middle-income countries in 2008. This paper explores this lacuna and shows that there are several grounds for attributing a similar responsibility to rising powers. These grounds are familiar from discussions of the established powers' responsibility for global distributive injustice in the writings of John Rawls, Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge. They are the capa.. (shrink)

This introduction expounds educational problems that arise from transnational migration. It argues that it is high time to critically analyze normative issues of and in education under conditions of globalization because dominant approaches in normative philosophy of education tend to suffer from both a nationalist bias and a sedentary bias. The contributions to this special issue address normative problems pertaining to migration-related education from a variety of ethical and philosophical perspectives, including analytic applied ethics, continental philosophy, care ethics, Hegelian philosophy, (...) the capability approach and theories of distributive justice. They discuss the education of both citizens and migrants in the receiving society as well as in the country of origin, focusing on ethical issues pertaining to access to education as well as to the content of educational programs. (shrink)

Pluralistic theories of global distributive justice aim at justifying a plurality of principles for various subglobal contexts of distributive justice. Helena de Bres has recently proposed the class of disaggregated pluralistic theories, according to which we should refrain from defending principles that apply to the shared background conditions of such subglobal contexts. This article argues that if one does not justify how these background conditions should be regulated by principles of a just global basic structure, then the realization of the (...) principles that are justified for the subglobal contexts of distributive justice can erode and undermine justice over time. For example, the realization of justice in international trade might undermine climate justice, at least if climate justice requires increasing tariffs but justice in international trade calls for reducing tariffs. Principles of a just global basic structure would have to ensure that such justice-eroding spillover effects from one to another context of justice do not occur. Finally, the article responds critically to de Bres’ objections that an account of a just global basic structure is too idealistic, not action guiding, and superfluous. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made within them. This entry will survey the main answers that have been given to the following questions. First, how should legitimacy be defined? Is it primarily a descriptive or a normative concept? If legitimacy is understood normatively, what does it entail? Some associate legitimacy with the justification of coercive power and with the creation of political authority. Others associate it with the (...) justification, or at least the sanctioning, of existing political authority. Authority stands for a right to rule—a right to issue commands and, possibly, to enforce these commands using coercive power. An additional question is whether legitimate political authority is understood to entail political obligations or not. Most people probably think it does. But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold. (shrink)

While there need be no conflict in theory between addressing global inequality (inequalities between people worldwide) and addressing domestic inequality (inequalities between people within a political community), there may be instances in which the feasible mechanism for reducing global inequality risks aggravating domestic inequality. The burgeoning literature on global justice has tended to overlook this type of scenario, and theorists espousing global egalitarianism have consequently not engaged with cases that are important for evaluating and clarifying the content of their theories. (...) This chapter explores potential tensions between promoting global and domestic inequality. We introduce a class of second-best scenarios that global justice theorists have neglected to demonstrate the importance of such scenarios as an aid to constructing and evaluating ideals of global justice. (shrink)