A number of theorists have tried to resolve the tension between a western-oriented liberal scheme of human rights and an account that accommodates different political systems and constitutional ideals than the liberal one. One important way the tension has been addressed is through a “neutral” or tolerant, notion of human rights, as present in the work of Rawls, Scanlon and Buchanan. In this paper I argue that neutrality cannot by itself explain the difference between rights considered appropriate for liberal states (...) and rights considered to be human rights proper. The central arguments used by neutralist theorists presuppose, rather than justify, this differential treatment. Instead, that difference can be understood only by reference to the purpose of human rights as distinct from the constitutional rights of a liberal state. This requires us to reassess the point and purpose of a theory of international justice, in contrast to justice for a domestic and politically separate society. In the case of a theorist like Rawls, human rights represent guides to the foreign policy of a liberal state, rather than to principles by which all states are expected to abide. That is because of Rawls’ acceptance that no common, authoritative, third-party, institutions capable of imposing duties on all agents uniformly exist or can exist. This also makes his theory inherently conservative about human rights, given that they are simply to act as a guide to which states can be treated as legitimate when it comes to liberal foreign policy: those that possess institutions that can be said to represent a peoples, rather than being imposed through violence. This standard is lower than the ideal set of rights extended to all in a liberal society. (shrink)

_International Justice and the Third World_ vindicates belief in global or universal justice, and explores both liberal and Marxist grounds for such belief. It also investigates the presuppositions of belief in development, and relates it to sustainability, to environmentalism, and to the obligation to cancel Third World debt.

This book advances a novel theory of international justice that combines the orthodox liberal notion that the lives of individuals are what ultimately matter morally with the putatively antiliberal idea of an irreducibly collective right of self-governance. The individual and her rights are placed at center stage insofar as political states are judged legitimate if they adequately protect the human rights of their constituents and respect the rights of all others. Yet, the book argues that legitimate states have (...) a moral right to self-determination and that this right is inherently collective, irreducible to the individual rights of the persons who constitute them. Exploring the implications of these ideas, the book addresses issues pertaining to democracy, secession, international criminal law, armed intervention, political assassination, global distributive justice, and immigration. A number of the positions taken in the book run against the grain of current academic opinion: there is no human right to democracy; separatist groups can be morally entitled to secede from legitimate states; the fact that it is a matter of brute luck whether one is born in a wealthy state or a poorer one does not mean that economic inequalities across states must be minimized or even kept within certain limits; most existing states have no right against armed intervention; and it is morally permissible for a legitimate state to exclude all would-be immigrants. (shrink)

This paper discusses obligations of international distributive justice-specifically, obligations rich countries have to transfer resources to poor countries. It argues that the major seven OECD countries each have an obligation to transfer at least one percent of their GDP to developing countries. -/- The strategy of the paper is to defend this position without having to resolve the many debates that attend questions of international distributive justice. In this respect, it belongs to the neglected category of (...) nonideal theory. The key to the strategy is to show that a significant amount of good would be accomplished by a one percent transfer, despite the fact that one percent is quite a small amount. -/- To make this showing, the paper takes health as a fundamental measure of individual well-being and examines the improvement in life expectancy that would likely result from devoting the one percent transfer to the major determinants of health. It adduces data indicating that substantial progress towards raising life expectancy in developing countries to the global average of 64.5 years can be expected from expenditures of $125 per capita, divided between health care, education, and basic nutrition and income support. A one percent transfer from the major seven is enough to cover expenditures on that scale for the poorest fifth of the world's population. (shrink)

According to the basic needs principle, a state in favorable circumstances must enable its members to meet their basic needs throughout a normal life-span. Applied to the international situation, I argue, this principle implies that a global state would have a duty (ceteris paribus) to enable subordinate states to meet their members‘ needs. In the absence of a global state, existing states have a duty (ceteris paribus) to work to create a system of institutions that would enable each state (...) to meet its members‘ needs. Near the conclusion, I respond to skeptical objections about global justice. (shrink)

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.

The issue of international justice is both theoretical and practical. Being involved difficulties in both perspectives, this issue became one of major problems in public debates between liberalism and conservatism, the Right and the Left, globalization and nationalism, modernity and traditionalism, democratic and centralist claims, etc. This paper wants to clarify key conceptions involved, such as “private” and “public”, “society” and “state”, “global” and “universal”, “ideology” and “management”.

According to the basic needs principle, a state in favorable circumstances must enable its members to meet their basic needs throughout a normal life-span. Applied to the international situation, I argue, this principle implies that a global state would have a duty to enable subordinate states to meet their members‘ needs. In the absence of a global state, existing states have a duty to work to create a system of institutions that would enable each state to meet its members‘ (...) needs. Near the conclusion, I respond to skeptical objections about global justice. (shrink)

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.

Have we any obligations beyond our own borders? What form do these take? These questions are addressed through a concept of comparative justice indebted to the just war tradition and the equal moral regard of persons.

This paper presents a rival proposal to that presented by Dietsch and Rixen to ensure international background justice. It explains the notion of background justice and how this is challenged by the lack of international co-operation on taxation policy. It then presents the principles which Dietsch and Rixen propose in order to respond to this concern: the principle of membership and the principle of constraint. The paper proposes alternative principles of relationship and counter-incentive, which are argued (...) to be superior means to achieve the aim of global background justice. This is because the alternative principles do not interfere with the right of states to set the tax-rates that they desire. The counter-incentive approach instead rewards the states who set higher taxes and provides them with revenues from taxpayers who have left either to seek lower taxes elsewhere or for any of a number of other reasons. (shrink)

This article tries to explain why it was impossible for Rawls to develop a normative theory of justice for international relations; something that has been demanded by some rawlsian thinkers (Beitz, Pogge, etc.). There were two obstacles for such an enterprise. On one hand, the link established by the philosophical tradition between justice, as a political virtue, and the political unity (polis, national-state, etc.). On the other hand, Rawls’ meta-philosophical decisions, which make his a ‘post-metaphysical’ and ‘strictly (...) political’ theory of justice. (shrink)

The migration of elder-care workers appears to be a zero-sum game. This naturally offends our sense of justice, especially when the host populations are richer. In this article, I argue that we ought to look beyond the short run. Once we look at the long run, we will see possibilities of non-zero-sum games that are mutually beneficial.

The aim of this paper is to offer a concise and faithful account of Rawls’ theory of international justice, in an effort, first, to elucidate the structure of the argument that is advanced in that theory and, second, to present a critical assessment of it. The critical assessment section attempts, on the one side, to cope with crucial methodological issues, which have a more general bearing upon Rawls’ overall political philosophical position, including the constructivist perspective of theory making (...) and the division between a political conception and a comprehensive doctrine; on the other side, to weigh up a set of substantive claims made in the Rawlsian theory of international justice, including the recognition of peoples as the fundamental subjects of international law, the toleration of the so-called decent peoples and the considerably thin construal of human rights encompassed in The Law of Peoples. The paper attempts to provide a series of reasons that could be well-suited to explicate its author’s doubts about the soundness of the Rawlsian theoretical perspective with regard to both its formal methodological features and its more content-oriented convictions. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:John Rawls, The Law of Peoples.

The risk posed to the community by possible xenozoonosis after xenotransplantation suggests that some form of 'community consent' is required before whole organ animal-to-human xenotransplantation should take place. I argue that this requirement places greater obstacles in the path of ethical xenotransplantation than has previously been recognised. The relevant community is global and there are no existing institutions with democratic credentials sufficient to establish this consent. The distribution of the risks and benefits from xenotransplantation also means that consent is unlikely (...) to be forthcoming. Proceeding on the basis of hypothetical consent to a package of global health measures that includes xenotransplantation, as Rothblatt has recently advocated, is more problematic than she acknowledges. Given that it may place the lives of citizens of poor nations at risk to benefit the citizens of wealthy nations, xenotransplantation raises significant questions of international justice. (shrink)

This article attends to an unnamed and often missing element of the cosmopolitanism discourse: care ethics. Developed out of feminist theory in the 1980s, care ethics privileges the relational, contextual, and affective aspects of morality. It is my suggestion that contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism would benefit from integrating the moral commitments of care ethics. First, a definition of care ethics is offered followed by a delineation of themes of care in the cosmopolitan theorizing of an historical figure, Jane Addams, and (...) a contemporary theorist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. Ultimately, the contention here is that cosmopolitan societies envisioned by Addams and Appiah cannot be exclusively founded on systems of justice (i.e., rights, principles, laws) but needs caring to provide the social cohesion necessary for organic international justice, as well as lasting peace. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:John Rawls, The Law of Peoples.

Rawls's "The Law of Peoples" has not been well received. The first task of this essay is to draw (what the author regards as) Rawls's position out of his own text where it is imperfectly and incompletely expressed. Rawls's view, once fully and clearly presented, is less vulnerable to common criticisms than it is often taken to be. The second task of this essay is to go beyond Rawls's text to develop some supplementary lines of argument, still Rawlsian in spirit, (...) to deflect key criticisms made by Rawls's critics. The overall defense given here of Rawls's position draws on a deep theme running throughout all of Rawls's work in political philosophy, namely, that the task of political philosophy is to mark the moral limits given by and through a common human reason, itself socially and historically achieved, within which human nature must develop (and reveal itself over time) if it is to be an expression or manifestation of human freedom. (shrink)

This article attends to an unnamed and often missing element of the cosmopolitanism discourse: care ethics. Developed out of feminist theory in the 1980s, care ethics privileges the relational, contextual, and affective aspects of morality. It is my suggestion that contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism would benefit from integrating the moral commitments of care ethics. First, a definition of care ethics is offered followed by a delineation of themes of care in the cosmopolitan theorizing of an historical figure, Jane Addams, and (...) a contemporary theorist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. Ultimately, the contention here is that cosmopolitan societies envisioned by Addams and Appiah cannot be exclusively founded on systems of justice (i.e., rights, principles, laws) but needs caring to provide the social cohesion necessary for organic international justice, as well as lasting peace. (shrink)

When the topic of international justice did arise, discussion rarely got beyond recommendations about how nations could avoid war, as well as suggestions about when a declaration of war was morally justifiable and what sorts of methods might be used in the course of a justifiable war the topics of so-called just-war theory. Such is no longer the case.To be sure, just-war theory is reaching greater states of sophistication,much of it focused around Michael Walzer's book Just and Unjust (...) Wars.Excerpts from Walzer's book appear here, in Part Two, along with a set of newly written chapters that deal with issues arising from the use of violence among nations. The topics of these chapters are foreign interventionism and states' rights, deterrence and the threat of nuclear reprisal, and terrorism.But issues of international justice other than just-war theory have been discussed by an an ever-increasing group of twentieth-century scholars. These issues deal with what might be called distributive justice, which concerns the distribution of the world's natural resources and the goods produced by laborers across the world, as well as the duties,rights, and liberties possessed by individuals. How such items ought to be distributed within nation-states has been discussed extensively by social and political philosophers. Only in recent years has any attention been paid to the proper distribution of goods internationally. The chapters in Part One all do so. With one exception, all of these chapters are written for this volume. The exception is an excerpt from Charles Beitz's book PoliticalTheory and International Relations, Part Three of which is reproduced here almost in its entirety. The other chapters in this part are devoted to the topics of justice and the distribution of the world's resources, the obligation to assist the needy, the responsibilities of international corporations, and justice and the global environment. (shrink)

In this timely collection of thoughtful and provocative essays, a diverse group of prominent philosophers and political scientists discuss critical issues such as the nature and definition of terrorism.

Intergenerational justice not only requires the adoption of best practices and policies; but also the prevention and repression of deleterious and morally blameworthy human behaviour which have severe impacts on the long-term health; safety and means of survival of groups of individuals. While many international crimes have indirect consequences on the well-being of present and future generations; it cannot be said that existing international criminal law is currently well-placed to directly and clearly protect intergenerational rights. As such; (...) the development of a new type of international crime; crimes against future generations; may be a promising avenue for implementing intergenerational justice. Such a crime would penalise acts or conduct that amount to serious violations of existing international law regarding economic; social and cultural rights or the environment. (shrink)

In 2002, Hugh Laddie lamented the “blind adherence to dogma” that had led to an apparent impasse in philosophical and practical discussions of intellectual property : “On the one side, the developed world side, there exists a lobby of those who believe that all IPRs [intellectual property rights] are good for business, benefit the public at large, and act as catalysts for technical progress. They believe and argue that, if IPRs are good, more IPRs must be better.”1 But “on the (...) other side”, he continued: “there exists a vociferous lobby of those who believe that IPRs are likely to cripple the development of local industry and technology, will harm the local population, and benefit none but the developed world. They believe and argue that, if IPRs are bad, the fewer the better.” Laddie recommended reforms designed to ensure that IPR development and enforcement would better serve the interests of developing countries. He hoped these reforms would provide an effective response to those who regard IPRs as “food for the rich countries and poison for the poor”.2. (shrink)