Abstract
A fairly broad consensus has emerged about the characteristics of a minimally decent world. Indeed, during the past century, moral norms protecting the freedoms of the weak and vulnerable have become increasingly potent, condemning practices such as genocide, colonialism, autocracy, slavery, sexual violence against women, and economic structures that avoidably lead to widespread destitution. It is also commonly held that our current world fails to meet these criteria. Even after a period of unprecedented opulence, more than 800 million people lack adequate nutrition and access to basic health services, and there are some 110 million child labourers under the age of 12, more than half of whom work in hazardous conditions.
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I am indebted to Tony Lang, Thomas Pogge, Kate Raworth, Sanjay Reddy, and Joel Rosenthal for many fruitful discussions of these themes, and to Toni Erskine for her very helpful written comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Notes
David Miller refers to these as ‘remedial responsibilities’. See his excellent ‘Distributing Responsibilities’, Journal of Political Philosophy, IX (2001) 453–71.
P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Proceedings of the British Academy, XLVIII (1962) 1–25 (p. 23).
See O. O’Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); ‘Agents of Justice’, Metaphilosophy, XXXII (2001) 180–95, and T. Erskine, ‘ “Blood on the UN’s Hands”? Assigning Duties and Apportioning Blame to an Intergovernmental Organization’, Global Society, XVIII (January 2004).
This can engender, as Russell Hardin has recently put it ‘a semideliberate inattention’ in place of ‘individualized attention’. R. Hardin, ‘Institutional Morality’, in R. Goodin (ed.), Theories of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 126–53 (p. 142).
As Henry Shue has put it, ‘Isolated and uncoordinated efforts by individuals are materially wasteful and can be psychologically oppressive to no good purpose’. H. Shue, ‘Mediating Duties’, Ethics, XCVIII (1988) 687–704 (p. 697).
S. Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 38.
For discussion, see A. Sen, ‘How to Judge Globalism’, American Prospect, XIII 1 (2002) A2–A6, and T. Pogge, ‘Achieving Democracy’, Ethics & International Affairs, XV 1 (2001) 3–23.
For discussion, see P. Fajnzylber, D. Lederman and N. Loayza, What Causes Violent Crime? (Washington, DC: The World Bank, Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, 1998), and M. Klare and D. Anderson, A Scourge of Guns (Washington, DC: Arms Sales Monitoring Project, Federation of American Scientists, 1996).
R. Bittner, ‘Morality and World Hunger’, Metaphilosophy, XXXII (2001) 25–34. See also Barry and Raworth.
For discussion, see D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), chapter 3.
J. Rawls, Justice as Fairness (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press, 2001), p. 7.
See, for example, B. Barry, ‘Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective’, in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (eds), Ethics, Economics, and the Law, Nomos XXIV (New York: New York University Press, 1982), pp. 219–52.
One can contrast ‘global’ justice, which assesses global institutions, with ‘worldwide’ justice, which summarizes all of the injustices that take place on the globe, regardless of whether they are due to unfair local, national, or global institutions.
C. Beitz, ‘Does Global Inequality Matter?’, Metaphilosophy, XXXII (2001) 95–112.
A. Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 73.
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods’, in A. Sen and B. Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 159–86; A. Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Conceptions of global justice that focus on countries, rather than persons, also implicitly draw on utilitarian, resourcist, or capabilities approaches.
For an interesting discussion of this theme in the context of state reform, see S. Reddy and A. Pereira, The Role and Reform of the State (New York: United Nations Development Programme, Office of Development Studies Working Paper Series, 1998).
See, for discussion, N. Woods, ‘The Challenges of Multilateralism and Governance’, in C. L. Gilbert and D. Vines (eds), The World Bank: Structure and Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
See, for example, D. Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, in A. Hurrell and N. Woods (eds), Inequality, Globalization and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 187–210, H. Shue, Basic Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
This view is largely endorsed by the majority of articles of the various human rights instruments developed in the past fifty years. Some exceptions include elements of the declaration on the right to development, and Article 28 of the Universal Declaration.
On distributive justice, see M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Robertson, 1983). On citizenship, see D. Miller, ‘Bounded Citizenship’, in his Citizenship and National Identity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 81–96. For helpful
discussion of both of these claims, see D. Weinstock, ‘Prospects for Transnational Citizenship and Democracy’, Ethics & International Affairs, XV 2 (2001) 53–66.
For discussion, see C. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, [1979] 2nd edn (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1999) Afterword.
They differ, then, from views that stress the importance of local factors such as culture, climate, resource endowment, and institutional structures within particular countries. See T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), esp. pp. 118–45.
See J. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Knopf, 2002), pp. 3–23, 214–52, and R. Wade, ‘Showdown at the World Bank’, New Left Review, VII (2001) 124–37.
Although the principles discussed here sometimes differ from those explored in his article, the discussion in the next section owes much to David Miller’s ‘Distributing Responsibilities’.
Scheffler, p. 4. Many different distinctions have been offered to characterize this intuition, including those between doing and allowing, acting and refraining, making and permitting, and committing and omitting. These distinctions in turn have been invoked to ground still further distinctions such as those between killing and letting die and of negative and positive rights, duties, or responsibilities. For discussion, see Jonathan Bennett’s excellent The Act Itself (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 105–38, and W. S. Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, in A. Norcross and B. Steinbock (eds), Killing and Letting Die, 2nd edn (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), pp. 355–82.
The intuition behind this interpretation is that even when deprivations are overdetermined, those that are collectively involved in bringing them about must bear some responsibility for remedying them.
For discussion, see A. Honoré, ‘Causation in the Law’, in Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-law/and R. G. Wright, ‘Once More into the Bramble Bush: Duty, Causal Contribution and the extent of Legal Responsibility’, Vanderbilt Law Review, LIV (2001) 1071–1132.
I am indebted to Thomas Pogge for discussion of this principle.
Miller refers to this as the ‘community’ principle in Miller, ‘Distributing Responsibilities’, p. 462. See also H. L. A. Hart’s discussion of moral and legal responsibilities that attach to specific societal, institutional, or biological ‘roles’ in H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Thomas Pogge has referred to (and criticized) a view of this kind as ‘lofty nationalism’. See Pogge, World Poverty, pp. 129–30, 144–5.
Miller, ‘Distributing Responsibilities’, pp. 460–1. As Miller points out, views of this kind may be sensitive both to the efficiency of different agents and institutions in bringing remedy, and the cost to these agents of doing so. For more detailed discussion of this principle see Shue, ‘Mediating Duties’, pp. 687–704. Richard Posner has endorsed a similar principle for the purposes of assigning responsibility in civil law, arguing that the person best placed to avoid the loss most cheaply should bear social costs.
R. E. Goodin, ‘What Is So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?’, Ethics, XLVIII (1988) 663–86 (p. 678). As Miller points out in ‘Distributing Responsibilities’, views of this kind may be sensitive both to the efficiency of different agents and institutions in bringing remedy, and the cost to these agents of doing so.
See for discussion, Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 116–17.
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Barry, C. (2003). Global Justice: Aims, Arrangements, and Responsibilities. In: Erskine, T. (eds) Can Institutions Have Responsibilities?. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938466_13
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