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This paper considers theoretically the relationship between what rights people may be said to have, the normatively defensible distribution of wealth between people within nations & across the world, & people's empirical responses to poverty within their own state & across the world. We argue that rights are universal, & that rights & freedoms do entail a duty to reduce poverty. However freedom is defined, greater poverty entails, either conceptually or causally, reduced freedom. Since levels of freedom determine the material existence or non-existence of rights, poverty affects the rights that people can be said to enjoy. However, the duty to reduce poverty does not imply a duty to ensure universally uniform provision, which is neither an empirically plausible expectation nor a requirement of justice. Nonetheless, we owe more to the world's poor today than we did in the past. Globalization expands the moral community that we live in & thus affects our & others' rights & duties: the greater the level of economic interaction, & the greater the interdependencies of economies, the greater the extent to which the threshold values below which rights lack material existence are likely to converge. In particular, the growth of such interdependencies entails that the threshold values for the developing world should increase. 29 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper considers theoretically the relationship between what rights people may be said to have, the normatively defensible distribution of wealth between people within nations and across the world, and people's empirical responses to poverty within their own state and across the world. We argue that rights are universal, and that rights and freedoms do entail a duty to reduce poverty. However freedom is defined, greater poverty entails, either conceptually or causally, reduced freedom. Since levels of freedom determine the material existence or non-existence of rights, poverty affects the rights that people can be said to enjoy. However, the duty to reduce poverty does not imply a duty to ensure universally uniform provision, which is neither an empirically plausible expectation nor a requirement of justice. Nonetheless, we owe more to the world's poor today than we did in the past. Globalisation expands the moral community that we live in and thus affects our and others' rights and duties: the greater the level of economic interaction, and the greater the interdependencies of economies, the greater the extent to which the threshold values below which rights lack material existence are likely to converge. In particular, the growth of such interdependencies entails that the threshold values for the developing world should increase. (Original abstract)

In this paper we focus on the way in which courts affect public policy. We present a model of judicial behavior that combines insights from theories emphasizing the importance of policy preferences with those suggesting that courts are only motivated by formal-legal criteria. By embedding our model of judicial choice in a broader context of political decision-making we show how judges are able to affect policy and under what circumstances the judiciary will change their legal interpretations. The model is applied to decision-making by the Dutch Supreme Court on euthanasia to illustrate its main features.

In this paper we focus on the way in which courts affect public policy. We present a model of judicial behavior that combines insights from theories emphasizing the importance of policy preferences with those suggesting that courts are only motivated by formal-legal criteria. By embedding our model of judicial choice in a broader context of political decision making, we show how judges are able to affect policy & under what circumstances the judiciary will change their legal interpretations. The model is applied to decision making by the Dutch Supreme Court on euthanasia to illustrate its main features. 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 20 References. Adapted from the source document.

The article discusses recent attempts in rational choice theory to take account of the opportunity aspect of freedom, i.e., the value of alternatives, in measuring freedom. It is argued that each of these approaches (in terms of fixed preferences, of possible future preferences and of the preferences of reasonable persons) fails to solve important conceptual problems. Furthermore, we argue that differences between measures of opportunity freedom reflect different moral standards for the quality of alternatives, not different conceptions of freedom as such. Hence, we propose to separate discussions about the meaning of the concept of freedom from the issue of determining the value of opportunity sets.

AbstractThe small improvement argument has been said to establish that the standard weak preference or value relation can be incomplete. We first show that the argument is one of three possible 'small amendment arguments', each of which would yield the same conclusion. Generalizing the analysis thus, we subsequently present a strong and a weak version of small amendment arguments and derive the exact rationality conditions under which they reveal incompleteness. The results show that the arguments (in any of their variants) need not reveal a problem for the possibility of rational choice. In fact, it can be argued that they only reveal such a problem if the underlying relation is complete rather than incomplete.