Suchergebnisse

Several reasons are offered to explain why global poverty is of no serious moral concern for the affluent of developed countries. Often it is claimed that there are no morally salient connections between our actions and their poverty. In the first part of this article I argue that there are important morally salient connections between the affluent of developed countries and those in poverty. Considerations of desert and (fair) entitlement can bring this into better view. I argue that there are significant problems with the notion of desert that we typically invoke to defend our holdings. When we try to reconstruct a coherent notion of desert, we find we must be committed to a principle of (fair) equality of opportunity, so we must care about people's starting positions and desert-generating processes, in order for any claims of desert to defensibly gain moral recognition.

In this work, G. A. Cohen presents his Gifford Lectures. He explains why he no longer believes in the inevitability of equality, why he rejects liberals' faith in the sufficiency of political recipes, and why he now believes "that a change in social ethos, a change in the attitudes people sustain toward each other in the thick of daily life, is necessary for producing equality" (p. 3). Both just rules and just personal choices are required for distributive justice. Good structural design is not enough: You cannot change the world without changing the soul, as it were. He discusses how closely this aligns him with Christian views he once utterly disparaged.

In recent years, a number of important challenges have been raised about whether arguments for granting group rights in virtue of ethnicity can really stand up to scrutiny. Two of the most pressing issues involve whether granting rights to groups in virtue of ethnicity involves a certain unfairness to nonmembers (such as discrimination against nonethnic groups) & whether granting such rights licenses unfairness to members (because they may be oppressed or abused without recourse to the protections of nonmembers). If arguments for indigenous rights are to succeed, they must address these challenges & show how there is no important unfairness to nonmembers or members. Several arguments for indigenous rights are discussed, to show how they fall prey to one or both of the unfairness objections. The article goes on to offer an argument as to how proponents of indigenous rights might respond to claims that such rights discriminate obnoxiously between groups. This approach can accommodate the force of indigenous peoples' claims & so grant certain kinds of groups rights, without at the same time licensing the group's oppression of its more vulnerable members. Moreover, since the argument appeals to considerations typically thought persuasive in liberal theory, it should be attractive to liberals. 27 References. Adapted from the source document.

Examines cosmopolitanism & its claims that nationalism should be subordinate in distributive justice matters. David Held's model of cosmopolitan democracy is reviewed along with Will Kymlicka's points of criticism. It is demonstrated that Kymlicka's complaints neither undercut Held's basic arguments nor discredit the promise of his version of cosmopolitanism. K. Coddon