Suchergebnisse

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreakingWorld Poverty and Human Rightsis that the global political and economic orderharmspeople in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but torectify injustice. But does the global orderharmthe poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false.

Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Some philosophers find left-libertarianism promising because it seems that it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting such equality. However, the main goal of this article is to argue that, as far as coherence is concerned, at least one formulation of left-libertarianism is in trouble. This formulation is that of Michael Otsuka, who published it first in a 1998 article, and now in his thought-provoking book Libertarianism Without Inequality. In a nutshell, my objection is that the set of reasons that support egalitarian ownership of natural resources as Otsuka understands it stand in a deep tension with the set of reasons that would prompt one to endorse Otsuka's right to self-ownership. In light of their underlying commitments, a defender of either of the views that left-libertarianism combines would actually have to reject the other. This incoherence, it seems, can only be remedied either by an approach that renders left-libertarianism incomplete in a way that can only be fixed by endorsing more commitments than most left-libertarians would want to or by an approach that leaves left-libertarianism a philosophically shallow theory.

This work provides a radically new account of trade justice from its theoretical foundations to a range of specific issues. The state as an actor in the domain of global justice is central to the discussion which also explores the obligations of business. It provides a theoretical contribution to the creation of an exploitation-free world.