Obstacles to achieving a global climate treaty include disagreements about questions of justice raised by the UNFCCC's principle that countries should respond to climate change by taking cooperative action "in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions". Aiming to circumvent such disagreements, Climate Change Justice authors Eric Posner and David Weisbach argue against shaping treaty proposals according to requirements of either distributive or corrective justice. The USA's climate envoy, Todd Stern, takes (...) a similar position. In this article I explain the practical and theoretical drawbacks of Posner & Weisbach's welfarist perspective and propose an alternative. I show that their arguments fail to rule out John Rawls' non-utilitarian, political conception of international justice and human rights, the Law of Peoples. On this basis I develop a conception of climate justice that highlights implications of some of Rawls' principles and adds a principle for determining fair shares of climate -treaty-related benefits and burdens. I propose this conception as a moral framework for negotiating a treaty that would promote human welfare consistently with requirements of justice, and I argue that a treaty proposal satisfying these requirements could best satisfy Posner & Weisbach's own feasibility criteria. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to the elaboration of a deliberative approach to global institutional design. A deliberative approach aims to embed processes of mutual reason-giving at the heart of international relations and global decision-making. The theoretical framework that orientates this discussion is the liberal approach to international law developed by John Rawls. It may seem strange to invoke this model: after all, Rawls does not specifically discuss the issue of global institutional design and indeed has been (...) widely criticized for neglecting this topic. In fact, in its account of global public reason, Rawls's approach can be shown to contain important and surprisingly neglected resources for constructing a dynamic and inclusive theory of global deliberative politics. (shrink)

While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) as an issue of national security, human security, human rights, and global public goods. The global health governance literature is essentially untethered to a theorized framework to illuminate or evaluate governance. This article ties global health justice and ethics to principles for governing the global health realm, developing a theoretical framework for global and domestic institutions and actors. (shrink)

While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) as an issue of national security, human security, human rights, and global public goods. The global health governance literature is essentially untethered to a theorized framework to illuminate or evaluate governance. This article ties global health justice and ethics to principles for governing the global health realm, developing a theoretical framework for global and domestic institutions and actors. (shrink)

In The Law of Peoples Rawls claims that liberal well-ordered societies (LWOSs) should regard certain non-liberal societies, decent hierarchical societies (DHSs), as equal members of a just international order, a ‘Society of Peoples.’ Rawls maintains, however, that while the ‘basic structures’ (the main political and economic institutions) of LWOSs are fair systems of social cooperation, the basic structures of DHSs are only ‘decent’ systems of social cooperation. I explain why the basic structures of DHSs cannot be fair systems of social (...) cooperation. In doing so, I refute a recent defense of DHSs advanced by Samuel Freeman. I then argue that because the basic structures of DHSs cannot be fair systems of social cooperation, Rawls is not justified in holding that LWOSs should refrain always from offering economic incentives to DHSs in order to encourage them to liberalize their political institutions. The ultimate aim of the foreign policies of LWOSs should be a world in which liberal democratic rights are respected by all societies. (shrink)