Business ethicists should examine ethical issues that impinge on the perimeters of their specialized studies (Byrne 2011 ). This article addresses one peripheral issue that cries out for such consideration: the international resource privilege (IRP). After explaining briefly what the IRP involves I argue that it is unethical and should not be supported in international law. My argument is based on others’ findings as to the consequences of current IRP transactions and of their ethically indefensible historical precedents. In particular I (...) examine arguments from political philosophy for more equitable distribution of resources and appeals to property rights as a means of achieving this; business ethicists’ critiques of contemporary resource appropriations; and legal historians’ accounts of despoliation of aboriginal peoples, especially in what is now the United States, involving acquisition via conquest, asserted jurisdiction, and religious and racial preeminence. I also consider relevant human rights’ standards; supportive views of some theorists, especially early modern realists and current supporters of group rights and multidimensional rectification; some de facto incidences of substantive restitution; and proposals for effecting further rectification. (shrink)

Si bien al hablar de igualdad y derechos colectivos nos situamos aparentemente en dos espectros distintos de los derechos humanos, siguiendo a VASAK y su teoría de las tres generaciones, de un lado en el rango de un derecho fundamental, y del otro, en toda una amplia gama de derechos de tercera generación, es en realidad, en una misma órbita en donde debemos ubicarnos: en la del Estado de Social Derecho. Y es allí, donde la capacidad que éste tenga para (...) hacer frente a los desafíos que trae consigo su cumplimiento -sin olvidar el de los derechos económicos, sociales y culturales-, se convierte en el mejor elemento de juicio para determinar su éxito o fracaso, en una sociedad fracturada por un sinnúmero de fenómenos que atentan cada vez más contra las garantías y libertades de los ciudadanos. En este contexto, en el marco del programa de actividades formativas del Doctorado en Estudios Interdisciplinares de Género y Políticas de Igualdad, se organizó un Foro Académico cuya pretensión no era otra sino la de presentar a la comunidad una serie de reflexiones sobre algunos de estos mencionados fenómenos, a partir de la visión aquí propuesta. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge claims "that, by shaping and enforcing the social conditions that foreseeably and avoidably cause the monumental suffering of global poverty, we are harming the global poor ... or, to put it more descriptively, we are active participants in the largest, though not the gravest, crime against humanity ever committed." In other words, he claims that by upholding certain international arrangements we are violating our strong negative duties not to harm, and not just some positive duties to help. I (...) shall argue that even if Pogge were correct in claiming that certain rich states or at least the rich states collectively violate certain negative duties towards the poor and harm the poor, he is far too hasty in concluding that "we," the citizens of those states, are thus harming the global poor or violating our negative duties towards them. In fact, his conclusion can be shown to be wrong not least of all in the light of some of his own assumptions about collective responsibility, the enforceability of human rights, and terrorism. In addition, I will also argue that his view that we share responsibility for the acts of our political "representatives," who allegedly act "on our behalf," is unwarranted. (shrink)

When discussing whether or not our elected governments should intervene to end genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity in other countries, the humanitarian intervention debate has largely been assuming that liberal democracies bear no responsibility for the injustice at hand: someone else is committing shameful acts; we are merely considering whether or not we have a positive duty to do something about it. Here I argue that there are important instances in which this dominant third party perspective (...) (TPP) is empirically false and normatively misguided. Much before our positive ?responsibility to protect? potential victims from mass atrocities, we violate our negative duty not to harm these victims. Employing work by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar, I argue that this harm currently comes about as our elected governments either buy, or allow our corporations to buy, the world's most precious resources from brutal dictators and warlords, who dominate some of the states that are at the heart of intervention discussions. In these cases, democracies' most immediate duty is not intervention but rather humanitarian disintervention: boycotting severely oppressive regimes, and in particular stopping to recognizing these regimes ? whether dictators or civil warriors ? as possessing legitimate authority to sell their peoples' resources. I begin with a brief survey of the intervention literature, followed by the foundations for the disintervention alternative. I then elaborate the conceptual and practical advantages of disintervention, concluding with thoughts on the reasons for TPP's lasting dominance. (shrink)

This article examines which lessons political philosophers can learn from discussions within Critical Philosophy of Race. The article assumes a social-constructionist understanding of “race” and focuses on the question of how we can reconcile normative universalism with sensitivity to differences that have been created by processes of racialisation. To answer this question, it looks exemplarily at debates within three different fields of political philosophy: normativity, politics, and law. First, it presents objections voiced by critical race theory against liberal, ideal conceptions (...) of justice. Second, the article reconstructs the main arguments for and against affirmative action as a policy measure directed at minority groups. Third, it focuses on racial inequalities in the context of penal law. By way of conclusion, it suggests how debates around justice and punishment and the conceptual lenses offered by CPoR can be fruitfully applied to the German context. (shrink)

Se hace un llamado de atención a través de este capítulo de libro a los gobiernos locales y la Academia, para proponer políticas públicas donde se incluyan bases o lineamientos para la estructuración de un derecho global de acceso a los medicamentos. Para estos efectos, se importan a manera de pilares, tres planteamientos desde la óptica de la justicia global, que consideramos pueden acoplarse a esta problemática, y que aportan elementos novedosos al abordaje de los numerosos obstáculos que se suelen (...) presentar en las discusiones, especialmente en lo que respecta a la regulación del monopolio de la patente, y al tratamiento diferenciado que se les da a los ciudadanos de países desarrollados y en desarrollo. (shrink)

Scholars in philosophy, political science, and the policy community have recently advocated for a ‘sticks and carrots’, or conditional-coercion, approach to human rights violations. On this model, rights violators (usually states) are conceived of as rational agents who should be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior by other states seeking to improve human rights abroad. External states concerned about human rights abroad should impose punishments against foreign rights violators, and these punitive measures should not be lifted until (...) rights violations in target countries cease. Against these scholars, I argue that the conditional-coercion model is mistaken. In this article, I explicate the ‘sticks and carrots’ approach to human rights, criticize it on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and suggest an alternative approach that I term rights diagnostics. The model I propose is sensitive to the internal political struggles in rights violating states and the incentive structures faced by rights violators. This model takes account of relevant empirical evidence on the role of external coercion and inducements in producing institutional change. I conclude by sketching an institutional design that would potentially implement ‘rights diagnostics’ policy.1. (shrink)

According to Thomas Pogge, rich people do not simply violate a positive duty of assistance to help the global poor; rather, they violate a negative duty not to harm them. They do so by imposing an unjust global economic structure on poor people. Assuming that these claims are correct, it follows that, ceteris paribus, wars waged by the poor against the rich to resist this imposition are morally equivalent to wars waged in self-defense against military aggression. Hence, if self-defense against (...) military aggression is just, then, ceteris paribus, so are defensive wars against the imposition of economic injustice. While I do not think Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, I defend these inferences against various challenges. (shrink)

What counts as global ‘harm’? This article explores this question through critical engagement with Thomas Pogge’s conception of negative duties not to harm. My purpose here is to show that while Pogge is right to orient global moral claims around negative duties not to harm, he is mistaken in departing from the standard understanding of these duties. Pogge ties negative duties to global institutions, but I argue that truly negative duties cannot apply to such institutions. In order to retain the (...) global force of negative duties, we need to dissociate these duties from global institutions: each society’s negative duty to stop harming specific other societies ought to be seen as independent of global institutional change. In order to establish this thesis, I criticize both the features and the derivation of Pogge’s variant of negative duties. I conclude that one must see global negative duties as applying to the relations between specific sovereign societies as unitary agents rather than to global institutions. I then show how this view of negative duties can yield significant global reform, based on Pogge’s own accusations concerning democracies’ conferral of trading privileges upon dictators who embezzle state resources. After presenting the normative, empirical, and strategic advantages of such reform, I anticipate Poggean objections. (shrink)

The international investment regime has come under increasing scrutiny, with several developing countries withdrawing from bilateral investment treaties in recent years. A central worry raised by c...

The article makes two substantive contributions to the existing literature on the ethics of international assistance and global justice. First, it builds what we take to be a widely held set of propositions about international assistance into a consistent view, and articulates a strong case against its desirability. Second, it sketches a more attractive alternative. To do so the article uses Sen’s idea of agent-oriented development as a starting point while at the same time providing a generalization of Sen’s account (...) and a justificatory framework that does not rely on the capability approach. (shrink)