Some recent uses of artificial intelligence for facial recognition, evaluating resumes, and sorting photographs by subject matter have revealed troubling disparities in performance or impact based on the demographic traits of subject populations. These disparities raise pressing questions about how using artificial intelligence can work to promote justice or entrench injustice. Political theorists and philosophers have developed nuanced vocabularies and theoretical frameworks for understanding and adjudicating disputes about what justice requires and what constitutes injustice. The interdisciplinary community committed to understanding (...) and conscientiously using big data could benefit from this work. Thus, in the spirit of encouraging cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration, this piece examines contemporary scholarship in political theory and philosophy to illustrate some of the vocabularies and frameworks political theorists and philosophers have developed for thinking about justice and injustice. It then draws on these frameworks to illuminate how the use of artificial intelligence can implicate questions of justice, with a focus on institutional discrimination, structural injustice, and epistemic injustice. Ultimately, the piece argues that the use of artificial intelligence—far from representing a decision to take power out of human hands—represents a novel way of harnessing human power, making questions of justice central to its conscientious undertaking. (shrink)

Global justice or the lack thereof has internal connections with global poverty. Global justice is an ideal pursuit of cosmopolitanism, which regards basic human needs as its rightful object. The right to life, from the point of view of global justice, is the most fundamental in the list of Human Rights. International anarchy and the current international economic order, however, cast a utopian shadow on the realization of this right when we consider the de facto institutions and the ostensible goal (...) of impartial love for everyone. Humanitarian aid is another approach to the problem of contemporary global poverty. Its difficulty lies first in people’s different conceptions of obligation and donation. They consider the former as duty while the latter is seen to lie beyond the call of duty. Second, in terms of a correlation between right and duty, since everyone has the right to life, the duty falls accordingly upon organizations or individuals. Meanwhile, donation as duty is not perfect obligation, thus is not compulsory either. Finally, international humanitarian aid is constrained by nationalism and partial love. Hence, in the light of either government or individual, the humanitarian aid approach is beset with challenges. Global justice has gained academic importance worldwide since John Rawls’ later works. By contrast to domestic justice, it is a theory of justice that proposes to include all human beings. Global justice stands for a kind of utopian justice in regard to both the institutional path and the humanitarian aid approach. I shall examine the theory of global justice under these two aspects. (shrink)

Global justice or the lack thereof has internal connections with global poverty. Global justice is an ideal pursuit of cosmopolitanism, which regards basic human needs as its rightful object. The right to life, from the point of view of global justice, is the most fundamental in the list of Human Rights. International anarchy and the current international economic order, however, cast a utopian shadow on the realization of this right when we consider the de facto institutions and the ostensible goal (...) of impartial love for everyone. Humanitarian aid is another approach to the problem of contemporary global poverty. Its difficulty lies first in people’s different conceptions of obligation and donation. They consider the former as duty while the latter is seen to lie beyond the call of duty. Second, in terms of a correlation between right and duty, since everyone has the right to life, the duty falls accordingly upon organizations or individuals. Meanwhile, donation as duty is not perfect obligation, thus is not compulsory either. Finally, international humanitarian aid is constrained by nationalism and partial love. Hence, in the light of either government or individual, the humanitarian aid approach is beset with challenges. Global justice has gained academic importance worldwide since John Rawls’ later works. By contrast to domestic justice, it is a theory of justice that proposes to include all human beings. Global justice stands for a kind of utopian justice in regard to both the institutional path and the humanitarian aid approach. I shall examine the theory of global justice under these two aspects. (shrink)

Half of the working poor in developing countries are informal entrepreneurs – they make a living by engaging in commercial activities in the shadow economy. A series of government and market failur...

In recent years an increasing number of political philosophers have begun to ground their arguments in empirical evidence. I investigate this novel approach by way of example. The object of my case study is David Miller’s renewed empirical argument for a needs-based principle of justice. First, I introduce Miller’s argument. Then I raise four worries about the application of his methodology that give rise to corresponding general recommendations for how to do empirical political philosophy. Proponents of this approach should take (...) care to (1) check for inappropriately narrow (and broad) samples, (2) verify studies’ relevance for their empirical hypotheses, (3) adjust their confidence to the available empirical evidence, and (4) properly integrate their hypotheses into their philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs—to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and (...) how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be. (shrink)

Some normative theorists appeal to the concept of basic needs. They argue that when it comes to issues such as global justice, intergenerational justice, human rights or sustainable development our first priority should be that everybody is able to meet these needs. But what are basic needs? We attempt to inform discussions about this question by gathering evidence of ordinary English speakers’ intuitions on the concept of basic needs. First, we defend our empirical approach to analyzing this concept and identify (...) a number of its potential features. Then we present three preregistered empirical studies that were conducted to investigate the extent to which ordinary speakers endorse these features. The studies yield convergent evidence for the following three claims: (1) ordinary speakers sometimes apply the concept of basic needs to necessities for a flourishing (not just a minimally decent) life, (2) most ordinary speakers attribute at least some degree of subjectivity to the concept, and (3) most ordinary speakers attribute at least some degree of relativity to the concept. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical analyses of _basic needs_. (shrink)

Should conflicts among human rights be dealt with by including general principles for priority setting at some prominent place in the practice of human rights? This essay argues that neither setting prominent and principled priorities nor a case-by-case approach are likely to be defensible as general solutions. The main reasons concern how best to realize all human rights for all. Conflicts among human rights are more defensibly addressed by checking whether the conflict has been correctly diagnosed: Do human rights as (...) a whole get due priority? Have feasibility considerations inherent in human rights been considered, and the possibility of bringing in additional dutybearers? If a conflict among human rights is genuine, formal principles for priority setting are of some help. Sometimes, it is clear that these should be “upgraded” to substantive principles and sometimes that they should not. Many cases, however, are as yet unclear and will need further investigation. (shrink)

Do those of us living in the present have an obligation to rectify injustices committed by others in the distant past? This article is an attempt to revisit the problem of historical injustice by bringing together recent work on structural injustice in relation to the problem of wrongful benefit. The problem of benefitting from injustice, I argue, provides firmer grounds of obligation in forward-looking accounts of responsibility for historical injustice specifically. I argue (1) that if the negative effects of historical (...) injustice endure into the present, and (2) if we participate in structures that allow for its reproduction, then (3) our moral responsibility to set matters straight increases to the extent that we derive a benefit from the perpetuation of an unjust _status quo_. Finally, (4) a general moral obligation to make the world less unjust generates a motive for individuals to learn more about their place in a structure that reproduces the negative effects of historical injustice. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of filling in a missing component of David Miller's non-cosmopolitan theory of global justice, as elaborated in his recent National responsibility and global justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Miller originally included non-exploitation as one of the norms of global justice, but he does not provide a theory of exploitation in his recent book. This article is a preliminary attempt to suggest how Miller might fill in this gap. This article identifies the problems Miller faces (...) in coming up with a theory of exploitation, given the limits imposed by the other parts of his theory of global justice. It examines and criticises several possible theories of exploitation that Miller might use. Finally, it argues that a modified version of Hillel Steiner's liberal theory of exploitation fits into Miller's overall theory of global justice. (shrink)

This article considers the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention. It first examines the arguments for the duty to intervene and questions the possibility of supererogatory humanitarian intervention. It then considers the leading objections to this duty which, it is argued, are largely unpersuasive. In the final section, the article considers the duty to intervene in the context of the responsibility to protect doctrine, which provides the framework within which debates about humanitarian intervention now in large part occur.

It is commonly thought that when democratic states act wrongly, they should bear the costs of the harm they cause. However, since states are collective agents, their financial burdens pass on to their individual citizens. This fact raises important questions about the proper distribution of the state’s collective responsibility for its unjust policies. This article identifies two opposing models for sharing this collective responsibility in democracies: first, in proportion to citizens’ personal association with the unjust policy; second, by giving each (...) citizen an equal share of the costs. Proportional distribution is compatible with the principle of fairness. And yet, both in the literature and in political praxis we find many supporters for the equal sharing of the costs of unjust policies in democracies. How can equal distribution be defended on normative grounds? This article develops a defense that is grounded in citizens’ associative obligations. I argue that, at least in some democracies, one of the intrinsic values of the civic bond revolves around the joint formation and execution of worthy political goals. This social good generates the political associative obligation to accept an equal distribution of the costs of unjust policies. (shrink)

– This paper aims to deal with an increasing securitization and criminalisation of migration in Europe highlighting ethical implications of the current surveillance-based EU migration governance. It is shown that EU member states employ surveillance regimes to control movements across borders and to restrict migrants' access to their territories. The ethical acceptability of such practices is questioned with a particular focus on the “freedom of movement”., – In order to establish the extent to which the current EU migration governance can (...) be considered ethically justifiable, the article starts out from the right to mobility as coded in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is shown that the current migration governance obstructs the rights specified in Articles 13 and 14. At the same time, shortcomings of the UN declaration are discussed and the need for a better protection of the freedom of movement is suggested., – It is established that human rights are such that promote normative agency and a type of rights that trump, for example, states interests in restricting access to their territories do not outweigh individuals rights to seek asylum. In order to make this relation more clear however, the right to mobility should be made symmetric, including both a right to leave and to enter (but not a right to immigrate and settle). An extensive right to freedom of movement is advocated based on the significance of mobility for normative agency. A substantial right to mobility supports the right to seek asylum., – As of yet, ethical implications of surveillance-based border control are under-researched. (shrink)

A number of philosophers argue that the earth's resources belong to everyone equally. Suppose this is true. Does this entail that people have a right to migrate across borders? This article considers two models of egalitarian ownership and assesses their implications for immigration policy. The first is Equal Division, under which each person is granted an equal share of the value of the earth's natural resources. The second is Common Ownership, under which every person has the right to use the (...) earth's natural resources, but not the right to exclude others from them. While these models and their associated ideas have a long history within Western political thought, this article will examine them as they are presented by two sets of contemporary philosophers: Hillel Steiner, who defends Equal Division, and Michael Blake and Mathias Risse, who defend Common Ownership. In the case of each model, the article does three things. First, it considers the implications of the model for immigration policy. Second, it defends the model against objections from those defending immigration restrictions. Third, it contends that the model does not go far enough in its opposition to immigration restrictions. More specifically, the article argues that both Equal Division and Common Ownership, as presented by their proponents, fail to respect the claims of people whose interest in the land is not primarily economic. If the earth belongs to everyone equally, then people should not be prevented from pursuing important migratory goals such as family reunification, career development and education. The article concludes with a proposal for combining Equal Division with Common Ownership. Under this combined model, people would be free to migrate across international borders. (shrink)

In his most recent book, National Responsibility and Global Justice, David Miller presents an account of human rights grounded on the idea of basic human needs. Miller argues that his account can overcome what he regards as a central problem for human rights theory: the need to provide a ‘non-sectarian’ justification for human rights, one that does not rely on reasons that people from non-liberal societies should find objectionable. The list of human rights that Miller’s account generates is, however, minimal (...) when compared to those found in human rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. This article argues that contrary to what Miller claims, his account is ‘sectarian’, since it relies on reasons that some non-liberals should find objectionable given their divergent values. It goes on to question whether ‘sectarianism’, as Miller defines it, is, in any case, a problem for human rights theory. The article concludes that Miller provides us with no reason to abandon commitment to a more extensive list of human rights. (shrink)

This essay examines the most recent justifications for a people's exclusive right to resources as part of a territorial right. Divided into eight parts, the discussion covers contemporary philosophical discussion regarding: the conception of natural resources, the conception of resource rights, the general form of arguments supporting resource rights, arguments from self-determination, objections to arguments from self-determination, arguments from residence, arguments from improvement, and new directions for research in the future.

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 idea of global justice faces a serious challenge. We live in one global society and many regional and local societies at the same time. The existing plurality of institutional as well as cultural levels of social connection leads to this general question: what is the right site for addressing different questions of justice? Some philosophers argue that the paramount place for thinking about justice is the global level, but other philosophers claim that questions of justice presuppose a certain institutional (...) structure. It is therefore only at the local level, preferentially in the form of sovereign states, where questions of justice arise. I want to argue that it is possible to understand some issues of justice as global in an irreducible way, while other issues are best addressed on a local level not only for pragmatic reasons, but also for reasons that have to do with the normative significance of local institutions, cultural connections and social identities. (shrink)

The idea of global justice faces a serious challenge. We live in one global society and many regional and local societies at the same time. The existing plurality of institutional as well as cultural levels of social connection leads to this general question: what is the right site for addressing different questions of justice? Some philosophers argue that the paramount place for thinking about justice is the global level, but other philosophers claim that questions of justice presuppose a certain institutional (...) structure. It is therefore only at the local level, preferentially in the form of sovereign states, where questions of justice arise. I want to argue that it is possible to understand some issues of justice as global in an irreducible way, while other issues are best addressed on a local level not only for pragmatic reasons, but also for reasons that have to do with the normative significance of local institutions, cultural connections and social identities. (shrink)

Eine Ethik der Integration kann den aktuellen öffentlichen Diskurs über Migrationspolitik bereichern. Dazu ist es jedoch erforderlich, über die idealtheoretisch geprägten Debatten der politischen Theorie hinauszugehen und eine moralstrategische Perspektive einzunehmen. In diesem Beitrag werden einige Grundlagen einer pragmatischen Ethik der Integration geklärt, wobei drei Fragen im Zentrum stehen: Was sind die Kriterien einer gelingenden Integration von Immigrant_innen? Was sind die auf Integration bezogenen Pflichten und Rechte der Institutionen und Bürger_innen eines Landes, das Immigrant_innen aufnimmt? Was sind die auf Integration (...) bezogenen Rechte und Pflichten von Immigrant_innen? (shrink)

This paper examines the links between acting upon a duty to assist, responsibility for these actions, and how such actions link with incremental moral duties that can amass as a consequence of such action. More specifically, this paper is concerned with practices of international aid and assistance, whereby public and privately funded donations enable the actions of parties outside of the territorial and jurisdictional boundaries of a community and state to directly influence the functioning of that community, and the incremental (...) moral duties to which such action can give rise. Using a Senian account of the basis of moral duty, it explains how agents are responsible for the outcomes of their acts of assistance, even when mediated through international institutional actors, and how such acts can give rise to accumulative duties and obligations that are not bound or constrained by territorial boundaries or pre-existing special obligations. (shrink)

One major objection to social rights is a failure of determining which precise social and economic claims should be granted rights status. The social rights debate has grappled with this ‘indeterminacy problem’ for quite some time, and a number of proposals have emerged aimed at fixing the content of these rights. In what follows I examine three distinct approaches to fleshing out the idea of a minimum threshold: social rights as the fulfilment of basic needs, social rights as the securing (...) of a minimally decent life and social rights as a requirement of citizenship. Each of these proposals progressively expands on what the minimum threshold of social rights requires and, conversely, what obligations they generate on part of the state. I will show that none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory and suggest that the social rights debate look elsewhere to determine its content. (shrink)

Increased consumer usage of the internet has highlighted a number of problematic online marketing practices, including the use of online platforms to research consumers without full consumer awareness. Despite current debates regarding online research ethics from a marketing perspective, scant research has been published on consumers’ concerns with how they are researched online, which is a knowledge gap this paper seeks to address through qualitative research with UK consumers. This is an important yet neglected topic, given that consumer voices have (...) been under-represented in the online research ethics debate over the years. The paper makes a significant theoretical contribution as it extends the ethics of care and responsibility to an online context, which can frame ongoing online research ethics discussions where problematic power asymmetries may exist between researchers and consumers. (shrink)

This paper is interested in place-related attachments. It discusses the way in which territory or land is treated in theories of global distributive justice, and argues that this fails to capture the normatively significant relationship between peoples and places. This paper argues that any adequate theory of justice in territory has to begin by recognizing that territory is a claimant-relative good, and that this should be an important point of departure for theorizing about land and justice. Not only do the (...) current theories of distributive justice fail to acknowledge the claimant-relative nature of territory, but they do not offer a good way to incorporate place-related attachments in their theories. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between justice and colonialism. It defines colonialism; examines the kind of injustice that colonialism involved; and the possibility of corrective justice.

La visión imperante en el derecho internacional actual concibe los derechos humanos como normas relativas al trato que los Estados brindan a su propia población. Esta posición, que se conoce como la “perspectiva estatista” sobre los derechos humanos, es actualmente resistida por varios autores. En este artículo intentaré defender la perspectiva estatista contra una serie de críticas recientemente formuladas por Cristina Lafont en Isegoría y en otras importantes revistas especializadas. En particular, trataré de probar que, contrariamente a lo que Lafont (...) argumenta, esta perspectiva captura adecuadamente la razón de ser de la práctica contemporánea de los derechos humanos y dispone de recursos para resguardar los intereses de los seres humanos de las nuevas amenazas surgidas en un mundo globalizado. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that respect for human dignity establishes a justificatory presumption in favor of egalitarian rules, which presumption is applicable to the global economic association. This is the basis for condemning several feature of current global inequality as unjust.

Justice is important, but so is peaceful cooperation. In this article, I argue that if one takes seriously the autonomy of individuals and groups and the fact of moral pluralism, a just system of cooperation cannot guarantee peaceful cooperation in a pluralistic world. As a response to this consideration, I develop a contractarian theory that can secure peace in a pluralistic world of autonomous agents, assuming that the agents who exist in this world expect that peaceful cooperation is the most (...) beneficial form of interaction for them in the long run. The theory specifies the restrictions on the behavior of autonomous individual and collective agents that are indispensable for peaceful cooperation in a pluralistic world. In particular, I argue for the need of (i) a globally valid rule of conflict resolution to settle all intra- and inter-group conflicts that cannot be resolved locally, (ii) a world court to apply this rule in cases where local group authorities are inadequate to do so, and to serve as a final court of appeal, and (iii) a world police to enforce the rule. (shrink)

When a group does harm, sometimes there’s no obvious individual who bears moral responsibility, and yet we still intuit that someone is to blame. This apparent ‘deficit’ of moral responsibility has led some scholars to posit that groups themselves can be responsible, and that this responsibility is distributed in some uniform fashion among group members. This solution to the deficit, however, risks providing a scapegoat for individuals who have acted wrongly and shifting blame onto those who have not. Instead, this (...) article argues that, in most deficit cases, moral responsibility is borne not by the group but by specific individual members. When an individual acts within a group, she gains an increased potential for doing harm – and, accordingly, heightened duties of care toward others. These duties can, depending on the individual’s position, require amending the group’s rules, procedures, and norms. In most deficit cases, it is individuals who have failed to fulfill these duties who are responsible. (shrink)

Animal rights positions face the ‘predator problem’: the suggestion that if the rights of nonhuman animals are to be protected, then we are obliged to interfere in natural ecosystems to protect prey from predators. Generally, rather than embracing this conclusion, animal ethicists have rejected it, basing this objection on a number of different arguments. This paper considers but challenges three such arguments, before defending a fourth possibility. Rejected are Peter Singer’s suggestion that interference will lead to more harm than good, (...) Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s suggestion that respect for nonhuman sovereignty necessitates non-interference in normal circumstances, and Alasdair Cochrane’s solution based on the claim that predators cannot survive without killing prey. The possibility defended builds upon Tom Regan’s suggestion that predators, as moral patients but not moral agents, cannot violate the rights of their prey, and so the rights of the prey, while they do exist, do not call for intervention. This idea is developed by a consideration of how moral agents can be more or less responsible for a given event, and defended against criticisms offered by thinkers including Alasdair Cochrane and Dale Jamieson. (shrink)

Replying to Finlayson, I defend analytic political philosophy from the charge that, by ignoring their historical context, it fails to grasp what is really at stake in the case of issues such as immigration. I also defend my own work on that topic from the charge that it is implicitly racist by virtue of using arguments capable of being appropriated by racists.

This paper examines the idea of human rights, and how they should be justified. It begins by reviewing Peter Jones?s claim that the purpose of human rights is to allow people from different cultural backgrounds to live together as equals, and suggests that this by itself provides too slender a basis. Instead it proposes that human rights should be grounded on human needs. Three difficulties with this proposal are considered. The first is the problem of whether needs are sufficiently objective (...) for this purpose, to which it responds by drawing a distinction between human needs proper and societal needs. The second is the problem of overshoot: human needs are more expansive than human rights. It responds to this by arguing that where needs conflict, we make trade-offs before specifying the optimum set of human rights. The third is the problem of undershoot: needs cannot be used to ground civil and political rights. Here it suggests that some of these rights can be grounded directly in needs, others can be justified instrumentally, and yet others grounded in the human need for recognition. Finally the paper returns to Jones, and asks which approach to human rights is better able to justify them within both liberal and non-liberal cultures. (shrink)

This paper argues first that Armstrong is led to see natural resources primarily as objects of consumption. But many natural resources are better seen as objects of enjoyment, where one person’s access to a resource need not prevent others from enjoying equal access, or as objects of production, where granting control of a resource to one person may produce collateral benefits to others. Second, Armstrong’s approach to resource distribution, which requires that everyone must have equal access to welfare, conceals an (...) ambiguity as to whether this means equal opportunity for welfare, or simply equal welfare – the underlying issue being how far individuals should be held responsible for the use they make of the resources they are allocated. Third, when Armstrong attacks arguments that appeal to ‘improvement’ as a basis for claims to natural resources, he treats them as making comparative desert claims: if country A makes a claim to the improved resources on its territory, it must show that their comparative value accurately reflects the productive deserts of its members compared to those of countries B. But in fact, A needs only to make the much weaker claim that its members have done more than others to enhance the value of its resources. Overall, Armstrong’s welfarist approach fails to appreciate the dynamic advantages of allocating resources to those best able to use them productively. (shrink)

Mutually beneficial exchanges in markets can be exploitative because one party takes advantage of an underlying injustice. For instance, employers of sweatshop workers are often accused of exploiting the desperate conditions of their employees, although the latter accept the terms of their employment voluntarily. A weakness of this account of exploitation is its tendency for over-inclusiveness. Certainly, given the prevalence of global and domestic socioeconomic inequalities, not all exchanges that take place against background injustices should be considered exploitative. This paper (...) offers a framework to identify exploitation in mutually beneficial exchange, focusing on the case of sweatshop labor. It argues that an employer can be viewed as taking unfair advantage of an underlying injustice if and only if the employer’s surplus from the exchange in the unjust state of affairs exceeds the surplus it could maximally obtain in a just state of affairs. The paper illustrates the applicability of this framework using three different conceptions of justice and argues that it is superior to microlevel accounts of exploitation that regard background justice as irrelevant. The paper concludes by describing some normative implications that follow from judging an exchange exploitative. (shrink)

States combine the routine refusal of citizenship to migrants with policies that grant newborns of citizens (or residents) full membership of society without questions asked. This paper asks what, if anything, can justify this differential treatment of the two types of newcomers. It explores arguments for differential treatment based on the differential environmental impact, different impact on the (political) culture of the society in question and differences between the positions of the newcomers themselves. I conclude that, although some justification for (...) differential treatment exists, the case for it is weaker than one may expect and the grounds on which it can be justified are surprising and problematic. (shrink)

While different worries about population size are present in public debates, political philosophers often take population size as given. This paper is an attempt to formulate a Rawlsian liberal egalitarian approach to population size: does it make sense to speak of ‘too few’ or ‘too many’ people from the point of view of justice? It argues that, drawing on key features of liberal egalitarian theory, several clear constraints on demographic developments – to the extent that they are under our control (...) – can be formulated. Based on these claims, we can clarify both the grounds and content of our obligations to future generations. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that non-cosmopolitan considerations of justice justify relief of sovereign debt for highly indebted poor states. In particular, the article claims that considerations of national determination warrant some debt-forgiveness in the backdrop of unfair terms of global interaction. In a context of inequality, poor countries cannot generally afford to disregard the costs of ignoring the interests of the wealthiest states. Patterns of unbalanced interaction undermine national self-determination by limiting the poor countries' effective capacity to choose between (...) different policies to achieve development and other worthy goals. In concrete, this article suggests that unequal terms of interaction constrain national self-determination by making of sovereign debt an 'escape mechanism' in the absence of rival alternatives to palliate the effects of underdevelopment and related afflictions, despite the causes of sovereign debt being partly domestic, possibly. Thus, this paper views national self-determination as dependent on the availability of acceptable (non-unbearably burdensome) policy options on the part of states. (shrink)

That there is a human right to subsistence is a basic assumption for most moral and political theorists interested in the problem of global poverty, but it is not one exempt from controversy. In this article, I examine four justifications for this right and suggest that it takes the form of a claim, that is, a right which creates correlative duties on others who are then taken to be the main agents in its fulfillment. I point to some criticisms made (...) against this conceptualization and offer an alternative approach that emphasizes the key importance of the moral and political agency of the needy. Two aspects of this approach are that the needy are seen as actors in their own right when it comes to poverty alleviation measures and their demands are no longer seen as demands for mere subsistence but ultimately for putting an end to their political marginalization and exclusion. Towards the end, I point to the complementarity of both views. (shrink)

In Justice and Natural Resources: An Egalitarian Theory, Chris Armstrong proposes a version of global egalitarianism that – contra the default renderings of this approach – takes individual attachment to specific resources into account. By doing this, his theory has the potential for greening global egalitarianism both in terms of procedure and scope. In terms of procedure, its broad account of attachment and its focus on individuals rather than groups connects with participatory governance and management and, ultimately, participatory democracy – (...) an essential ingredient in the toolkit of green politics and policy-making. In terms of scope, because it does not commit itself to any particular moral framework, Armstrong’s theory leaves the door open for non-human animals to become subjects of justice, thus extending the realm of the latter beyond its traditionally anthropocentric borders. I conclude that these greenings are promising, but not trouble-free. (shrink)

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)

Dette nummeret av Etikk i praksis består av to deler, en temadel og en åpen del. Nummerets temadel dreier seg om irregulær migrasjon. Irregulære migranter skaper etiske, rettslige og politiske utfordringer for liberale velferdsstater i Europa. En irregulær migrant oppholder seg nemlig innenfor en stats grense, men er uten oppholdstillatelse. Dersom man aksepterer at stater har suveren rett til å bestemme over hvem som kvalifiserer seg til oppholdstillatelse og ikke, vil personer uten lovlig opphold reise følgende spørsmål: Har staten et (...) ansvar for å ivareta denne gruppens sikkerhet og velferd? Det er viktig å påpeke at irregulære migranter i liberale velferdsstater ikke er fullstendig rettighetsløse. De fleste liberale velferdsstater anerkjenner at de har sivile rettigheter samt et minimum av sosiale og økonomiske rettigheter.1 Territorielt og til en viss grad juridisk befinner de seg altså innenfor staten. Samtidig er de ekskludert fra de fleste sosiale og økonomiske rettigheter, og kan i prinsippet sendes ut av landet når som helst. På denne måten befinner de seg allikevel utenfor staten. I praksis er irregulære migranter altså på samme tid både innenfor og utenfor staten. Dette nummerets temadel inviterer til en normativ diskusjon om liberale velferdsstaters politikk overfor irregulære migranter. Og, ikke minst, hvordan samfunnet bør behandle denne gruppen innbyggere. (shrink)

This article explores the tensions between different conceptions of “citizenship.” On the one hand, we point out the virtues and limitations of cosmopolitan citizenship in the terms in which Seyla Benhabib understands it in The Right of Others…; on the other hand, we delve into another notion of citizenship, namely, the localist, in a version that could be at odds with some cosmopolitan values, that is, localism as understood by some Mexican autonomous communities, particularly the Zapatistas. Although Benhabib’s cosmopolitan federalism (...) is inclusive in spirit, it is conceived within a preponderantly global perspective and ends up being asymmetrical. While her proposal has some positive aspects, it faces some difficulties in the case of Mexican autonomous communities. In this article, we shall introduce the notion of democratic confederalism as a form of sociopolitical organization that seeks to strengthen the self-organization of social actors and to recognize the practice of citizenship in the terms in which autonomous communities exercise it. We propose that democratic confederalism could be an alternative for decreasing tensions between global citizenship and the idea of citizenship within autonomous communities. (shrink)

El artículo analiza cómo se relaciona la premisa normativa de la dignidad humana con la evaluación del fenómeno migratorio. Para aquello, da cuenta de una concepción de dignidad humana que no recurre a presupuestos naturalistas ni supraempíricos, y presenta tres alternativas diferentes para otorgarle contenido normativo en base a un umbral suficientarista. Desde estas perspectivas, se sostiene que el trato corriente que se da a los refugiados, a los desplazados medioambientales y a los inmigrantes económicos, amenaza su dignidad y debe, (...) por tanto, dar paso a otros modos de hacer frente al fenómeno migratorio. (shrink)

Algorithm-assisted decision procedures—including some of the most high-profile ones, such as COMPAS—have been described as unfair because they compound injustice. The complaint is that in such procedures a decision disadvantaging members of a certain group is based on information reflecting the fact that the members of the group have already been unjustly disadvantaged. I assess this reasoning. First, I distinguish the anti-compounding duty from a related but distinct duty—the proportionality duty—from which at least some of the intuitive appeal of the (...) former illegitimately derives. Second, I distinguish between different versions of the anti-compounding duty, arguing that, on some versions, uses of algorithm-assisted decision procedures rarely clash with the anti-compounding duty. Third, drawing on examples of algorithm-assisted decision procedures, I present three objections to the idea that there is a reason not to compound injustice. The most important of these is that one can compound injustice in a non-disrespectful way, and that the wrongfulness of non-disrespectfully compounding injustice is fully explained by the proportionality duty. (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)

It is normally taken for granted that states have a right to control immigration into their territory. When immigration is raised as a normative issue two questions become salient, one about what the right to exclude is, and one about whether and how it might be justified. This paper considers the first question. The paper starts by noting that standard debates about immigration have not addressed what the right to exclude is. Standard debates about immigration furthermore tend to result either (...) in fairly strong cases for open borders or in denials that considerations of justice apply to immigration at all, which results in state discretion positions. This state of debate is both theoretically unsatisfactory and normatively implausible. The paper therefore explores an alternative approach to the right to exclude immigrants from the perspective of recent debates about the territorial rights of states. The right to exclude claimed by states is analysed and it is shown to differ both conceptually and normatively from rights to impose political authority within a territory. The paper finally indicates how this analysis might broaden the focus of debates about immigration and suggest alternative regimes of migration regulation the possibility of which is obscured by traditional justice approaches. (shrink)