Despite some clear positives, the draft text of the Sustainable Development Goals does not fulfill its self-proclaimed purpose of inspiring and guiding a concerted international effort to eradicate severe poverty everywhere in all of its forms. We offer some critical comments on the proposed agreement and suggest 10 ways to embolden the goals and amplify their appeal and moral power. While it may well be true that the world's poor are better off today than their predecessors were decades or centuries (...) ago, to judge whether this is moral progress, we must bring into view what was possible then and what is possible now. We may well find that there have never been so many people avoidably subjected to life-threatening deprivations as there are today, and if this is the case, we should insist that our governments end this oppression immediately through appropriate institutional reforms to be prominently outlined in their post-2015 agenda. (shrink)

How can governments and peoples better hold to account international economic institutions, such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF? This article proposes an approach based on public accountability, advocating improvements in four areas: constitutional, political, financial, and internal accountability.The argument for more accountability is made with two caveats: more accountability is not always good–it can be distorting and costly; and, enhancing the accountability of international institutions should not justify increasing their jurisdiction for the sake of reducing the (...) role of national governments. Constitutional accountability poses limits on how the institutions expand their activities, requiring the active consent of all members and particularly those most affected by their activities. Political accountability requires that those who make decisions in the organizations are directly answerable to all member governments and not just to the most powerful ones. The institutions' uneven record and structure of financial accountability is addressed through a model of mutual restraint. Finally, the internal accountability should ensure that technical decisions are distinguishable from political decisions. A better matching of the right kinds of accountability to the activities of the organizations would improve both their effectiveness and legitimacy. (shrink)

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ?undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice?. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel between (...) this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone. (shrink)

Because of the way that the international lending system works, poor nations have been forced to repay sovereign debts without having a moral obligation to do so. Suppose a corrupt public official borrows money from an international agency, or from private investors, and later on embezzles this money, or uses it to oppress the population. Suppose, further, that the lender is aware of the potential of this situation and still lends. Typically, the international community considers that successor governments have the (...) obligation to repay the funds and the interests associated to them. In fact, this is what they usually end up doing. Public officials are all aware that if they do not honour sovereign debts, they will face all kinds of negative consequences, including exclusion from future markets, loss of reputation and legal sanctions. Owing to this mechanism, entire generations have been burdened with debts fraudulently incurred in their name by governments in the past. These kinds of debts have been known in the legal literature as ‘odious’.In this article, I discuss the conditions defining the bindingness of a debt. I suggest that they can be made explicit by looking at the rules under which the lending system works at the domestic level, and by then extending these rules to the international domain. I argue that, because of their plausibility, these are the rules that should govern international lending from now on. I also discuss the feasibility of extending these rules globally, and consider potential objections to my proposal. (shrink)

I present a new challenge to the Rawlsian insistence on ideal theory as a compass orienting concrete policy choices. My challenge, focusing on global politics, consists of three claims. First, I contend that our global ideal can become more ambitious over time. Second, I argue that Rawlsian ideal theory’s level of ambition might change because of concrete policy choices, responding to moral failures which can be identified and resolved without ideal theory. Third, I argue that we currently face such potentially (...) transformative choices. I conclude that these choices are analytically prior to, rather than derivative from, global ideal theory. (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)

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full (...) compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian. (shrink)