Pogge and Wenar have recently argued that we are responsible for the persistence of the so-called ‘resource curse’. But their analyses are limited in important ways. I trace these limitations to their undue focus on the ways in which the international rules governing resource transactions undermine government accountability. To overcome the shortcomings of Pogge’s and Wenar’s analyses, I propose a normative framework organized around the social value of government responsiveness and discuss the implications of adopting this framework for future normative (...) assessment of the resource curse and our relationships to it. (shrink)

Henry Shue’s model of basic rights and their correlative duties provides an excellent framework for analysing the requirements of global distributive justice, and for theorising about the minimum acceptable standards of human entitlement and wellbeing. Shue bases his model on the claim that certain ‘basic’ rights are of universal instrumental value, and are necessary for the enjoyment of any other rights, and of any ‘decent life’. Shue’s model provides a comprehensive argument about the importance of certain fundamental goods for all (...) human lives, though he does not consider health or health care in any significant detail. Adopting Shue’s model, I argue that access to health care is of sufficient importance to the enjoyment of any other rights that it qualifies as what Shue describes as a ‘basic’ right. I also argue that the basic right to health care is compatible with the basic rights model, and is required by it in order to for it to achieve its goal of enabling right holders to enjoy any decent life. In making this claim I also explore the requirements of the basic right to health care in terms of Shue’s triumvirate of duties and with reference to several key examples. (shrink)

The current philosophical debate on just international trade has moved away from purely idealistic theorizing into the direction of non-ideal theory. At the same time most philosophical thought on just trade is still rather idealistic and the main argument of the paper is that some philosophical reasoning about international trade justice should be more realistic. The paper develops in three steps. In a first step I will give a short overview over normative questions that arise with respect to international trade. (...) I will then highlight a proposal brought forward by Leif Wenar, because he is aware of the realist challenge and tries to counter it. In a second step I will discuss why it is important to integrate a realist perspective into philosophical considerations of international trade justice. Trade agreements are embedded in political contexts that influence the normative perspective one should take on trade justice. This leads to the third part of the article, where I will explore how a realist approach can go along with more idealistic perspectives, which leads to a weakly realist perspective on trade justice. (shrink)