Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. We citizens of the rich countries are conditioned to think of this problem as an occasion for assistance. Thanks in part to the rationalizations dispensed by our economists, most of us do not realize how deeply we are implicated, through the new global economic (...) order our states have imposed, in this ongoing catastrophe. My sketch of how we are so implicated follows the argument of my book, World Poverty and Human Rights, but takes the form of a response to the books critics. (shrink)

Injustices of the past cast a shadow on the present. They are the root cause of much harm, the source of enmity, and increasingly in recent times, the focus of demands for reparation. In this groundbreaking philosophical investigation, Janna Thompson examines the problems raised by reparative demands and puts forward a theory of reparation for historical injustices. The book argues that the problems posed by historical injustices are best resolved by a reconciliatory view of reparative justice and an approach that (...) explains how people acquire intergenerational responsibilities and entitlements. It ranges in its subject matter from the claims of indigenous people to land stolen from their ancestors to the growing movement for reparations for slavery. The book provides an original and convincing answer to the questions of how citizens can have reparative responsibilities for wrongs committed before they were born, and why descendants of victims may be entitled to compensation for historical injustices such as slavery. It also explains how members of nations can make recompense for injustices of the past without ignoring the inequities of the present.Taking Responsibility for the Past is a significant contribution to philosophical and legal debates about reparative justice, and at the same time an accessible and thought-provoking book for general readers. (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)

The ethics of corruption cannot be analysed without simultaneously addressing the legitimacy of public office or entrusted power. This paper introduces a concept of core unethical corruption, defined as violations of distributed ethical obligations for private gain. In other words, it is suggested that what is ethically wrong with corruption is that it entails the violation of certain obligations attributed to agents. By explicitly relating corruption to obligations, this approach helps make ethical sense of the concepts of public office or (...) entrusted power, attending to the question of their legitimacy. Since distributed obligations are implied by a wide range of ethical theories, the concept of core unethical corruption also reflects a (partial) overlapping consensus on the ethics of corruption. (shrink)

Overcoming corruption and authoritarian government in developing countries is hampered by global institutional arrangements. In particular, international borrowing and resource privileges, which entitle those exercising power in a country to borrow in its name and to effect legally valid transfers of ownership rights in its resources, can be obstacles to achieving democracy. These international conventions greatly increase the incentives toward attempts at coups d'état, especially in countries with a large resource sector. In exploring how this problem might be highlighted and (...) addressed, it is essential to understand that affluent societies have a great interest in upholding the prevailing institutional arrangements: Their banks benefit from their international lending and, far more importantly, their firms and people benefit greatly from cheap resource supplies. Institutional reform is more likely, then, to come from the developing countries.Thus, fledgling democracies may be able to improve their stability through constitutional amendments that bar future unconstitutional governments from borrowing in the country's name and from conferring ownership rights in its public property. Such amendments would render insecure the claims of those who lend to, or buy from, dictators, thus reducing the rewards of coups d'état. This strategy might be resisted by the more affluent societies, but such resistance could perhaps be overcome if many developing countries pursued the proposed strategy together, and if some moral support emerged among the citizenries of affluent societies. (shrink)