In this article, I explore some advantages of viewing well-being in terms of an individual's health status. Principally, I argue that this perspective makes it easier to establish that rich countries at least have an obligation to transfer 1 percent of their GDP to poor countries. If properly targeted at the fundamental determinants of health in developing countries, this transfer would very plausibly yield a disproportionate `bang for the buck' in terms of individual well-being. This helps to explain how the (...) obligation can be both light enough in its burden on the rich to avoid being `too demanding' and yet also bountiful enough in its effects to be worthy of the status of a `minimum obligation'. The advantages I enunciate are particularly relevant to establishing an obligation in the context of a non-ideal theory of international justice, which aims to set interim targets for practical action before an ideal theory has been settled. Key Words: health • international justice • foreign aid • determinants of health • non-ideal theory. (shrink)

I. Three Basic rights. This book is about the moral minimum--about the lower limits on tolerable human conduct, individual and institutional.

And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

In this paper I shall argue that due to the constructivist procedure which John Rawls employs in “The Law of Peoples,” he is unable to justify his claim that there is a relationship between limiting the internal and external sovereignty of states. An alternative constructivist procedure is viable, but it extends the ideal theory of international justice to include liberal democratic and egalitarian principles. The procedure and principles have significant implications for non‐ideal theory as well, insofar as they justify a (...) principle of international resource redistribution and weaken general prohibitions against intervention. (shrink)

John Rawls argued in The Law of Peoples that we should reject any principle of international distributive justice, whether in ideal theory or nonideal theory. Instead, he advocated a duty of assistance on the part of well‐ordered societies toward burdened societies. I argue that Rawls is correct that we should endorse a principle with a target and cut‐off point rather than a principle of international distributive justice. But the target and cut‐off point he favors is too undemanding, because it can (...) be met by assisting a burdened society to become a decent people. Instead, only a society that respects the right to an adequate standard of living, and not simply a right to subsistence, can be an acceptable target. Rawls is prevented from drawing this conclusion by a failure to disentangle issues of intervention and assistance, a failure bound up with his flawed, intervention‐driven account of human rights in defining a decent people. (shrink)

Moral egalitarianism will depend on one of two basic ideas. The first is the idea of equality itself. We might believe that it is a good thing if different people have equal shares of resources, or if their lives score equally well in terms of whatever makes lives valuable, at least if there is no reason based on some other moral value for one person to do better than the other. Equality is a relationship between the lives of different people. (...) This version of egalitarianism claims that the existence of the relationship makes an outcome better. It attributes value to relations between lives rather than to the content of lives. (shrink)

Political philosophers have recently begun to take seriously methodological questions concerning what a theoretical examination of political ideals is suppose to accomplish and how effective theorising in ideal theory is in securing those aims. Andrew Mason and G.A. Cohen, for example, believe that the fundamental principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility and questions about human nature. Their position contrasts sharply with political theorists like John Dunn and Joseph Carens who believe that normative theorising must be integrated (...) with an appreciation of the empirical realities of one’s society. Rather than bracket questions of feasibility and human nature, empirically-oriented political theorists believe that real, non- ideal considerations must be taken seriously when deriving normative theories of justice.1 And some justice-theorists, most notably John Rawls, attempt to. (shrink)