Ethics & International Affairs 

About: Ethics & International Affairs is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Human rights & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0892-6794. Over the lifetime, 992 publications have been published receiving 16909 citations. The journal is also known as: ethical theory & Ethics.

The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions

Abstract: ‘Legitimacy’ has both a normative and a sociological meaning. To say that an institution is legitimate in the normative sense is to assert that it has the right to rule — where ruling is promulgating rules and attempting to secure compliance with them by attaching costs to noncompliance and/or benefits to compliance. Ruling in this broad sense does not require that the rules be backed by coercion, much less that the rulemaker claims a rightful monopoly on coercion within a jurisdiction, so it does not presuppose the state. Later we will see that the notion of the right to rule is subject to stronger and weaker interpretations, but for now it will suffice to say that an institution is legitimate in the sociological sense when it is widely believed to have the right to rule.1 When people disagree over whether the WTO is legitimate, they are not disagreeing about whether they or others believe that institution has the right to rule; they are disagreeing about whether it has the right to rule.

Personal and social responsibility for health

Abstract: Everyone wants to be healthy, but many of us decline to act in healthy ways. What bearing, if any, should these choices have on the ethics of clinical practice and health policy? Should risk-takers have the same claim on scarce resources, such as organs for transplant, as those whose plight is due to no choices of their own? And is there any reason not to impose fees and taxes on risk-takers, be they smokers or mountain climbers, to defray the added expense of the care they may need? In health resource allocation aimed at reducing the burden of disease, should we regard certain burdens as individual responsibilities: for example, dealing with stigma, or caretaking for family members? Socioeconomic status (SES) and health expectancy are strongly linked. To the extent that this results from risk-taking by the poor, is reduction of SES-linked health inequalities a morally important social goal? International public health aims at improving health on a population level. The World Health Organization has been criticized for failing to distinguish genuine health risks from personal lifestyle choices, as when it speaks of a tobacco-related “epidemic” as if cigarette use were a contagious disease like malaria. Should personal responsibility for health be taken into account in setting the agenda for global public health, and in measuring progress by countries in improving health. This paper addresses applications of the notions of personal and social responsibility for health. It also looks at the vulnerability of the notion of personal responsibility for health to intentional manipulation by self-interested parties in health policy debates.

Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification

Abstract: A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreaking World Poverty and Human Rights is that the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but to rectify injustice. But does the global order harm the poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false.

Climate Justice and Capabilities: A Framework for Adaptation Policy

Abstract: This article lays out a capabilities and justice-based approach to the development of adaptation policy. While many theories of climate justice remain focused on ideal theories for global mitigation, the argument here is for a turn to just adaptation, using a capabilities framework to encompass vulnerability, social recognition, and public participation in policy responses. This article argues for a broadly defined capabilities approach to climate justice, combining a recognition of the vulnerability of basic needs with a process for public involvement. Such an approach can be used to engage stakeholders with varied perceptions of what is at risk, and to develop priorities for adaptation policy. It addresses both individual and community-level vulnerabilities, and acknowledges that the conditions of justice depend on a functioning, even if shifting, environment.

Severe Poverty as a Violation of Negative Duties

Abstract: Mathias Risse discusses whether the global system of territorial sovereignty that emerged in the fifteenth century can be said to harm the poorer societies. This question is distinct from the question I raise in my book—namely, whether present citizens of the affluent countries, in collusion with the ruling elites of most poor countries, are harming the global poor. These questions are different, because present citizens of the affluent countries bear responsibility only for the recent design of the global institutional order. The effects of the states system as it was shaped before 1980, say, is thus of little relevance to the question I have raised. A further difference is that whereas Risse's discussion focuses on the well-being of societies, typically assessed by their GNP per capita, my discussion focuses on the well-being of individual human beings. This difference is significant because what enriches a poor country (in terms of GNP per capita) all too often impoverishes the vast majority of its inhabitants, as I discuss with the example of Nigeria's oil revenues (pp. 112–14).My focus is then on the present situation, on the radical inequality between the bottom half of humankind, suffering severe poverty, and those in the top seventh, whose per capita share of the global product is 180 times greater than theirs (at market exchange rates). This radical inequality and the continuous misery and death toll it engenders are foreseeably reproduced under the present global institutional order as we have shaped it. And most of it could be avoided, I hold, if this global order had been, or were to be, designed differently. The feasibility of a more poverty-avoiding alternative design of the global institutional order shows, I argue, that the present design is unjust and that, by imposing it, we are harming the global poor by foreseeably subjecting them to avoidable severe poverty.