Open AccessJournal Article
Contributing and Benefiting: Two Grounds for Duties to the Victims of Injustice: Response to World Poverty and Human Rights
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Pogge as mentioned in this paper argued that the role that benefiting from injustice plays in determining our duty to work toward reforming unjust practices and mitigating their harmful effects is best understood in terms of compensation.Abstract:
Contrasting his own position with that of those who conceive the moral challenge of global poverty in terms of a positive duty to help, Thomas Pogge suggests that “we may be failing to fulfill our stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from [emphasis added] the unjust impoverishment of others” (p. 197). We should conceive of our individual donations and of possible institutionalized initiatives to eradicate poverty not as helping the poor but “as protecting them from the effects of global rules whose injustice benefits us and is our responsibility” (p. 23, emphasis added). Pogge also claims that such activities should be understood in terms of compensation: “The word ‘compensate’ is meant to indicate that how much one should be willing to contribute toward reforming unjust institutions and toward mitigating the harms they cause depends on how much one is contributing to, and benefiting from, their maintenance” (p. 50, emphasis added). In characterizing wrongful involvement in an unjust social order and the compensatory duties that arise from it, Pogge refers to the terms contribution/responsibility as well as to benefit/profit (the latter are used interchangeably). The first of these factors is unobjectionable: we can take it for granted that there is a negative duty not to contribute to injustice and that those who are responsible for harmful institutions should compensate their victims. I want to raise doubts, however, about the role that Pogge assigns to benefiting from injustice in the determination of our duties toward the victims of injustice. I shall do so by challenging his claim that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice, and that the role that benefiting from injustice plays in determining our duties to work toward reforming unjust practices and mitigating their harmful effects is best understood in terms of compensation.read more
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Dissertation
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References
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Book
World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present four easy reasons to ignore world poverty and defend our acquiescence in world poverty, and do our new global economic order really not harm the poor?
Journal ArticleDOI
Climate justice and historical emissions
Lukas H. Meyer,Dominic Roser +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the developing world should receive higher per capita emission rights than the developed world, justified by the fact that the latter already owns a larger share of benefits associated with emission generating activities because of its past record of industrialisation.
Book
The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy
TL;DR: Chatterjee as mentioned in this paper discusses the new problem of distance in morality and the need for new paradigms for human rights and human rights as foreign policy imperatives in the context of global justice.
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Give it up for climate change: a defence of the beneficiary pays principle
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the normative problem of establishing how the burdens associated with implementing policies designed to prevent, or manage, climate change should be shared among states involved in ongoing international climate change negotiations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Unethical Consumption and Obligations to Signal
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labor practices, an individual ought to signal to others her commitments to ethical consumption, and defend the deliberate consumption of only ethically produced goods as a moderately costly and therefore reliable signal.