Rawls, Fraser, redistribution, recognition and The World Summit on the Information Society

The author frames an account of the 2005/6 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) in the framework of John Rawls' arguments for redistribution using the 'difference principle' and Nancy Fraser's arguments for recognition as constituents of justice. He argues that the intensity and character of debates in the WSIS/WGIG can better be understood in terms of Fraser's notion of recognition rather than Rawls' notion of redistribution. He argues that the dynamics of WSIS/WGIG can be understood in terms of conflicting recognition claims from states and civil society focused on the legitimacy of "trilateralism", including civil society, as a principle of participation in these Internet governance fora

Power/Knowledge in Discourses of Climate Justice

Rawlsian political philosophers and theorists approach climate justice using ideal theories of the fair distribution of climate change burdens, and the rights to be protected in the face of those burdens. Other theorists and activists embrace these ideal principles, but also identify structural causes of climate injustice, calling for the profound transformation of the global political, economic, and cultural order. Using a Foucaultian framework, this thesis argues that liberal and activist discourses of climate justice are specific configurations of power/knowledge with particular constraints and material effects. Distributive and rights-based climate justice discourses vitiate the voices of those most affected by climate change, overlook and conceal root causes of climate injustice, marginalise alternative political projects, and thereby reinforce existing power relations. By contrast, across critical, utopian, and spatial dimensions, activist climate justice discourse exposes and confronts these fundamental relations of oppression and domination

Senses of Sen: Reflections on Amartya Sen’s Ideas of Justice

This review essay explores how Amartya Sen’s recent book, The Idea of Justice, is relevant and important for the development and assessment of transnational theories and applications to transnational justice and legal education programs. The essay captures a trans-jural dialogue of multinational scholars and teachers, discussing Sen’s contributions to moral justice theory (criticizing programs for “transcendental institutionalism” (like Rawlsian theory) and instead focusing on “comparative broadening” including empirical, relative, and comparative assessments of programs to ameliorate injustice in the world in its comparative concreteness (as in Indian social justice theory and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and related work). The authors are professors in the transnational legal education program, the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, sponsored by over 25 different law schools, located in London. They teach courses in a wide variety of subjects, including comparative legal theory, constitutional law, business and legal ethics, moral and legal philosophy, international and comparative law, capital markets and business law, emergency powers, international dispute resolution and a variety of other common and civil law subjects

Equity and Justice in Global Warming Policy

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such as the international Kyoto Protocol, post-Kyoto negotiations, regional initiatives, and unilateral actions. Although most studies on climate change policies in economics have considered efficiency aspects, there is a growing literature on equity and justice. Climate change policy has important dimensions of distributive justice, both within and across generations, but in this paper we survey only studies on the intragenerational aspect, i.e., within a generation. We cover several domains including the international, regional, national, sectoral and inter-personal, and examine aspects such as the distribution of burdens from climate change, climate change policy negotiations in general, implementation of climate agreements using tradable emission permits, and the uncertainty of alternatives to emission reductions.Economics of Climate Change, Intragenerational Equity, Distributive Justice

Responsibility Ascriptions in Technology Development and Engineering: Three Perspectives

In the last decades increasing attention is paid to the topic of responsibility in technology development and engineering. The discussion of this topic is often guided by questions related to liability and blameworthiness. Recent discussions in engineering ethics call for a reconsideration of the traditional quest for responsibility. Rather than on alleged wrongdoing and blaming, the focus should shift to more socially responsible engineering, some authors argue. The present paper aims at exploring the different approaches to responsibility in order to see which one is most appropriate to apply to engineering and technology development. Using the example of the development of a new sewage water treatment technology, the paper shows how different approaches for ascribing responsibilities have different implications for engineering practice in general, and R&D or technological design in particular. It was found that there was a tension between the demands that follow from these different approaches, most notably between efficacy and fairness. Although the consequentialist approach with its efficacy criterion turned out to be most powerful, it was also shown that the fairness of responsibility ascriptions should somehow be taken into account. It is proposed to look for alternative, more procedural ways to approach the fairness of responsibility ascriptions

Resilience ethics: responsibility and the globally embedded subject

This article seeks to analyse the rise of ‘resilience ethics’, in terms of the shift in ethical approaches away from the hierarchical liberal internationalist constructions of the 1990s and towards broader and more inclusive understandings of ethical responsibility for global problems. This shift in ethical attention away from the formal international politics of inter-state relations and towards the unintended consequences of both institutional structures and the informal market choices of individuals has diversified understandings of global ethical responsibilities. It is argued that the recasting of ethical responsibility in the increasingly sociological terms of unintended and indirect consequences of socio-material embeddedness constructs new ethical differentials and hierarchies of responsibility. These framings have facilitated new policy practices, recasting interventionist policy-making in terms of the growing self-awareness and reflexivity of Western actors, reframing ethical foreign policy as starting with the choices of individual citizens, and, at the same time, operating to reify the relations of the market

Health and justice: the capability to be healthy.

This is an inter-disciplinary argument for a moral entitlement to a capability to be healthy. Motivated by the goal to make a human right to health intelligible and justifiable, the thesis extends the capability approach, advocated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, to the theory and practice of the human health sciences. Moral claims related to human health are considered at the level of ethical theory, or a level of abstraction where principles of social justice that determine the purpose, form, and scope of basic social institutions are proposed, evaluated, and justified. The argument includes 1) a conception of health as capability, 2) a theory of causation and distribution of health capability as well as 3) an argument for the moral entitlement to a sufficient and equitable capability to be healthy grounded in the respect for human dignity. Moreover, the entitlement to the capability to be healthy is defended against alternative ethical approaches that focus on welfare or resources in evaluating and satisfying health claims. In specific, it is argued that human health is best understood as a capability to be healthy—a meta-capability to achieve a cluster of basic and inter-related capabilities and functionings. Such a cluster of capabilities and functionings is in line with Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities. A theory of causation and distribution of health capability is put forward that integrates the “classic” biomedical factors of disease (genetic endowment, exposure to hazardous materials, behaviour), social determinants of disease, and Drèze and Sen’s econometric analysis of the causation and distribution of acute and endemic malnutrition. Furthermore, the argument critiques Norman Daniels’s revised Rawlsian theory of health justice, and advocates for the capability approach to recognize group capabilities in light of “population health” phenomena. Lastly, the thesis also argues that a coherent, capability conception of health as a species-wide conception will tend to make any theory of justice recognizing health claims a cosmopolitan theory of justice

A critical interrogation of corporate social responsibility and global distributive justice

This thesis provides a critical interrogation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and global distributive justice. The central argument of the thesis is that global corporations display profound effects on people‘s life chances, which should render such corporations subject to principles of global distributive justice. Such principles, it is argued, ought to reflect the complex realities of the political-economic circumstances within which corporations operate. Thus the thesis provides an account of global distributive justice that speaks to both political philosophical attempts to ground discussion of global justice in the extant realities of globalisation, as well to critical accounts of the corporation within the global economy that as yet lack a normative foundation on which proposals for reform can be based. The thesis argues that both statist and cosmopolitan conceptions of justice have neglected the important role corporations play in many unjust circumstances. In an attempt to reconcile the gap that often exists in political philosophy between theory and practice, the thesis discusses two sets of normative standards that it argues ought to apply to corporate activity. The first set, the ideal-aspirational set, draws on Rawlsian ideas to do with property-owning democracy, and argues that a fully just corporation on this reading would set restrictions on corporate size, profit and executive remuneration, as well as requiring a change from concentrated ownership in the hands of a few, to widespread ownership. The second set of ideas, those of concessive theory - to which priority is given - concedes to the facts of global corporations and global capitalism, and addresses both substance and procedure in relation to global distributive justice. In relation to substance, a do no harm principle is suggested as the basic normative minimum standard by which corporate activity should be assessed. In relation to procedure, the application of an all affected interests principle would give those who experience the profound effects of corporations a right to a say in decisions taken that affect their lives. Cutting across these principles are five conditions that would work towards their implementation throughout global corporate activity. These conditions are: pre-consultative learning, transparency and disclosure of information, a consultative forum, evaluation, and the opportunity for redress. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the UN Global Compact and an analysis of the extent to which the Compact meets the ideas of thesis, as well as making recommendations for reform of the Compact on the basis of these ideas