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Many assert that affluent countries have contributed in the past to poverty in developing countries through wars of aggression and conquest, colonialism and its legacies, the imposition of puppet leaders, and support for brutal dictators and venal elites. Thomas Pogge has recently argued that there is an additional and, arguably, even more consequential way in which the affluent continue to contribute to poverty in the developing world. He argues that when people cooperate in instituting and upholding institutional arrangements that foreseeably result in more severe or more widespread poverty or human rights deficits than would foreseeably result under feasible alternative arrangements, they are contributors to these harms. Because of this, he argues, they have stringent, contribution-based (or negative) duties to address this poverty. We will call this the ‘Feasible Alternatives Thesis' (FAT), and our aim in this article is to examine it critically. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Suppose two people are about to drown. We are in a position to save only one, so the other will have to die. One of the two has just culpably killed an innocent person, but has no intention of killing anybody else and there is no reason to expect that he will. Everything else being equal, should we give them an equal chance of being saved by flipping a coin? In this paper I argue that we should not. I argue that the implications of a person's moral culpability for (recent or prospective) harm to a particular victim should transfer to other conflict situations in which the wrongdoer might find him or herself. This requires establishing the extent to which a person's contributing to harming another person - and his moral culpability for that harm - impinges on our decision making in situations where it is possible only to assist either the wrongdoer or some other person that is not his victim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I ponder the moral status of conditional threats, in particular the extent to which a threatened party would be permitted to use (lethal) defensive force. I first investigate a mugger case before turning briefly to the more complicated issue of national defence in the face of an invading army. One should not exaggerate the level of protection people under threat owe their conditioned killers simply because what is extorted is of little value. After all, either the conditional threat is willing to kill for something she has no claim on at all, or, if she has a just claim on it – or good reason to believe that she has – she is willing to kill to (re)acquire something of not much worth. In both cases the moral culpability of the conditional threat could be seen as reducing her claim on protection from harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the important factors in assessing the permissibility of applying force to keep agents provide assistance to people in need. Philosopher Thomas Pogge accordingly argued that everyone in this world has the duty to offer assistance to the financially oppressed people, which is therefore interpreted as a necessity to take actions on the impact of poverty. In conclusion, the amount of force used is eventually sensitive to the person's blameworthiness in providing assistance, and that, permissibility is actually dependent on how a person contributes by far.