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Martha Nussbaum’s list of the 10 central capabilities contains the most plausible account of valuable functionings that we have. In this lecture, I explore how Nussbaum’s account converges with the...

Transnational trade rules endow authoritarians and armed groups with unaccountable power in states rich with natural resources. This structural flaw in international trade generates the ‘resource curse’ phenomena that have driven many of the world's most serious crises since the 1970s. Attempts to curtail this unaccountable power from outside resource-rich states have not been successful, and crises caused by this structural flaw continue to plague the global community. The shipping sector provides a promising location for reforms to fight the resource curse, as it is a sector where extensive, unified and enforceable regulations have long been established.

The West has intervened violently in oil-rich states for decades. Western oil companies have been shamelessly exploitative. Because of climate change, we should be getting off fossil fuels as fast as we can. Those things we know. But there is a deeper story to oil in world affairs, that hasn't yet been told. Every day we are forced to send our money to some of the most ruthless men in the world. And by empowering those men, we endanger ourselves.

Article 1 of both of the major human rights covenants declares that the people of each country “shall freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.” This chapter considers what conditions would have to hold for the people of a country to exercise this right—and why public accountability over natural resources is the only realistic solution to the “resource curse,” which makes resource-rich countries more prone to authoritarianism, civil conflict, and large-scale corruption. It also discusses why cosmopolitans, who have often been highly critical of prerogatives of state sovereignty, have good reason to endorse popular sovereignty over natural resources. Those who hope for more cosmopolitan institutions should see strengthening popular resource sovereignty as the most responsible path to achieving their own goals.

Sebastiano Maffettone is a well-known Italian professor of Political Theory. His interests range from theories of justice to normative and applied ethics, from liberalism to global justice and so on. His contribution to the dissemination of John Rawls’s works in Italy is universally acknowledged. Here, I intend to focus on some works in which Maffettone exposes his thoughts about liberalism with a peculiar reference to Rawls’s Political Liberalism (Rawls 1993). In light of his sympathetic interpretation of Rawls’s masterpiece, Maffettone offers a re-examination of political liberalism as a sort of liberal ethos and as a pluralist theory of values. My reading proposal of Maffettone’s works is organized as follows: first, I introduce Maffettone’s idea of liberalism, with a special regard to the relationship between justification and legitimation. Second, I stop to illustrate Maffettone’s defense of Rawls’s political liberalism and his intention to ameliorate its performances by adopting the so-called frame-liberalism. Third, I focus on public metaphysics, in order to highlight Maffettone’s idea of liberalism as liberal public ethics. I see such a reference to public metaphysics as necessary to clarify the deep sense of Rawlsian political liberalism, ordered to include – under certain conditions - any ‘substantial’ difference into the public debate, be it cultural, metaphysical, or religious. Fourth, I draw some conclusions.

A global market exists only because all states have chosen to converge on rules that coordinate property rights. For property rights over natural resources and products made from them, states converge on the rule of effectiveness, or might makes right. Because of effectiveness, consumers making everyday purchases like electronics, cosmetics and gasoline cannot help but support foreign authoritarians and militias. Effectiveness in the international system puts consumers into business with highly coercive actors abroad. States’ choice of effectiveness also leads to their enforcing the injustices of foreign actors within their own borders, with their own justice systems.

The resource curse can strike countries that export high-value natural resources, such as oil, metals and gems. Resource-exporting countries are more prone to authoritarian governance, they are at higher risk of civil wars and they tend to suffer economic dysfunctions such as corruption and slower growth.1 Associations between resources and these pathologies are seen in the list of the ‘Big Five’ African oil exporters: Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan. The recent histories of mineral exporters support the correlations: for example, ‘blood diamonds’ fuelled Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war, and the continuing conflict in the metal-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The phenomenon is not solely African: Syria, Yemen and Turkmenistan, for example, are also resource-cursed. Moreover, poor governance in resource-cursed countries can engender follow-on pathologies, such as a propensity to cause environmental damage both domestically (for example, through the destruction of forests) and globally (through increased greenhouse gas emissions). Most research on the resource curse has focused on the exporting countries. Here I focus instead on major importing countries, especially those in the G8. First I survey how the resource curse endangers the core interests of importing states, and how the laws of importing states drive the resource curse. The second half of the article describes a new policy framework for importing states that will improve international trade in resources for both importing and exporting countries.

This is a new analysis of rights, particularly of the paradigm: the claim-right. The new analysis makes better sense of rights than the leading alternatives do. The new analysis handles all of the well-known counterexamples to the Will and Interest theories; it seems not to generate counterexamples of its own; and it solves many long-standing puzzles in the theory of rights. Moreover, the central concepts of the new theory are as salient and forceful as are rights themselves.

This article evaluates what Scanlon has written on contractualism from the perspective of the theory of rights. It asks: where are the rights within contractualism? And: where is contractualism within the space of rights? Scanlon’s discussions and omissions show the urgency of aligning contractualism (indeed any normative theory) with an adequate analysis of rights. Topics include what rights are, how to tell who has them, and the importance of thinking about the power to change them.

The “resource curse” can strike countries that derive a large portion of their national income from exporting high-value natural resources, such as oil, gas, metals, and gems. Resource-exporting countries are subject to four overlapping curses: they are more prone to authoritarianism, they tend to suffer more corruption, they are at a higher risk for civil wars, and they exhibit greater economic instability.

RE liberal societies peaceful? Many liberals believe so, and John Rawls argues their case. Rawls holds that truly liberal societies are satisfied: they will not go to war for the sake of power, territory, riches, glory, or to spread their religion. “Their basic needs are met, and their fundamental interests are fully compatible with those of other democratic people s... There is true peace among them because all societies are satisfied with the status quo for the right reasons” (LoP, p. 46). 1 Rawls also offers a striking explanation for this thesis of liberal satisfaction: it is the internal political structures of liberal societies that make them externally non-aggressive. We believe that there are serious difficulties both with Rawls’s thesis that liberal societies are peaceful and with his explanation for why they might be so. Rawls has not established that liberal societies “will have no reason to go to war with one another” or with other peaceful states (LoP, p. 19). Moreover we hold that there are good grounds—even within Rawls’s own view—for doubting this pacific element of the liberal self-image. The plan of this article is as follows. First, we present Rawls’s taxonomy of societies and his general theory of foreign policy. Second, we check the democratic peace literature to see whether it offers prima facie support for Rawls’s vision of a peaceful world. Third, we set out the three internal features of liberal societies that allegedly make them peaceful. These three features are a commercial orientation, an indifference to economic growth, and a lack of desire to impose a comprehensive world-view on other societies. We then examine these three features critically, arguing that the first and third features do not rule out the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy, and that the second feature is unlikely to be a feature of a liberal society. We then consider Rawls’s attempt to explain away historical examples of liberal aggression by attributing the aggressiveness to

David Miller’s position on global justice might be summarised as ‘sufficiency not equality’. Justice may require rich individuals to help poor foreigners, but it does not require equality between rich and poor for its own sake. Miller shares this general stance with many major contemporary figures (Rawls, Nagel, Scanlon, Buchanan, etc.), and shares the same justificatory burdens that this stance carries with it. The general challenge for the ‘sufficiency not equality’ position is to generate an argument that is strong enough to establish the sufficientarian requirements, but whose momentum does not carry the position further into egalitarianism. The philosophical principles that keep Miller’s position stable are not obvious. Indeed, some of the arguments that Miller deploys against global egalitarianism may work to undermine his own sufficientarian position. Deeper explorations will be required to discover whether Miller’s position on global justice will be able to maintain its desired equilibrium.

Because of a major flaw in the system of international trade, consumers buy stolen goods every day. Consumers may buy stolen goods when they buy gasoline and magazines, clothing and cosmetics, cell phones and laptops, perfume and jewelry. The raw materials used to make many of these goods have been taken—sometimes by stealth, sometimes by force—from some of the poorest people in the world. These goods flow through the system of global commerce under cover of a rule that is little more than a cloak for larceny. The plainest criticism of global commerce today is not that it violates some abstract distributive standard, but that it violates property rights. The international commercial system breaks the first rule of capitalism in transporting stolen goods, and does so on an enormous scale. The priority in reforming global commerce is not to replace “free trade” with “fair trade.” The priority is to create trade where now there is theft. Ending the global traffic in stolen goods will require no new theories or novel international agencies. The principles of lawful trade are well understood, and global commerce has already created powerful institutions to enforce property rights. What is required is to use these institutions to bring all international resource sales into the system of enforced market rules. This article sets out a framework for doing this.

Contemporary movements for the reform of global institutions advocate greater\ud transparency, greater democracy, and greater accountability. Of these three, accountability is the\ud master value. Transparency is valuable as means to accountability: more transparent institutions\ud reveal whether officials have performed their duties. Democracy is valuable as a mechanism of\ud accountability: elections enable the people peacefully to remove officials who have not done\ud what it is their responsibility to do. “Accountability,” it has been said, “is the central issue of our\ud time.”\ud \ud \ud The focus of this paper is accountability in international development aid: that range of\ud efforts sponsored by the world’s rich aimed at permanently bettering the conditions of the\ud world’s poor. We begin by surveying some of the difficulties in international development work\ud that have raised concerns that development agencies are not accountable enough for producing\ud positive results in alleviating poverty. We then examine the concept of accountability, and\ud survey the general state of accountability in development agencies. A high-altitude map of the\ud main proposals for greater accountability in international development follows, and the paper\ud concludes by exploring one specific proposal for increasing accountability in development aid.

The twentieth century saw a vigorous debate over the nature of rights.\ud Will theorists argued that the function of rights is to allocate domains of\ud freedom. Interest theorists portrayed rights as defenders of well-being.\ud Each side declared its conceptual analysis to be closer to an ordinary\ud understanding of what rights there are, and to an ordinary understanding\ud of what rights do for rightholders. Neither side could win a decisive\ud victory, and the debate ended in a standoff.\ud \ud \ud This article offers a new analysis of rights. The first half of the article\ud sets out an analytical framework adequate for explicating all assertions\ud of rights. This framework is an elaboration of Hohfeld’s, designed around\ud a template for displaying the often complex internal structures of rights.\ud Those unfamiliar with Hohfeld’s work should find that the exposition\ud here presumes no prior knowledge of it. Those who know Hohfeld will\ud find innovations in how the system is defined and presented. Any theorist\ud wishing to specify precisely what is at stake within a controversy over\ud some particular right may find this framework useful.\ud \ud The analytical framework is then deployed in the second half of the\ud article to resolve the dispute between the will and interest theories. Despite the appeal of freedom and well-being as organizing ideas, each\ud of these theories is clearly too narrow. We accept rights, which do not (as\ud the will theory holds) define domains of freedom; and we affirm rights\ud whose aim is not (as the interest theory claims) to further the interests\ud of the rightholder. A third theory, introduced here, is superior in describing\ud the functions of rights as they are commonly understood.

One third of the human species is infested with worms. The World Health Organization estimates that worms account for 40 per cent of the global disease burden from tropical diseases excluding malaria. Worms cause a lot of misery.In this article I will focus on one particular type of infestation, which is hookworm. Approximately 740 million people suffer from hookworm infection in areas of rural poverty: more than one human in ten, a total greater than twenty-three times the population of Canada or twice the population of the United States. The greatest numbers of cases occur in China, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa- that is, mostly in the places in the world where poverty is most severe.Hookworm larvae pierce the skin, enter the bloodstream, work their way into the heart and then into the lungs, where they climb the bronchial tree into the throat and are swallowed.

This article presents a unifying interpretation of Rawls’s major works. The interpretation emphasizes the parallels in Rawls’s theories of justice and legitimacy for domestic and global institutions.

What morality requires of us in a world of poverty and inequality depends both on what our duties are in the abstract, and on what we can do to help. T.M. Scanlon's contractualism addresses the first question. I suggest that contractualism isolates the moral factors that frame our deliberations about the extent of our obligations in situations of need. To this extent, contractualism clarifies our common-sense understanding of our duties to distant others. The second, empirical question then becomes vital. What we as individuals need to know is how to fulfil our duties to the distant poor. Moral theorists tend to base their prescriptions on simple assumptions about how the rich can help the poor. Yet a survey of the empirical literature shows how urgently we need more information on this topic before we can know what contractualist morality — or any plausible morality — requires of us.

This article examines Rawls's and Scanlon's surprisingly undemanding contractualist accounts of global moral principles. Scanlon's Principle of Rescue requires too little of the world's rich unless the causal links between them and the poor are unreliable. Rawls's principle of legitimacy leads him to theorize in terms of a law of peoples instead of persons, and his conception of a people leads him to spurn global distributive equality. Rawls's approach has advantages over the cosmopolitan egalitarianism of Beitz and Pogge. But it cannot generate principles to regulate the entire global economic order. The article proposes a new cosmopolitan economic original position argument to make up for this lack in Rawls's Law of Peoples.

RP: YOU'RE KNOWN AS A CRITIC OF LIBERALISM. What exactly is liberalism and what is wrong with it? Sandel: I take myself to be a critic of a certain version of liberalism. It's the version of liberalism that finds its most influential expression or statement in Immanuel Kant, but also in contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls. It's the version of liberalism that says government should be neutral among competing conceptions of the good life, in order t o respect persons as free and independent selves capable of choosing their own ends. It's that, Kantian, version of liberalism that I have been a critic of.

L'A. critique la conception de la justice developpee par J. Rawls dans son ouvrage intitule «Political Liberalism», parce qu'elle est fondee sur une mauvaise interpretation de ce qui raisonnable pour le consensus politique. L'A. montre que cette conception de la justice est une doctrine sectaire sur laquelle une societe non-repressive ne peut s'ordonner

This chapter argues that neither of the two principal theories of rights — the Interest Theory and the Will Theory — can adequately account for all rights. It proposes instead a theory that ascribes multiple functions to rights.

The institutions of a modern democratic society, Rawls said in A Theory of Justice (1971), have a deep influence on the life chances of each citizen.1 This fact generates the problem of the justice of these institutions: how to justify the effects that these institutions will have on those living within them. Rawls’s solution is famous for its insistence on the equality of individuals. The distribution of the benefits of social life should be based at the deepest level on the fundamental equality of all citizens, and not on their contingent natural or social attributes such as gender, race, or social class of origin. Equality is the baseline for all institutional arrangements in a just society, and this is equality independent of the features of individuals that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ (Rawls, 1999a: 63). Rawls’s difference principle is the most famous expression of this ideal of equality. The difference principle states that inequalities in wealth and income should only be allowed if such inequalities are to the benefit of all, and especially to the benefit of the worst-off.

Contrast two conceptions of human rights which, following Beitz, we can call the orthodox and the practical conceptions. The orthodox conception defines human rights as those rights that each human has against every other, at all times, in all places, under all conditions, and simply in virtue of her humanity. This orthodox conception is familiar from the philosophical literature on human rights, and any philosopher will know how to construct an orthodox theory of human rights using the standard tools of a consequentialist or deontological moral theory. The practical conception of human rights is quite different, and is more familiar from international politics than from the philosophical literature. On the practical conception, human rights define a boundary of legitimate political action. Human rights specify the ways in which state officials must and must not act toward their own citizens, where it is understood that violations of these human rights can morally permit and in some cases morally require interference by the international community. This practical conception of human rights is what one finds in the various proclamations and treaties on human rights, such as the Universal Declaration and the Convention against Torture. Here I will explore why it is worthwhile for philosophers to theorize more about human rights understood in this second, practical way, and also say a few words about how such theorizing might be done. Thomas Pogge’s account of human rights will provide the mileposts for the exploration of this topic. To an orthodox theorist, the practical question about human rights will appear misguided. The practical question turns on legitimate action by the officials of modern states, and is especially concerned to find rights whose violation will permit or require outside intervention. Yet why this emphasis on legitimacy, modernity, and intervention? And why, in particular, this obsession with the state? After all states are not the only sort of agency that endangers individuals through violence, coercion, and neglect. Strangers, family members, and multinational corporations also endanger individuals — in fact quite often these other agencies will threaten individuals more than does their state. Why then should we take the actions of state officials as a special topic for normative theory? The answer is that, until recently, the state was to outsiders a moral black box. Until World War II state officials violated, coerced, and neglected those within their territories with almost total impunity, appealing to the Westphalian ideal of state sovereignty to immunize themselves from external criticism and intervention. Before the Second World War there were virtually no commonly accepted standards for justifiable interference into what was called the internal affairs of a state. State officials were almost incorrigible with respect to their treatment of humans within their borders, and this is what distinguished state officials from other actors like family members and corporations. The Second World War showed that the state could not remain a moral black box to outsiders. After the Holocaust it became clear that standards were required for official conduct toward citizens, such that violation of these standards could license or even necessitate an international response. The language that postwar political leaders used to describe these standards was the language of human rights. Human rights were meant to fill the void in the space of moral evaluation and action that was created by the concept of state

Leif Wenar examines the impact on takings scholarship of the redefinition of\ud "property" early in the twentieth century. He argues that the Hohfeldian\ud characterization of property as rights (instead of as tangible things) forced\ud major scholars such as Michelman, Sax, and Epstein into extreme interpretations\ud of the Takings Clause. This extremism is unnecessary, however, since the\ud original objections to the idea that "property is things" are mistaken.

This book traces the life's work of a man now widely regarded as one of the greatest economists, political philosophers and social theorists of the century. The result is the most alive and accessible introduction to Hayek to date.