The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice

Global justice is an exciting area of refreshing, innovative new ideas for a changing world facing significant challenges. Not only does work in this area often force us to rethink ethics and political philosophy more generally, but its insights contain seeds of hope for addressing some of the greatest global problems facing humanity today. This book has been selective in bringing together some of the most pressing topics and issues in global justice as understood by the leading voices from both established and rising stars across twenty-five new chapters. The book explores severe poverty, climate change, egalitarianism, global citizenship, human rights, immigration, territorial rights, and much more.

Author(s):  
Megan Blomfield

This chapter introduces climate change as a problem of natural resource justice by outlining some real-world examples of resource conflicts that are being generated, or exacerbated, by climate change. It then provides some necessary background for the discussion to follow. The science and predicted impacts of climate change are explained, along with the options for responding to this problem, such as mitigation and adaptation. The chapter then briefly introduces the debate about global justice and climate change, as it has appeared in the political philosophy literature, looking at the human rights approach, the distributive justice approach, and the key methodological distinctions between integrationism and isolationism and ideal versus nonideal theory. After providing further characterization of, and motivation for, the natural resources approach to climate justice that is taken in the work, it concludes with an outline of the chapters to follow.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Gach

While climate change has been framed as an environmental issue from the very beginning of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations, over the years the concept has expanded to further emphasize it as a fundamental issue of human rights and global justice. This paper examines the evolution of the conception of climate change since 2009, arguing that the issue framing utilized by UNFCCC member states has increasingly trended toward some aspects of the climate justice frame, including disparities in vulnerability to climate change (loss and damage), human rights impacts, and social inequalities. This shift also extends to the framing adopted by civil society organizations in the form of the Climate Action Network (CAN International), in which a larger focus on issues of climate justice can be seen in recent years. These trends are then reviewed alongside the objectives, mechanisms, and language of the ratified text of the Paris Agreement in order to evaluate the status of the growing international norm of climate justice.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Wolff

This chapter examines some issues that have come to greater attention in more recent decades, with particular emphasis on what it calls ‘oversights’ of justice. It begins by arguing that some of the greatest political philosophers had suffered from ‘oversights’, notably Karl Marx, Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill. It then considers some of these oversights of justice, first by looking at issues of gender equality, then at racial justice, followed by issues of disability and sexual orientation, each from the standpoint of what is known as ‘domestic justice’: justice as it operates within a single state. It also explores questions of global justice, including immigration, and global inequalities of wealth, along with justice to future generations, especially in relation to climate change. These discussions reflect areas of great contemporary concern, both in political philosophy and in real life.


Author(s):  
Henry Shue

Since its original publication, this book has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of international relations and foreign policy, particularly in debates regarding foreign policy's role in alleviating global poverty. The book asks: Which human rights ought to be the first honored and the last sacrificed? It argues that subsistence rights, along with security rights and liberty rights, serve as the ground of all other human rights. This classic work, now available in a thoroughly updated fortieth-anniversary edition, includes a substantial new chapter examining how the accelerating transformation of our climate progressively undermines the bases of subsistence like sufficient water, affordable food, and housing safe from forest-fires and sea-level rise. Climate change threatens basic rights.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Wolff

An Introduction to Political Philosophy provides and introduction to the subject, combining clarity and a conversational style with a thought-provoking account of the central questions of the discipline. The text explores the subject through a series of enduring and timeless questions, jumping centuries and millennia to explore the most influential answers and demonstrate the relevance of political philosophy for an understanding of contemporary issues. This new edition has been updated to include the on-going developments in multiculturalism and global justice, as well as in human rights and deliberative democracy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
Colin Farrelly

Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice is a unique and important contribution to the growing literature on global justice. Risse’s approach to a variety of topics, ranging from domestic justice and common ownership of the earth, to immigration, human rights, climate change, and labour rights, is one that conceives of global justice as a philosophical problem. In this commentary I focus on a number of reservations I have about approaching global justice as a philosophical rather than an inherently practical problem. To his credit Risse does acknowledge at various stages of the book that a good deal of the applied terrain he ventures into presupposes complex and contentious empirical assumptions. A greater emphasis on those points would, I believe, helpfully reveal the shortcomings of tackling intellectual property rights by appealing to Hugo Grotius’s stance on the ownership of seas, or the shortcomings of tackling health by invoking the language of human rights without acknowledging and addressing the constraints and challenges of promoting health in an aging world.


Author(s):  
Carl-Henric Grenholm

The purpose of this article is to examine the contributions that might be given by Lutheran political theology to the discourse on global justice. The article offers a critical examination of three different theories of global justice within political philosophy. Contractarian theories are criticized, and a thesis is that it is plausible to argue that justice can be understood as liberation from oppression. From this perspective the article gives an analysis of an influential theory of justice within Lutheran ethics. According to this theory justice is not an equal distribution but an arrangement where the subordinate respect the authority of those in power. This theory is related to a sharp distinction between law and gospel. The main thesis of the article is that Lutheran political theology should take a different approach if it aims to give a constructive contribution to theories of justice. This means that Lutheran ethics should not be based on Creation and reason alone – it should also be based on Christology and Eschatology.


Author(s):  
Siobhan McInerney-Lankford ◽  
Mac Darrow ◽  
Lavanya Rajamani
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document