Basic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Shue
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Forest Fires ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Original Publication ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
Basic Rights ◽  
Subsistence Rights

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.

scholarly journals Globalna sprawiedliwość a problem imigracji

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Łukasz Mirocha
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Standard Theory ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
Minimal Standard ◽  
Justice Theories

Global justice and the problem of immigrationModern legal philosophy provides us with two main types of global justice theories. Distributive or egali­tarian theories claim that justice requires striving to achieve the global equality from us not only in legal but also economic dimension. On the other hand, there are many theories focusing on providing and keeping only „minimal standard” i.e. human rights and questioning the global equality as an ideal. In the article I investigate which type of theories describes contemporary international relations in the most accurate way claiming that „minimal standard” theory does it and I also wonder which type is more legitimate. In my opinion, considerations devoted to the question of global justice give us a well-established background for further studies on immigration policy, especially in the context of recent EU frontiers incidents.

Introduction

Basic Rights ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 5-10
Author(s):  
Henry Shue
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Basic Rights ◽  
Subsistence Rights ◽  
To Receive

This introductory chapter provides an overview of basic rights. The wisdom of a U.S. foreign policy that includes attention to “human rights” depends heavily upon which rights are in practice the focus of the attention. The major international documents on human rights include dozens of kinds of rights, often artificially divided into “civil and political” and “economic, social, and cultural” rights. U.S. foreign policy probably could not, and almost certainly should not, concern itself with the performance of other governments in honoring every one of these internationally recognized human rights. The policy must in practice assign priority to some rights over others. It is not entirely clear so far either which rights are receiving priority or which rights ought to receive priority in U.S. foreign policy. The purpose of this book is to present the reasons why the most fundamental core of the so-called “economic rights,” which can be called subsistence rights, ought to be among those that receive priority. The chapter then presents some divergent indications of what the priorities actually are.

scholarly journals Normative Shifts in the Global Conception of Climate Change: The Growth of Climate Justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Gach
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Issue Framing ◽  
Vulnerability To Climate Change ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
The Status

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.

Poverty and Global Justice

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Kokaz
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Society ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Just World ◽  
Poverty Eradication ◽  
Law Of Peoples ◽  
Scope Of Application ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

Poverty eradication has been identified as the largest challenge facing international society in its quest for a peaceful, prosperous, and just world. I respond to this challenge by proposing a global poverty eradication principle. Grounded in John Rawls's account of human rights and assistance for the law of peoples, the global poverty eradication principle applies regardless of causal patterns that may obtain in a given case. The relationship between persons affected by poverty and their governments has implications only for the selection of the appropriate means of poverty eradication, but never undermines the goal of poverty eradication itself. The duties of human rights and assistance that establish the global poverty eradication principle apply even to societies that may reject them, because they are institutional reaffirmations of the natural duties of persons in the context of international society, without whose affirmation no domestic society can be considered well-ordered. I conclude by pointing out some of the challenges that are likely to arise in the application of the global poverty eradication principle. While I cannot hope to settle these practical problems philosophically, flagging them helps to clarify the scope of application of the global poverty eradication principle and gives a sense of the concrete targets and measures that could be adopted in working toward its fulfillment in practice, especially for the elimination of certain types of severe deprivation at a minimum.

Global Poverty, Human Rights and Correlative Duties

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Julio Montero
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Poverty Rate ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Imperfect Duty ◽  
Affluent Country ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The International Monetary Fund ◽  
Do So

Does the fact that my actions cause someone to lack access to the objects of her human rights make me a human rights violator? Is behaving in such a way that we deprive someone of access to the objects of her human rights even when we could have avoided behaving in such a way, sufficient to maintain that we have violated her human rights? When an affluent country pursues domestic policies that will foreseeably cause massive deprivation abroad in order to improve its already prosperous economy, has this country violated the human rights of the very poor just by doing so? If international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization pursue policies that lead to an increase in the global poverty rate, are such organizations human rights violators? Can an individual undertaking certain actions in the market place that render insecure the access of the worst-off to the objects of their human rights be blamed for violating their rights?In this article I discuss the thesis that claims that whenever we cause, or contribute to the cause of, someone else’s lack of access to the objects of her human rights, we are human rights violators. I contend that this thesis, which seems to underpin the arguments of many cosmopolitan authors taking part of the global justice debate, is mistaken. In order to achieve this end, I analyze several alternative formulations of the causal thesis. My conclusion is that before it can be said that an agent has violated someone else's human rights, it has to be proven that this agent has caused, or contributed to the cause of, a state of affairs where someone lacks access to the object of some of her human rights, by infringing a duty not to do so. Furthermore, I maintain that this must be a perfect, as opposed to an imperfect, duty.

scholarly journals Population, climate change, and global justice: a moral framework for debate

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cripps
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Population Policy ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Global Population

This paper outlines a moral framework for the debate on global population policy. Questions of population, climate justice and global justice are morally inseparable and failure to address them as such has dangerous implications. Considerations of population lend additional urgency to existing collective duties to act on global poverty and climate change. Choice-providing procreative policies are a key part of that. However, even were we collectively to fulfil these duties, we would face morally hard choices over whether to introduce incentive-changing procreative policies. Thus, there is now no possible collective course of action which is not morally problematic.

The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Johan Olsthoorn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Just War ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Basic Rights ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
Just War Doctrine ◽  
The Right

Some philosophers have recently argued for the revisionist just war doctrine that individuals can have the right to initiate war in defense of their human rights when their government fails in its duty to protect them. It was a central tenet of early modern just war theory, too, that when judicial recourse is not available, individuals are entitled to enforce their basic rights by force of war. How should we conceptualize such remedial rights to secure basic rights by armed force? And where to fit such rights within ethical theories of war? This chapter explores these questions by critically contrasting two ways to ground individual rights to wage so-called “private subsistence wars”: via “modern” duties of global justice and via “old” rights of necessity. I argue that the right-of-necessity model—for better or worse—can sidestep problems of indeterminate and underdetermined moral liability by grounding resistance rights in enforceable rights (of subsistence) rather than in enforceable duties (of global justice). My analysis thus charts normative implications of dispensing with the legitimate authority condition by analyzing what it means for rights and duties to be enforceable.

Introduction: Global Justice and Climate Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Megan Blomfield
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nonideal Theory ◽  
Resource Conflicts ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation

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.

Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Bertoldi
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Difference Principle ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
International Anarchy

Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations (PTIR) played a pioneering role for contemporary international political theory by bringing together two domains of inquiry that had proceeded largely independently from each other in the twentieth century. This chapter will assess PTIR’s contributions to international political theory and explore its continuing relevance for debates on sovereignty, human rights, and globalization in a plural world. After reviewing the ways in which PTIR shaped the evolution of both international relations theory and political theory by questioning the central assumptions of international anarchy and political autonomy and by establishing cosmopolitanism as the dominant mode of analysis for international political theory with its groundbreaking argument for a global difference principle, the chapter will conclude by identifying several productive tensions in Beitz’s work that can further enrich contemporary discussions of global justice.

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