Narrow Versus Comprehensive Justification in Humanitarian Aid: A Case Study of the CERF

This chapter provides a more comprehensive justification of the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) by supplementing conventional justifications with one of two fundamental principles of global morality: the Principle of Global Minimal Concern and Respect or the Principle of Global Equal Concern and Respect. Although CERF only accounts for around 4 per cent of total annual humanitarian funding, it represents a significant innovation in the way humanitarian aid is financed. The CERF is a standing fund of $500 million annually that can be called upon by UN frontline agencies and partner organisations to tackle humanitarian emergencies. While it is widely agreed that the CERF has made advances toward the objectives of timeliness, predictability and equity in emergency relief, questions remain unanswered about these objectives.

Three Approaches to Global Health Care Justice: Rejecting the Positive/Negative Rights Distinction

This chapter presents three cosmopolitan approaches to global health care justice: Thomas Pogge's negative duties based approach, Gillian Brock's minimal needs view, and Henry Shue's model of basic rights. While these approaches share a common focus on attempting to justify the existence of global duties to aid, held by the wealthy and owed to the global poor, each offers a distinct interpretation of why such duties exist and suggests a range of options for fulfilling them. Importantly, while the chapter argues that Shue's approach to global duties is the most effective of the three, it considers that they all offer important insight into the problem of global poverty and provide a variety of possible practical solutions to this problem.

Justice in a Complex World: An Introduction1

This introductory chapter provides an overview of global justice. Theorising about global justice starts by questioning the symbolic role classically attributed to national borders as not only physical and administrative circumscriptions but also frontiers demanding the contours of the groups of people that are included and excluded from a scheme of distributive justice, that is, from a system of rules and institutions designed to regulate the distribution of the benefits and burdens originated from social cooperation between the individuals that compose a given community's basic structure. Defenders of global liberal conceptions of justice employ two types of argument to justify the inclusion of all persons worldwide within the web of normative ties between persons that create duties of moral assistance.

Global Justice and the Mission of the European Union

This concluding chapter argues that any conception of justice relevant today must combine two elements, both strongly rooted in European traditions, but neither of them exclusive to them: equal respect for the diversity of conceptions of the good life that characterises pluralist societies and equal concern for the interests of all members, present and yet to come, of the society concerned. This concern, moreover, must be responsibility-sensitive — distributive justice is not a matter of outcomes but of opportunities — and it must be efficiency-sensitive, a fair distribution need not be a strictly equal distribution, but rather one that sustainably maximises the condition of the worst off. Justice, in brief, means real freedom for all, the greatest real freedom for those with least of it. Therefore, justice means global justice.

Toward Another Kind of Development Practice

This chapter examines the Discourse-Theoretic Rationale, presenting it as a novel moral rationale for certain forms of international development practice. This discourse-theoretic, internationalist moral rationale agrees with theorists of global distributive justice that participation in certain forms of international development practice can count as a demand of justice instead of solely a demand of humanity. Yet it also rejects their view that the moral rationale for international development practice is to further realize an ideal of global distributive justice. Rather, international development practice can contribute to establishing certain domestic socio-political structures that are required by global discursive justice. This is because, by fostering in various ways of democratic practices at the domestic level, certain forms of international development practice help to satisfy the intranational conditions of a fundamentally just global basic structure.

The (Difficult) Universality of Economic and Social Rights

This chapter argues that there are strong reasons to be concerned with the universality of economic and social rights. The main reasons are that, firstly, the existence of human rights cannot be determined without reference to concrete conditions of life, and that, secondly, concrete conditions of life are today not sufficiently similar across the world to justify all human beings possessing the economic and social rights asserted in human rights doctrine. The chapter also raises some concerns about the emphasis placed by political approaches on the role that human rights are intended to play in global political life. Underlying this emphasis is the idea that universality is a necessary but not a sufficient existence condition for human rights: in order for a right to qualify as a human right, it must not only be universal, but it must also be important enough to justify an international response.

Restitution and Distributive Justice

This chapter explores the extent of consensus and disagreement among alternative contemporary accounts of justice on the matter of the kinds of events that might warrant restitution and, consequently, the computation of the magnitude of restitution. The goal is not to adjudicate the relevant normative controversies, but rather to illustrate the significance of normative theory for the restitution project. For purposes of demonstration, the chapter focuses on three important traditions in the recent scholarship on economic justice: the libertarian tradition of political philosophy, the liberal contractarian approach, and the capabilities approach. This focus shows that normative controversy surrounding the concept of justice bears heavily on considerations pertaining to restitution.

Economic Justice and the Minimally Good Human Life Account of Needs

This chapter discusses the minimally good human life account of needs. On the minimally good human life account, people need whatever enables them to live minimally good human lives. Most perfectionists are concerned with what it is for a human life to be good as opposed to minimally good. The chapter suggests that whether or not one lives a minimally good human life is not a completely subjective matter. Rather, a minimally good human life is characteristically choice-worthy and a life in which one can make some significant choices. In making such choices one must be free to shape one's own life. Indeed, because humans are distinctively autonomous creatures, autonomy is characteristic of a minimally good human life.