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Thomas Pogge
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Notions such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice are integral to evaluating social progress and developing policies. One increasingly influential way to think about these concepts is the capability approach, a theoretical framework which was pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s.
In this book Ingrid Robeyns orientates readers new to the capability approach through offering an explanation of this framework. Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice also endeavors to resolve historical disputes in the literature and thus will be equally engaging to those familiar with the field. The author offers a novel and illuminating account of how the capability approach can be understood in a variety of academic disciplines and fields of application. Special attention is paid to clarifying misunderstandings that have been caused by different disciplinary assumptions and the interpretive consequences they have for our consideration of the capability approach.
Robeyns argues that respecting the distinction between the general capability approach, and more specific capability theories or applications, helps to clear up confusion and misinterpretation. In addition, the author presents detailed analyses of well-known objections to the capability approach, and also discusses how it relates to other schools of analysis such as theories of justice, human rights, basic needs, and the human development approach.
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice offers an original and comprehensive account of the field. The book will appeal to scholars of the capability approach as well as new readers looking for an interdisciplinary introduction.
Defending a procedural conception of global justice that calls for the establishment of reasonably democratic arrangements within and beyond the state, this book argues for a justice-based understanding of social development and justifies why a democracy-promoting international development practice is a requirement of global justice.
Many privileged and influential persons and governments hold that they have no weighty moral responsibility toward foreigners in desperate need. I have attacked this view elsewhere, arguing that we do have such a responsibility.1 Of those who accept a weighty responsibility toward needy foreigners, most advocate that more such persons be admitted into the richer states and that more be done to ensure that those already here gain equal citizenship with ourselves in the fullest sense. I will argue here that such advocacy is not a good way of discharging our responsibility.
During the past twenty-five years, the capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has come to play a major role in political philosophy and normative economics. This approach has gained much support, among academics as well as among international agencies and nongovernmental organizations, at the expense of competing resourcist and welfarist approaches exemplified, respectively, by John Rawls's theory and utilitarianism. Here I examine how the capability approach has been, and might be, justified as superior to, in particular, its resourcist competition. I reach two main conclusions. First, this question should not be answered in isolation, but can be plausibly resolved only in conjunction with other key elements of a conception of social justice. Instead of asking which approach is superior, we should ask which approach can deliver the most plausible public criterion of social justice. Second, neither Sen nor Nussbaum has so far shown that the capability approach can produce a public criterion of social justice that would be a viable competitor to the more prominent resourcist views. While I concentrate my critical attention on the capability approach and reject much of the case made in its favor, my intent is wholly constructive. I am working on the same problem as the pioneers of the capability approach and I do not have all the answers any more than they do. If they can learn from my critique even a fraction of what I have learned from their work, I will be well satisfied.
The international doctrine of human rights is one of the most ambitious parts of the settlement of World War II. Since then, the language of human rights has become the common language of social criticism in global political life. This book is a theoretical examination of the central idea of that language, the idea of a human right. In contrast to more conventional philosophical studies, the book takes a practical approach, looking at the history and political practice of human rights for guidance in understanding the central idea. It presents a model of human rights as matters of international concern whose violation by governments can justify international protective and restorative action ranging from intervention to assistance. The book proposes a schema for justifying human rights and applies it to several controversial cases - rights against poverty, rights to democracy, and the human rights of women. Throughout, the book attends to some main reasons why people are sceptical about human rights, including the fear that human rights will be used by strong powers to advance their national interests. The book concludes by observing that contemporary human rights practice is vulnerable to several pathologies and argues the need for international collaboration to avoid them.
This book is about the philosopher John Rawls and about his largest body of work in social justice. The book opens with a comprehensive biography of Rawls, which is the result of this book's author's academic and later personal relationship with Rawls. From thereon, it introduces and discusses Rawls's theory of social justice mostly derived from his well-known work, A Theory of Justice. This book provides an introduction to Rawls's writings in political philosophy. It provides exposition on the fundamental ideas of Rawls's theory of justice, and further examines why and how Rawls came to formulate such views. In doing so, misinterpretations of Rawls's views are discussed, elaborations and additional examples are used to clarify, and significant objections as well as possible defenses are raised. It also considers some of the major opponents of Rawls and the main criticisms they have raised against his conception of justice.
In this major book Martha Nussbaum, one of the most innovative and influential philosophical voices of our time, proposes a kind of feminism that is genuinely international, argues for an ethical underpinning to all thought about development planning and public policy, and dramatically moves beyond the abstractions of economists and philosophers to embed thought about justice in the concrete reality of the struggles of poor women. Nussbaum argues that international political and economic thought must be sensitive to gender difference as a problem of justice, and that feminist thought must begin to focus on the problems of women in the third world. Taking as her point of departure the predicament of poor women in India, she shows how philosophy should undergird basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by all governments, and used as a comparative measure of quality of life across nations.
Cohen seeks to rescue the concept of justice from those, among whom he includes Rawls, who think that correct fundamental moral principles are fact-sensitive. Cohen argues instead that any fundamental principles of justice, and fundamental moral principles generally, are fact-insensitive and that any fact-sensitive principles can be traced back to fact-insensitive ones. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of Cohen's argument, and the kind of fact-insensitivity he has in mind. In particular, it distinguishes between internal and external fact-sensitivity – that is, whether facts are referenced in the content of the principle, or must otherwise be the case in order for the principle to apply at all. Cohen himself seems likely to endorse internally fact-sensitive fundamental principles. This leads to a discussion of Cohen's Platonism about moral principles and the extent to which his arguments cover all its rivals.1
Philosophy & Public Affairs 31.3 (2003) 211-245
In this article, I argue for a thesis, which I state in section d below, about the relationship between facts and normative principles (or, as I shall call them, for short, "principles"). A normative principle, here, is a general directive that tells agents what (they ought, or ought not) to do, and a fact is, or corresponds to, any truth, other than (if any principles are truths) a principle, of a kind that someone might reasonably think supports a principle. Note that, under the foregoing stipulations, it is not excluded that normative principles might themselves be facts in a different sense of "fact" from that which is here stipulated. Principles might, that is, be facts in the broader sense of "fact" in which all truths, including, therefore, true principles (if there are any), represent facts. I myself believe that there exist true normative principles, but the thesis about principles and facts to be defended here is, as I shall explain at q below, neutral with respect to whether any normative principles are truths.
I shall also explain in q why the very little (almost nothing) that I just said about what constitutes a fact suffices for my demonstrative purposes. I am happy for facts to be whatever my opponents in this debate, whose position I shall presently describe, (reasonably) understand them to be: my argument, so I believe, is robust across permissible variations in the meaning of "fact," and it is also neutral across contrasting conceptions of the relationship of fact and value. Nor does my view about facts and principles, or so I argue at l below, require me to take a position on the famous question of whether an "ought" can follow from an "is." It bears emphasis that the question that my thesis answers is neutral with respect to controversies about the objectivity of principles, the relationship between facts and values, and the "is-ought" question, and, let me add for good measure, the realism/anti-realism/quasi-realism/a-little-bit-of-realism-here-not-so-much-realism-there controversy. The question pursued here is distinct from those that dominate the meta-ethical literature, and, so far as I know, it is hardly discussed in that literature. You will inevitably misunderstand me if you assimilate the thesis I shall state to one within those familiar controversies.
The independent status of the issue canvassed here in relation to long-standing controversies makes the present discussion less interesting than it otherwise might be, in that it has a limited effect on those popular philosophical controversies, but also in one way more interesting than it otherwise might be, in that it addresses a relatively novel and, I think, consequential issue, an issue which philosophers don't argue about much, but about which most of them, either spontaneously or when appropriately provoked, display strongly opposed and unargued views, which each side finds obviously true: that circumstance suggests that there is something of a philosophical problem here, about which most philosophers are at least in part mistaken (because a view is unlikely to be obviously true if a goodly number of reflective thinkers believe it to be obviously false).
The thesis to be defended here contradicts what many people (and, I believe, most moral and political philosophers) are disposed to think, to wit, that our beliefs about matters of normative principle (including our beliefs about the deepest and most general matters of principle) should reflect, or respond to, truths about matters of fact: they should, that is,—this is how I am using "reflect" and "respond to"—include matters of fact among the grounds for affirming them. So, for example, many find it obvious that our beliefs about principles should reflect facts about human nature (such as the fact that human beings are liable to pain, or the fact that they are capable of sympathy for each other) and they also think that our beliefs about principles should reflect facts about human social organization (such as the tendency for people to encounter collective action problems, or for societies to be composed of individuals who have diverse interests, and...
Comparaison de la conception de la justice distributive chez G. A. Cohen et J. Rawls. Examinant les criteres de la justice distributive que sont les conventions, l'ethos social et les choix personnels selon Cohen, et le principe de la difference chez Rawls, l'A. defend une approche dualiste des normes de la distribution contre la position de L. Murphy et Coehn.
Work on this paper was supported by a Laurance S. Rockefeller fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Written for a conference on “the Ethics of Nationalism” at the University of Ihnois at Urbana-Champaign, it was also presented to audiences at Princeton, Hamard, New York, Stanford, and Oxford Universities. I an1 grateful for the barrage of' forceful criticisms 1 have received-in particular from Alyssa Bernstein, Brian Barry, Lea Brilmayer, Anthony Coady, John Cooper, Roger Crisp, Peter de Marneffe, Alan Houston, Frances Kamm, Elizabeth Kiss, Christine Korsgaard, Ling Tong, Stuart White, and the editors of Philosophy G Public Affuzrs.
G. A. COHEN is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge, 1995) and he is a frequent contributor to Philosophy & Public Affairs. The article that appears here is an expanded version of one of his 1996 Gifford Lectures.
One-third of all human lives end in early death from poverty-related causes. Most of these premature deaths are avoidable through global institutional reforms that would eradicate extreme poverty. Many are also avoidable through global health-system reform that would make medical knowledge freely available as a global public good. The rules should be redesigned so that the development of any new drug is rewarded in proportion to its impact on the global disease burden (not through monopoly rents). This reform would bring drug prices down worldwide close to their marginal cost of production and would powerfully stimulate pharmaceutical research into currently neglected diseases concentrated among the poor. Its feasibility shows that the existing medical-patent regime (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights—TRIPS—as supplemented by bilateral agreements) is severely unjust—and its imposition a human-rights violation on account of the avoidable mortality and morbidity it foreseeably produces.
If the global economy seems unfair, how should we understand what a fair global economy would be? What ideas of fairness, if any, apply, and what significance do they have for policy and law? Working within the social contract tradition, this book argues that fairness is best seen as a kind of equity in practice. The global economy as we know it is organized by an international social practice in which countries mutually rely upon common markets. This practice generates shared responsibilities of "structural equity," independently of humanitarian, human rights, or other justice concerns, for how benefits and burdens are distributed across different societies and their social classes. Equity in the practice of trade requires not only compensation of people harmed by their exposure to global economic forces, but also equal division of the "gains of trade," across and within societies, unless still greater gains flow to developing countries. Fairness therefore calls for strong social insurance schemes, international capital controls, policy flexibility for developing countries, and more-all as the "fair price" of free trade.
The kantian interpretation of justice as fairness
- Thomas Pogge
Politics as usual. What lies behind the pro-poor rhetoric
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Amartya: Inequality reexamined. Cambridge/MA 1995
- Sen
Realizing Rawls. Ithaca
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Fairness in practice
- Aaron James