Public Goods, Human Rights and Global Justice: course description
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Given today’s inequalities on a world-wide scale, global justice has become an urgent need. There is no lack in efforts, neither in practical measures nor in academic debates, to give a fair share of the world’s wealth to the populations in developing countries, and the need to develop a robust conception of global justice is clearly perceived – inside and outside of academic departments. However, in prevalent ac-counts of justice, justice is mainly seen as relative to a given society: it is justice within a society, not justice between nations or societies. On the other hand, where international justice is explicitly addressed we find the notion of justice restricted to the law of peoples (cf. John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples (1999)). Within this setting, aspects of fair distribution (of natural resources or burdens to protect the biosphere) on global scale cannot be adequately met.
However, two conceptual developments do seem to make headway towards a more substantial notion of global justice. First, the idea of universally valid human rights has gained ground and seems apt to pave the way at least for a formal reading of global justice. It can be argued that this is due, at least partially, to the intensified efforts to provide an ethical justification for human rights (as contrasted with their existence in positive law; cf. James Griffin: On Human Rights (2008)).
A second strand is the increasing recognition of (global) public goods as crucial ele-ments for well-being on a global scale. Public goods are typically characterised by non-divisibility in consumption and non-excludability. Global public goods are public goods that are not regionally or locally restricted (as, e.g., national defence or lighthouses at national shores). Examples for global public goods are disease surveillance, the stability of international finance markets, environmental protection or even scientific knowledge. Public goods are in a number of ways related to global justice. First, they are typically essential for individual well-being and thus should be distributed on fair and equal terms. Second, in important cases global public goods depend crucially on international or even global cooperation. Thus, the need for their provision is a powerful incentive for cooperation and conflict resolution. Finally, phenomena like free riding or strategic interaction resulting in Pareto inferior outcomes (Prisoners’ Dilemma) point to the need to create a stable political order on the global scale by way of institutional arrangements. In the absence of suitable institutions, the benefits of global public goods as well as the burdens in their provision will be unevenly distributed, and this in turn will be detrimental to the prospect of further cooperation.
The aim of this course is to discuss these recent developments, in particular the no-tion of global public goods. A central claim will be that present approaches to human rights and to global justice have common roots in the tradition of liberalism and are therefore based on a notion of individual freedom (cf. Amartya Sen: Development as Freedom).
Course Prerequisites: None
