Christian Barry

International Trade and Labor Standards: A Proposal for Linkage

Should some rights to engage in international trade be made conditional on the promotion of labor standards? The critics of such conditionality, known as linkage, are right to be concerned about its possible adverse effects. However, linkage can be desirable. A set of rules for international trade that incorporates linkage can serve the interests of developing countries, and in particular of less advantaged individuals within them - if it is un-imposed, transparent and rule-based, applied in a manner reflecting a countrys level of development, demands adequate international burden-sharing, and incorporates measures that ensure that appropriate account is taken of different viewpoints within each country. Such a linkage system could substantially reduce the costs that are incurred by exporting countries when they attempt to promote the interests of workers. By enabling and encouraging countries to promote labor standards, an appropriate form of linkage can serve as a cornerstone of a worker-oriented world trading system.

On the concept of climate debt: its moral and political value

A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a ‘climate debt’ to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with global climate change and for guiding international climate negotiations. We conclude that the idea of a climate debt can be coherently formulated, and that while some understandings of the idea of climate debt could lead to morally objectionable conclusions, other accounts would not. However, we argue that climate debt nevertheless provides an unhelpful frame for advancing global justice through international climate negotiations – the only existing means of resolving political conflict over the collective action problems posed by human-induced climate change – due to its retrospective and potentially adversarial emphasis, and to problems of measurement.

Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism.

Benefiting from Wrongdoing and Sustaining Wrongful Harm

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing (qua beneficiary) if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing per se does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts.

What Is Special about Human Rights

Human rights occupy a privileged position within contemporary politics. They are widely taken to constitute perhaps the most fundamental standards for evaluating the conduct of states with respect to persons residing within their borders. They are enshrined in numerous international documents, national constitutions, and treaties; and those that have been incorporated into international law are monitored and enforced by numerous international and regional institutional bodies. Human rights have been invoked to justify popular revolt, secession, large-scale political reform, as well as forms of international action ranging from the imposition of conditions on foreign assistance and loans to economic sanctions (as in South Africa and Burma) and military intervention (as in Kosovo and East Timor). Michael Ignatieff has gone so far as to claim that human rights have become “the major article of faith of a secular culture that fears it believes in nothing else,” and one might add that they are articles of faith of many non-secular cultures, too.

Global Justice: Aims, Arrangements, and Responsibilities

A fairly broad consensus has emerged about the characteristics of a minimally decent world. Indeed, during the past century, moral norms protecting the freedoms of the weak and vulnerable have become increasingly potent, condemning practices such as genocide, colonialism, autocracy, slavery, sexual violence against women, and economic structures that avoidably lead to widespread destitution. It is also commonly held that our current world fails to meet these criteria. Even after a period of unprecedented opulence, more than 800 million people lack adequate nutrition and access to basic health services, and there are some 110 million child labourers under the age of 12, more than half of whom work in hazardous conditions.

Can Withdrawing Citizenship Be Justified

Denationalisation – withdrawing citizenship from a person – is a practice with a long historic pedigree that continues to affect the lives of many people today. Are there conditions under which denationalisation is morally justified? If so, what are they? And can legal and political norms that authorise states to engage in citizenship withdrawal be justified? This article provides answers to these questions.

Global Financial Crisis:The Ethical Issues

Notes on Contributors Introduction N.Dobos Global Financial Institutions, Ethics and Market Fundamentalism S.Miller The Legitimacy of the Financial System and State Capitalism N.Chomsky Neoliberalism-Is This the End? N.Dobos Ethical Investing in an Age of Excessive Materialistic Self-Interest J.C.Harrington The Achilles Heel of Competitive/Adversarial T.Pogge Financial Services Providers: Integrity Systems, Reputation, and the Triangle of Virtue S.Miller Who Must Pay for the Damage of the Global Financial Crisis M.Peterson & C.Barry Index

Young on responsibility and structural injustice

In the years before her untimely death in 2006, Iris Marion Young published a series of influential essays in which she developed an original and far-reaching account of how individuals should conc...

Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency

This book explores the nature of moral responsibilities of affluent individuals in the developed world, addressing global poverty and arguments that philosophers have offered for having these responsibilities. The first type of argument grounds responsibilities in the ability to avert serious suffering by taking on some cost. The second argument seeks to ground responsibilities in the fact that the affluent are contributing to such poverty. The authors criticise many of the claims advanced by those who seek to ground stringent responsibilities to the poor by invoking these two types of arguments. It does not follow from this that the affluent are meeting responsibilities to the poor. The book argues that while people are not ordinarily required to make large sacrifices in assisting others in severe need, they are required to incur moderate costs to do so. If the affluent fail consistently to meet standards, this fact can substantially increase the costs they are required to bear in order to address it.