Leif Wenar

The unity of Rawls’s work

This article presents a unifying interpretation of Rawls’s major works. The interpretation emphasizes the parallels in Rawls’s theories of justice and legitimacy for domestic and global institutions.

The Nature of Claim-Rights

This is a new analysis of rights, particularly of the paradigm: the claim-right. The new analysis makes better sense of rights than the leading alternatives do. The new analysis handles all of the well-known counterexamples to the Will and Interest theories; it seems not to generate counterexamples of its own; and it solves many long-standing puzzles in the theory of rights. Moreover, the central concepts of the new theory are as salient and forceful as are rights themselves.

Human rights and equality in the work of David Miller

David Miller’s position on global justice might be summarised as ‘sufficiency not equality’. Justice may require rich individuals to help poor foreigners, but it does not require equality between rich and poor for its own sake. Miller shares this general stance with many major contemporary figures (Rawls, Nagel, Scanlon, Buchanan, etc.), and shares the same justificatory burdens that this stance carries with it. The general challenge for the ‘sufficiency not equality’ position is to generate an argument that is strong enough to establish the sufficientarian requirements, but whose momentum does not carry the position further into egalitarianism. The philosophical principles that keep Miller’s position stable are not obvious. Indeed, some of the arguments that Miller deploys against global egalitarianism may work to undermine his own sufficientarian position. Deeper explorations will be required to discover whether Miller’s position on global justice will be able to maintain its desired equilibrium.

Clean Trade in Natural Resources

The “resource curse” can strike countries that derive a large portion of their national income from exporting high-value natural resources, such as oil, gas, metals, and gems. Resource-exporting countries are subject to four overlapping curses: they are more prone to authoritarianism, they tend to suffer more corruption, they are at a higher risk for civil wars, and they exhibit greater economic instability.

The Nature of Human Rights

Contrast two conceptions of human rights which, following Beitz, we can call the orthodox and the practical conceptions. The orthodox conception defines human rights as those rights that each human has against every other, at all times, in all places, under all conditions, and simply in virtue of her humanity. This orthodox conception is familiar from the philosophical literature on human rights, and any philosopher will know how to construct an orthodox theory of human rights using the standard tools of a consequentialist or deontological moral theory. The practical conception of human rights is quite different, and is more familiar from international politics than from the philosophical literature. On the practical conception, human rights define a boundary of legitimate political action. Human rights specify the ways in which state officials must and must not act toward their own citizens, where it is understood that violations of these human rights can morally permit and in some cases morally require interference by the international community. This practical conception of human rights is what one finds in the various proclamations and treaties on human rights, such as the Universal Declaration and the Convention against Torture. Here I will explore why it is worthwhile for philosophers to theorize more about human rights understood in this second, practical way, and also say a few words about how such theorizing might be done. Thomas Pogge’s account of human rights will provide the mileposts for the exploration of this topic. To an orthodox theorist, the practical question about human rights will appear misguided. The practical question turns on legitimate action by the officials of modern states, and is especially concerned to find rights whose violation will permit or require outside intervention. Yet why this emphasis on legitimacy, modernity, and intervention? And why, in particular, this obsession with the state? After all states are not the only sort of agency that endangers individuals through violence, coercion, and neglect. Strangers, family members, and multinational corporations also endanger individuals — in fact quite often these other agencies will threaten individuals more than does their state. Why then should we take the actions of state officials as a special topic for normative theory? The answer is that, until recently, the state was to outsiders a moral black box. Until World War II state officials violated, coerced, and neglected those within their territories with almost total impunity, appealing to the Westphalian ideal of state sovereignty to immunize themselves from external criticism and intervention. Before the Second World War there were virtually no commonly accepted standards for justifiable interference into what was called the internal affairs of a state. State officials were almost incorrigible with respect to their treatment of humans within their borders, and this is what distinguished state officials from other actors like family members and corporations. The Second World War showed that the state could not remain a moral black box to outsiders. After the Holocaust it became clear that standards were required for official conduct toward citizens, such that violation of these standards could license or even necessitate an international response. The language that postwar political leaders used to describe these standards was the language of human rights. Human rights were meant to fill the void in the space of moral evaluation and action that was created by the concept of state

Fighting the Resource Curse

The resource curse can strike countries that export high-value natural resources, such as oil, metals and gems. Resource-exporting countries are more prone to authoritarian governance, they are at higher risk of civil wars and they tend to suffer economic dysfunctions such as corruption and slower growth.1 Associations between resources and these pathologies are seen in the list of the ‘Big Five’ African oil exporters: Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan. The recent histories of mineral exporters support the correlations: for example, ‘blood diamonds’ fuelled Sierra Leones decade-long civil war, and the continuing conflict in the metal-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The phenomenon is not solely African: Syria, Yemen and Turkmenistan, for example, are also resource-cursed. Moreover, poor governance in resource-cursed countries can engender follow-on pathologies, such as a propensity to cause environmental damage both domestically (for example, through the destruction of forests) and globally (through increased greenhouse gas emissions). Most research on the resource curse has focused on the exporting countries. Here I focus instead on major importing countries, especially those in the G8. First I survey how the resource curse endangers the core interests of importing states, and how the laws of importing states drive the resource curse. The second half of the article describes a new policy framework for importing states that will improve international trade in resources for both importing and exporting countries.

Rights and What We Owe to Each Other

This article evaluates what Scanlon has written on contractualism from the perspective of the theory of rights. It asks: where are the rights within contractualism? And: where is contractualism within the space of rights? Scanlon’s discussions and omissions show the urgency of aligning contractualism (indeed any normative theory) with an adequate analysis of rights. Topics include what rights are, how to tell who has them, and the importance of thinking about the power to change them.

Shipping Policy to Fight the Resource Curse

Transnational trade rules endow authoritarians and armed groups with unaccountable power in states rich with natural resources. This structural flaw in international trade generates the ‘resource curse’ phenomena that have driven many of the worlds most serious crises since the 1970s. Attempts to curtail this unaccountable power from outside resource†rich states have not been successful, and crises caused by this structural flaw continue to plague the global community. The shipping sector provides a promising location for reforms to fight the resource curse, as it is a sector where extensive, unified and enforceable regulations have long been established.

COERCION IN CROSS-BORDER PROPERTY RIGHTS

A global market exists only because all states have chosen to converge on rules that coordinate property rights. For property rights over natural resources and products made from them, states converge on the rule of effectiveness, or might makes right. Because of effectiveness, consumers making everyday purchases like electronics, cosmetics and gasoline cannot help but support foreign authoritarians and militias. Effectiveness in the international system puts consumers into business with highly coercive actors abroad. States’ choice of effectiveness also leads to their enforcing the injustices of foreign actors within their own borders, with their own justice systems.