Mark Christopher Navin

Among Anglo-American philosophers, contemporary debates about global economic justice have often focused upon John Rawls’s Law of Peoples. While critics and advocates of this work disagree about its merits, there is wide agreement that, if today’s wealthiest societies acted in accordance with Rawls’s Duty of Assistance, there would be far less global poverty. I am skeptical of this claim. On my view, the Duty of Assistance is unlikely to require the kinds and amounts of assistance that would be sufficient to eradicate much global poverty. This is because the DA cannot require societies to rapidly or radically change their ways life, and because the kinds and amounts of assistance that are most likely to eradicate global poverty would cause rapid and radical changes to the ways of life of the societies that undertook them.

I argue that a parental prerogative to sometimes prioritize the interests of one’s children over the interests of others is insufficient to make the parental refusal of routine childhood vaccines morally permissible. This is because the moral permissibility of vaccine refusal follows from such a parental prerogative only if the only (weighty) moral reason in favor of vaccination is that vaccination is a means for promoting the interests of others. However, there are two additional weighty moral reasons in favor of routine vaccination: fairness and concern for the vulnerable. These moral reasons in favor of vaccination are not defeated by a parental prerogative to prioritize the interests of one’s children over the interests of others.

In Globalization and Global Justice, Nicole Hassoun advocates a political philosophy that is deeply-informed by empirical work and a utopianism that is constrained by considerations of real-world feasibility. As Hassoun acknowledges, these features are unusual for philosophical work, and she is right to think that the global justice literature needs to be more focused on practical questions and better-informed by facts about international political economy (15-7). However, it is also a mark of good political philosophy that its arguments succeed and that its analyses move philosophical discussions forward. Unfortunately, Globalization and Global Justice often fails on these points.

In The Idea of Human Rights (hereafter IHR), Charles Beitz advocates a different approach to questions about the nature and aims of human rights. He advances a ‘practical conception’, which turns to the role that human rights play in contemporary political discourse to arrive at answers about the structure and function of human rights. As Beitz says, ‘we take the functional role of human rights in international discourse and practice as basic: it constrains our conception of a human right from the start’ (103). Accordingly, we answer questions about the structure and function of human rights practice (eg, about the relevant participants in the practice or its public discursive role) with a sort of philosophical anthropology. Instead of looking to fundamental moral ideas to discover the nature and aims of human rights discourse, we instead turn to the ‘linguistic commitments one would undertake if one were to participate in good faith in the … practice’ (106). We interpret the relevant international texts, the public political culture of human rights practice, and actions by states, international institutions and non-governmental organisations so as to ‘attend to the practical inferences that would be drawn by competent participants in the practice from what they regard as valid claims of human rights’ (102). From these sources we can construct an interpretation of the nature and purpose of human rights.