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.

Oppression can be unjust from a luck egalitarian point of view even when it is the consequence of choices for which it is reasonable to hold persons responsible. This is for two reasons. First, people who have not been oppressed are unlikely to anticipate the ways in which their choices may lead them into oppressive conditions. Facts about systematic phenomena (like oppression) are often beyond the epistemic reach of persons who are not currently subject to such conditions, even when they possess adequate information about the particular consequences of their choices. Second, people may be (much) less responsible for remaining in oppressive conditions, even if they are responsible for entering circumstances of oppression. Oppression that results from a person’s choice may cause or contribute to dramatic changes in that person, and these changes may be sufficient to undermine the person’s responsibility for the results of her earlier choice.

Leaders of the world’s largest food sovereignty movement, La Vía Campesina, have argued that gender justice is a core component of food justice. On their view, food justice requires an end to violence against women and a guarantee of women’s equal social and political status. However, some have wondered what gender justice has to do with food. In particular, they have worried that La Vía Campesina’s embrace of radical gender egalitarianism cannot be grounded in food-related concerns. My goal in this paper is to respond to these objections, and to show that La Vía Campesina’s efforts to promote gender justice may be grounded in its broader food justice goals.

Many want to justify the continued existence of the human species or the absolutism of human rights. In his recent book, George Kateb argues that moral values (which, in his view, focus primarily upon suffering) are insufficient for these tasks. Morality condemns humanity for its history of needless death and destruction; morality tolerates violations of human rights. Kateb claims that human dignity (which he characterizes as an existential value) must do some of the heavy lifting required to defend the continuation of the species and the absolutism of human rights. In his view, the idea of humanity dignity results from reflection upon the uniqueness of humanity. The core content of human dignity is that “on earth, humanity is the greatest type of beings…[and] every member deserves to be treated in a manner consonant with the high worth of the species” (pp. 3-4). Human dignity consists both of the superior stature of the species and the equal status of each individual human being. A commitment to the superior stature of the species bolsters the justification of the species. While humanity may have condemned itself from a moral point of view, it may be justified by its great achievements and by its capacity to serve nature. A commitment to the equal status of all individuals bolsters the case for human rights by protecting against rights violations that may achieve a greater moral good.

Techniques from behavioral economics—nudges—may help physicians increase pediatric vaccine compliance, but critics have objected that nudges can undermine autonomy. Since autonomy is a centrally important value in healthcare decision-making contexts, it counts against pediatric vaccination nudges if they undermine parental autonomy. Advocates for healthcare nudges have resisted the charge that nudges undermine autonomy, and the recent bioethics literature illustrates the current intractability of this debate. This article rejects a principle to which parties on both sides of this debate sometimes seem committed: that nudges are morally permissible only if they are consistent with autonomy. Instead, I argue that, at least in the case of pediatric vaccination, some autonomy-undermining nudges may be morally justified. This is because parental autonomy in pediatric decision-making is not as morally valuable as the autonomy of adult patients, and because the interests of both the vaccinated child and other members of the community can sometimes be weighty enough to justify autonomy-infringing pediatric vaccination nudges. This article concludes with a set of worries about the effect of pediatric vaccination nudges on parent-physician relationships, and it calls on the American Academy of Pediatrics to draw on scientific and bioethics research to develop guidelines for the use of nudges in pediatric practice and, in particular, for the use of pediatric vaccination nudges.

Many advocate practices of ‘local food’ or ‘locavorism’ as a partial solution to the injustices and unsustainability of contemporary food systems. I think that there is much to be said in favor of local food movements, but these virtues are insufficient to immunize locavorism from criticism. In particular, three duties of international ethics—beneficence, repair and fairness—may provide reasons for constraining the developed world’s permissible pursuit of local food. A complete account of why (and how) the fulfillment of these duties constrains locavorism will require extensive empirical evidence about the relationship between agricultural demand-led industrialization, international trade (rules), and local food practices. In this paper I can only gesture at some of this evidence and, for that reason, my policy prescriptions are merely provisional. Instead, the upshot of this paper is that advocates of locavorism ought to be attentive to the empirical-dependence of the moral permissibility of their projects. As local food ‘scales up’—and comes to be embraced as a goal of political communities—these concerns should receive even greater attention