Gillian Brock

Do any needs defensibly make claims on anyone? If so, which needs and whose needs can defensibly do this? What are the grounds for our responsibilities to meet others' needs, when we have such responsibilities? The distinguished contributors to this volume consider these questions as they evaluate the moral force of needs. They approach questions of obligation and moral importance from a variety of different theoretical perspectives, including contractarian, Kantian, Aristotelian, rights-based, egalitarian, liberal, and libertarian perspectives

In his recent review essay, Stan van Hooft raises some interesting potential challenges for cosmopolitan global justice projects, of which my version is one example.1 I am grateful to van Hooft for doing so. I hope by responding to these challenges here, others concerned with developing frameworks for analyzing issues of global justice will also learn something of value. I start by giving a very brief synopsis of key themes of my book, Global Justice,2 so I can address van Hooft’s concerns about the structure of the book. I then outline the normative thought experiment that yields the global justice framework I endorse, in order to address five main concerns van Hooft has with it. These center around problems he foresees about what it would be reasonable to agree to in the face of quite different worldviews. There are five specific concerns he identifies related to reasonableness and I address these in the third and fourth sections of this paper. (Published: 26 May 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2010, pp. 155-170. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i2.5175

In recent years, a number of important challenges have been raised about whether arguments for granting group rights in virtue of ethnicity can really stand up to scrutiny. Two of the most pressing issues involve whether granting rights to groups in virtue of ethnicity involves a certain unfairness to non-members and whether granting such rights licenses unfairness to members . If arguments for indigenous rights are to succeed, they must address these challenges and show how there is no important unfairness to non-members or members.Several arguments for indigenous rights are discussed, to show how they fall prey to one or both of the unfairness objections. The article goes on to offer an argument as to how proponents of indigenous rights might respond to claims that such rights discriminate obnoxiously between groups. This approach can accommodate the force of indigenous peoples’ claims and so grant certain kinds of groups rights, without at the same time licensing the group's oppression of its more vulnerable members. Moreover, since the argument appeals to considerations typically thought persuasive in liberal theory, it should be attractive to liberals

In this paper I argue for there being some deep connections between claims of desert and claims of need, despite the fact that these sorts of claims are frequently pitted against one another. I present an argument to show some conceptual links between desert and needs. Principles underlying why people are thought to be deserving entail principles which commit us to caring about others' needs. I also examine whether we can construct some coherent notion of desert and an argument for why some can have goods on the basis of desert. Here again we find we are committed to a principle which entails that needs must be adequately accommodated if we care about desert.

How are we to navigate between duties to compatriots and duties to non-compatriots? Within the literature there are two important kinds of accounts that are thought to offer contrasting positions on these issues, namely, cosmopolitanism and statism. We discuss these two rival accounts. I then outline my position on global justice and how to accommodate insights from both the cosmopolitan and statist traditions within it. Having outlined my ideal theory account of what global justice requires, I discuss the far more pressing question of what our remedial responsibilities are in our decidely non-ideal world: what does the developed world owe to the developing world and what are our responsibilities to non-compatriots, given our situation here and now? I argue that we have considerable responsibilities and I sketch some of the supporting grounds for this view. Finally, I consider how the general account of global justice and remedial responsibilities developed here applies to the case of responsibilities for migrants’ and refugees’ healthcare