Christine Koggel

Moral Issues in Global Perspective seeks to challenge standard approaches to morality and moral issues shaped by Western liberal theory and to extend the inquiry beyond the context of North America. It includes critiques of traditional liberal accounts of rights, justice, and moral values that raise questions about the treatment of disadvantaged groups within liberal societies as well as in other societies and across societies. It covers a broader range of issues and arguments than most textbooks on practical ethics. It incorporates work by race, class, feminist, and disability theorists that provides new perspectives on issues such as reproduction, euthanasia, censorship, and the environment. The collection places moral issues in a global context by providing selections by moral and political theorists from many different parts of the world.

I begin by discussing forms of cosmopolitanism that motivate challenges to distributive accounts of global justice. I then use Sen's version of the capabilities approach to show how distributive accounts fall short, why an overarching theory of justice is not needed, and that democracy understood as the exercise of public reasoning can do the work of identifying and addressing injustices. That said in favor of Sen, I argue that his account fails to attend to the kinds of injustices emerging from relationships of power and the institutions and structures in which these relationships are embedded. To show this, I outline features of a feminist relational approach, which I then apply to Canada's attempt to address historic harms through the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While I agree with Sen that we do not need a theory of global justice that is universal, ideal, impartial, or abstracted from context, I aim to broaden the scope of justice beyond both distributive accounts and Sen's version of the capabilities approach

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context.