CIAO DATE: 07/06

Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

2005, Vol 19, No. 1

SYMPOSIUM: World Poverty and Human Rights

 

• World Poverty and Human Rights by Thomas Pogge Full Text  (PDF, 3.61 MB, 7 pages)

  Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. The annual death toll from poverty-related causes is around 18 million, or one-third of all human deaths, which adds up to approximately 270 million deaths since the end of the Cold War.

  This problem is hardly unsolvable, in spite of its magnitude. Though constituting 44 percent of the world’s population, the 2,735 million people the World Bank counts as living below its more generous $2 per day international poverty line consume only 1.3 percent of the global product, and would need just 1 percent more to escape poverty so defined. The high-income countries, with 955 million citizens, by contrast, have about 81 percent of the global product. With our average per capita income nearly 180 times greater than that of the poor (at market exchange rates), we could eradicate severe poverty worldwide if we chose to tryin fact, we could have eradicated it decades ago.

• Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification? by Mathias Risse

• Should We Stop Thinking About Poverty in Terms of Helping the Poor? by Alan Patten

• Human Rights and Positive Duties by Rowan Cruft

• Contributing and Benefiting: Two Grounds for Duties to the Victims of Injustice by Norbert Anwander

• What Do We Owe the Global Poor? by Debra Satz

• Severe Poverty as a Violation of Negative Duties by Thomas Pogge

Articles

• On the Alleged Conflict between Democracy and International Law by Seyla Benhabib  (PDF, 284 KB, 17 pages)

  The period since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has witnessed the rise of an international human rights regime. There has been a shift in international law from state-based treaty obligations to cosmopolitan norms whose subject is individuals and their rights and entitlements under international law. Along with the rise of cosmopolitan norms, conflicts between enactments by states, often through democratic legislatures, of laws and practices that may contradict these norms, has also intensified.

  The article focuses on one such set of cosmopolitan norms concerning the crossborder rights of immigrants within the context of the European Union. By examining a German Constitutional Court Case which denied long-term resident aliens voting privileges in local and district-wide elections, it illuminates the “paradox of democratic legitimacy.” The rights of foreigners and aliens are an intrinsic aspect of the self-understanding of a democratic people. The demos can alter the boundaries differentiating it from nonmembers. The line between citizenship and alienage can be renegotiated through processes of democratic iterations. Cosmopolitan norms can become guidelines informing the will and opinion formation of democratic peoples.

• The Democratic Minimum: Is Democracy a Means to Global Justice? by James Bohman

  I argue that transnational democracy provides the basis for a solution to the problem of the "democratic circle"that in order for democracy to promote justice, it must already be justat the international level. Transnational democracy could be a means to global justice. First, I briefly recount my argument for the "democratic minimum." This minimum is freedom from domination, understood in a very specific sense. Employing Hannah Arendt’s conception of freedom as "the capacity to begin," the form of nondomination sufficient for the democratic minimum is the capability to initiate deliberation and thus democratic decision-making processes. My point in developing this argument further concerns the political form of a transnational polity: its citizens enjoy the democratic minimum as members of various demoi. In the case of the European Union, this leads to a potential for democratic domination. I call this the demoi problem, a difficulty that holds for any multilevel polity, for bounded as well as transnational political communities. Second, I argue that such domination is overcome so long as the capacity to initiate deliberation is distributed among various units and various levels. The democratic minimum could fail to obtain not only because individuals or groups are dominated by nondemocratic means, but also because they are dominated democratically to the extent that the demos of one unit lacks the normative power to initiate deliberation and thus is subordinated to others.

Recent Books on Ethics and International Affairs

• Torture: A Collection, Sanford Levinson, ed. by REVIEWED BY DAVID L. PERRY

• Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee, eds. by REVIEWED BY FRANCES V. HARBOUR

• Green Giants? Environmental Policies of the United States and the European Union, Norman J. Vig and Michael G. Faure, eds. by REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH R. DESOMBRE

• The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization, Ariel C. Armony by REVIEWED BY WILLIAM T. BARNDT

• Ethnicity Without Groups, Rogers Brubaker by REVIEWED BY BILL KISSANE

• The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, Gilles Kepel, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh by REVIEWED BY CAROLYN M. WARNER