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CIAO DATE: 06/02
Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
Volume 15, No.2, 2001
Many industrialized countries, developing countries, and countries that have recently made the transition from communism to market-oriented economies are characterized by high and increasing income inequality. Trends in income inequality have been understood to have ethical significance for different reasons. Some have argued that lessening income inequality is a valuable goal in itself. This essay, on the other hand, focuses on three instrumental reasons for pursuing economic policies that engender less income inequality, particularly in developing countries.
- Inequality can inhibit growth and slow poverty reduction.
- Inequality often undermines the political process: that may lead to an inadequate social contract and may trigger bad economic policies-with ill effects on growth, human development, and poverty reduction.
- Inequality may undermine civic and social as well as political life, and inhibit certain kinds of collective decision-making; at the societal level it may also generate its own self-justifying tolerance, perpetuating a high inequality equilibrium despite the potential economic and political costs.
The author concludes that while societies with relatively high income inequality can, in principle, be equitable, it is more likely that income differentials will compound and aggravate unfairness in the allocation of opportunities, the functioning of the political process, and efforts to improve the well-being of the least advantaged.
The world is in the early stages of what will be the greatest health crisis in modern times. Millions of people-most of them in the world's poor countries-are infected with HIV. The vast majority of these people will suffer and die from AIDS. The extent of this problem presents profound moral and ethical questions for the world's wealthy people and countries, for it is they who are most able to assist the poor in addressing this tragedy. Nevertheless, developed countries have been very slow in responding to the international dimensions of this problem. They have instead focused on the relatively few people within their own borders at risk for HIV or suffering from AIDS, seemingly unwilling to recognize the greater challenges posed by the global spread of HIV. The rhetoric has started to change, but the developed countries have not backed this rhetoric with the substantial new and additional funds to assist the poor countries in coping with and reversing the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, and they continue to participate in activities that exacerbate the crisis and associated human suffering. This essay examines this moral problem in the context of North-South relations. It serves to highlight the need for much more international assistance from developed countries to help combat HIV and AIDS in the developing world.
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Many political theorists believe that the extension of democratic institutions beyond the nation-state would inevitably be deleterious to the possibility of meaningful citizenship and to the functioning of democratic institutions. It is argued here that many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.
Determining who, or indeed what, is to respond to prescriptions for action in cases of international crisis is a critical endeavor. Without such an allocation of responsibilities, calls to action - whether to protect the environment or to rescue distant strangers - lack specified agents, and, therefore, any meaningful indication of how they might be met. A fundamental step in arriving at this distribution of duties is identifying moral agents in international relations, or, in other words, identifying those bodies that can deliberate and act and thereby respond to ethical guidelines. Often, the most effective and relevant moral agents in international relations are not individuals but institutions. However, it is necessary to qualify any claim that institutions can bear duties in international relations. Not only must they possess capacities for decision-making and purposive action, they must also enjoy the conditions under which specific duties can be discharged. The importance of this latter stipulation can be usefully illustrated by examining the disparate circumstances within which states - those that exercise positive sovereignty and those that are sovereign only in name - are expected to act.
There is no body that has the legal right to exercise agency on behalf of international society (IS), even though the notion of "society" encapsulated in IS is, in principle, close to that conveyed by bodies such as clubs and associations that can be represented by, for example, a board of directors or governing committee. Some have argued that the UN or the Security Council can exercise agency on behalf of IS, but in view of the "underinstitutionalization" of IS in the UN, a more interesting possibility is that groups of states may authorize themselves to act on the behalf of IS as "coalitions of the willing." However, the contrasting experience of the Gulf War of 1990/91 and the Kosovo campaign of 1999 suggest that the degree of ideological coherence of the coalition in question is an important variable here - in 1999, NATO was able with some plausibility to represent the wider international society because of its commitment to certain core democratic values, while in 1991 the Gulf War coalition could only act conservatively in restoring the status quo because of its diverse nature.
This essay examines the impact of activist mobilization within the anti-sweatshop movement on shared understandings of corporate moral agency. The anti-sweatshop movement represents a transnational advocacy network, which arose in response to the global restructuring of the apparel industry and is organizing to demand that apparel manufacturers be accountable to communities, workers, and consumers. The movement has been central in contesting received notions of corporate rights and responsibilities and in reconstituting the boundaries of the corporate moral agent. Underpinning this investigation is a discussion of the ascription of moral agency to collective actors. With the aid of a relational approach, it is argued that corporate moral agency is a construct emerging out of social historical interactions that reflect processes through which the boundaries of actors are drawn and justified. Through the use of rhetoric linking private economic transactions and international labor and human rights standards, the movement has successfully challenged corporate practices that were previously considered unremarkable.
This essay examines the pragmatic and ethical implications of traditional, "place-based" environmentalism for the issue of global climate change. Although American environmentalism has had considerable success in addressing threats to particular places and resources, this well-organized and enormously popular social movement has not resulted in effective action on the problem of global warming. This failure is especially striking given the possibility that climate change will seriously degrade the places that local environmentalists work so hard to protect. Drawing on both the history of environmentalism and a contemporary case study in the northeastern United States, I argue that a partial explanation lies in the internal contradictions of environmentalism itself. Of particular importance is its privileging of a supposedly pristine, non-human nature, which draws attention away from the more subtle material implications of routine behavior?in this case, the burning of fossil fuels and emission of greenhouse gases. Also crucial is reliance on scientific prediction and technical management of ecosystems and natural resources, which suggests that solutions to global warming lie not in fundamental economic or behavioral changes, but in more efficient management of resources. By failing to re-examine these socially constructed assumptions and the ways in which they reinforce continued economic expansion and resource exploitation, traditional environmentalism can actually inhibit the sort of far-reaching reforms that may be needed to solve the problem of climate change. The essay explores the ethical implications of this situation, which are especially profound given the highly disproportionate contribution of the U.S. and other developed countries to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the higher vulnerability to climate change of many poorer countries. It concludes with suggestions for alternative models of political action.