Global poverty and responsibility: Identifying the duty-bearers of human rights

Human Rights Review

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 35-52

  Gosselin, Abigail ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249167912     PISSN: 15248879     EISSN: 18746306     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12142-006-1014-7     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Contemporary theories of rights draw upon distinctions made by Wesley Hohfeld (1919) between four meanings of rights: as a bare liberty, a claim, a power, or an immunity. Hohfeld's discussion of rights refers largely to the legal meaning of rights, but it is also relevant to understanding which moral rights are justified and why. A bare liberty or privilege means that a person has no duty not to do something, in other words no one can justifiably refrain her from acting in a certain way. A claim is something that a person holds against others that others must, morally and legally, let her do or have. A power is an ability to change existing legal arrangements, while an immunity protects a person from such legal changes. A claim by person A against person B entails that B has a duty to A, while a privilege by A entails that B and others can have no claim over A. A power of A over B means that B is liable to A, while an immunity of A from B entails that B has a disability regarding A. The opposite of a claim is not having a claim; the opposite of a privilege is having a duty. The opposite of power is disability, while the opposite of immunity is liability.
2. W.N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (New York: Yale University, 1919).
3. Jeremy Waldron, "Introduction," in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 6-7.
4. Carl Wellman, A Theory of Rights: Persons UnderLaws, Institutions, and Morals (Totowa, N J: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 17-60.
5. "United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)," in M.R. Ishay (ed.), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 407-412.
6. "United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)," in M.R. Ishay, The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 424-432.
7. Rodney Peffer, "World Hunger, Moral Theory, and Radical Rawlsianism," International Journal of Politics and Ethics 2(4) (March 2003)
8. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, Second Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 36-37.
9. For a detailed explanation of the relationship between rights and wrongs, and how causation of wrongful harm entails duties of rectification.
10. Jules Coleman, Risks and Wrongs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
11. Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
12. "United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)" in M. R. Ishay (ed.), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 433-440.
13. James W. Nickel, 1996, "A Human Rights Approach to World Hunger," in W. Aiken and H. La-Follette (eds.), World Hunger and Morality: Second Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 175.
14. Alison M. Jaggar, "Challenging Women's Global Inequalities: Some Priorities for Western Philosophers," Philosophical Topics 30(2)(Fall 2002), p. 232 and footnote 6.
15. Peffer, "World Hunger, Moral Theory, and Radical Ralwsianism"; Shue, Basic Rights, pp. 36-37.
16. For a discussion of what "closeness" may mean,
17. Rudiger Bittner, "Morality and World Hunger," in T. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 24-31.
18. It is worth noting that some communitarian objections are parallel to the libertarian objections I focus on here. Although the two political views are not identical and not fully compatible with each other, they both prioritize "special" obligations over impartial, universal ones. For communitarians, these special obligations are partial, based on some notion of "closeness"; for libertarians, special obligations may include partial duties, but also and more crucially those responsibilities that arise on account of entering relationships with particular others such as by voluntary contracts or causation of harm. Because my interest is to address concerns about particularity, not partiality, this paper focuses on libertarian objections, but it is worth noting the overlap with communitarian objections with respect to the cosmopolitan scope of certain duties.
19. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Second Edition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
20. Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
21. Gewirth, Human Rights, p. 2
22. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
23. Wellman, A Theory of Rights, pp. 57-59.
24. Feinberg, Harm to Others, p. 134
25. Marilyn Friedman, "The Practice of Partiality," Ethics 101(4) (July 1991), p. 831.
26. Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 47.
27. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
28. This argument against the existence of "positive" duties applies to any impartial, cosmopolitan conception of duty in which individuals are thought to be the primary duty-bearers, including not only duties that correspond to human rights but also consequentialist duties.
29. Jeremy Waldron, "Welfare and the Images of Charity" in J. Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 225-249.
30. A number of such arguments have been given, but I shall not explain or evaluate them here. See Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice.
31. Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
32. Alan Gewirth, "Starvation and Human Rights," in K.E. Goodpaster and K.M. Sayre (eds.), Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 139-158.
33. James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
34. Shue, Basic Rights; Henry Shue, "Solidarity among Strangers and the Right to Food," in W. Aiken and H. LaFollette (eds.), World Hunger and Morality: Second Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 113-132.
35. Note that philosophers disagree about what constitutes a claim, in other words what is the object that one seeks to secure in making a human rights claim. Common candidates for claims include need, interest, and agency requirements. For need- based accounts.
36. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 166.
37. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights. One interest approach is given by Joel Feinberg in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
38. For accounts of claims as agency requirements.
39. Gewirth; H.L.A. Hart, "Are There Any Absolute Rights?" in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 77-99.
40. J.L. Mackie, "Can There Be a Right-Based Moral Theory?" in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 168-181.
41. Peter A. French, "Types of Collectivities," in P. French (ed.), Individual and Collective Responsibility, Second Edition (Rochester VT: Schenkman Books, 1998), pp. 33-50.
42. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
43. Onora O'Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice, and Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
44. O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, p. 129.
45. O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, p. 135.
46. O'Neill distinguishes between four general kinds of duties. Universal perfect obligations are held by all and owed to all; they are the opposites of liberty or "negative" rights. Universal imperfect obligations are held by all and owed to none; they are obligations to oneself to improve one's character and express one's desired virtues as best as possible through action. Special perfect obligations are held by some and owed to specific others; these are opposites of special rights and are determined by specific transactions and relationships. They can also be distributed universally by appropriate institutions such as governments.
47. Special imperfect obligations are held by some and owed to none; they are involved and expressed in specific relationships, practices, and characters (as in the virtue ethics model of partiality). Perfect obligations map onto impartial "negative" and "positive" rights, while imperfect obligations map onto virtue ethics' partial duties to oneself and others. Special perfect obligations are the duties of assistance that human rights theorists advocate as a response to poverty.
48. O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, pp.147-152.
49. Gewirth "Starvation and Human Rights."
50. Peg Connor, Expression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
51. What counts as rightfully earning one's means is an issue I will not explore here.
52. Although I believe it can be argued that poverty is usually not merely a bad state of affairs, and is actually a wrongful harm or institutional injustice as explained below, this argument is not necessary to show that the understanding of poverty as mere harm is inadequate to demonstrate to the libertarian why agents have responsibilities to address global poverty.
53. Duties of redress are justified according to the causal relationships an agent has to a harmful outcome, when an agent has made a morally relevant causal contribution to harm. Joel Feinberg describes this morally relevant causal connection as a contributory fault condition (CFC). The CFC establishes the liability of an agent that grounds duties to rectify the harm one has caused. Three conditions must be satisfied for a CFC to exist. First, it must be true that a person did the action in question, or at least that she made a substantial causal contribution to it. Second, the causally contributory action must somehow be faulty. Note that there is a distinction between action being faulty and an agent being at fault. Strict liability requires only that the action is faulty; the fault of the agent is irrelevant.
54. Third, there must be a necessary, relevant, and direct causal connection between the faulty action and its consequence (the harm that occurs as a result). If these three conditions can he satisfied, then the relevant causal connection between an agent's action and harm holds, justifying the liability of the agent.
55. Joel Feinberg, "Collective Responsibility," in L. May and S. Hoffman (eds.), Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), p. 53.
56. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Policy and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp.64-65.
57. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 92.
58. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 126.
59. J.L Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 80-82;
60. Rawls, 1971, p. 55.
61. Thomas W. Pogge, 'Human Flourishing and Universal Justice', Social Philosophy and Policy 16:1 (Winter 1999), pp. 337.
62. Thomas W. Pogge, "Three Problems with Contractarian-Consequentialist Ways of Assessing Social Institutions," Social Philosophy and Policy (Summer 1995), p. 241.
63. Andrew Hurrell describes institutions in the following way: "International institutions are made up of two elements: first, clusters of connected norms, principles, and rules (constitutive, transactional, and societal); and, second, clusters of norms organized into stable and ongoing social practices".
64. Andrew Hurrell, "Global Inequality and International Institutions," in T.W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 36.
65. As discussed above, there are many different kinds of harms and injustices, and the institutional injustice that Young and Pogge identify is only one kind. Harm that is caused by faulty action, in which an agent's action makes a morally relevant causal contribution to resulting harm, is a case of wrongful harm, which demands corrective justice to "right the wrong," so to speak. Harm that results from social practices, on the other hand, in which no particular agent's action caused the harm in the morally relevant way, is a case of structural or institutional injustice, demanding a change in institutional practices so that individuals do not receive unjust burdens from their institutions based solely or primarily on their social positioning. If social harm results from faulty (whether intentional or not) action of particular agents, but it is a case of wrongful harm rather than institutional injustice.
66. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 64-65
67. Stefan Gosepath, "The Global Scope of Justice," in T.W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 145-168;
68. Hurrell, "Global Inequality and International Institutions" pp. 32-54;
69. Onora O'Neill, "Agents of Justice" T.W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 188-203.
70. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 46.
71. Michael Green, "Institutional Responsibility for Global Problems," Philosophical Topics 30(2) (Fall 2002), pp. 79-95.
72. Although arguing that collectives can have capacities for agency is beyond the scope of this paper, any notion of collective responsibility assumes that collectives have some relevant agency capacities, such as those suggested above (e.g., decision-making and action-delegating procedures), since responsibility is predicated only of agents.
73. O'Neill, "Agents of Justice?"
74. For elaboration on some of these specific group memberships and roles.
75. Larry May, The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).
76. Larry May, Sharing Responsibility, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
77. Larry May, The Socially Responsible Self: Social Theory and Professional Ethics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
78. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
79. Young, Inclusion and Democracy.