Global justice: whose obligations?
In Deen K Chatterjee (ed.) The ethics of assistance: morality and the distant needy, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 242–259
Abstract
Discussions of global economic justice often focus on rights that matter for the poor. These rights are not taken seriously unless matched by obligations that are feasible for those who are to discharge them. It is not enough to assume that states or ’the international community’ can secure rights if they lack the power to do so. Since abstract cosmopolitanism and statist accounts of obligations to the poor are both insufficiently realistic, it is important to take account of a greater range of possible agents of justice.
