Justice across Boundaries Whose Obligations?

Who ought to do what, and for whom, if global justice is to progress? In this collection of essays on justice beyond borders, Onora O'Neill criticises theoretical approaches that concentrate on rights, yet ignore both the obligations that must be met to realise those rights, and the capacities needed by those who shoulder these obligations. She notes that states are profoundly anti-cosmopolitan institutions, and that even those committed to justice and universal rights often lack the competence and the will to secure them, let alone to secure them beyond their borders. She argues for a wider conception of global justice, in which obligations may be held either by states or by competent non-state actors, and in which borders themselves must meet standards of justice. This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to a broad array of academic researchers and advanced students of political philosophy, political theory, international relations and philosophy of law.

Introduction; Part I. Hunger across Boundaries: 1. Lifeboat Earth; 2. Rights, obligations and world hunger; 3. Rights to compensation; Part II. Justifications across Boundaries: 4. Justice and boundaries; 5. Ethical reasoning and ideological pluralism; 6. Bounded and cosmopolitan justice; 7. Pluralism, positivism and the justification of human rights; Part III. Action across Boundaries: 8. From Edmund Burke to twenty-first-century human rights: abstraction, circumstances and globalisation; 9. From statist to global conceptions of justice; 10. Global justice: whose obligations?; 11. Agents of justice; 12. The dark side of human rights; Part IV. Health across Boundaries: 13. Public health or clinical ethics: thinking beyond borders; 14. Broadening bioethics: clinical ethics, public health and global health; Index.

Onora O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a former Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. She sits as a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords and is Emeritus Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on Kant's philosophy and her most recent publications include Acting on Principle, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2013).