Responsibility And Justice

Download or read book Responsibility and Justice written by Matt Matravers and published by Polity. This book was released on 2007-03-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively and accessible book, Matt Matravers considers the role of responsibility in politics, morality and the law. In recent years, responsibility has taken a central place in our lives. In politics, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush have claimed that individual responsibility is at the centre of their policy agendas. In morality and the law, it seems just that people should be rewarded or punished only for things for which they are responsible. Yet responsibility is a hotly contested concept. Some philosophers claim that it is impossible, while others insist on both its possibility and importance. This debate has become increasingly technical in the philosophical literature, but it is seldom connected to our practices of politics and the law. Matravers asks, What are we doing when we hold people responsible in deciding questions of distributive justice or of punishment?. By addressing this question, he not only shows how philosophy can help in thinking about current political and legal controversies, but also how we can keep hold of the idea of responsibility in an age in which we are increasingly impressed by the roles of genetics and environment in shaping us and our characters.

Download or read book Responsibility for Justice written by Iris Marion Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. Young argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which she calls the "social connection" model. She develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live. With a foreward by Martha C. Nussbaum, this last statement by a revered and highly influential thinker will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers, ethicists, and feminist and political philosophers.

Download or read book Responsibility and Distributive Justice written by Carl Knight and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents new essays investigating a difficult theoretical and practical problem: how do we find a place for individual responsibility in a theory of distributive justice? Does what we choose affect what we deserve? Would making justice sensitive to responsibility give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality?

Download or read book National Responsibility and Global Justice written by David Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-22 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steering a middle course between cosmopolitanism and a narrow nationalism, the book develops an original theory of global justice that also addresses controversial topics such as immigration and reparations for historic wrongdoing.

Download or read book Global Justice, Kant and the Responsibility to Protect written by Heather Roff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative contribution to the study of the Responsibility to Protect and Kantian political theory. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine has been heralded as the new international security norm to ensure the protection of peoples against genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet, for all of the discussion, endorsements and reaffirmations of this new norm, R2P continues to come under fire for its failures, particularly, and most recently, in the case of Syria. This book argues that a duty to protect is best considered a Kantian provisional duty of justice. The international system ought to be considered a state of nature, where legal institutions are either weak or absent, and so duties of justice in such a condition cannot be considered peremptory. This book suggests that by understanding the duty’s provisional status, we understand the necessity of creating the requisite executive, legislative and judicial authorities. Furthermore, the book provides three innovative contributions to the literature, study and practice of R2P and Kantian political theory: it provides detailed theoretical analysis of R2P; it addresses the research gap that exists with Kant’s account of justice in states of nature; and it presents a more comprehensive understanding of the metaphysics of justice as well as R2P. This book will be of much interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, global ethics, international law, security studies and international relations (IR) in general.

Download or read book Justice, Luck, and Knowledge written by Susan L. Hurley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice.

Download or read book Just Responsibility written by Brooke A. Ackerly and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day, from food insecurity to unsafe labor conditions and natural disasters, are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? In one sense, we answer this question when we buy the local homeless street newspaper, decide where to buy our clothes, remember our reusable bags when we shop, donate to disaster relief, or send letters to corporations about labor rights. But given the global scale of injustices related to poverty, environmental change, gender, and labor, can these individual acts really impact the seemingly intractable global social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate and exacerbate them? Moreover, can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly both answers the question of what should we do, and shows that it's the wrong question to ask. To ask the right question, we need to ground our normative theory of global justice in the lived experience of injustice. Using a feminist critical methodology, she argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice, regardless of our causal responsibility and extent of our knowledge of the injustice. Furthermore, it is a matter that needs to be guided by principles of human rights. As she argues, while many understand human rights as political goals or entitlements, they can also guide political strategy. Her aims are twofold: to present a theory of what it means to take responsibility for injustice and for ensuring human rights, as well as to develop a guide for how to take responsibility in ways that support local and global movements for transformative politics. In order to illustrate her theory and guide for action, Ackerly draws on fieldwork on the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, the food crisis of 2008, and strategies from 125 activist organizations working on women's and labor rights across 26 countries. Just Responsibility integrates these ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.