Dept Sem: Global Justice

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Many problems in international politics can be understood as disputes about the demands of global justice. For example: do the global rich have a responsibility to redistribute their wealth to the global poor? Should institutions of global governance be designed in such a way as to be made more democratically accountable to the peoples they serve? Do powerful nations have the right to intervene in the affairs of other sovereign states in order to enforce human rights? How should states manage immigration? Do governments have a moral duty to prioritize the needs their own citizens over the needs of outsiders? If so, does this conflict with their generally stated, and often constitutionally entrenched, commitment to equality? This course offers a survey of recent efforts in political theory to grapple with these questions. Throughout, we will also keep in mind the more general dispute between realism and idealism in thinking about international affairs. We will read a number of contemporary political theorists and philosophers who have written about global justice. In the first part of the semester, we will deal mostly with works that are largely theoretical and philosophically sophisticated. In the last portion of the semester, we will analyze three pressing problems of international justice that occur in everyday political life and on which these theoretical resources can be brought to bear: climate change, international military intervention and the ethics of immigration and border control.