POL3129

GLOBAL
JUSTICE

Week 1 –
Introduction

Dr Johannes Kniess
 Overview

• What is our topic?

• What kinds of questions will we
examine?
• Scepticism about moral
Structure reasoning

• History of the global justice

debate
• Overview of the weeks
Facts about our
world
• 9.2% of the world, or 689 million people, live
in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 a day
(World Bank)
• The world’s richest 1% have more than twice
as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Oxfam)
• 70.8 million people are forcibly displaced
worldwide as a result of persecution,
conflict, violence, or human rights violations
(UNHCR)
 Global Justice as
International Law
What the
module isn’t Global Justice as activism
about:
Global Justice as empirical
study of
poverty/inequality
 Global Justice as political philosophy

• What obligations do people have? What rights?

• Normative reasoning

• Goals of the module

• Understand philosophical and moral
challenges
• Examine theoretical responses to those
challenges
• Learn to methods to evaluate these
responses
 Moral
scepticism
• 3 forms of scepticism
• Isn’t morality subjective?
• Isn’t morality culturally
relative?
• Aren’t moral arguments
pointless in international
relations?
(Realism/Hobbes)
The limits of radical moral scepticism
• International affairs isn’t
exactly anarchy in Hobbes’
sense
• Cultural relativism need not
apply to all values… and it
may be self-defeating
• Disagreement in itself is not
proof of subjectivity
Assessing normative arguments

• There are more or less good 1. Heroin is a drug.

arguments: 2. Selling heroin is illegal.
3. Therefore, heroin use is
immoral
• Logical validity
• Soundness
1. All Newcastle students are
born in Wolverhampton.
2. You are a Newcastle student.
3. Therefore, you were born in
Wolverhampton.
What is Justice?
What is Global Justice?
Rawls’s Theory (1971)

• What rules would people agree on if they

did not know their position in society?
Outline of the topics (1)

Week 2 Human Rights

Week 3 Global Poverty

Week 4 Inequality and Cosmopolitanism

Week 5 Statism and Nationalism

Week 6 Historic Injustice and Colonialism

 Outline of the topics (2)

Week 7 Essay Workshop

Week 8 International trade
Week 9 Ethics of Migration
Week 10 Climate Justice
Week 11 TBC