Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:20:21.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Local Priorities, Universal Priorities, and Enabling Harm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2012

Christian Barry
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“National communities,” Michael Ignatieff writes in his thoughtful essay on the prospects for a global ethic, “have some good reasons, as well as some not so good ones, to privilege local ahead of universal priorities and interests.” And he goes on to explain the clash of local and universal priorities as rooted in a conflict between the values of “justice and democracy.” I would rather suggest that the conflict is an internal one—a conflict inherent in our thinking about what justice requires. But in any case, he is surely right that providing a compelling account of how to distinguish good from bad reasons for privileging local priorities, and identifying how weighty the good reasons for local priorities are, is fundamental to developing a plausible global ethic.

Type
Symposium: In Search of a Global Ethic
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 21 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 See Michael Ignatieff, “Reimagining a Global Ethic,” in this issue.

2 See Singer, Peter, The Life You Can Save (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009), p. 19Google Scholar; and Unger, Peter, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Singer, Peter, One World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

4 See Goodin, Robert, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?” Ethics 98 (1988), pp. 663–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

6 See Williams, Bernard, “Persons, Character, and Morality,” reprinted in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See Wolf, Susan, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), pp. 419–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Scheffler, Samuel, Boundaries and Allegiances (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 36.Google Scholar

9 See Thomas Pogge, “Bounds of Nationalism,” reprinted as chapter 5 in Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).Google Scholar

10 Barry, Christian and Øverland, Gerhard, “The Feasible Alternatives Thesis: Kicking Away the Livelihoods of the Global Poor,” Philosophy, Politics and Economics (May 10, 2011); doi:10.1177/1470594X10387273.Google Scholar

11 Kristof, Nicholas D., “Farm Subsidies That Kill,” New York Times, July 5, 2002.Google Scholar

12 See Rickless, Samuel C., “The Moral Status of Enabling Harm,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2011), pp. 66–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hanser, Matthew, “Killing, Letting Die and Preventing People from Being Saved,” Utilitas 11 (1998), pp. 277–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar