On Thursday 11th August the Macquarie Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE)
is hosting a public lecture by Thomas Pogge (Yale University) on Human rights as constraints on global institutional arrangements Place: Y3A Theatre One Time: 6 to 8 pm. Everyone is welcome -- entry is free Severe poverty and a massive disease burdens are human rights violations when they are the foreseeable effect of active conduct by human agents and an effect these agents could avoid without undue hardship. By this criterion, the failure of rich countries and their corporations and citizens to assist very poor people abroad does not violate any human rights of the latter because the relevant conduct of the former is merely passive: they fail to help. Yet, the rich countries and their corporations and citizens are violating the human rights of the global poor if and insofar as they do things that, for the sake of minor gains, foreseeably aggravate severe poverty and disease. One thing they do together, and with the help of poor-country rulers and "elites," is design and impose supranational institutional arrangements that -- shaped to benefit the imposers -- are foreseeably much less avoiding of severe poverty and disease than they might be. This claim can be illustrated by reference to the regulation of trade (grandfathering of protectionist barriers), intellectual property, profit-and-loss reporting, banking deposits, environmental harms, labor standards, sovereign borrowing and resource exports, and international trade in arms. In view of the harms such supranational institutional arrangements foreseeably and avoidably inflict on the global poor, their imposition can easily qualify as the largest (though not the gravest) human rights violation in human history. -- Jeanette Kennett Professor of Moral Psychology Cognitive Science CORE Department of Philosophy Macquarie University NSW 2109 _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info 1000 subscribers now served!! To UNSUBSCRIBE, change your MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS, find ANSWERS TO COMMON PROBLEMS, or visit our ONLINE ARCHIVES, please go to the LIST INFORMATION PAGE: http://sydphil.info
