A cosmopolitan right of necessity

Abstract

Confronted with the high toll of human lives that global poverty takes today, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, a growing number of contemporary moral theorists and political philosophers have posed the question of what moral duties wealthy countries and individuals owe to the poor. Their answers could be divided in two main camps. Justice cosmopolitans, on one hand, emphasize the importance of building just institutions at the global level that stop harming the worse-off. On the other hand, assistance cosmopolitans emphasize the importance of aiding the needy, regardless of any past or present responsibilities that the wealthy may have toward them. In this thesis I focus on what the needy may do for themselves in order to get out of their plight. I believe this is a necessary complement to the perspective where the materially privileged seem also to be the morally anointed to address the plight of the needy. My claim is that, given certain conditions - i.e. the agent is morally innocent, the resources are accessible, the owner is not equally (or nearly as) needy in the same relevant respect, and it is a last resort - an agent in need has a right to take and use any resources needed to survive. This right has the form of a claim over those resources; that is, a right which is correlated with a duty on their owner to give them away or to let them be taken and used by the needy - if the owner is present and aware of the relevant circumstances. If he is absent, meanwhile, the agent may take and use those resources, assuming that - had the owner been present - he would have recognized her right. Moreover, this right is morally enforceable, by which I mean that the agent may take and use the resources needed by actual force if the owner fails to comply with his correlative duty, even if this goes against the established laws and social mores. I develop the normative framework of this cosmopolitan right of necessity and its correlative duty of humanity (as I call them in continuity with a long-standing philosophical tradition), based on the accounts of Samuel Pufendorf and Francis Hutcheson. Because they give different justifications for this moral relation (the former, contractarian-based; the latter, utilitarian), my aim is to persuade readers of both leanings that it is not contradictory, but follows from the very principles of these theories to accept the existence of such a duty and right. I then refer to the implications of accepting this principle as part of a cosmopolitan morality, and present some contemporary scenarios where it may be applied. -- provided by Candidate. Show more