Spring Journal Features World Poverty Symposium

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMarch 31, 2005 The Carnegie Council announces the release of the Spring 2005 issue of Ethics & International Affairs. Since the United Nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals five years ago, the sense of urgency concerning global inequality has only continued to rise. In a special symposium in this issue, Thomas Pogge defends the argument of his book, World Poverty and Human Rights, that affluent countries could easily eradicate much of severe poverty in the world and have simply chosen not to do so. Moreover, he writes, poverty is a harm that the affluent have indeed inflicted on the least fortunate through unfair international rules, one that they therefore have very stringent moral obligations to remedy.

Taking issue with Pogge’s claims are Debra Satz, Norbert Anwander, Mathias Risse, Rowan Cruft, and Alan Patten. “When confronted with the dire facts of global poverty, most observers will assert that someone is morally required to provide the resources and to bring about changes in policies or social arrangements that will be necessary to mitigate or eliminate it,” says Paige Arthur, deputy editor of Ethics & International Affairs. “There are sharp disagreements, however, about which agents are responsible for doing so and what the content of their responsibility is. The contributors to this symposium help both to clarify the true nature of these disagreements and present evidence and highly original arguments that help to resolve them.”

Also featured in this issue:

• Seyla Benhabib contributes an article on the complex but positive relationship between international law and domestic politics, taking the case of immigrant claims to citizenship in Germany as an example.
• James Bohman writes about how the capacity to initiate political deliberation constitutes a threshold minimum for democracy both within and among states.

Books reviewed include:

• Torture: A Collection, edited by Sanford Levinson
• Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee
• The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, by Gilles Kepel.

Ethics & International Affairs is the flagship publication of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. Recent issues have explored global economic justice, American empire, preventive war, and the Kyoto Protocol.