Explore the contemporary debates and controversies around global justice, including topics like human rights, national and cultural boundaries, distributive justice, global inequality and poverty, environmental devastation, and violence against women and children.
How do we define, understand, and uphold principles of justice in the global political environment? Some argue we cannot achieve global justice in a world that is increasingly chaotic and diverse. Others say that, by its very nature, justice demands a global context and uniform scope of applicability.
In this course, we review political philosophy, international and global relations, history, practical reasoning, the tensions between universalism and relativism, and the challenge of creating and maintaining just or fair societies in a global context.
Can global society be just and fair? Should individuals and states desire convergence on a set of abstract principles or consequent norms? Furthermore, does this type of global convergence (whether required, coerced, or encouraged) necessarily occur at the expense of particular cultures, traditions, and identities?
Justice is fundamentally about human rights. We begin this course by reviewing political theories of global justice, followed by an exploration of contemporary global dynamics in applied and distributive justice. In Units 4–7, we study gender and sexuality issues, race and ethnicity, genocide, self-determination, environmental concerns, class, and participatory rights within the context of global justice.
- Unit 1: A Human Rights Context for Global Justice
- Unit 2: Origins of the Contemporary Justice and Rights Discourse
- Unit 3: Political Theory and Global Justice
- Unit 4: Empowerment, Agency, and Global Justice: Revisiting the Universal-Relative Debate
- Unit 5: Resolving Conflicting Claims for Justice: Revisiting the Individual-Collective Debate
- Unit 6: Participation, Rights, Needs, and Global Justice: Revisiting Civil, Political and Economic, Social, Cultural Rights Debate
- Unit 7: Final Considerations: Are Global and Justice Compatible in Theory and Practice?
- Discuss the significance of a human rights context for exploring global justice including key conceptual, international historical developments, and western versus non-western perspectives of human rights;
- Compare and contrast competing notions of justice grounded in the debate between natural order and utilitarian conceptualizations;
- Compare and contrast nationalist and cosmopolitan political perspectives, and explain how different conceptions of the self and corresponding theories of justice relate to each perspective;
- Identify different conceptions of global distributive justice and articulate arguments made in support of and against these conceptions;
- Analyze western and non-western perspectives as well as their related conceptual underpinnings of human rights and associated notions of theoretical and applied justice; and
- Reconsider theoretical material in light of specific global realities pertaining to political agency, conflicting pursuits of justice, and the needs versus rights discourse.