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Pogg'es Institutional Cosmopolitanism, Scott Nees

Philosophy Theses

In his landmark work World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge offers a novel approach to understanding the nature and extent of the obligations that citizens of wealthy states owe to their less fortunate counterparts in poor states. Pogge argues that the wealthy have weighty obligations to aid the global poor because the wealthy coercively impose institutions on the poor that leave their human rights, particularly their subsistence rights avoidably unfulfilled. Thus, Pogge claims that the wealthy states' obligations to the poor are ultimately generated by their negative duties, that is, their duties to refrain from harming. In this essay, …

Necessary Fictions: Indigenous Claims And The Humanity Of Rights, Peter Fitzpatrick

Human Rights & Human Welfare

To begin, not propitiously. When checking whether my title ‘Necessary Fictions’ was being used elsewhere, Google revealed that it was going to be used in a future talk, and by me. It transpired mercifully that this use was going to be quite different to the present which suggested the prospect of a new academic genre: same title, different paper; rather than the standard combination of same paper, different title. Fortuitously, that contrast gave me the leitmotiv for this talk – that things ostensibly the same can be different, and that things ostensibly different can be the same.

© Peter Fitzpatrick. …

The Sources Of International Law: Some Philosophical Reflections, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It seems only natural to begin the study of international law with a description of its sources. After all, whether as practitioner or scholar a person cannot begin to ask or answer questions about international law until he or she has some sense of what the law is. This requires in turn a basic grasp of the processes whereby international legal norms and regimes come to exist. Thus students of international law must engage immediately with some of the most basic questions in the philosophy of law: what is law, and what is a legal order or system.

These questions …