Speaker addresses the idea of global justice and the obligations of affluent countries

By Ryan McGeeney

Friday, December 5, 2008

What, as people, do we owe one another?

Specifically, what do we as Americans, along with other relatively affluent countries, owe to the people of less-fortunate countries?

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Photo by Ryan McGeeney

Richard Arneson, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, shares his thoughts on philosopher T.H. Green with graduate students in Wescoe Hall on Thursday afternoon. Arneson will speak at 4 p.m. today in Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. His lecture entitled "What Does a Liberal Society Owe the Disadvantaged?"

These are the root questions Richard Arneson will be addressing at 4 p.m. today in his lecture titled “What Does a Liberal Society Owe the Disadvantaged?”

Arneson, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, will be speaking as part of the Hall Center Lecture Series.

“The position I want to hold, with respect to global justice duties, is brutally simple,” Arneson said. “Roughly, it’s ‘justice as beneficence.’”

According to Arneson, one of the fundamental philosophical problems facing the world is the reticence of nations to apply the same sense of responsibility they feel for their own citizens to citizens suffering in other countries.

“There’s almost a philosophical consensus, a strong movement among people who work on these issues nowadays regarding strong duties of distributive justice that doesn’t hold across national borders,” Arneson said. “I want to knock down those views.”

Arneson said that the argument he will put forth will propose a simple cosmopolitanism (the idea that all of humanity shares a common moral responsibility to one another) that operates on dependent factors such as individual capabilities, the consequences of individual sacrifice and the possible benefit of actual contributions.

“Beneficence here doesn’t just mean a helping hand; it may mean changing institutions or interacting with people in various ways,” Arneson said. “But the basic idea is, ‘What produces the best outcome?’ and ‘What is the best outcome for people?’”

Arneson said that this philosophy shouldn’t necessarily be construed as anti-capitalist, but rather an ethical guideline for decision-making.

“I’ve got no puritanical hostility to consumer expenditure,” Arneson said. “In principle, there can be expensive goods that make possible great activities. I have nothing against shopping at Neiman Marcus or Saks 5th Avenue — I would love a world where everybody could do that. It’s not that I hate fancy mink coats, or that it’s not good that people have them. It’s that the money could be better spent on stuff that people need a lot more elsewhere. It’s a comparative question: Where are resources going to do the most good?”

Arneson will speak in the Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The event is free and open to the public.

— — Edited by Kelsey Hayes

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