IAH231b Michigan State Humanitarianism and Human Rights Discussion Please see the exam document. There are five reading materials for you to answerthose ex

IAH231b Michigan State Humanitarianism and Human Rights Discussion Please see the exam document. There are five reading materials for you to answerthose exam questions. Thanks! IAH 231b Moral Issued Arts and Humanities
Unit 1
Introduction to Humanitarianism and Human Rights
Part 1 (30%): In your own words, interpret and explain 4 of 7 of the following
quotations. What is the context of the quote? What points are the authors trying to
make? Answer should be given in a short paragraph (3-7 sentences)—answers should
not exceed that amount, but should be as complete as possible within those limits.
a) “The Rights of Men, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable – even in
countries whose constitutions were based upon them – whenever people appeared
who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this fact, disturbing enough
in itself, one must add the confusion created by many recent attempts to frame a
new bill of human rights, which have demonstrated that no one seems able to
define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from
the rights of citizens, really are.”
~ Hannah Arendt
b) “One reason is that by focusing on needs, we are drawing a distinction between what
is essential to human beings and what is non-essential – between food as such, and
particular delicacies for which different people will have different preferences, for
example. Since human rights are supposed to constitute a kind of moral bedrock –
meeting them is a moral imperative, whereas other claims impose weaker duties, or
none at all – they should be justified by reference to essential features of human life.”
c)
“I have claimed that human rights are best understood and justified through the idea
of basic needs common to all human beings. But not all needs can ground rights
directly. Some needs may be impossible to fulfill at any given historical moment.
Others may be such that it cannot be obligatory to fulfill them – needs for love and
respect, for example.”
~David Miller
d) “If we force ourselves to look, the picture is grim: extraordinary wealth and terrible
poverty, the powerful few and the powerless many, tyrants and warlords and their
desperate victims. These polarities are frightening and, to my mind, obscene. But it is
the people at their farther end whose living conditions and daily dying demand from
us a single, coherent moral and political response.”
~Michael Walzer
e) “Humanitarian aid in international society is not like dropping a coin in a beggar’s
cup. Delivered out of simple good will, without political forethought, it often has
unintended and very harmful consequences like bringing in new groups of predators
who take their cut, and more, of the aid workers’ beneficence. So we are bound to
study the mixed record of success and failure, to argue about the best remedial
policies, and then press the appropriate agents to carry them out. Some of these
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agents will be NGOs, some will be attached to religious communities, some will be
organs of the UN or international agencies like the IMF or the World Bank, but the
most effective agents in what is still a global society of states are the actually existing
states. And that means that our humanitarian efforts require not only political
knowledge but also political action; we have to press for the engagement of state
officials and the expenditure of state funds.”
~Michael Walzer
f) “We may conclude from this that the pity you express for someone always contains
an element of injustice towards that person; he experiences not just our pity but also
the impotence and the specious character of the compassionate act.”
~ Theodor Adorno
g) “We must work to recognize our dependence on those for whom we feel
compassion. This recognition brings them even closer. It requires sustained attention
to see others through less self-centered lenses. We must work at recognizing their
enormous impact on our well-being. When we resist indulging in a self-centered view
of the world, we can replace it with a worldview that takes every living being into
account.”
~Dalai Lama
Part 2 (30%): Answer 3 of 5 questions from the following list. The questions are to be
answered in a short paragraph (3-7 sentences)—answers should not exceed that
amount, but should be as complete as possible within those limits.
a) Define concept of “global minimum” as introduced in Miller’s article!
b) Name and explain the differences between negative and positive duties/rights regarding
human rights?
c) Explain the concept of humanitarianism, and identify dangers that M. Walzer has
identified in regard to this phenomenon?
d) Explain Arendt’s concept of “stateless people”! What does it refer to and what kind of
challenges does it place on human rights framework?
e) What are Adorno’s major criticisms aimed at compassion?
Part 3 (40%): Answer 2 of the 3 following questions in essay form. Develop your
answer as much as your knowledge permits (500 – 750 words).
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a) In the readings and lectures for UNIT 1 we see different approached to ground human
rights and define range of duties that these norms set on people and governments. After
revisiting historical development and main theoretical aspects of these rights please explain
main challenge that are tied with human rights discourse! Do you think concerns that I have
raised in lecture are justified? If yes, why? What do you think has changed (or didn’t) in past
50 years since UNHRD has been written?
b) Ethics of compassion is one of the most debated understandings of morals today. We
have encountered two views which have somewhat different understanding of compassion’s
value for our ethical agency – Dalai Lama and Theodor Adorno. Explain each of the two
positions, contrast them and give your own insights about value of compassion today for
humanitarianism and global justice.
c) In her book ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ Hannah Arendt talks about ‘rights of men’. After
revisiting historical development of these rights please explain main challenge that Arendt
ties with human rights discourse! Do you think her concern is justified? If yes, why? What do
you think has changed (or didn’t) in past 50 years since she wrote this piece?
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THE JOSEPH AND GWENDOLYN STRAUS INSTITUTE
FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF LAW & JUSTICE
Professor J.H.H. Weiler
Director of The Straus Institute
Straus Working Paper 08/11
Michael Walzer
Global and Local Justice
NYU School of Law  New York, NY 10011
The Straus Institute Working Paper Series can be found at
http://nyustraus.org/index.html
All rights reserved.
No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form
without permission of the author.
ISSN 2160‐8261 (print)
ISSN 2160‐827X (online)
© Michael Walzer 2011
New York University School of Law
New York, NY 10011
USA
Publications in the Series should be cited as:
AUTHOR, TITLE, STRAUS INSTITUTE WORKING PAPER NO./YEAR [URL]
Global and Local Justice
GLOBAL AND LOCAL JUSTICE
By Michael Walzer
I
Global justice would seem to require a global theory—a single philosophically
grounded account of what justice is that explains why it ought to be realized in exactly
this way, everywhere. It requires a comprehensive story about the just society, about
equality, liberty, human rights, moral luck, and much else, a story that need only be
repeated again and again, for it applies in identical fashion to every country in the world
and also to the world as a whole. But there are several practical difficulties with this
project. First, there is no one to whom we can tell the story, who can act authoritatively
in its name. There is no global agent of justice whose legitimacy is widely recognized,
who might take up the story in its true version and pursue the project it describes.
Second, we can’t be sure that the story will be understood in the same way by all
the people who hear it. The story won’t connect with a single common life whose
interests and ideals might make it, first, comprehensible, and then appealing. There isn’t
a common life of that sort or, better, there are many common lives of different sorts. The
diversity of cultures and the plurality of states make it unlikely that a single account of
justice (even if it were the single true account) could ever be persuasive across the globe
or enforceable in everyday practice. A global despot or a philosophical vanguard might
manage the enforcement, but it is hard to see how their rule, even if it served the cause
of justice, could itself be just.
And yet, the vast inequalities of wealth and power in the world today, and the
accompanying poverty, malnutrition, and illness, cry out for a globally applicable
critique. So does the extreme vulnerability of so many people to natural disaster and
political violence. And this necessary critique cannot endorse the idea that cultural
difference makes a difference; it must insist on the simple wrongness of the human
suffering that we currently live with and, mostly, accept. If we force ourselves to look,
the picture is grim: extraordinary wealth and terrible poverty, the powerful few and the
1
powerless many, tyrants and warlords and their desperate victims. These polarities are
frightening and, to my mind, obscene. But it is the people at their farther end whose
living conditions and daily dying demand from us a single, coherent moral and political
response. We don’t actually need to agree on the wrongness of inequality, or on a
complete list of human rights, or on any full-scale theory of distributive justice in order
to defend a global campaign against poverty, hunger, and disease, against mass murder
and ethnic cleansing.
No doubt, each of these human disasters is partly, even significantly, the product
of local causes and agents, but all of them are also the products of an international
economy increasingly marked by the flow of money, labor, and goods across political
and cultural borders and of an international politics increasingly marked by the use of
force and the transfer of military resources across those same borders. From our
perspective, from the perspective of the wealthiest and most powerful countries, global
impact takes precedence over local difference.
So, how should we address the terrible injuries endured by the people at the
wrong end of the global polarities? How should we think about the urgent needs of the
desperately poor and the desperately weak? Let’s agree that we can’t agree on a
comprehensive account of what global justice would require and that there isn’t right
now a globally effective agent who could meet those requirements, even if we did agree
about them—and “right now” is the absolutely necessary temporal rule. What we require
instead is minimalist in character: the recognition of people like ourselves, concern for
their suffering, and a few widely shared moral principles. If these three amount to a
theory, it is, so to speak, a “little” theory, one that is incomplete in much the same way
that global society is incomplete.
This minimalist account of justice-right-now has two aspects, which I will call
humanitarian and political; the two are not entirely distinct, but I will discuss them
separately, in that order. What work would remain to be done if justice-right-now were
ever realized, what kind of justice lies beyond our current urgencies—that requires a
maximalist theory adapted to the realities of cultural and political difference. I will try to
say something later on about those realities and about the pursuit of justice-over-thelong-run.
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Global and Local Justice
II
When we see human beings suffering, we feel a natural empathy with them, and
we want to help. John Rawls claims that there is a natural duty to help people in
trouble—a “duty of mutual aid.” He is right, I think, and this duty must have its root in
fellow-feeling, in the pre-philosophical recognition of the “others” as people like us and
of their troubles as troubles that might be ours. It is this natural empathy that explains
the outpouring of aid after a devastating flood or earthquake. The response comes from
thousands of ordinary men and women acting through voluntary associations and from
political communities acting in the name of their citizens. But it starts from the feelings
of individuals. How can these feelings generate a duty? It must be because one of the
things we feel is that we ought to feel this way: we ought to want to help.
Floods and earthquakes are natural disasters, but we know that their effects are
often aggravated by malevolent or negligent human agents. Similarly, many of the
disasters of social life were once imagined as acts of nature, but these days we look for
direct or indirect human agency. In all these cases, whether the resultant suffering is
naturally caused or man-made, it is right to respond in a humanitarian way. But
whenever human agents are involved, we are also required to follow the causal chain, to
examine the history of malevolence or negligence, and consider the responsibilities of all
the men and women in the chain—including ourselves, if we find ourselves there. And
once we know the names of the agents, natural duty will be transformed into political
obligation.
But let’s begin with the natural duty to relieve human suffering. We don’t do this
very effectively since there is so much suffering; it has so many causes; and there isn’t a
single, coordinated relief effort that we can simply join. Still, in particular cases, we
ought to help as best we can, and these cases extend beyond singular events like floods
and earthquakes, epidemics and massacres. They include general conditions like deep
poverty, homelessness, endemic disease, and ongoing persecution. I will focus mostly on
poverty because it is the poor who suffer the most from every other kind of disaster.
Americans saw this very clearly when hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the city of
New Orleans. It was the poorest residents who lived on the lowest ground, protected by
the least looked-after levees, whose homes suffered the greatest damage. This is, as we
all know, the common story. Disease kills first the weak and malnourished. Earthquake
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and fire are most deadly for those who live in jerry-built houses and tenements. Even a
man-made disaster like ethnic cleansing, where the violence cuts across class lines, will
impact most cruelly on people without the resources that make escape possible. We can
take poverty as the primary condition of human suffering—the first object of our natural
duty to help.
Again, we ought to help for humanitarian reasons and, again, we don’t need the
guidance of a full-scale theory of justice. But we may need other theories, political
theories or, at least, political knowledge, because what ought to be done, concretely,
practically, here and now, is often far from obvious. Humanitarian aid in international
society is not like dropping a coin in a beggar’s cup. Delivered out of simple good will,
without political forethought, it often has unintended and very harmful consequences—
like bringing in new groups of predators who take their cut, and more, of the aid
workers’ beneficence. So we are bound to study the mixed record of success and failure,
to argue about the best remedial policies, and then press the appropriate agents to carry
them out. Some of these agents will be NGOs, some will be attached to religious
communities, some will be organs of the UN or international agencies like the IMF or
the World Bank, but the most effective agents in what is still a global society of states are
the actually existing states. And that means that our humanitarian efforts require not
only political knowledge but also political action; we have to press for the engagement of
state officials and the expenditure of state funds.
Because these are humanitarian efforts, the duty to join them extends to all
humankind. The duty of individuals and associations is relative only to their ability to
help; it is a universal duty, and I think that we experience it that way. The sight of
human suffering, whoever the victims are, brings with it the sense of a duty to respond. I
know that many people don’t, in fact, acknowledge this duty, but it is enough that those
of us who do acknowledge it (and we too are many) don’t act only as individuals but as
members of, and in a way on behalf of, humanity as a whole. So when we give money to
Oxfam, or to Doctors Without Borders, or to Human Rights Watch, or when we ask the
US government to help the victims of a tsunami or to try to stop an ongoing massacre,
we are simply doing what we ought to do, what everyone ought to do. Exactly how much
individual men and women, or their governments, are required to give of their time,
energy, and money, I am not able to say. Philosophical argument doesn’t lend itself to
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Global and Local Justice
that kind of precision. Arguments can certainly be made (about relative urgency, for
example) for doing this rather than that, but we must not expect any detailed theoretical
guidance. It is probably possible, though, and if it’s possible then it is also necessary, to
insist that individuals and governments are not doing enough even if we cannot specify
exactly how much they should be doing. Hence the effectiveness of the argument that
Thomas Pogge has been making in a number of recent books and articles–that it would
take only a very small percentage of the GNP of the wealthiest countries to end global
poverty. If that is true, then there is a strong argument for deploying those resources,
whatever other deployments might be morally required.
Sometimes, in cases of man-made disasters like massacre or ethnic cleansing, the
necessary response requires the use of force. We call this “humanitarian intervention,”
and like other forms of humanitarianism, it is a universal duty: the obligation to stop a
massacre falls on any state or coalition of states capable of acting effectively. Individuals
are not capable in such cases, and NGOs sometimes provide relief for the wounded, as
they did in Bosnia in the 1990s, in ways that facilitate the ongoing killing. State action of
a forceful kind is required here; the goal is to stop the massacre and then help to install a
non-murderous regime. Once again, the leaders of a military intervention don’t require
a theory of the best regime to guide their efforts; they too should be minimalists.
Humanitarian aid is commonly discussed under the heading of philanthropy, but
I think that is a mistake. Because it is obligatory, because it has to be massive, because it
requires political agency, and because it can reach to the use of force—for all these
reasons, humanitarianism in its global application is best understood as an aspect of
justice. It includes charitable efforts and it is driven in the first instance by the feelings
of individual men and women, but its scope, its organizational complexity, the policy
debates it necessarily involves, and the fact that we can’t give it up, make it the work of
the just and not only of the good.
III
The humanitarian responses that I have been describing should be the same
whether the crisis is a natural disaster or the product of human action (or inaction). The
relevant principle is: Whoever can, should. But if we examine the suffering caused by
human beings, we will be led to argue for more particular obligations. Much of the
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world’s poverty and many of the attendant disasters of poverty are caused by predatory
rulers, corrupt oligarchs, and brutal warlords. These are the agents of political plunder,
economic disruption, civil war, and mass flight. They are not, however, the sole agents,
for many of them are assisted or supported by more distant and less visible political and
economic actors. States seeking compliant allies, corporations looking for cheap labor;
entrepreneurs bribing public officials so as to avoid regulation; banks eager to receive
the plundered money—these too are agents of human di…
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