JUSTICE AND THE HUMAN GOOD
Program Manager – Professor Thomas Pogge
Program members
- Dr Christian Barry
- Margaret Coady
- Dr Steve Curry
- Dr Kieran Donaghue
- Dr Simon Keller
- Dr Jeremy Moss
- Professor Gerhard Overland
- Matt Peterson
- Professor Thomas Pogge
- Professor Doris Schroeder
- Dr Michael Selgelid
- Dr Daniel Star
- Dr Christopher Wellman
The Justice and the Human Good Program considers a wide range of ethical issues which are embedded in decisions in relation to welfare, such as concepts of equality, justice, harm and rights used in policy, develops theoretical perspectives for assessing the ethical values that should guide policy and works with policy makers in implementing these ideas. As well as the core projects the program has projects on poverty, on aspects of the treatment of mental disorders and on the ethics of international aid.
The Welfare Group has had a very successful 2008. Under the ARC terms of reference, the program has two core projects:
(1) Obligations of Individual Citizens of Wealthy Nations in Relation to International Poverty
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One main focus continued to
be the Pharma Project, seed-funded by an ARC discovery grant Just Rules for Incentivising Pharmaceutical
Research and Disseminating its Benefits ($358,000 for 2006-08),
complemented by funds from the UK-based BUPA Foundation and by a European Union
grant (EUR 728,640; 2008-10). In August, we published a book explaining the
Health Impact Fund proposal (free download from www.healthimpactfund.org). Based
on this book, launches of the proposal took place in Oslo (August), in Vienna, London, Cambridge and Oxford (November),
and in Washington (December). CAPPE members Thomas Pogge, Peter Singer, Doris Schroeder, Michael Selgelid,
Christian Barry, Kieran Donaghue, Kit Welman, and Matt Peterson have been actively contributing to the work.
A new focus is the FemPov Project that — with various partners including Oxfam UK and the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA, Melbourne) — has won an ARC Linkage grant ($1,098,000; 2009-12). Its aim is to design and test a gender-sensitive poverty measure that will give firm guidance to governments and donors in the allocation of development resources, with a view to (i) improving the cost-effectiveness of development spending; (ii) attracting a higher level of resources to poverty reduction; and (iii) facilitating the design of macro and microeconomic policies that are sensitive to poverty, particularly as it affects women and girls. CAPPE members Kieran Donaghue, Doris Schroeder, Thomas Pogge, Christian Barry, and Matt Peterson are involved in this effort.
Doris Schroeder has completed work as a co-editor of and author in Indigenous Peoples, Benefit Sharing and Decision-Making (Springer 2009). She continued writing her dignity book and started work on the edited collection Benefit Sharing – from Biodiversity to Human Genomics, both likely to be published by Cambridge UP. She submitted an application for Australian co-funding of the Pharma Project from Strategic Policy Funds. In 2008, she gave 16 invited or externally funded presentations on four continents. She was also newly appointed to the International Governing Board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and to the Scientific Advisory Board of Bioethics in Research.
Gerhard Øverland had two papers accepted: ‘Forced Assistance’ (by Law and Philosophy) and ‘Conditional Threats’ (by the Journal of Moral Philosophy). He led a successful Discovery Grant application (with Christian Barry and Thomas Pogge) on the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty ($289,000; 2009-11). A complementary grant application is pending with the European Commission. He is also a candidate for a prestigious Future Fellow position.
Christian Barry has published International Trade and Labor Standards: A Proposal for Linkage (Columbia UP 2008, co-authored with Sanjay Reddy) and ‘Does Global Egalitarianism Provide an Impractical and Unattractive Ideal of Justice?’ International Affairs (co-authored with Pablo Gilabert). He has also commenced, with Matt Peterson, a new webcast series Public Ethics Radio (www.publicethicsradio.org), which has thus far featured Thomas Pogge, Leif Wenar, Jessica Wolfendale, Larry May, Larry Temkin, and (jointly) Lina Eriksson and Robert Goodin). Barry has a bunch of essays in various stages of production and, besides the two Discovery grants already mentioned, is likewise a candidate for a Future Fellow position.
Peter Singer has completed The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (Random House and Text 2009), a revised edition of A Companion to Bioethics (2009; co-edited with Helga Kuhse), and an intellectual autobiography plus replies to critics for Peter Singer Under Fire (Open Court 2009). He has also published several shorter pieces and continued to write his monthly syndicated column for Project Syndicate. During 2009 he will produce a 3rd revised edition of Practical Ethics and will also make progress on a more theoretical work about the foundations of utilitarianism.
Thomas Pogge published a revised edition of his World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity 2008) and edited a special issue of Public Health Ethics on Access to Medicines, which includes several discussions of the Health Impact Fund and to which Michael Selgelid also contributed. With CAPPE funds, Pogge co-edited two massive teaching volumes on Global Justice and Global Ethics (Paragon House 2008). Pogge published two dozen essays and gave 58 public lectures during the year. He also moved his US affiliation from Columbia to Yale where he now serves as the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs.
Kit Welman published four papers (including two in Ethics) and had one book accepted for publication: A Liberal Theory of International Justice (OUP; co-authored with Andrew Altman). In 2009 he will apply for a Discovery Grant on the topic of immigration.
(2) Rights of the Child
Margaret Coady has published three new essays, two of them on the rights and interests of children, which she also continues to represent in various political bodies. She also presented a lecture the Victorian Autism Institute.Other Program highlights
Michael Selgelid has become Deputy Director of the ANU node of the National Centre for Biosecurity (NCB), based in the Institute for Population Health. He also serves on the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts Working Group on avian influenza vaccine, on a WHO Task Force on Ethical Issues in TB Control Programmes, and on the Ethics Advisory Group of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. He has published 19 essays in 2008 as well as Ethical and Philosophical Consideration of the Dual-Use Dilemma in the Biological Sciences (Springer 2008; co-authored by Seumas Miller ). With Thomas Pogge, he is editing an Ashgate Volume on Health Rights, and with Angela McLean, Julian Savulescu, and Nim Pathy, he is guest editing a special edition of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry on the Ethics and Infectious Disease: Limiting Liberty in Contexts of Contagion. Selgelid also holds a half-dozen grants from a variety of organizations.
Simon Keller completed an entry on ‘Consequentialism’ (for A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand; Monash ePress), ‘Welfarism’ (forthcoming in Philosophy Compass; 2009); and ‘Welfare as Success’ (forthcoming in Nous; 2009). He also taught an Honours class at Melbourne on the ethics of special relationships and applied for a Discovery Grant on the ethics of loyalty (turned down this time).
Steven Curry completed the llongitudinal evaluation of the mental health impacts of participation in community arts, on behalf of the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation and as part of a multi-disciplinary team drawn from all over the University of Melbourne and from the Brotherhood of St Lawrence. The project also led to a major international conference of arts and community development practitioners and academics, convened by the project team and auspiced by the UNESCO Observatory. Steven's greatest pleasure this year was to receive an invitation to join his co-authors from the book Ethical Practice in Social Work: An Applied Approach and colleagues from Charles Sturt University to deliver a day of ethics training to social services workers on the NSW North Coast at Gosford. In 2009 Steven will develop research projects with one or more faith-based welfare agencies to look at issues of governance and the relationship between the state and civil society. He will also be seeking funding, along with Gerhard Øverland, for a project entitled Poor Reasons, which will use photography and philosophical dialogues to explore the values that help inhabitants of informal communities avoid criminality.
Daniel Star co-organized (with Nic Southwood) a joint CAPPE-RSSS conference in August 2007, “Reasons, Reasoning and Rationality: Themes from the work of John Broome” at which he also presented a new co-authored paper (with Stephen Kearns). The conference papers were later submitted to Ethics, and three of them, including his, have been accepted there (in October 2008 issue). John Broome replied to papers at the conference, and Ethics is publishing his written responses to the papers that they accepted. Star also polished and published an essay in Ratio and another (also co-authored with Stephen Kearns) in Oxford Studies in Metaethics (2009). He won two book contracts: for a monograph with OUP, Knowing Better and for a textbook with Blackwell, History of Ethics: Essential Readings with Commentary. Star has now left CAPPE for a tenure-track post at Boston University.
Jeremy Moss who directs CAPPE’s Social Justice Initiative Project funded by The University of Melbourne, worked on an ARC Discovery Project with Robert Young on Reassessing Egalitarianism and on an ARC Linkage with Kevin White on Health, Freedom and Independent Contracting. He also organised workshops on ‘Foundations of Social Justice’ and ‘Climate Change and Social Justice’.