Welfare Ethics
Program Manager – Professor Thomas Pogge
This program considers a wide range of ethical issues which are embedded in decisions in relation to welfare, a term which is broadly understood to mean provision by state agencies, by other organisations or groups of people aimed at the well-being of individuals and communities. The program looks at them meanings and justifications of the broad philosophical concepts used in policy, such as equality, justice, harm and rights. The program also develops theoretical perspectives for assessing the ethical values that should guide policy in these areas and works with policy maker concerned with the implementation of 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.
Core Projects
- Obligations of Individual Citizens of Wealthy Nations in Relation to International Poverty
- The Obligations of Welfare Recipients
Program members
- Dr Christian Barry
- Dr Steve Curry
- Professor Marilyn Friedman
- Dr Iwao Hirose
- Dr Simon Keller
- Associate Professor Jeanette Kennett
- Dr Jeremy Moss
- Professor Gerhard Overland
- Professor Doris Schroeder
- Dr Michael Selgelid
- Professor Peter Singer
- Dr Daniel Star
- Professor Thomas Pogge
Recent Program highlights
The Welfare program covers a wide spread of topics ranging from more theoretical analyses of the nature of equality to very concrete proposals for changing incentives for the pharmaceutical industry in order to provide greater access to medicines by the poor.
The equality work, funded by an ARC Discovery grant, Reassessing Egalitarianism, and centred at the University of Melbourne, is headed by Jeremy Moss and Robert Young, and supported by Simon Roberts-Thomson. Moss has completed an anthology, Welfare and Equality (under review), and is preparing a book manuscript on key aspects of egalitarianism including definitions of egalitarianism, responsibility and the role of ideals. The PhD student funded as part of the project — Rekha Nath — has submitted one related article to a journal and been awarded a grant of $3,000 for another such article to be published in 2007. Another PhD student has been recruited to work on egalitarianism. Moss has also been active in the media; including four articles published in The Sunday Age and a television appearance, and has received with Dr Greg Marston an ARC Linkage Grant: Disability, Welfare and Work, which commenced in 2006.
Thomas Pogge and Judith Whitworth’s ARC grant Just Rules for Incentivising Pharmaceutical Research and Disseminating its Benefits continued to make solid progress with the help of Michael Selgelid, who joined CAPPE in March 2006 from the University of Sydney, and a number of new CAPPE members. Major events were a workshop at the University of Melbourne as well as the Eighth World Congress of Bioethics in Beijing, where CAPPE helped organise a Plenary Session and a Major Session on access to essential drugs. Pogge, Selgelid, and Tom Faunce were featured speakers at both events. Pogge presented aspects of the work in progress in 18 additional lectures in seven countries, including at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, New York University, and as the inaugural Routledge Lecture at Cambridge. Pogge and Selgelid also contributed essays on the topic to two anthologies for one of which Selgelid also served as first editor (Selgelid, M.J., Battin, M.P., and Smith, C.B., eds., Ethics and Infectious Disease, Oxford: Blackwell 2006). An additional collection jointly edited by Selgelid and Pogge is in progress. Selgelid is spending the first half of 2007 as a fully funded visitor at the Brocher Foundation, Hermance (Geneva) to complete a writing project on ethics and genetics. There he is attached also to the Institute for Biomedical Ethics of the University of Geneva, under a “Boursier d’Excellence.”
The Welfare Group (and the Pharma team in particular) is strengthened by four new arrivals. Kit Wellman will share his time between CAPPE and Washington University in St. Louis. He has just finished a book (co-authored with Andrew Altman), A Liberal Theory of International Justice. Jason Grossman and Christian Barry will share their time between CAPPE and the ANU Philosophy Department. Grossman is co-recipient of a current ARC Discovery Grant, Big-Picture Bioethics: Policy-Making and Liberal Democracy. Barry is co-author of International Trade and Labor Standards: A Proposal for Linkage, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. The book discusses whether rights to engage in international trade should in any way be made conditional on the promotion of labour standards; short opinion pieces on the theme have appeared in the Financial Times and the Economic Times (of India). As part of a two-year Ford Foundation–funded project, Barry also edited a special issue on sovereign debt for the journal Ethics & International Affairs as well as an edited volume of original essays on this theme, Dealing Justly with Developing Country Debt, for Blackwell. A freshly minted D.Phil. from Oxford, Daniel Star joined CAPPE in mid-2006 and has become a central link between CAPPE and the RSSS.
In January 2006, Keith Horton began working on a project called “Collective Obligations and Partial Compliance”, for which he was awarded a 3-year ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Peter Singer has been working on responses to his critics, for a forthcoming book of essays to be edited by Jeffrey Schaler and published by Open Court under the title Singer Under Fire. Topics addressed include methodology in normative ethics, the ethics of our treatment of animals, euthanasia and the sanctity of human life, and the obligations of the rich to aid the poor.
During 2006, Michael Selgelid has been a Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organization’s department of Ethics, Trade, Human Rights and Health Law as part of expert working group on “Isolation, Quarantine, Border Control, and Social-Distancing Measures” in project aimed at “Addressing Ethical Issues in Pandemic Influenza Planning”. He participated in technical meeting of working groups in Geneva on 18–19 May 2006, and contributed to a paper/report on an ongoing basis. Thomas Pogge, apart from numerous publications in the Welfare program, has spread his ideas on global justice by giving 74 public lectures in 12 countries on five continents. He will be co-leader of a new Centre of Excellence (the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature) in Oslo.
Thomas Pogge — together with Jeanette Kennett and Rekha Nath and ex-CAPPE member Kate Macdonald as well as a highly international team with members in Norway, Belgium, the UK and the US — are starting a new project investigating the so-called feminization of poverty worldwide. The project involves collaboration with Oxfam UK and the new Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo.