This paper develops and defends the approach to distributive justice the author presents in his 2012 book On Global Justice. Characteristic of that approach is that the notion of distributive justice is understood as capturing the most stringent moral demands while at the same time being broadly...

In the last half a century, Singapore has gone through truly astonishing transformations. It has now arguably come of age as a First World country, as captured by the title of a recent book by the Founding Father of modern Singapore, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. But First World countries are normally taken...

The author's 2012 book On Global Justice gives pride of place to the idea that humanity collectively owns the earth. Independently of this approach there has been a flourishing literature on the justification of rights to territory. Central to this discussion are a Kantian approach and a Lockean...

Economic theory teaches us that it is in every country's own best interest to engage in trade. Trade therefore is a voluntary activity among consenting parties. On this view, considerations of justice have little bearing on trade, and political philosophers concerned with matters of global...

I argue that there is a human right to vital pharmaceuticals, not in the sense that anybody has a claim right to the provision of pharmaceuticals that are not yet available, but in the sense that access to pharmaceuticals must not be limited by means of overblown private intellectual property...

That humanity collectively owns the earth was the guiding idea of 17th century political philosophy, which was partly a reflection of the increasing concern with questions of global reach at that time. The basis for that standpoint was mostly religious. However, the view that the earth...

A common and intuitively plausible approach to thinking about the distributional questions that arise about global climate change is that the atmosphere is a "global sink" whose use is subject to regulation in terms of an equal-per-capita principle: Each person should have the same entitlement...

In a paper called "Racial Profiling," published in "Philosophy and Public Affairs" in 2004, Richard Zeckhauser and I offer some reflections on moral issues pertaining to the use of race in police tactics. This paper has attracted a considerable amount of criticism. The present paper has been...

Human rights are rights that are invariant with respect to conventions, institutions, culture, or religion. One concern about such rights is the problem of parochialism, the question of whether human rights can plausibly be of global reach and thus justify actions even against societies that do...

Rights to territory and rights to immigration are usefully theorized together. Our starting point is a Lockean analysis of the moral foundations of territoriality offered by John Simmons. Crucially, this Lockean account makes the legitimacy of a state’s claim to its territory dependent on a...