Racial profiling is a matter of considerable concern in the U.S., and mutatis mutandis in other countries. Yet, perhaps because of its sensitive nature, there is almost no philosophical reflection on this subject. This essay provides a normative assessment of racial profiling and invites more...

Many unjust relationships continue to exist among peoples as well as among individuals. Perhaps there are so many of them that their sum total supports the verdict that we live in an unjust world. Yet this study asks whether the "global order" as such is unjust, and seeks to give a partial...

This article is intended for an edited volume in the series "The New Harvard Bookshelf: Towards a Liberal Education for the 21st Century." The purpose of that collection is to bring together articles that capture the basic ideas of various courses offered in the general education curriculum of...

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...

In earlier work I argue that, despite increasing global interconnectedness, shared membership in states remains morally relevant. At the same time states are historically contingent forms of political organization with considerable drawbacks. Once we have clarified what an assessment of the...

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...