Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- PART I THE ETHICS OF DISTANCE
- PART II COMMUNITIES AND OBLIGATIONS
- PART III THE LAW OF PEOPLES
- 8 Women and theories of global justice: our need for new paradigms
- 9 Human rights as foreign policy imperatives
- 10 Human rights and the law of peoples
- PART IV RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES AND INSTITUTIONAL REFORMS
- Index
9 - Human rights as foreign policy imperatives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- PART I THE ETHICS OF DISTANCE
- PART II COMMUNITIES AND OBLIGATIONS
- PART III THE LAW OF PEOPLES
- 8 Women and theories of global justice: our need for new paradigms
- 9 Human rights as foreign policy imperatives
- 10 Human rights and the law of peoples
- PART IV RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES AND INSTITUTIONAL REFORMS
- Index
Summary
INTERNATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
In this chapter I will argue for a broad conception of moral responsibility with respect to human rights. This conception concerns requirements of justice that extend across borders. I will defend a principle of International Responsibility for Human Rights, according to which widespread human rights abuses require an international response.
Under this principle, the particular obligations that individual states incur will vary as follows: all states are morally prohibited from profiting in their dealings with regimes that violate human rights. Further, a state that is directly implicated causally in human rights violations in another state has a special obligation to support international efforts to halt those violations and to make reparations. This may include shouldering the costs of intervention across borders. And finally, as benefiting members of an international community, wealthier states are obligated to offer aid to poor states, when doing so will further the cause of human rights. I will not explore in any detail strategies states ought to take in order to satisfy the positive obligations the principle imposes. I focus instead on arguments that aim to show that societies in crisis must be brought up to a decent minimum. A reasonable consensus on human rights defines that minimum.
The argument I develop thus addresses the content of human rights as well as their function within international relations.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Ethics of AssistanceMorality and the Distant Needy, pp. 177 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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