Global Justice and Human Rights

Content

Many of the problems we face today – like migration, climate change, inequality, economic fluctuations or human rights abuses – have a strong international and often even global dimension. They can only be solved if people look beyond their personal and group interests and not only try to realize just societies that show suitable solidarity with fellow human beings, but also strive for peaceful and fair global relationships. The difficulty to realize all this constitutes one of the main challenge of our age. How to understand aforementioned problems and contribute to their potential solutions? This challenge requires, among other things, a coherent normative framework of interpretation. Over the past decades, a lively debate has developed about these global problems within political philosophy and philosophy of law. Well-known authors as John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, Peter Singer, Amartya Sen, Joseph Carens, Jürgen Habermas and Charles Beitz offer original approaches to disentangle the multifaceted challenges of global injustice and unfairness. This module presents and further develops theories of global justice and human rights, and examines how economic, political and social problems can be dealt with creatively. As such theories of global justice and human rights do not only offer ways to better understand the world around us, but also offer opportunities – in so far possible – to contribute to change.