International justice: Rights and obligations of states
By: Steve Vanderheiden
Abstract:听
A preliminary question to its application concerns whether or not justice can defensibly be extended to relations between states, as the notion of 鈥渋nternational justice鈥 supposes that it can be. Philosophers and political theorists have long assumed that some ethical norms govern the conduct of nation-states in international politics, occasionally prescribing limits on state actions beyond those inscribed in law or justifying international responses to transgressions of these norms. Strong environmental protections might be advocated from the weaker sense of justice that is coextensive with human rights doctrine, although with the somewhat more modest goal of ensuring that all meet some threshold of access to environmental goods and services, or are not put at risks that exceed a similar threshold by the acts of others. An alternative formulation to distributive justice principles that have developed around the ideal of equity, which lends itself to several problems in global environmental politics, is one that is instead built around ideal of responsibility.