PHI 343—Global Justice

Around 767 million people (or about 10.7% of the global population) live in extreme poverty. These people frequently lack effective access to proper nutrition, adequate shelter, safe drinking water, and sanitation. As a result, they also bear the greatest burdens of famine and epidemic disease, and they also frequently face social and political conditions of unrest and systematic oppression. In this course, we will pursue the question of what, if anything, we in technologically and economically developed nations owe to the global poor. We will therefore focus considerable attention on competing theories of global justice, as well as the interrelationships between poverty, health, and human rights. We will critically examine different strategies for international development that emphasize one or more of these three things, and we will consider how information about their complex interactions should be factored into the development process.