Carmen Pavel’s paper, “Negative Duties, the WTO and the Harm Argument” was accepted for publication in Political Studies this month. Here is an abstract for the paper:
“Citizens in rich countries should shoulder the burden of alleviating global poverty because they are harming the poor, or so many argue. But the baseline for assessing harm is often unclear. Therefore we must provide a standard for evaluating claims of harm. Once we apply this standard we can see that many of the examples discussed, instead of representing cases of harms caused, are rather instances of benefits withheld from the poor. A moral case can be made that benefits should be extended by the rich countries toward poor ones, but this case will look very different than a case for responsibility for harm.”
