Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She has held the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago and the Laurie Chair in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She works in three main areas of philosophy - philosophy of action, feminist ethics, and human rights theory. She is currently writing a monograph, Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights.

Meyers's collection is an important contribution to the philosophical discussions surrounding moral responsibility for global injustice, global poverty, and moral agency more generally. Meyers's book and the essays contained in it provide a crucial starting point for more discussions to come, which will hopefully lead to more developed and nuanced ways of understanding the complex links between poverty and agency. Only when we fully understand these links between human action and the moral wrongs of poverty will we be in a position to effectively motivate and enact the changes necessary to finally eradicate avoidable, human-caused poverty on a global scale. This project is a profound step in that direction.

• Introduction, Diana Tietjens Meyers ; Part 1: Thinking through the Meanings of Poverty ; 1. Surviving Poverty, Claudia Card ; 2. Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, and Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution to Social Epistemology, David Ingram ; 3. Rethinking Coercion for a World of Poverty and Transnational Migration, Diana Tietjens Meyers ; Part 2: Ethical Responses to Poverty ; 4. Responsibility for Violations of the Human Right to Subsistence, Elizabeth Ashford ; 5. Global Poverty, Decent Work, and Remedial Responsibilities: What the Developed World Owes to the Developing World and Why, Gillian Brock ; 6. Trafficking in Human Beings: Partial Compliance Theory, Enforcement Failure, and Obligations to Victims, Leslie P. Francis and John Francis ; 7. "Are My Hands Clean?" Responsibility for Global Gender Disparities, Alison Jaggar ; Part 3: Promoting Development and Ensuring Agency ; 8. Agency and Intervention: How (Not) to Fight Global Poverty, Ann Cudd ; 9. Empowerment Through Self-Subordination?: Microcredit and Women's Agency, Serene J. Khader ; 10. Paradoxes of Development: Rethinking the Right to Development, Amy Allen ; Part 4: Transnational Transactions and Human Rights ; 11. Poverty, Voluntariness, and Consent to Participate in Research, Alan Wertheimer ; 12. Children's Rights, Parental Agency and the Case for Non-coercive Responses to Care Drain, Anca Gheus ; 13. Human Rights and Global Wrongs: The Role of Human Rights Discourse in Responses to Trafficking, John Christman ; Index