Human Rights and Global Justice (PDF)

Global justice has been one of the hottest issues among legal and political philosophers in the past several decades. David Miller, Professor of Political Theory at Oxford University, is without doubt one of the theorists who have been taking the lead in the debate on global justice. In the summer of 2011 he was invited to give the tenth Kobe Lecture, which was first established in 1988 in order to commemorate the Thirteenth IVR World Congress that had taken place in Kobe. As well as delivering his Kobe Lecture 'Are Human Rights Conditional?' in Kyoto on 9 July 2011, Professor Miller conducted seminars in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka. His Kobe Lecture, eleven comments on the lecture and his celebrated book National Responsibility and Global Justice, and his response to them are included in this volume. The title of the volume, Human Rights and Global Justice, represents our shared belief that guaranteeing basic human rights is an essential element of global justice.

It is quite interesting to examine how the subject of his lecture, human rights, has come out of his intense study on global justice. What brought Miller to the examination of the conditionality and reciprocity of human rights in this lecture soon after criticising cosmopolitanism in his theory of global justice? What kind of reactions does his multifaceted theory of global justice and human rights cause in Japan? This volume gives the key to address these intriguing questions.