Leif Wenar Research Articles

The child's right to bodily integrity and autonomy: A conceptual analysis

It is widely accepted that children enjoy some form of a right to bodily integrity. However, there is little agreement about the precise nature and scope of this right. This paper offers a conceptual analysis of the child's right to bodily integrity, in order to further elucidate the relationship between the child's right to bodily integrity and considerations of autonomy. Following a discussion of Leif Wenar's work on the structure and justification of rights, I first explain how the adult's right to bodily integrity can be distilled into separate elements that may plausibly be justified by different moral considerations. In particular, I claim that this analysis suggests that whilst the adult's right to bodily integrity is not wholly reducible to bodily autonomy, autonomy nonetheless remains entwined with our understanding of this right in a number of ways. On the basis of this discussion, I go on to outline three important complexities that arise when we consider the child's right to bodily integrity, before particularly focusing on the question of how third parties should determine whether or not to perform a physical interference upon a child who lacks decision-making capacity. Here, I raise some objections to Earp and Mazor's recent attempts to answer this question, before briefly defending an ‘autonomy-based interests’ account of permissible interference, an account that shares in what I take to be the spirit, if not the precise letter, of these earlier views.

Comments on Leif Wenar's Nussbaum Lecture, “The Development of Unity”

It is a privilege to comment on Leif Wenar's Nussbaum Lecture. Wenar's lecture is the third in a most distinguished series, beginning with Philip Pettit in Athens and continuing on with Seyla Benha...

Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World

Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World

Being Realistic about International Trade Justice

AbstractThe current philosophical debate on just international trade has moved away from purely idealistic theorizing into the direction of non-ideal theory. At the same time most philosophical thought on just trade is still rather idealistic and the main argument of the paper is that some philosophical reasoning about international trade justice should be more realistic. The paper develops in three steps. In a first step I will give a short overview over normative questions that arise with respect to international trade. I will then highlight a proposal brought forward by Leif Wenar, because he is aware of the realist challenge and tries to counter it. In a second step I will discuss why it is important to integrate a realist perspective into philosophical considerations of international trade justice. Trade agreements are embedded in political contexts that influence the normative perspective one should take on trade justice. This leads to the third part of the article, where I will explore how a realist approach can go along with more idealistic perspectives, which leads to a weakly realist perspective on trade justice.

Getting to Yes: Lessons for a Transnational Activist

Leif Wenar argues, in Blood Oil, that the current rules governing natural resource exploitation by governments leaves too much room for the sale of a country’s natural resources in a manner which does not benefit its citizens. To that end, he proposes what he calls a Clean Trade Policy, under which individual developed states would pass laws forbidding the trade in resources where minimum standards for resource exploitation and sale are not met. In our paper, we first develop Wenar’s proposal, and then ask if it is possible for it to come to fruition. We theorize how activists interested in bringing about these changes might utilize the existing features of international law to adopt Wenar’s proposals. Beginning with Jessup’s theory of transnational law as a method of understanding the interaction of public, private, national and international legal regimes, and the process of norm creation and enforcement outside states, we argue that activists interested in taking up Wenar’s challenge to reform the ownership and distribution of global commodities would do well to move beyond Wenar’s narrow public law framework, and study the myriad forms of regulation and interactions that define the contemporary transformation of political sovereignty and rule-making under the conditions of globalization. We argue thatnonly by exploiting mechanisms of transnational lawmaking could the Clean Trade Policy be made law.

Popular sovereignty over natural resources: A critical reappraisal of Leif Wenar’sBlood Oilfrom the perspective of international law and justice

Abstract:The article discusses the concept of popular sovereignty over natural resources and its possible applicability to a broader account of natural resource justice based on a moral interpretation of international law. Leif Wenar’s recent proposal to entrench popular resource sovereignty as a counterclaim to illegitimate uses of natural resources by corrupt and authoritarian regimes serves as the starting point for the discussion of the possible meaning of popular resource sovereignty and its role in an account of natural resource justice. Three key aspects of Wenar’s conception are in focus: 1) the framing of popular resource sovereignty within the current system of sovereign territoriality, 2) the notion of collective ownership of natural resources as the content of popular resource sovereignty, and 3) civil and political rights as the key set of norms determining the conditions of legitimate exercise of resource sovereignty. The article argues that collective sovereignty claims over natural resources can neither be framed exclusively through boundaries of current sovereign states, nor understood in terms of full and unlimited property rights. Concerning civil and political rights, I argue we need to move past the liberal conception of legitimacy toward a more comprehensive human rights-based conception of justice serving as a standard for assessment of legitimacy of both sovereign and non-sovereign entities which have rights over natural resources.

Leif Wenar: Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World

Leif Wenar: Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World

Why it is Disrespectful to Violate Rights: Contractualism and the Kind-Desire Theory

The most prominent theories of rights, the Will Theory and the Interest Theory, notoriously fail to accommodate all and only rights-attributions that make sense to ordinary speakers. The Kind-Desire Theory, Leif Wenar’s recent contribution to the field, appears to fare better in this respect than any of its predecessors. The theory states that we attribute a right to an individual if she has a kind-based desire that a certain enforceable duty be fulfilled. A kind-based desire is a reason to want something which one has simply in virtue of being a member of a certain kind. Rowan Cruft objects that this theory creates a puzzle about the relation between rights and respect. In particular, if rights are not grounded in aspects of the particular individuals whose rights they are (e.g., their well-being), how can we sustain the intuitive notion that to violate a right is to disrespect the right-holder? I present a contractualist account of respect which reconciles the Kind-Desire Theory with the intuition that rights-violations are disrespectful. On this account, respect for a person is a matter of acknowledging her legitimate authority to make demands on the will and conduct of others. And I argue that kind-based desires authorize a person to make demands even if they do not correspond to that person’s well-being or other non-relational features.

In Defense of the Interest Theory of Right-Holding: Rejoinders to Leif Wenar on Rights

In two quite recent essays, Leif Wenar (2008; 2013) has impugned my version of the Interest Theory of right-holding and has proposed a theory which he commends as an alternative to mine. In this paper I rebut Wenarʼs objections to my version of the Interest Theory, and I contest his view that his own theory is a promising alternative to mine.

Resources and the Property Rights Curse

This paper offers a critical appraisal of the growing body of philosophical work on questions of justice in the exploitation of natural resources. It argues that failure to treat property as a distinct set of considerations from those of distributive justice has led to an impoverished philosophical analysis. Moreover, it demonstrates how a property-based approach contributes to a more complete view of the interests at stake in resource exploitation by drawing attention to aspects of human relationships with the physical environment that cannot be captured through the allocation of wealth, such as environmental and cultural integrity. The reason that philosophers have not, by and large, appreciated this contribution rests on mistaken views about the function of property rules that could be rectified through legal understanding. In pursuing this line of argument, the paper considers a recent proposal that seems promising on this front: Leif Wenar’s analysis of the resource curse. Wenar’s proposal is unique in suggesting that questions of resource justice be analysed and resolved through settled principles of property law, rather than through a theory of distributive justice. However, he makes several key tactical errors. Examining where the proposal goes wrong and why provides important insights into the use of legal concepts to analyse intractable questions of justice in political philosophy, and into the place of property in particular—methodological issues that have not received adequate attention, despite the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of scholarship in this area.

Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, by Patricia Illingworth, Thomas Pogge, and Leif Wenar (ed).

The editors of this volume suggest that it constitutes ‘the first major contribution to the new field of the ethics of philanthropy’ (p. 8). This field of inquiry, as they conceive it, addresses itself to the full range of normative questions that can be raised about the practice of charitable giving, from the extent of individuals’ obligations to give, to the acceptability of various methods of fundraising, to the fairness of tax policies allowing deductions for charitable donations. It is also broadly interdisciplinary, bringing together questions of interest to those working in a range of fields, including philosophy, political science, law, economics, psychology, anthropology, and development studies. The volume includes contributions from prominent scholars in many of these areas, and the essays (as the editors claim) ‘offer overlapping and reinforcing views on the ethical demands on individuals, corporations, NGOs, states, international organizations, and aid workers in the field’ (p. 8).

Reply to Leif Wenar

Explains how a contractualist moral theory can explain the moral phenomena commonly called rights, although it does not appeal to the notion of a right as a basic element of moral thinking, or explain the difference between rights violations and wrongs of other kinds. Argues that the latter failure is not an important fault.

Reciprocity as Mutual Recognition

Reciprocity as Mutual Recognition

Humanitarian disintervention

When discussing whether or not our elected governments should intervene to end genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity in other countries, the humanitarian intervention debate has largely been assuming that liberal democracies bear no responsibility for the injustice at hand: someone else is committing shameful acts; we are merely considering whether or not we have a positive duty to do something about it. Here I argue that there are important instances in which this dominant third party perspective (TPP) is empirically false and normatively misguided. Much before our positive ‘responsibility to protect’ potential victims from mass atrocities, we violate our negative duty not to harm these victims. Employing work by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar, I argue that this harm currently comes about as our elected governments either buy, or allow our corporations to buy, the world's most precious resources from brutal dictators and warlords, who dominate some of the states that are at the heart of intervention discussions. In these cases, democracies' most immediate duty is not intervention but rather humanitarian disintervention: boycotting severely oppressive regimes, and in particular stopping to recognizing these regimes – whether dictators or civil warriors – as possessing legitimate authority to sell their peoples' resources. I begin with a brief survey of the intervention literature, followed by the foundations for the disintervention alternative. I then elaborate the conceptual and practical advantages of disintervention, concluding with thoughts on the reasons for TPP's lasting dominance.

Conceptualizing the curse: two views on our responsibility for the ‘resource curse’

This essay critically engages proposals by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar meant to combat ‘the resource curse.’ Pogge and Wenar call for boycotts against stealing oppressors, sharing the expectation that the boycotts will significantly contribute to economic and political reform in the target countries. In contrast, I argue that liberal democracies should indeed stop trading with dictators and civil warriors, but for inward rather than outward looking reasons. We, the citizens of liberal democracies through our elected governments, ought to boycott severely oppressive regimes for the sake of our own moral integrity—simply in order to stop being complicit in what is effectively massive scale armed robbery. This inward looking thesis is distinctive in three ways. First, it contrasts with the dominant assumption that global reform must be grounded in the achievement of better political and economic outcomes for others. Second, the inward look manages to avoid the profound empirical uncertainty associated with any attempt to predict the direct effects of global rule changes on domestic institutions. Third, by isolating each democracy's responsibility for each case of illicit trade, the inward looking strategy deals more adequately than the outward view with collective action problems, and therefore has a greater chance of grounding actual reforms, with whatever prospects for better outcomes they may entail.

The Resource Curse: A Legal Perspective

This article analyzes the different dimensions of the so-called resource curse hypothesis from the perspective of international and domestic law. The analysis is structured as a commentary of the views of the UK-based philosopher Leif Wenar and the Swiss philosopher Peter Schaber on this issue. The article concludes that, under current legal arrangements, states remain the main guarantors of the public good of the people living under their sovereignty. Thus, for better or worse as long as, from a political or an ethical standpoint, peoples are sovereign, they will also continue to assume the main responsibility for their own development even when their house is not in order. KEYWORDS: resource curse, resource ownership, international law, domestic law, Ogoni, Equatorial Guinea. The superfluous of the rich should serve for the necessity of the poor; yet, quite to the contrary, the necessity of the poor serves for the superfluous of the rich.--Jean Domat IN TWO RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PHILOSOPHY LITERATURE, ONE BY THE UK-based philosopher Leif Wenar(1) and the other by the Swiss philosopher Peter Schaber, (2) these authors engage in an interesting discussion over who is the proper owner of natural resources as well as on the ensuing consequences from an ethical perspective. Wenar's argument is, in essence, that natural resources belong to peoples and, as a result, cannot be sold by authoritarian governments to foreign acquirers without proper authorization from the true owners. Moreover, according to Wenar, we would all be responsible for maintaining this situation, to the extent that we buy goods made of such stolen resources. Schaber objects to Wenar's argument on the grounds that it is not the authorization to sell the resources that makes such a hypothesis unethical, but rather the fact that authoritarian rulers use the proceeds of the sales for their own private benefit. As for Wenar's second argument, Schaber argues that multinational corporations' purchases and subsequent transfers of money to dictatorial rulers should only be seen as a basis for responsibility when there is a relation of complicity. According to Schaber, enabling a situation is not the same as contributing to it. For instance, producers and consumers of knives cannot, absent specific circumstances, be held responsible for the potential stabbing of people with those knives. Furthermore, Schaber notes that to stop buying natural resources from authoritarian regimes would likely not help the affected people. From the perspective of a lawyer, the debate between Wenar and Schaber provides an interesting set of propositions against which to assess what the international and domestic legal architecture has to offer to address the problem often referred to as the resource curse; that is, that countries where there is an abundance of natural resources tend to do worse in terms of human and economic development than countries with fewer natural resources. From a legal standpoint, the issues underlying the debate between Wenar and Schaber can be pinned down to two basic legal questions; namely, (1) who owns natural resources, and (2) what legal consequences are attached to spoliation or misuse. After some initial clarifications, the following discussion seeks to address the main aspects of these two questions from the perspective of international and domestic law, before providing a concise assessment of the current state of the law on these issues. Because the article is not primarily intended for an audience of international lawyers, I have endeavored to discuss the relevant legal concepts and mechanisms without going into unnecessary technical details. Framing the Discussion Before undertaking the analysis, I would like to make three clarifications that will be useful for framing the discussion. First, there is an important difference between the philosophical analyses provided by Wenar and Schaber and the legal analysis provided here, and that is the need for a lawyer to take into account the existing legal framework applicable to a given issue, whether one agrees or not with the current state of the law. …

Refining the Interest Theory of Rights

Refining the Interest Theory of Rights Matthew H. Kramer Matthew H. Kramer Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar *This essay was originally written for a workshop on rights at King's College London in May 2010. I am extremely grateful to all the participants in that workshop and especially to the two organizers, Rowan Cruft and Leif Wenar. I am also very grateful to Mark McBride for some earlier conversations about a few of the matters discussed in this paper, and to Gerard Bradley and John Finnis for comments on the penultimate draft. Author Notes The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 55, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 31–39, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/55.1.31 Published: 01 June 2010

Review: Ethics & International Affairs

ETHICS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS A Reader, third edition Joel H. Rosenthal and Christian Barry, editors Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. 352pp, US$34.95 paper ISBN 978-1-58901-272-1This is third edition ofthe popular Ethics & International Affairs readers. Ten years have passed since second edition, and as scholar Chris Brown states on back ofthe latest edition, editors have extensively revised collection. Like its forerunners, it collects recent articles from journal Ethics & International Affairs, some of which are updated and slightly revised, and organizes them into four parts. Part I, on conflict resolution, includes contributions on realism (David Hendrickson), preventive war (Neta Crawford), and accountability and reckoning with past wrongs (David A. Crocker). Part II covers grounds for intervention, including essays that provide an overview of topic (Michael Smith), moral basis for intervention (Terry Nardin), responsibility to protect in relation to Iraq and Darfur (Alex Bellamy), and a chapter on ecological intervention (Robyn Eckersley). Part III, on governance, law, and membership collects essays on global governance institutions (Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane), democracy and international law (Seyla Benhabib), global justice for women (Alison M. Jaggar), and ethics of immigration laws (Joseph H. Carens). Part IV, on global economic justice, includes chapters on models of international economic justice (Ethan B. Kapstein), American empire (Robert Wade), accountability in development aid (Leif Wenar), and three chapters of an exchange between Thomas Pogge and Mathias Risse on world poverty and human rights.In their preface, Rosenthal and Barry, who also edit journal, note that their selections are neither 'hits' of international ethics, nor greatest 'misses' of global public policy, nor do they necessarily address the most pressing issues. Rather, selections are intended to be conversations... taken as invitations to normative, empirical discussions, and to ultimately balance between supply [ing] a volume fit for ethics classroom, and to reflect growing maturity ofthe of international ethics (x).If these are standards by which scholars, practitioners, and even general readers should measure this third edition, there is much to commend it. For starters, this is a fantastic, easily accessible and well-written series of contributions. Despite editors' modest prefatory remarks, these are selections from some ofthe most serious, vibrant, and esteemed scholars in today's field of international ethics. The essays, then, in addition to being straightforward, are still intellectually provocative and cover a wide range of topics. This makes this volume perfectly suited to courses on international ethics, of course, but with impressive coverage it could be used as a supplementary text in global development, international law, human rights, and international organizations courses. …

A Two‐Tiered Reparations Theory: A Reply to Wenar

In his recent article “Reparations for the Future” that appeared in this Journal, Leif Wenar argues for a theory of reparations that is forward-looking and not backward-looking. I will begin by presenting Wenar's account. I will argue contra Wenar that backward-looking considerations play an important role in his theory and that the existence of such considerations forms a necessary condition for his reparations theory. If I am correct, then it is not the case that forward-looking considerations are the only or most relevant factors in justifying reparations for his account. Instead, Wenar defends a two-tiered reparations theory.

Reason, Right, and Revolution: Kant and Locke

Philosophy & Public AffairsVolume 36, Issue 4 p. 375-404 Reason, Right, and Revolution: Kant and Locke KATRIN FLIKSCHUH, KATRIN FLIKSCHUH London School of EconomicsSearch for more papers by this author KATRIN FLIKSCHUH, KATRIN FLIKSCHUH London School of EconomicsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 November 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.00146.xCitations: 22 Earlier versions of this article were given at a conference on Kant's Doctrine of Right in Jena during the summer of 2007; at the political philosophy seminar at the University of Edinburgh, the philosophy seminar at the University of Bristol, and the political theory workshop at the LSE. My thanks to participants at these events for their helpful comments and suggestions, including Chris Bertram, Sharon Byrd, Thomas Christiano, Philip Cook, Cecile Fabre, Tim Hayward, Joachim Hruschka, Chandran Kukathas, Jens Kulenkampff, Hannes Leitgeb, Bernd Ludwig, and Leif Wenar. I am especially grateful to Paul Kelly for his generous guidance on Locke; to Christian List for fascinating exchanges on collective and group agency, and to Arthur Ripstein for sustained and always enjoyable discussion on Kant. Many thanks, finally, to the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for their helpful suggestions for revision of the penultimate draft. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume36, Issue4Fall 2008Pages 375-404 RelatedInformation