Julio Montero
PhD Candidate in Political Theory
- Name: Julio Montero
- Telephone: +44 (0)20 7679 4999
- Fax: +44 (0)20 7679 4969
- Email: julio.montero@ucl.ac.uk
Provisional dissertation title
- World Poverty and Moral Responsibility: A Theory of Global Duties
About
The goal of my dissertation is to make an original contribution to the
current debate on global distributive justice by developing an account
of global responsibilities. This account will establish what kind of
obligations different agents have regarding international justice and
global poverty. This will be an original contribution to the
subject-matter insofar as the several existing theories on the field do
not take properly into account questions of moral responsibility and
agency, what renders them either mistaken or incomplete.
Thus, I hope to develop an account of global duties and
responsibilities. This implies two tasks. First, I will work out a
general theory of moral responsibility. This theory will establish a
set of conditions that ought to be met in order for it to be said that
a certain agent is responsible for a certain state of affairs (e.g.
global poverty), and should therefore face the burdens that this state
of affairs involves. This requires providing a theory of duties
specifying (a) what kind of moral duties are there (perfect and
imperfect, primary and secondary, natural and special, direct and
generative, etc.), and (b) what degrees of responsibility each of these
types of duties involve. Second, this account of responsibility will be
applied to issues of international justice and global poverty. In this
sense, I will consider different agents, including individual citizens,
world leaders, transnational corporations, affluent states, and
international organisms, and define what specific duties they may have
in terms of international distributive justice and poverty eradication.
For this I will take into account not only claims regarding global
justice, but also the overall duties that each of these agents have,
their right to pursue agent-relative goals, and their real capacity to
fulfill specific obligations.
In this way, I expect to develop an account of international
justice capable of addressing the issue of global poverty by allocating
clear duties to specific agents of justice.
