Eszter Kollar

Global equality of opportunity and national self-determination are two central principles of a liberal theory of international justice, but the relationship between them remains contested. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a sound understating of the contentionwhere the tensions and possible contradiction between self-determination and global equality of opportunity lieand then propose a way forward. To this end the chapter reviews the main approaches to this issue in contemporary political theory: the incompatibility thesis, the tradeoff thesis, and moves on to lay out the possibility of reconciliation between selfdetermination and equal opportunity.

Which ideal of distributive justice is suitable for the European
Union? Is surplus fairness, that is, distributing the surplus of
European integration between the Member States, the most
we can hope for? I argue that building on the normative commitment
to freedom of movement, a deeper, more demanding,
egalitarian conception can be defended, I call prospect
fairness. I first argue that for cross-border labour migration to
result in a fair distribution of burdens and benefits for all,
EU-level institutions of background justice are necessary.
I further argue that beyond the surplus of integration, the
threefold social constitutedness of unequal contributive
capacities of persons also requires moral assessment, which
triggers the moral demand of prospect fairness between EU
citizens and residents. I then elaborate on why prospect
fairness is a more demanding and more inclusive egalitarian
conception that should morally ground the idea of a
European Social Union.

Brain drain refers to the large scale movement of professional across borders that results in net losses for source countries and has global distributional consequences. It  raises a particularly acute set of challenges for liberal theorists. Liberals seek to protect our interest in autonomy, and value freedom of movement and freedom of occupational choice. At the same time, liberals are worried about securing essential social justice goods for vulnerable populations; goods that provide the social conditions of their autonomy. Is it ever permissible for the liberal state to interfere with the autonomy of migrant professionals in order to supply essential goods? This entry examines the ethical challenges of brain drain from three normative perspectives. What duties do destination countries have to further solutions to the brain drain problem? Do individual migrants have moral responsibilities toward their country of training or origin? What may source countries legitimately do to counteract the negative effects of brain drain? We discuss the different moral grounds of responsibilities to counteract the deleterious effects of brain drain, and elaborate the ethical requirements and permissible policy measures that follow.

David Miller’s political philosophy of immigration employs two complementary argumentative strategies to challenge open border theories. The first strategy is to defeat the principled case for open borders, such as the global equality of opportunity argument for more lax immigration control. The second strategy is to establish the democratic community’s prima facie right to determine the shape of its future, including membership and the right to exclude. First, I argue that Miller’s conception of global equality of opportunity is overly narrow and that his objections to the principle, to the metric and to what counts as feasible political action misfire against other, more plausible, accounts. Second, I argue that his democratic interpretation of collective self-determination does not solve the pressing question concerning the morally justified scope and content of self-determination and the moral limits of the right to exclude. I conclude by questioning Miller’s general strategy: whether theories of immigration should be engaged in an exercise of shifting the burden of proof between open and closed borders. By contrast, I argue that a more desirable task for the political philosophy of immigration is to find ways in which the joint requirement of global equality of opportunity and collective self-determination can be coherently upheld.

Are taxation and public service requirement for prospective emigrants justifiable in a liberal state? Brock thinks that taxation and service are normatively on a par. By contrast, Blake thinks that public service is impermissible, and only justified under emergency conditions when the liberal state itself is under threat. I argue that neither Brock nor Blake have adequately argued their case. Brock’s normative grounds of obligations and how exactly prospective emigrants incur enforceable obligations are not spelled out in sufficient detail. As a result, she is too quick to draw an analogy between taxation and service requirement, without considering the morally salient difference between the two. I discuss a plausible ground, fair reciprocity in social cooperation, and draw out its implications for Brock’s view.  By contrast, Blake has not adequately shown that restricting life plans directly is unjustifiable, while restricting life plans indirectly by reducing the resources available to persons is justifiable. His account only shows that public service requires a different, more compelling justification than taxation. He does not, however, offer adequate support for the extreme justificatory burden he places on public service requirement. To conclude, both authors owe us an account of the resources and powers that can be legitimately claimed for purposes of social justice; whether there is a tenable normative boundary between transferring resources to the needy versus providing socially useful services to them.

Michael Blake holds that liberal states are precluded from introducing compulsory medical service to improve access to health care under conditions of critical health worker shortage. “Emergency circumstances” are the only exception when the suspension of liberty may be justified. I argue that there are three problems with Blake's emergency justification of compulsory service. First, his concept of emergency is vague. Second, his account does not really rely on emergency as much as liberty. Third, his conception of permissible restrictions of liberty is too narrow. I argue that liberties may be limited to some degree, temporarily, for the sake of attaining the capacities necessary for the exercise of liberties and for safeguarding the social conditions of the right to health. I conclude that in poor societies, temporarily delaying emigration through a highly qualified compulsory medical service can sometimes be justified.

One of the most ambitious and sophisticated recent approaches to provide a theory of global health justice is Sridhar Venkatapuram’s recent work. In this commentary, we first outline the core idea of Venkatapuram’s approach to global health justice. We then argue that one of the most important elements of the account, Venkatapuram’s basis of global health duties, is either too weak or assume d implicitly without a robust justification. The more explicit grounding of the duty to protect and promote health capabilities is based on Martha Nussbaum’s version of the capability approach.We argue that this foundation gives rise to humanitarian duties rather than duties of justice proper. Venkatapuram’s second argument from the social determinants of health thesis is instead a stronger candidate for grounding duties of justice. However, as a justificatory argument, it is only alluded to and has not yet been spelled out sufficiently. We offer plausible justificatory steps to fill this gap and draw some implications for global health action.We believe this both strengthens Venkatapuram’s approach and serves to broaden the basis for future action in the area of global health.

""Health worker migration, commonly called 'medical brain drain', refers to the mass migration of trained and skilled health professionals (doctors, nurses, midwives) from low-income to high-income countries. This is currently leaving a significant number of poor countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, with critical staff shortages in the health care sector. A broad consensus exists that where medical brain drain exacerbates such shortages, it is unethical, and this review presents the
main arguments underpinning this view. Notwithstanding the general agreement, which policies are justifiable on ethical grounds to tackle brain drain and how to go best about implementing them remains controversial. The review offers a discussion of the specific ethical issues that have to be taken into account when deciding which policy measures to prioritise and suggests a strategy of policy implementation to address medical brain drain as a matter of urgency.""

This paper develops a political conception of international background justice for medical brain drain by appeal to norm governed practices that states engage in. It argues that two principles should guide institutions and constrain international conduct in medical brain drain: sufficiency in health workforce and fairness in international health service trade. The two principles provide politically justifiable normative responses to the different ways in which the problem of justice arises in two distinct international social practices. Medical brain drain is both a problem of a) unconstrained competition for health care skills among states; and b) improperly constrained competition for health care skills within an emerging international service trade regime. The two standards working together provide the normative standard of assessment for state level brain drain measures on the immigration and emigration side.

The increasing international migration of health workers from low-income to high-income countries, often called medical brain drain, is part of a larger problem known as the ‘global health workforce crisis’: the shortage and the radically unequal distribution of health workers in proportion to population density and burden of disease. The migration of health professionals could be seen as a legitimate life plan in a global age. However, unregulated mass emigration comes with significant losses to vulnerable health care systems that translate into disease and death in source populations. Does medical brain drain violate the human right to health of source populations?
The paper challenges those positions that take medical brain drain to be either morally neutral or directly locate harm or wrongdoing in the agential actions of recruiting countries, source countries or emigrating health workers. It aims to capture the moral stakes in a novel way by putting forward a global structural account of a human rights violation. First, the paper argues that medical brain drain is a standard threat to the health of vulnerable populations without social and global institutions in place to guard against it. In this respect, people living in source countries with critical health worker shortages do not enjoy their right to health. 
How should we conceive of the violators? Second, this paper argues that medical brain drain should not be construed as a human rights violation via the actions of individual and collective agents (states).  The agent-centred model of human rights responsibility fails to capture the structural features that enable and constrain the actions of the alleged violators in a morally relevant way. The paper argues that medical brain drain is a structural human rights violation where individual and collective agents pursue their ends within the limits of existing rules, norms and background conditions that produce large-scale, systematic and severe (health) deprivations, and there are no institutions in place to mitigate these consequences.
The human right to health should, then, be seen as a minimal moral constraint on the global structure and the way it affects state capacity to guard against standard threats to health. It triggers forward-looking shared responsibility, which provides reason to reform exiting institutions towards progressively realizing the right to health, and to establish new ones where they do not yet exist.

The immigration debate in political theory has produced a series of accounts that justify the state’s right to exclude potential immigrants, where the right of self-determination figures prominently. We challenge two prominent accounts of the self-determination-based right to exclude and defend a circumscribed right to exclude and a corollary duty to admit immigrants, based on our ‘people relationship goods’ account of self-determination. Our conception reconciles the moral claims of global opportunity migrants with the well-being and non-alienation interests of the locals. It therefore provides a principled answer to the philosophical question underlying pressing political conflicts today, namely what is the permissible scope of exclusion by self-determining political communities, in light of weighty global moral demands of inclusion.

Following the 2015 refugee crisis, concerns about the integrity and the sustainability of the asylum system have deepened. Policies that aim to deter ingenuine asylum seeking through economic and social rights restrictions, and the swift return of those whose protection claim has been rejected, have consequently increased. However, this goal is in tension with moral claims of asylum seekers during the asylum process, and also with a potential right of rejected asylum seekers to remain, if they have developed social ties in the receiving society during the lengthy asylum process. Taking the perspective of an ethical policy maker, this working paper develops guidelines towards a policy response to the dilemma between maintaining the integrity and sustainability of the asylum system and the moral rights of rejected asylum seekers.
The working paper argues that restricting the rights of asylum seekers and reducing the length of the asylum process raise ethical concerns and practical problems. Rejected asylum seekers should be treated differently depending on their normative attitude to the refugee system. Those who have made their claim in good faith should have a social membership-based right to remain in the host society. By contrast, those rejected asylum seekers who have made disingenuous claims in bad faith should be legitimately returned.

GLOBAL JUSTICE : THEORY PRACTICE RHETORIC (8/1) 2015 For many advocates of global justice, one important strategy in fostering development is to address women's specific development needs. One of the principal aims of this strategy is to improve the status of maternal and infant health, and thereby to improve the status of women more generally. For many scholars and practitioners working to eradicate poverty, this focus is unambiguously a good thing, since women (and their children) are among the most vulnerable members of their own communities, and are therefore most likely to suffer from the devastating effects of poverty more generally. Such improvements are considered central to the achievement of development goals, since improvements in women's conditions are believed to translate into development gains for the whole community. Yet the devastating effects of poverty can be compounded by the ways in which gender bias is so often focused on women's bodies; the ways in...

In this article, we propose a reconciliation between global equality of opportunity and self-determination, two central and seemingly conflicting principles in the contemporary theory of global justice. Our conception of reconciliation draws on the family-people analogy, following the account of familial relationship goods, developed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, on permissible parental partiality and domestic equality of opportunity. We argue, first, that a plausible conception of global equality of opportunity must be able to distinguish morally arbitrary aspects of nationality that require mitigation from morally permissible ones. Second, we argue that a plausible criterion for the distinction integrates a person’s normative interests over a lifetime: (i) the interests of a child born into societal circumstances that impact her life prospects; and (ii) the interests of an adult citizen in collective self-determination. Third, we outline an account of ‘people relationship goo...

David Miller’s political philosophy of immigration employs two complementary argumentative strategies to challenge open border theories. The first strategy is to defeat the principled case for open borders, such as the global equality of opportunity argument for more lax immigration control. The second strategy is to establish the democratic community’s prima facie right to determine the shape of its future, including membership and the right to exclude. First, I argue that Miller’s conception of global equality of opportunity is overly narrow and that his objections to the principle, to the metric and to what counts as feasible political action misfire against other, more plausible, accounts. Second, I argue that his democratic interpretation of collective self-determination does not solve the pressing question concerning the morally justified scope and content of self-determination and the moral limits of the right to exclude. I conclude by questioning Miller’s general strategy: whether theories of immigration should be engaged in an exercise of shifting the burden of proof between open and closed borders. By contrast, I argue that a more desirable task for the political philosophy of immigration is to find ways in which the joint requirement of global equality of opportunity and collective self-determination can be coherently upheld.

Michael Blake holds that liberal states are precluded from introducing compulsory medical service to improve access to health care under conditions of critical health worker shortage. "Emergency circumstances" are the only exception when the suspension of liberty may be justified. I argue that there are three problems with Blake's emergency justification of compulsory service. First, his concept of emergency is vague. Second, his account does not really rely on emergency as much as liberty. Third, his conception of permissible restrictions of liberty is too narrow. I argue that liberties may be limited to some degree, temporarily, for the sake of attaining the capacities necessary for the exercise of liberties and for safeguarding the social conditions of the right to health. I conclude that in poor societies, temporarily delaying emigration through a highly qualified compulsory medical service can sometimes be justified.

One of the most ambitious and sophisticated recent approaches to provide a theory of global health justice is Sridhar Venkatapuram's recent work. In this commentary, we first outline the core idea of Venkatapuram's approach to global health justice. We then argue that one of the most important elements of the account, Venkatapuram's basis of global health duties, is either too weak or assumed implicitly without a robust justification. The more explicit grounding of the duty to protect and promote health capabilities is based on Martha Nussbaum's version of the capability approach. We argue that this foundation gives rise to humanitarian duties rather than duties of justice proper. Venkatapuram's second argument from the social determinants of health thesis is instead a stronger candidate for grounding duties of justice. However, as a justificatory argument, it is only alluded to and has not yet been spelled out sufficiently. We offer plausible justificatory steps...

ABSTRACT In this article, we defend a normative theory of prenatal equality of opportunity, based on a critical revision of Rawls's principle of fair equality of opportunity (FEO). We argue that if natural endowments are defined as biological properties possessed at birth and the distribution of natural endowments is seen as beyond the scope of justice, Rawls's FEO allows for inequalities that undermine the social conditions of a property-owning democracy. We show this by considering the foetal programming of disease and the possibility of germ-line modifications. If children of lower socioeconomic background are more likely to develop in a poor foetal environment and germ-line enhancements are available only to the rich, initial inequalities between the rich and the poor would grow, and yet FEO would be satisfied. In order to avoid the problem, we propose a revised FEO principle omitting any reference to the comparison of natural endowments. Our revised FEO requires that institutions mitigate social class effect from reproduction and gestation to the greatest extent compatible with parental freedoms and the value of the family.

With the signing of the 2030 Agenda, the international community has committed to ending poverty in all its forms. This first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) recognises poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon that goes beyond the simple lack of a sufficient amount of income. However, the way the SDG 1 and, in particular, Target 1.2 – “reduce ... poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions” – are formulated poses challenges for its operationalisation.