Skip to main content

School of Philosophy

  • Home
  • People
  • Events
    • Event series
    • Conferences
      • Past conferences
    • Past events
  • News
    • Audio/Video Recordings
  • Research
  • Study with us
    • Prizes and scholarships
  • Visit us
  • Contact us

Centres & Projects

  • Centre for Consciousness
  • Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory
  • Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences
  • Humanising Machine Intelligence

Related Sites

  • Research School of Social Sciences
  • ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

Centre for Consciousness

Related Sites

Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory

Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences

School of Philosophy

Administrator

Breadcrumb

HomeUpcoming EventsChris Armstrong (Southampton): The Resource Trade, Accountability, and Law
Chris Armstrong (Southampton): The Resource Trade, Accountability, and Law

In his book Blood Oil, Leif Wenar argues that we have compelling moral reasons to cease buying natural resources from unaccountable leaders (including dictators) in other countries. Rather than hurting them, such a cessation can be expected to have positive consequences for the world's poor. As a result, he argues, advocates of a variety of views on global justice (including global egalitarianism) ought to endorse cessation. Moreover - and by contrast to some of the proposals which egalitarians have actually advocated - cessation looks eminently accessible to us. Indeed it might be thought that principles which are already at the heart of the international legal order demand that we cease trade. Thus cessation 'merely' puts into practice a principle (of popular sovereignty over resources) to which most of the world's states are already explicitly committed. This talk has two objectives. The first is to investigate, even if only in brief brush-strokes, what we can expect cessation to deliver. This allows us to assess, in turn, the extent to which egalitarians ought to commit to cessation, and the extent to which it ought to be prioritised over other policies they have tended to support. The second goal is to assess the claim that cessation is in some sense required by principles which are already embedded in the international legal order. On both counts my conclusions will be somewhat sceptical.

Date & time

  • Mon 22 Aug 2016, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location

Coombs Seminar Room A

Event Series

MSPT seminars