Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights

Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights collects thirteen new essays that analyze how human agency relates to poverty and human rights respectively as well as how agency mediates issues concerning poverty and social and economic human rights. No other collection of philosophical papers focuses on the diverse ways poverty impacts the agency of the poor, the reasons why poverty alleviation schemes should also promote the agency of beneficiaries, and the fitness ofthe human rights regime to secure both economic development and free agency. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 considers the diverse meanings of poverty both from the standpoint of the poor and from that of the relatively well-off. Part 2 examines morally appropriate responses to poverty on the part of persons who are better-off and powerful institutions. Part 3 identifies economic development strategies that secure the agency of the beneficiaries. Part 4 addresses the constraints poverty imposes on agency in the context of biomedical research, migration forwork, and trafficking in persons.

Meyers's collection is an important contribution to the philosophical discussions surrounding moral responsibility for global injustice, global poverty, and moral agency more generally. Meyers's book and the essays contained in it provide a crucial starting point for more discussions to come, which will hopefully lead to more developed and nuanced ways of understanding the complex links between poverty and agency. Only when we fully understand these links between human action and the moral wrongs of poverty will we be in a position to effectively motivate and enact the changes necessary to finally eradicate avoidable, human-caused poverty on a global scale. This project is a profound step in that direction., I strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in present philosophical debates on global poverty and human rights., The volume Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights is an important contribution to the fields of global ethics and justice. ... The volume is, thus, deeply concerned about practical issues in nonideal theory. We believe that this represents a significant improvement over several of the earlier contributions to global ethics and justice., Human rights practitioners have been stressing the importance of community participation and stakeholder engagement for some time, so it is helpful to see... what a philosophical argument for incorporating these considerations would look like., A handy volume on contemporary global poverty, this collection of philosophical papers is recommended for students, educators, and practitioners from the social sciences and humanities concerned with the issues of poverty, globalization, development studies, and international human rights.

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She has held the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago and the Laurie Chair in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She works in three main areas of philosophy - philosophy of action, feminist ethics, and human rights theory. She is currently writing a monograph, Victims' Stories and the Advancementof Human Rights.