Elizabeth Ashford: Hunger’s Unwitting Executioners

Colloquium lecture by Elizabeth Ashford (St Andrews), organized by the Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy

Genuine acknowledgement of a fundamental human right entails prohibiting and classifying as a violation behaviour that predictably deprives persons of the object of the right. There is widespread acknowledgement of a fundamental human right to subsistence. There is also widespread agreement that much severe poverty should be attributed to persons’ being actively deprived of the means of subsistence. However, the causal chains that result in these subsistence deprivations are generally of a scale and complexity that cannot be captured by either of the two main accounts of human rights violations, the interactional or the institutional accounts. Thus, (continue reading...)