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This chapter develops a new account of the types of social relations that principles of justice are meant to assess. It argues that the function of justice is to limit the ways in which we may permissibly coerce one another and distinguishes between two types of coercion: interactional (directly perpetrated by agents) and systemic (occurring through systems of rules). Two key insights underpin this coercion-based normative framework. First, from a liberal perspective, certain restrictions of freedom – those defined here as coercive – need special justification. The principles articulating the required justification are those that should be called principles of justice. Second, the relevant restrictions of freedom need not be direct, that is, perpetrated by an agent – collective or individual – against other agents. They can also be indirect, resulting from formal and informal social rules, supported by a large enough number of agents. This conclusion has important implications for our thinking about justice in the global realm, where there clearly are pervasive systems of formal and informal social rules, but no overarching, state-like group agent.

This chapter elucidates the relationship between responsible agency and knowledge. I argue that responsible agency requires only minimal self-knowledge that need not include explanatory knowledge of the mental causation of one’s actions. I argue that responsible agency also requires minimal social knowledge of others and minimal empirical knowledge of the world. I subsume these epistemic implications of responsible agency under what I call the thesis of cognitive minimums: the requirement that one be minimally knowledgeable about one’s mind, the social world, and the empirical world. Focusing on the cognitive minimums of self-knowledge and social knowledge, I argue that there are different ways in which we may partake in shared culpable ignorance about non-mainstream subjects, groups, and experiences, and I begin to develop an account of shared responsibility with respect to epistemic justice for the correction of blind spots and social insensitivities associated with racism and (hetero)sexism.

This chapter addresses the sources of cooperation for economic, social and cultural rights in international law, and explores the contemporary content of this obligation. Drawing on a broad range of hard and soft law instruments, the centrality of international cooperation for addressing the deprivations of poverty is reaffirmed legally, and given shape operationally. The complementary principle of a shared responsibility for human rights, recently pronounced by the international community, strengthens this legal obligation to cooperate internationally.

According to a traditional image, “true professionals” are independent agents who, unlike businesspersons, serve clients without having to submit to the authority of managers. With the advent of managed health care and large legal offices, most physicians and attorneys now work within authority-structured corporations. Indeed, all issues in professional ethics, not only those surrounding personal commitments, increasingly concern interactions between professionals and their organizations, and also among members of different professions. This chapter discusses three aspects of shared responsibility: the interplay between professionals' authority as experts and managers' authority within organizations, the possibility of corporations and professionals serving shared or widely overlapping goals, and how respect for authority is compatible in principle with professional autonomy. It also explores professionals' right of conscience that leaves room for personal ideals within authority relationships. Although the focus is on the profession of engineering, the main points apply to all professions.

This chapter introduces another ideology—republicanism—in order to interrogate sprawl in terms of civic virtue of self-governance and assumed shared responsibility. Civic republicans challenge the current American society—its institutions, culture norms, societal practices, and existing preferences to the extent of undercutting freedom as self-governance. As history dictates, however, sprawl apparently resulted from the desires of American society to live the suburban convenience, not out of a desire to foster active citizenship.

This chapter examines informality and collegiality at PubliCare Hospital. In part, informality and collegiality at PubliCare seemed to result from organizational inertia—the same people had been working in the same ways for decades. However, this environment also seemed to reflect the care that the hospital delivered. Just as practitioners were forced to rely on informal ties and reciprocal obligations to take care of their patients, the same ties and obligations found their way into practitioners' relationships with one another. As one doctor put it, “You're in it together, and there's a camaraderie [at PubliCare].” The chapter considers the possible factors that contributed to PubliCare's egalitarianism, as well as the shared responsibility between its doctors, nurses, and managers. It also looks at Westside Health Corporation's alliance with Sierra Medical Foundation, its enlistment of entrepreneurs, and its decision to close PubliCare.

The cases of global injustice any of us has in mind when thinking about the requirements of justice condition our take on justice and responsibility. Chapter 1 provides two cases of injustice itself: garment worker labor rights struggles and the global food crisis. Throughout the book, the author refers back to specifics in these discussions. The empirical and conceptual complexity of these problems illustrates the kind of problem she thinks is most challenging for global justice and responsibility. She introduces other approaches to responsibility with which just responsibility has an affinity: Larry May’s shared moral responsibility, Hannah Arendt’s political and collective responsibility, and Iris Marion Young’s connected responsibility. A comprehensive discussion of how the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity takes responsibility for injustice illustrates the kinds of practices that are part of a political approach to taking responsibility for injustice itself.

Obesity has become a global health epidemic and, as a result, a vivid debate about who bears responsibility has emerged. The book chapter elaborates on three fundamental elements that significantly influence agency in the context of food decisions: awareness and knowledge, the presence of alternatives, and addictive or addiction-like tendencies of human physiology and psychology. Under current conditions consumers do not have full agency to take full responsibility for obesity. Instead, corporations and governments play an active role in restoring consumer agency to make responsible food choices.

This chapter discusses burden-sharing in the context of secondary obligations (responsibility) under international law relating to the energy sector. The allocation of shared responsibilities among multiple state and/or other actors is relatively unexplored in international law. The possibility was not excluded by the International Law Commission (ILC) in its work on the responsibility of States and of International Organizations (IOs), but it provided only limited guidance on the allocation of responsibility in such cases. Thus, this chapter considers the practice of shared responsibility (and ‘softer’ forms of shared accountability) in the specific context of international energy activities regulated at international law (i.e. the system of law governing relations between states).

This chapter begins by considering the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello rules, which regulate different aspects of war, as well as the relationship between international law and the just war tradition, as two sets of rules that apply to the regulation of armed conflict. It then looks at one of two key challenges that privatization poses to jus in bello rules. The challenge stems from the fact that jus in bello rules, though intended to regulate the conduct of individuals during war time, incorporate some statist assumptions. These rules exist primarily for the purpose of protecting populations that are particularly vulnerable to the horrors of war. While constraining the conduct of private military contractor (PMC) personnel presents the more pressing moral problem, these individuals are sometimes in need of protection themselves. As such, their ambiguous status as something between civilian noncombatants and military members poses a unique set of problems. Finally, the chapter turns to the question of who bears responsibility for the violations of jus in bello norms, suggesting a system of shared responsibility for PMC personnel who violate jus in bello norms, the PMCs that employ them and, in some cases, the states that hire the PMCs.

Laura used a variety of activities to help her students see themselves as part of a caring community from which they drew benefits and to which they had responsibilities. She engaged them in setting goals and norms for the classroom, provided lots of opportunities for shared experiences, and helped them build a shared history. She used class meetings to help them feel part of the whole class, and, together with her students, created special customs and experiences that helped define them as a group. Perhaps, most important, she encouraged her students to share in the responsibility for creating and maintaining their community, and she helped them do so.

How to allocate responsibility for refugee protection between states forms a salient question in international refugee law. Explicit principles are lacking, yet there is a growing consensus that the issue of responsibility-sharing relates to the system’s most salient deficiencies. Within Europe, the sharing of responsibility for refugees is equally contested. Explicit legal rules exist within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) of the EU on the one hand, and the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) on the other. The chapter explores the schemes of responsibility-sharing that underlie these two frameworks, the scheme of layered responsibility under the ECHR, and the scheme of alternative responsibility under the Dublin legislation of the CEAS. It discusses the respective implications for the regulation of borders and safeguarding of rights. It points to the role of individual procedural rights arguing that lessons can be learned from the European case which can also apply to the international level.

This chapter describes the context in the Netherlands where current public policy defines the work-family ‘balance’ as a shared responsibility between government, employees and employers. However, assumptions about gendered responsibilities remain rather traditional. Drawing on a case study of a Dutch finance company, the chapter describes an organisation that adopts several formal supportive policies and experiences many tensions. It shows how work-family policies play out in paradoxical and ambivalent ways in the organisation at different levels, and the consequences for working parents and their managers. The chapter argues that although employers recognise and acknowledge that work-family policies and supports make sense in the changing economic environments and are intended to enhance employee satisfaction, in practice these policies do not feature in senior management strategic business planning and hence, are not included in the organisational culture. As a result, workers do not feel entitle to take advantage of them.

This chapter focuses on the social shift of economic risk to individuals and the need to overcome the barriers—psychological, cognitive, analytic, and ideological—to understanding the risk allocation. It begins with a historical overview of risks to human health, welfare, and well-being before explaining why it is difficult to see risk and its shift from government and businesses to individuals and families. It then looks at policy proposals to address these shifts, from income support to consumer credit reforms. The chapter concludes by arguing that democratic action toward addressing social policy challenges posed by these shifts is not possible in the absence of a greater sense of shared risks and shared responsibility.

Chapter 6 shifts to Phase 2 in the rise of diaspora institutions, describing the spread of diaspora institutions from the mid-1990s, as a ‘model’ of migration management in regional integration schemes like the EU. Diaspora institutions helped regional leaders to merge their member states into new regional units. Because these diaspora institutions involved the projection of one state’s authority into the domestic domain of another, they required states to soften their sovereignties and share responsibility for migrants. They demonstrated how an integrated region with porous ‘intercultural’ borders could address Europe’s abiding ethnic minority issues where a Europe of sealed nation-states could not. And they helped the new EU border states build the migration management capacities to deal with their new responsibilities as the sentries of Europe’s new perimeter. But sometimes, this process has released pent-up nationalisms and dredged up past territorial disputes.

Chapter 8 concludes with a summary of the book’s main findings, which relate to the initial impetus for a regional refugee instrument, the meaning of key terms of the 1969 Convention, its relationships with the international refugee convention and with regional human rights law, and the institutional architecture supportive of this treaty framework. It also addresses several overarching issues: the lack of formal supervision of the 1969 Convention, the challenge of effective implementation, and both negative and constructive forms of international responsibility sharing. Finally, it suggests a protection priority the AU and states should focus on going forward: fostering the local integration of refugees in protracted situations, including by respecting refugees’ work rights and their freedom of movement.

Tunnel-digging, or tunneling, hardly features in international legal instruments. Unlike land, space, and sea, the underground remains largely unregulated. In trying to decipher international law’s take on the underground, this chapter searches for answers in general international law. Does international law recognize state sovereignty over the underground as it does for air, land, and space, or does sovereignty over the underground fall into an unregulated loophole? A close analysis reveals that states have sovereignty over underground resources located in areas under their control or jurisdiction, provided these rights have not been transferred to private entities. This chapter argues that the same principles governing sovereignty over land, air, and water—sovereignty, development, shared resources, cooperation, and peace and security—should apply to state sovereignty over the underground. The implications for the legality of tunnel-digging under international law are far-reaching.