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 of the 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 for work, and trafficking in persons.

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 Advancement of Human Rights.

Introduction, Diana Tietjens Meyers
Part 1: Thinking through the Meanings of Poverty
1. Surviving Poverty, Claudia Card
2. Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, and Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution to Social Epistemology, David Ingram
3. Rethinking Coercion for a World of Poverty and Transnational Migration, Diana Tietjens Meyers

Part 2: Ethical Responses to Poverty
4. Responsibility for Violations of the Human Right to Subsistence, Elizabeth Ashford
5. Global Poverty, Decent Work, and Remedial Responsibilities: What the Developed World Owes to the Developing World and Why, Gillian Brock
6. Trafficking in Human Beings: Partial Compliance Theory, Enforcement Failure, and Obligations to Victims, Leslie P. Francis and John Francis
7. "Are My Hands Clean?" Responsibility for Global Gender Disparities, Alison Jaggar

Part 3: Promoting Development and Ensuring Agency
8. Agency and Intervention: How (Not) to Fight Global Poverty, Ann Cudd
9. Empowerment Through Self-Subordination?: Microcredit and Women's Agency, Serene J. Khader
10. Paradoxes of Development: Rethinking the Right to Development, Amy Allen

Part 4: Transnational Transactions and Human Rights
11. Poverty, Voluntariness, and Consent to Participate in Research, Alan Wertheimer
12. Children's Rights, Parental Agency and the Case for Non-coercive Responses to Care Drain, Anca Gheus
13. Human Rights and Global Wrongs: The Role of Human Rights Discourse in Responses to Trafficking, John Christman
Index