Global Justice Course at Lehman

I have a few seats left open in my upper-level Global Justice course at Lehman this spring. It's ideal for students working on interactions between morality, politics, and global economics. Interested students should contact me at csula@gc.cuny.edu for registration information.

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Global Justice

Prof. Chris Alen Sula

Lehman College, Spring 2008

Wed 10a-12:30p

Over 80% of the world’s wealth belongs to 20% of its population. How do we account for this huge inequality? (How) Should we respond to it morally? This class will survey prospects for global justice and their related problems. In particular, we’ll consider the historical and conceptual foundations of global justice, the roles of nations and global organizations in achieving justice, different models of equality and their possible measurements, the nature and scope of human rights, and applied issues of global justice, including citizenship, violence, and the environment. Our readings will cover the diverse areas of philosophy, political science, economics, and law. My goal is to tie theories of global justice to actual practice as much as possible, so we’ll also examine public documents like United Nations reports and resolutions, as well as psychological work on allocation behavior and judgments of equality and fairness.

Thom Brooks, ed. The Global Justice Reader (Blackwell, 2008).

Additional readings—to be distributed

Book for review (choose one of the following):

Hiram Chodosh, Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology (NYU, 2005).

David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford, 2008).

Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Belknap, 2007).

Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, 2005).

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (W W Norton, 2003).

Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, Patriotism (Cambridge, 2004).

This course will be writing intensive. Students will prepare eight reading primers (questions or outlines), write three response papers (1,000 words), and complete a final project of a critical review (2,000 words) of a recent book in global justice, along with a group presentation.