ABSTRACT
One way to ground moral responsibility to those we do not already have a connection to is through the Good Samaritan principle, also known as the principle of mutual aid. Elizabeth Ashford takes up Pogge’s framework but argues that a different understanding of responsibility ought to emerge from it. She argues for an account of responsibility of individuals in Western states to the global poor. A influential account of responsibility for global justice comes from Iris Young, who argues that we ought to treat certain global harms as kinds of structural injustice, which she understands as the unintended but unjust outcome of the actions of millions of differently positioned individuals acting according to normally accepted rules. One of the challenges that comes with seeing global injustices as structural is that assigning responsibility is daunting. The most direct way is through benefiting from policies and practices that guard our sovereign right to control membership and that keep displaced peoples far from our territory.
