When Misfortune Becomes Injustice

When Misfortune Becomes Injustice surveys the progress and challenges in deploying human rights to advance health and social equality over recent decades. Alicia Ely Yamin weaves together theory and firsthand experience in a compelling narrative of how evolving legal norms, empirical knowledge, and development paradigms have interacted in the realization of health rights, and challenges us to consider why these advances have failed to produce greater equality within and between nations. In this revised and expanded second edition, Yamin incorporates crucial lessons learned about the state of global health equity and public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating just how incompatible the current institutionalized world order—based on neoliberal, financialized capitalism—is with one in which the rights of diverse people around the globe can be realized. COVID-19 struck a world that had been shaped by decades of disinvestment in public health, health systems, and social protection, as well as privatization of wealth and gaping social inequalities within and between countries, and the evident crisis of confidence in the capacity of democratic political institutions and global governance was deepened by the pandemic. Yamin argues that transformative human rights praxis in health calls for addressing issues of structural inequality and political economy, and working across disciplinary silos through networks and social movements.

When Misfortune Becomes Injustice surveys the last thirty years of health, economic, and social rights advancement within the international human rights community. Alicia Ely Yamin reflects on her firsthand experience as an academic, practitioner, and advocate to explore the shift in how international human rights bodies approached issues of health and ill-health. Yamin argues the narrative has evolved to view health as a human right, encapsulating health crises as injustices, not simply misfortunes. Starting with debates in the 1970s, Yamin carefully surveys the points of intersection and friction between the fields of law, public health, and economics and development conversations to show how the general discourse evolved over time. When Misfortune Becomes Injustice tells a story of extraordinary progress with respect to the right to health over the last few decades, including how traditional forms of tyranny and discrimination were curbed, and how new discourses of equality were formed. However, Yamin shows that the possibilities and political space necessary to advance a robustly egalitarian health rights agenda are increasingly shrinking with growing inequality, and a greater attention to diverse strategies for resistance and social transformation is sorely needed.

Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity provides a solid foundation for comprehending what a human rights framework implies and the potential for greater justice in health it entails.

In this tightly organized collection of essays, sixteen distinguished political theorists explore Shklar's intellectual legacy, focusing both on her own ideas and on the broad range of issues that most intrigued her. The volume opens with a series of varied and illuminating assessments of Shklar's conception of liberal politics. The second part, with essays on Descartes and Racine, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Laski, emphasizes the relation between individual freedom and moral psychology in modern political thought. The third part addresses contemporary issues, such as the role of hypocrisy, offensive speech, and constitutional courts in liberal democracies. The book concludes with an autobiographical essay by Shklar that provides a vivid sense of her singular voice and personality.

How can we distinguish between injustice and misfortune? What can we learn from the victims of calamity about the sense of injustice they harbor? In this book a distinguished political theorist ponders these and other questions and formulates a new political and moral theory of injustice that encompasses not only deliberate acts of cruelty or unfairness but also indifference to such acts. Judith N. Shklar draws on the writings of Plato, Augustine, and Montaigne, three skeptics who gave the theory of injustice its main structure and intellectual force, as well as on political theory, history, social psychology, and literature from sources as diverse as Rosseau, Dickens, Hardy, and E. L. Doctorow. Shklar argues that we cannot set rigid rules to distinguish instances of misfortune from injustice, as most theories of justice would have us do, for such definitions would not take into account historical variability and differences in perception and interest between the victims and spectators. From the victim's point of view--whether it be one who suffered in an earthquake or as a result of social discrimination--the full definition of injustice must include not only the immediate cause of disaster but also our refusal to prevent and then to mitigate the damage, or what Shklar calls passive injustice. With this broader definition comes a call for greater responsibility from both citizens and public servants. When we attempt to make political decisions about what to do in specific instances of injustice, says Shklar, we must give the victim's voice its full weight. This is in keeping with the best impulses of democracy and is our only alternative to a complacency that is bound to favor the unjust.

Seventeen original pieces of writing that use powerful storytelling to define justice, to give it a face, and to show how it affects the lives of every one of us. Includes contributions from Julia Alvarez, Richard Bausch, Madison Smartt Bell, Blanche McCrary Boyd, John Casey, Michael Dorris, Garrett Hongo, Charles Johnson, Alex Kotlowitz, Beverly Lowry, Martha Minow, Clarence Page, Sarah Pettit, Ntozake Shange, Susan Richards Shreve, Gerald M. Stern, Daniel J. Wideman, and John Edgar Wideman.

Fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the world explore the theological, philosophical, and historical connections between the three Abrahamic faiths and ethics. Timely reading for students of religion, philosophy, and ethics.

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.