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Corruption is a pervasive problem for global justice: Gillian Brock presents a much-needed philosophical treatment. She offers a new framework for allocating responsibility for corruption, providing the analytical tools we need to tackle the global injustice that it causes.
List of contents
- 1: Corruption, Responsibilities, and Global Justice: An Introduction
- 2: Corruption and Global Injustice
- 3: Justice, State Responsibilities, and Human Rights
- 4: Reducing Corruption: The Many Dimensions
- 5: Contemporary Corruption-curbing Tools
- 6: Abusive Tax Avoidance and Tax Professionals' Responsibilities
- 7: Sharing Responsibilities for Action
- 8: Addressing Common Challenges and Future Directions
- Appendix: Is a Comprehensive Account of Corruption Available? Some Difficulties
About the author
Gillian Brock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She has published widely on issues in political and social philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics. Her books include Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (OUP, 2009), Debating Brain Drain (with Michael Blake, OUP, 2015), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (OUP, 2013), Justice for People on the Move (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Migration and Political Theory (Polity, 2021). She has received several prestigious awards including a Fulbright Award in 2005 and she was joint winner of the 2014 Amartya Sen Prize.
Summary
Corruption is a pervasive problem across the world and is regularly ranked as among the greatest global challenges. Considering the role that corruption plays in exacerbating deprivation and fuelling social tension, peaceful and just societies are unlikely to come about without tackling corruption.
Addressing corruption should be a high priority for those concerned with poverty eradication, peace, security, and justice. Yet, curiously, corruption has not yet been the focus of any books by philosophers working on global justice topics. Corruption and Global Justice does so. Author Gillian Brock offers a normatively justified account of how to allocate responsibilities for addressing corruption across the many agents who can and should play a role. In order to know who should take responsibility and how they should do so, we need to understand multiple forms of corruption, the corruption risks associated with various activities, the interventions that tackle corruption effectively, and current policy and legal frameworks in place for addressing corruption. In addition, Brock proposes a new framework for navigating responsibility to address injustice, one that is action-oriented and forward-looking. Adopting an agent-empowering approach and harnessing the power of joining forces in effective collective action, Corruption and Global Justice addresses a significant global problem in a comprehensive way, providing the tools we need for progress as we collaborate to tackle this global scourge.
Additional text
Despite the massive size of the global justice literature, Brock's book is one of the first - perhaps the first - to focus specifically on corruption in relation to global justice. It would be an important work for this reason alone, but it also has many other virtues which should make it the touchstone of the topic going forward ... Brock is correct that corruption is an important problem and that global justice theorists have not given it the attention it deserves. And many of her proposals are worth taking seriously ... the topic is ripe for further work, and Brock is to be commended for bringing it to the table.
