Collected here are fifteen essays about the severe poverty that today afflicts billions of human lives. The essays seek to explain why freedom from poverty is a human right and what duties this right creates for the affluent. This volume derives from a UNESCO philosophy program organized in response to the first of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000: 'to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger'.--Publisher's description.

Some 2.5 billion human beings live in severe poverty, deprived of such essentials as adequate nutrition, safe drinking water, basic sanitation, adequate shelter, literacy, and basic health care. One third of all human deaths are from poverty-related causes: 18 million annually, including over 10 million children under five. However huge in human terms, the world poverty problem is tiny economically. Just 1 percent of the national incomes of the high-income countries would suffice to end severe poverty worldwide. Yet, these countries, unwilling to bear an opportunity cost of this magnitude, continue to impose a grievously unjust global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably perpetuates the catastrophe. Most citizens of affluent countries believe that we are doing nothing wrong. Thomas Pogge seeks to explain how this belief is sustained. He analyses how our moral and economic theorizing and our global economic order have adapted to make us appear disconnected from massive poverty abroad. Dispelling the illusion, he also offers a modest, widely sharable standard of global economic justice and makes detailed, realistic proposals toward fulfilling it. Thoroughly updated, the second edition of this classic book incorporates responses to critics and a new chapter introducing Pogge's current work on pharmaceutical patent reform.

'Poverty itself is a violation of numerous basic human rights.' (Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner on Human Rights)The idea that freedom from poverty is a basic human right that gives rise to moral and legal obligations of governments and other actors has received increased international attention in recent years. Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has pushed the international agenda on poverty and human rights forward by characterizing extreme poverty as one of the key human rights problems that the world faces. The recognition of poverty as a human rights issue is alsoincreasingly reflected in the work of international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and of campaigning organizations such as Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.In Poverty and Human Rights Vizard analyses the importance of the work of the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen for contemporary debates about poverty and human rights. Bringing together perspectives from ethics, economics, and international law, Vizard provides a detailed and concise analysis of Sen's contributions and examines the ways in which his work has promoted cross-fertilization and integration across traditional disciplinary divides. She demonstrates that Sen has made a majorcontribution to the development of an 'interdisciplinary bridge' between human rights and theoretical and empirical economics, and to the establishment of poverty as a human rights issue.Vizard demonstrates that Sen's work has deepened and expanded human rights discourse in important and influential ways. In ethics, Sen is shown to have challenged the exclusion of poverty, hunger, and starvation from the characterization of fundamental freedoms and human rights, and to have contributed to the development of a framework in which authoritatively recognized international standards in this field can be meaningfully conceptualized and coherently understood. In economics, Sen isshown to have set out a far-reaching critique of standard frameworks that fail to take account of fundamental freedoms and human rights, and to have moved the economics and human rights agenda forward by pioneering the development of new paradigms and approaches which focus on theseconcerns.

This important Research Handbook explores the nexus between human rights, poverty and inequality as a critical lens for understanding and addressing key challenges of the coming decades, including the objectives set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. The Research Handbook starts from the premise that poverty is not solely an issue of minimum income and explores the profound ways that deprivation and distributive inequality of power and capability relate to economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights.

By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development--for both rich and poor--in the twenty-first century. Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities. In the new global economy, where, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers--perhaps even the majority of people--he concludes, it is still possible to practically and optimistically restain a sense of social accountability. Development as Freedom is essential reading.