Dr. Ndidi Nwaneri

Fellow von Oktober 2015 bis Juli 2016

Ms. Ndidi Nwaneri came to Loyola University Chicago in 2010 to earn the Ph.D. degree in Philosophy.  She previously earned a B.Sc. in Economics (Development) from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria and an M.A. in Public Policy from George Washington University in Washington D.C.   

Ms. Nwaneri comes from a professional background in the fields of public policy and international development, and currently serves on the executive board of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA). Her primary research interest is in the area of global justice, and she describes her dissertation research this way:

“My research project is a philosophical analysis of global justice theories. I hold the position that the most basic right and duty moral agents have and owe others respectively is the right to non-domination. I propose that global injustice is a violation of the negative duty of non-domination. I therefore argue that an adequate global justice theory should be grounded on the right and correlative duty of non-domination.”

While at Loyola, Ms. Nwaneri has served as a teaching assistant (2010-14) and a teacher of record (2014-15).  In the summer of 2014, she was awarded a Graduate Student Summer Research Award from the Philosophy Department. 

 

Projekt am fiph

A Philosophical Analysis of Global Justice Theories

In this project, I argue that the most basic right and duty moral agents have and owe others is the right to non-domination. I propose that global injustice should be understood as a violation of this negative duty, and that global justice theories should be grounded on the right and correlative duty of non- domination.

Some important global justice theories such as those proposed by Rawlsians, take the global institutional order and the mal-distribution of resources that these institutions create and maintain, as central to the problem of global justice. Although it is not my intention to undermine the importance of access to resources, I hold the position that global resource distribution patterns rest on more fundamental issues than such theories allow. I argue inter alia, that a global justice theory that remains at the level of institutions will elide or obscure the role of human agency in explicating the problem of global injustice.

I therefore attempt to develop a global justice theory that moves the level of analysis beyond global institutions and practices to the level of inter-subjective relations between moral agents. The advantage of such an analysis is that it will create a space that accommodates global distributive injustice, as well as other aspects of global injustice. For instance, my analysis examines the inter-subjective relationships between victims of global injustice on the one hand, and on the other hand, two (sometimes overlapping), groups: those who create and maintain the global institutions and those who benefit from such institutions (relative to those who suffer from it). My project opens up the following question: How would a global justice theory look if we took the expression of human agency as the cause, and restriction of human freedom, as the effect, of global injustice? I argue that global injustice should also be understood as the result of fundamentally flawed inter – subjective relations, which leads to the unjustified domination of some moral agents by others. To do this, I utilize the works of Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst to analyze and critique the global justice theories proposed by Thomas Pogge and Richard Miller.