Editorial

This issue of Journal of Global Ethics contains a collection of accepted articles from among our refereed submissions and a special section focused on a matter of continuing concern, the COVID-19 global emergency.

We open with the refereed articles of three authors, two of whom focus on governance in the context of the business management paradigm that is called corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR has been proposed as a model for self-regulation by the businesses themselves. It has been under some form of consideration since before Milton Friedman presented the familiar claim that ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits … to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.’ CSR extends the claim on management’s responsibilities far beyond that limit, and it similarly makes a more expansive claim than a third familiar model, stakeholder theory, which requires management to consider those who are especially affected by a management decision. So, CSR is different in kind than both of these: it is intended to include as part of the corporate objective a regard for social purposes and social problems that businesses may alleviate through their activity. Businesses might be called upon to weigh the opportunity to reduce the opportunities for government corruption that would arise if they were to implement more costly accounting systems, for example. As different concerns have come under discussion, the specific responsibilities that are appropriate to consideration under a CSR approach have been a changing subject that extends into consideration of environmental concerns and wealth inequities especially in this century. CSR discourse is reconfigured within the two articles, presenting turns that are recent innovations in the business ethics literature, and that are generally unfamiliar within discussion of global ethics. Michael Aßländer, in ‘Subsidiarity, wicked problems and the matter of failing states’, and Juliette Schwak, in ‘Foreign aid and discourses of National Social Responsibility: evidence from South Korea’, both apply the approach of CSR to governance, rather than to business management, and each takes the conversation in a very different direction.

Michael Aßländer applies concerns of social organization to business entities, extending the corporate objective to the ideal of a ‘corporate citoyen’/citizen. The ideal of subsidiarity is embodied in the principle that ‘societal tasks should be solved by subordinate entities in society if these entities have the competencies to solve such problems,’ and Aßländer hazards that the ideal may be applied to corporations as responsible problem-solvers. Aßländer continues a discussion begun in the pages of this journal by Tjidde Tempels, Vincent Blok, and Marcel Verweij in 2017 (13:1). Aßländer notes that ‘subsidiary responsibilities are often task-related and not always predefined by clearly classified competences,’ and considers the extreme case of failed states, which present conditions of compromised governance in which corporate citizens may even have a generative role in producing order. In this context and in others, the competitive characteristic of business activity may be applied: as Aßländer suggests, ‘actors having similar problems may test different solutions and, thus, compete with each other for the best solutions, which then can serve as models for other cases.’

Juliette Schwak applies CSR discourse to governments, ‘transposing’ CSR in a parallel discourse of ‘National Social Responsibility’ (NSR) for foreign policymaking. Schwak writes that ‘states must actively invest efforts in building their reputation as liberal international actors, notably by providing aid, to maintain their status in global economic competition.’ Donor states also act within ‘a marketplace’ that recipient states survey ‘in which recipients can choose between donors’ aid offers.’ Schwak focuses on the example of South Korea as presenting a case in which ‘ethical behavior can become a marketable asset to enhance a state’s competitiveness in the global economy.’ Schwak interviews South Korean development agency officials who take exception to such explicit assessment of their public discourse in market terms, instead referring to their efforts as ‘development cooperation.’ Schwak’s analysis presents new food for thought both because it has been paired with such interviews, and because of her argument that the policies of South Korea ‘systematically circumvent the public sector’ in their choice of projects within recipient states, encouraging ‘market-driven inequalities.’

In the journal’s third refereed article, Jørn Sønderholm and Jakob Thrane Mainz continue the discussion of aid provision at the individual, rather than national level. ‘Why some defenders of positive duties serve a bad theoretical cocktail’ considers the combination of three assumptions about donor responsibility that constitute what the authors call ‘a bad theoretical cocktail’: (1) that positive duties to aid exist; (2) that these duties are overdemanding; and (3) that cut-off points need to be set. They examine theorists who defend positive duties to help the poor by zeroing in on possible answers to the objection that these duties are overdemanding. Rich individuals can almost always help some more. The question they attempt to answer is how to set cut-off points for how demanding morality is or should be. In other words, theorists defending positive duties to aid need to address the objection of overdemandingness by setting cut-off points ‘if their theory is supposed to be action-guiding with respect to what it takes to live up to the demands of morality.ֹ’ The authors engage several thought experiments, starting with Peter Singer’s drowning child, to show how difficult it is to set cut-off points that can delineate the positive duties that the rich have to aid the poor.

The final issue of Journal of Global Ethics for 2021 appears about two years into our continuing experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization received a report of the virus on the last day of 2019. Rapid development, testing and approval of vaccines followed, and mass production began in the last quarter of 2020. In July 2021, the WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, claimed that ‘the pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it. It’s in our hands. We have all the tools we need: we can prevent this disease, we can test for it, and we can treat it’ (WHO 2021a). Recent developments in treatment are promising, but progress has not been optimal, despite the achievement of a global cooperative mechanism for prevention and treatment, the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator), which was formed in the first half of 2020.¹ We dedicate space in the journal to authors who appraise the global response, and the vaccination effort in particular. Fiona Robinson, who is included among the authors, has joined with Eric Palmer to collect the views of four authors who develop their writing from material first presented in recent web events sponsored by the International Development Ethics Association and by the International Research Group for Global Health Justice, which is a recently-created nexus of philosophers and related specialists who are focused on supporting the global response to COVID-19.²

Beginning in the first quarter of 2020, a global planning effort for COVID response was taking shape under the auspices of the World Health Organization. The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator) was announced April 24 2020; it includes as co-convening partners a collective of organizations that focus on:

• vaccine research and health innovation (CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations; FIND, the global alliance for diagnostics)

• vaccine distribution (Gavi, the global Vaccine Alliance)

• international finance (World Bank; Unitaid, a global health agency)

• non-profit funding (Wellcome; Gates Foundation) (WHO 2021b)

The ACT-Accelerator’s specific vaccines initiative is called COVAX. It is led by GAVI and CEPI, and is supported by delivery partners UNICEF and PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization (WHO 2021c). These ten organizations work in alliance with further diverse partner organizations. The ACT-Accelerator, under the auspices of the WHO, also engages politically with states by researching and reporting funding needs and by highlighting regional needs for COVID-related support (see WHO 2021b; WHO 2021c).

As of December 31, 2021, 8.5 billion vaccine doses had been delivered globally. COVAX delivered 910 million doses, which were 11% of the total, and less than half of the 2 billion COVAX doses that had been projected for 2021 (UNICEF 2021). The aspirational goal announced by the UN for a complete (1-2 dose) inoculation was 40% of every country’s population by the end of 2021. As of 1 December, 71 countries classified by the World Bank as very high-income had reached the mark, alongside 27 higher-income countries, and 12 middle-income countries (AFP 2021). Of the 27 countries classified as low-income, only Rwanda achieved the mark, in late December (WHO Africa 2021). The underperformance of the ACT-Accelerator and the current inequities in distribution provide clear indications of the urgency of reflection on policy, distributive justice, and the social sources that perpetuate this ongoing global health crisis.

Several of the authors who contribute to our discussion reflect on the ACT-Accelerator and the developing vaccination effort. In ‘Intellectual property rights trump the right to health,’ James Crombie situates the ACT-Accelerator with respect to criticisms of the global intellectual property rights system that arose in response to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, reminding readers of arguments for the ‘delinkage’ of development costs and production costs for health-related products, noting that patent-supported monopoly pricing limits access and distorts research priorities. Crombie explains the approach taken by one country’s legislators to provide lower-cost generic copies of patented medicines produced under compulsory licenses for the world’s developing and least-developed countries – Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR), which dates from 2004. Efforts to apply the legislation to COVID vaccines have not succeeded, indeed the legislation has hardly been applied at all since its enactment, in part due to structural shortcomings that Crombie details. Crombie also refers in passing to comparable initiatives developed in the legislation of other countries and by Unitaid, and he notes recent lawsuits intended to yield compulsory licenses for the production both of COVID vaccines and of remdesivir drug treatment. The discussion gives readers of this journal a window into how justice is imperfectly served, and perhaps is not well-served, in the current global agreement of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

Eduardo Rueda-Barrera also discusses TRIPS in ‘The waiver of COVID-19 vaccine patents: a fairness-based approach.’ Rueda provides a critique of the system with reference to John Rawls’ theory of distributive justice, introducing a new category of ‘crucial goods’ that may present a basis for exceptions to TRIPS. Rawls’ argument regarding ‘primary goods’ is articulated in the context of a single ‘modern democratic society,’ and does not extend to the global political order (Rawls 1993, xvi; Pogge 1994, 196). Rueda argues that distributive arguments do extend globally concerning vaccines, ‘a type of good (a) on which depends the possibility that people effectively have access and enjoy human rights and (b) which availability depends not on chance but on political decisions.’ Rueda’s introduction of this sort of good into the discussion of distributive justice merits attention. He continues on to argue that the property rights system limits the capacity for global production, and that increases may arise through waiver of those rights for the sake of production of these crucial goods.

Other authors in this section focus on the social sources that exacerbate and may alleviate the crisis. Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez continues with specific attention to the vaccination effort and to programs that follow in train, in ‘Build that wall! Vaccine certificates, passes and passports, the distribution of harms and decolonial global health justice.’ Arguedas reflects critically on both access and barriers to access. She traces vestiges of historical colonialism and ‘vaccine diplomacy’, and the reproduction of colonial relations of power in COVAX and other international vaccine distribution arrangements. Arguedas also presents a wide-ranging observation of inequity and power relations within nations, drawing from human rights, labor, and other monitoring organizations. Arguedas notes newly arising sources of precarity and injustice for labor, less-visible sources of exclusion from access to vaccines, and new social barriers that are appearing within the developing national and international monitoring regime of ‘vaccine passports.’

The opening and concluding contributions to this section, authored by Fiona Robinson and Sridhar Venkatapuram, provide global reflections on the continuing COVID crisis. Each contribution is informed by a body of previous writing of these authors that finds new expression within this context. Robinson’s work on expanding care ethics to international relations and a broader global context is well-known, and has been featured in two previous articles published in this journal (Vol. 2 Issue 1, Vol 9, Issue 2) and in The ethics of care: A feminist approach to human security (Temple University Press, 2011). In this issue, Robinson’s ‘Global health and the COVID-19 pandemic: a care ethics approach’ moves away from universalist and principles-based accounts, eschewing ‘the “cosmopolitanism” vs. “nationalism” framing found in traditional global distributive justice approaches.’ Instead, Robinson’s feminist care ethics approach zeroes in on the ‘everyday practices of people existing in relations of responsibility for and interdependence with others.’ Robinson argues that applying this approach to COVID-19 expands the inquiry and provides insights into ‘the enduring hierarchies that perpetuate global injustice’.

Sridhar Venkatapuram’s contribution to this journal builds on his general discussion of the social determinants of health and of their place in the theory of justice that is presented in Health justice: An argument from the Capabilities Approach (Polity Press, 2011; see also Flood et al. 2020). ‘Pandemic as revelation’ considers the shock that COVID has introduced, discussing the ‘inter-related social and biological causes’ that unequally constrain our capabilities. He writes, ‘To call it a medical crisis shows the lack of awareness (or unwillingness) to recognize the broad social factors in the causal chain preceding the immediate exposure to the virus.’ Venkatapuram attends to ‘social interactions and choices’ that have led to dysfunction and preventable death: he considers the role of the global order in the unequal distribution of harms, the lack of capacity for ethical reasoning within global institutions that consequently yields further inequity, and the effect of ‘racism and persistence of white supremacy as a fundamental driver of human deprivations.’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Comprehensive explanation of the covax scheme may be found at https://www.gavi.org/covax-facility#what.

2 The International Development Ethics Association webinar is archived at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMD_cS52qvfvC8icf5Zqwfg. The event was co-presented by Red para la formación ética y ciudadana and the Universidad Autónoma LatinoAmericana, with further support provided by the Guadalupe Institute. Archived events of the International Research Group for Global Health Justice may be found at https://www.irg-ghj.org/events. For an introduction to the group, see their vision statement (Arguedas-Ramirez, Chung, and Jaggar 2021).