Australian Review of Public Affairs (
2002)
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Abstract
Why is it that we respond to one form of human suffering rather than another? If we are all human beings, and thus are all capable of imagining—if only imperfectly—the pain and suffering caused by wars, famines, bombings, floods, accidents and other instances of human misery, then why should it matter if it happens to people who look like us or talk like us? Or who happen to live here rather than somewhere else? Immanuel Kant, in his amazingly prescient 1796 essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’, suggested that the moral possibilities of what we today call globalisation would only be realised when ‘the violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (Kant 1991, pp. 107–8). How close to this ideal are we today?