Kieran Oberman tteching Global Justice Class

During spring quarter Kieran Oberman, Post doctoral Fellow for the Program on Global Justice has been teaching "An Introduction to Global Justice". The course looks at controversial ethical questions regarding international affairs such as what should be done to alleviate global poverty, under what circumstances is war justified and who should pay the costs of averting climate change. The course has proved extremely popular, so much so we have had to move to a much larger lecture theater to accommodate everyone. In class students have participated enthusiastically in debate and developed their positions on some of the world's most pressing problems. The focus of his research this quarter closely pairs with that of his teaching. The paper he is currently working on is entitled "Justice and War: Is the War in Afghanistan an Injustice to Africa?" The paper holds that a strong argument against the resort to war is that war expends resources that could be used to address poverty. If a war is to be justified it must be justified to the victims of poverty as well as to the victims of the war. This point (he hopes) will seem intuitive to many, yet strangely it is almost entirely disregarded in modern just war theory. His paper asks why this is so.