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Previous research has documented only a modest success rate for imposed sanctions. By contrast, the success rate is higher in cases that are settled at the threat stage. In this article, the authors provide new insights about the circumstances under which sanctions cause behavioral change only after being imposed. First, the target must initially underestimate the impact of sanctions, miscalculate the sender's determination to impose them, or wrongly believe that sanctions will be imposed and maintained whether it yields or not. Second, the target's misperceptions must be corrected after sanctions are imposed. A game-theoretical model with incomplete information is used to develop and clarify the argument.

Many theorists claim that if an agent benefits from an action that harms others, that agent has a moral duty to compensate those who are harmed, even if the agent did not cause the harm herself. In the debate on climate justice, this idea is commonly referred to as the beneficiary pays-principle (BPP). This paper argues that the BPP is implausible, both in the context of climate change, and as normative principle more generally. It should therefore be rejected.

In this paper I address the objection to sufficientarianism posed by Paula Casal and Richard Arneson, that it is hard to conceive of a sufficiency threshold such that distribution is highly important just below it, and not required at all just above it. In order to address this objection, I elaborate on the idea that sufficientarianism structurally can be seen to require two separate thresholds, which may or may not overlap. I then argue that a version of such a view is plausible. Lastly, I distinguish this view from related proposals in the literature.

Sufficientarianism is a principle of distributive justice according to which it is important that everyone has enough of some relevant form of advantage. Many, but not all, sufficientarian theories accept both the positive thesis, which holds that there is a level of advantage such that it is especially important that people reach it, and the negative thesis, which holds that there is a level of advantage such that above it, distributive justice concerns do not arise. Sufficientarians disagree on a number of questions: whether it is welfare, resources, or capabilities (or something else) that constitutes the relevant form of advantage; whether the incidence of sufficiency should be maximized or the extent of insufficiency should be minimized; whether the threshold should be high or low; whether there should be more than one threshold; and whether sufficiency should have a wide scope, temporally and spatially. Most sufficientarians agree, however, that absolute levels of advantage are morally important, that equality is not intrinsically valuable, and that advantage need not be maximized.

Thomas Pogge has argued that we have strong negative duties to assist the global poor because we harm them through our contribution to the global economic order. I argue that Pogge's concept of harm is indeterminate. The resources of any group will typically be affected by at least two economic schemes. Pogge suggests that the responsibility for any affected group's shortfall from a minimum standard ought to be shared between the contributing schemes. I argue that shared responsibility can be interpreted in two different ways. Unfortunately, both interpretations are problematic. Lastly, I suggest a strategy for amending this problem.

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person’s vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that decision affects her interests, independently of her voting weights on other decisions. Further, we consider two recent alternative proposals for how the All Affected Principle should weight votes, and give reasons for rejecting both.