Poverty, the deprivation of access to basic needs necessary for human well-being, is of central concern in the field of global justice. Each year millions of people die due to poverty-related causes. Daily billions of people suffer under poverty’s crushing weight. The scale and level of harm merit global attention. The normative groundwork for concerns over poverty rests on the basic principles of the right of human beings to life and to live life, as moral equals, free from undue harms and suffering. Though the right to life can be construed minimally as freedom from interference, recent international declarations and treaties (including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976), the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1976), UN Millennium Development Goals (2000)) extend the right to life to include access to life enabling goods. Such items include access to food, shelter, clean water, basic sanitation, health...
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Sieger, L.E. (2011). Poverty. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_360
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