Most accounts of global justice, whether it be the nationalist, cosmopolitan or Rawlsian moderate approach, tend to focus on the obligations of well-ordered societies towards non-well-ordered societies, or more precisely of liberal and decent peoples to burdened societies (Rawls, 1999). But the question to know what burdened societies themselves owe to their own citizens in this respect or how several natural, cultural and social encumbrances into which they are trapped impact the assessment of their obligations towards their own peoples did not receive adequate attention in the global justice literature so far. Maybe this is due in part to the fact that theorists of global justice, who mostly belong to liberal societies, assume that burdened societies need help and tend to frame unconsciously global justice in terms of the transfer of a minimum package of something from the North to the South. An implicit normative consequence will be that burdened societies have no strong moral obligations toward their own citizens, if not to accept help from well-ordered societies.
Furthermore, in the same vain, these accounts of global justice generally frame firms’ obligations in the international arena in terms of what can be called a ‘do no harm’ approach and adopt a moral division of labor with separate responsibilities where States are considered as unique primary agents of global justice and firms only as secondary agents of justice (O’Neill, 2005). This way of framing the respective moral obligations of states and firms in the international arena did find a sound echo in the influential UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights (Ruggie, 2011) where the states have the duty to protect human rights, firms have the responsibility to respect human rights and both share the responsibility to give access to remedy to those whose human rights have been violated. An explicit normative consequence of this division of moral labor is that, in so far as firms do not violate the human rights of citizens from burdened societies, they are fulfilling their human rights obligations from a global justice stand point.
The aim of this project is to take issue with both claims and to offer an African perspective on these issues by relying on the human right to health(care) in Sub-Saharan Africa.