1. Seminar Series on Global Justice
Over the last two decades, there has been a renewed and growing interest in academic circles about
understanding the requirements of global justice at both the individual and institutional levels. These
discussions have implications for how one may consider the role of organizations such as the World
Trade Organization, vertical global health funds, or the World Bank in development policy and practice.
The Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics, the unit in the World Bank’s Human Development
Network working on the relationships between values, faith, ethics, and development, is organizing a
series of four seminars with leading contemporary philosophers in order to inform Bank staff of recent
developments in this area. The BBL seminars will be organized on Thursdays every fortnight.
Seminar series
September 30, 2010 - 12.30 to 2.00 pm: Mathias Risse, Harvard University
October 14, 2010 - 12.30 to 2.00 pm in MC 13-121: Judith Lichtenberg, Georgetown University
October 28, 2010 - 12.30 pm to 2.00 pm in MC 2-800: Thomas Pogge, Yale University
November 11, 2010 (tentative): Larry Temkin, Rutgers University
The first seminar on September 30, 2010 (in room JB1-075), with Professor Mathias Risse of Harvard
University, will discuss how recent views of global justice have assessed global institutions and explain
what role such institutions have within his own approach to global justice, which he is developing in his
forthcoming book The Grounds of Justice. The seminar will start with the presentation of a conceptual
framework that will then be applied to the World Trade Organization on which Prof. Risse has published
several articles in leading journals. He will then discuss to what extent the conceptual framework can
also be applied to institutions such as the World Bank.
Brief biographies of the four speakers
Mathias Risse is Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University. His primary research areas include
contemporary political philosophy (in particular questions of international justice,
distributive justice, and property) and decision theory (in particular, rationality and
fairness in group decision making). His articles have appeared in journals such as
Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Nous, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and
Social Choice and Welfare. Risse received his BA, BS and MS in mathematics from
Bielefeld, and his MA and PhD in philosophy from Princeton. Before coming to Harvard
he taught in the Department of Philosophy and the Program in Ethics, Politics and
Economics at Yale. His forthcoming book The Grounds of Justice: An Inquiry about the State in Global
Perspective is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Judith Lichtenberg joined the Georgetown University philosophy department in 2007.
She previously taught at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she held
appointments in the philosophy department and at the university's Institute for
Philosophy and Public Policy. Her writing and teaching are in the fields of ethics and
political philosophy, with special interests in justice and charity both in the domestic
and the international spheres, race and ethnicity, education, the mass media, and
moral psychology. She has held visiting appointments at Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale,
and the University of Melbourne, and in 2006-07 spent her sabbatical at Stanford
University's Humanities Center.
Thomas Pogge is currently the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner
Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. In addition to his Yale
appointment, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature
at the University of Oslo and a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied
Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University. Pogge is also an editor

2. for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the
Norwegian Academy of Science. Pogge received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation
supervised by John Rawls. Since then he has published widely on Kant and in moral and political
philosophy, including various books on John Rawls and global justice.
Larry Temkin is Professor II of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He
graduated number one with a B.A.Honors Degree from the University of
Wisconsin/Madison (1975), and earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton
(1983). He also studied at Oxford University. Specializing in ethics and political
philosophy, Temkin is the author of Inequality, (Oxford University Press, 1993), as
well as many articles. He has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation and
the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and been a Visiting Fellow or Scholar at the National
Humanities Center, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, All
Souls College Oxford University, the National Institutes of Health, and the Australian
National University. He is also the recipient of eight major teaching awards.
For information on the Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics seminar series, please contact Jorn
Sonderholm at jsonderholm@worldbank.org. To register for this seminar series or for other seminars
organized by the unit, please contact Sukanya Venkataraman at svenkataraman@worldbank.org. For
more general information on the unit’s work, please contact Quentin Wodon at qwodon@worldbank.org
or visit our website at www.worldbank.orgdevelopmentdialogue.
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