Dear Ambitious Student - What an assignment! What you propose to write could indeed be a book instead of a research paper, so my hat is off to you and your ambitions. As a piece of advice, you might want to check with your professor (before the assignment is due) to see if there is a way to meet the requirements of the assignment, but evaluate the issues in a more specific way. This might help you to narrow down your research. In am not sure, for example, you need to do a whole review of moral theory in order to write a paper about economic justice. As far as resources, I recommend beginning with the online (and free!) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Perhaps begin by searching articles in justice or economics. Besides the numerous articles, be sure to make use of the bibliographies at the end of them. You will get a sense of who the major names are, both historically and today. Good luck!

My Charitable Friend, I disagree that it is not 'worth' doing, but it all depends on how you measure worth. Your good friend is correct in saying that shoebox full of trinkets and everyday supplies sent to a child or two won't solve world poverty. Ours is a world in which an estimated five thousand children under age ten die every day from preventable causes. A few shoeboxes won't change that, so it is the effort it takes you to assemble the shoebox is a wasted one because your individual actions will not change the basic dynamics of world poverty. Yet I disagree. Worth is not just measured by predicted efficacy. 'Worth it' is also about values. By preparing the shoeboxes you take an ethical stand that these children matter, that they are not forgotten, that they deserve goodies at holiday time like other children do. Values matter a good deal, so your shoebox campaign is important - but not just for your own sense of virtue. The shoeboxes, their contents and what they represent,...

The immigration debate you mention reminds me of the reparations for slavery debate that happens on my side 'of the pond.' These are wonderfully interesting issue, but you are right: let's put aside the particulars of those debates to talk about justice, then pizza, and then I’ll swing back around to responsibility. It is true that people alive today cannot be to blame for the evils of the British Empire or American slavery. This is why it seems strange to some that 'we' should pay the price for injustices committed long ago. However, history isn't a matter for the history books. The lingering effects of past historical injustices stay with us long after the occupiers have left or the shackles have been removed. One of these lingering effects is that people alive today may well continue to benefit from injustices committed hundreds of years ago - injustices which they deplore, but nevertheless continue to benefit them. For example, British citizens now could be said to enjoy a high standard of living...

I suspect you are right on many fronts. However, we (in the United States ) have a ignoble history of blocking adults from voting, e.g., denying suffrage to women and non-whites. I think ought to make us skeptical of movements to disenfranchise people. Another way to go, of course, is to enfranchise children - as when the United States lowered the voting age to eighteen from twenty one. Maybe we ought to move the voting age to fifteen or twelve? Recently someone told me one quick test for dementia is how quickly and accurately you can count back from 100 in units of 7. I flunked. I am thirty four. But if we are press forward with the imposition of minimum cognitive standards then we would need some fair system for discerning which elderly citizens have enough capacity to vote from those that do not; the blanket approach we take with minors would be hard to defend when imposed on seniors because it is much more difficult...