Speaker Series: Dr. Meena Krishnamurthy, University of Manitoba "Coercion, Global Justice and International Loan Conditionalirty"

Short Abstract: International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank impose economic policy conditions on the money they lend to developing countries. This means that the distribution of money is contingent upon implementing specific economic policies such as liberalization and privatization of the economy. While popular critics of globalization have tended to be vocal in their criticisms of loan conditionality, there has been very little philosophical discussion of the moral soundness of such a policy. In this paper, I aim to fill this gap. I argue that loan conditionality is morally objectionable because it is unjustifiably coercive. In doing so, I develop a new motivation based account of coercion. I argue that this account not only gives a better account of the wrongness of loan conditionality but also provides a better account of what constitutes coercion than the standard (option based) account.