Politics as Usual E-Book

Thomas W. Pogge

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 528

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Worldwide, human lives are rapidly improving. Education, health-care, technology, and political participation are becoming ever more universal, empowering human beings everywhere to enjoy security, economic sufficiency, equal citizenship, and a life in dignity. To be sure, there are some specially difficult areas disfavoured by climate, geography, local diseases, unenlightened cultures or political tyranny. Here progress is slow, and there may be set-backs. But the affluent states and many international organizations are working steadily to extend the blessings of modernity through trade and generous development assistance, and it won't be long until the last pockets of severe oppression and poverty are gone.

Heavily promoted by Western governments and media, this comforting view of the world is widely shared, at least among the affluent. Pogge's new book presents an alternative view: Poverty and oppression persist on a massive scale; political and economic inequalities are rising dramatically both intra-nationally and globally. The affluent states and the international organizations they control knowingly contribute greatly to these evils - selfishly promoting rules and policies harmful to the poor while hypocritically pretending to set and promote ambitious development goals. Pogge's case studies include the $1/day poverty measurement exercise, the cosmetic statistics behind the first Millennium Development Goal, the War on Terror, and the proposed relaxation of the constraints on humanitarian intervention. A powerful moral analysis that shows what Western states would do if they really cared about the values they profess.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

General Introduction

1 What Is Global Justice?

1.0 Introduction

1.1 The extent of global poverty

1.2 The moral significance of global poverty

1.3 From international to global justice

1.4 Interactional and institutional moral analysis

1.5 Global institutional analysis

1.6 The global institutional order contributes to severe poverty

1.7 Global poverty is foreseeable and avoidable

1.8 Conclusion

2 Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor

2.0 Introduction

2.1 Human rights and correlative duties

2.2 The purely domestic poverty thesis

2.3 The Panglossian view of the present global order

2.4 Is the present global order merely less beneficial than it might be?

2.5 The present global order massively violates human rights

2.6 The promise of global institutional reform

3 The First UN Millennium Development Goal: A Cause for Celebration?

3.0 Introduction

3.1 Reflection one – on halving world poverty

3.2 Reflection two – on tracking poverty by counting the poor

3.3 Reflection three – on where the line is drawn

3.4 Reflection four – on relating the IPL to the global product

3.5 Concluding thoughts

4 Developing Morally Plausible Indices of Poverty and Gender Equity: A Research Program

4.0 Introduction

4.1 How the World Bank is tracking poverty by counting people below some IPL

4.2 The problematic reliance on CPIs and PPPs

4.3 Tracking development with the HDI and gender equity with the GDI

4.4 Toward new indices of development, poverty, and gender equity

5 Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices

5.0 Introduction

5.1 Who benefits from recent growth?

5.2 Intra-national inequality

5.3 Growth and poverty in China

5.4 Global inequality

5.5 What next?

6 Dworkin, the Abortion Battle, and Global Poverty

6.0 Introduction

6.1 Dworkin’s problematic reconstruction of the pro-life perspective

6.2 Review of the alleged inconsistencies of the pro-life perspective

6.3 The search for common ground

6.4 Global poverty as a competing moral priority from the pro-life perspective

6.5 Comparing the responsibilities for abortion and global poverty

6.6 Objections to the comparative moral priority of poverty

6.7 Conclusions

7 Making War on Terrorists: Reflections on Harming the Innocent

7.0 Introduction

7.1 The uses of terrorism for politicians and the media

7.2 Public support for anti-terror policies

7.3 One failure in the moral justification for terrorism

7.4 Other problems for the moral justification of terrorism

7.5 Taking morality seriously

7.6 Acting under color of morality

7.7 The measures taken in our name

7.8 How do we justify our policies?

8 Moralizing Humanitarian Intervention: Why Jurying Fails and How Law Can Work

8.0 Introduction

8.1 The amazing appeal to the Rwandan genocide

8.2 Would an intervention to stop the Rwandan genocide really have been illegal?

8.3 Humanitarian heroes fettered by legal niceties?

8.4 The jurying model

8.5 How to think about improving the international legal order

9 Creating Supranational Institutions Democratically: Reflections on the European Union’s “Democratic Deficit”

9.0 Introduction

9.1 The Maastricht verdict of the German Constitutional Court

9.2 Why the people allegedly cannot play a role in shaping political institutions

9.3 The constitutive features of the Union

9.4 Concluding remarks

Bibliography

Index

To Albert Hirschman

Courageous Cosmopolitan

Copyright © Thomas Pogge 2010

The right of Thomas Pogge to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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Acknowledgments

This book owes much to Matt Peterson who has not only critically supported my work on chapters 4, 5, and 7, but has also played a major role in selecting, adapting, and updating all the component essays and in weaving them together into a coherent volume. We also have Matt to thank for the bibliography and the index.

Chapter 1 originally appeared as an essay under the same title in Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge, eds., Real World Justice (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). It has also appeared in Chinese and Spanish, and has been heavily revised for this book.

Chapter 2 is an updated version of an essay first published under the same title in the Leiden Journal of International Law 18/4 (2005): 717–45, as part of a Symposium on Cosmopolitism, Global Justice, and International Law. It has also appeared in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Czech. Many thanks to Roland Pierik for very helpful comments and suggestions.

Chapter 3 was first presented at the University of Oslo as the first Oslo Lecture in Moral Philosophy on September 11, 2003, and then published, under its present title, in the Journal of Human Development 5 (2004): 377–97. It has also appeared in German and Spanish. Based on a new set of purchasing power parities (PPPs), the World Bank, in the summer of 2008, unveiled a new international poverty line (IPL), which the UN is now using to track progress toward the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG-1). In order to take account of this new IPL and of the new poverty figures the Bank is generating with it, I have thoroughly rewritten the whole essay. I have also abridged it somewhat to avoid overlap with chapter 4.

Chapter 4 was first published, under its present title, in Philosophical Topics 37/2 (2009): 199–221. It has also appeared in Spanish, and is here only lightly revised. Many thanks to Kieran Donaghue, Alison Jaggar, Justine Kolata, Matt Peterson, and Elizabeth Weissberg for their good comments and suggestions.

Chapter 5 was first published, under its present title, in Dissent 55/1 (2008): 66–75. It has also appeared in German, Italian, Chinese, and Spanish. The facts and figures have been updated.

Chapter 6 first appeared, under the title “Dworkin, the Abortion Battle, and World Hunger,” in Steffen Wesche and Veronique Zanetti, eds., Dworkin (Brussels: Ousia, 1999). It has also appeared in Spanish. The facts and figures have been updated. Many thanks to Christian Barry, Rüdiger Bittner, Bonnie Kent, Jens Saugstad, Ser-Min Shei, Judith Thomson, and Ling Tong for very helpful comments and criticisms. The question of moral priorities addressed in this essay is further discussed in my “Moral Priorities for International Human Rights NGOs,” in Daniel A. Bell and Jean-Marc Coicaud, eds., Ethics in Action: The Ethical Challenges of International Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations (Tokyo: United Nations University Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Chapter 7 was first presented on February 24, 2006, under its present title, in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theater as an Amnesty International Lecture. It then appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy 16/1 (2008): 1–25 and in Chris Miller, ed., War on Terror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). I am grateful for written comments and suggestions I received from Jeff McMahan, Chris Miller, Rekha Nath, Matt Peterson, Michael Ravvin, Ling Tong, Leif Wenar, and Andrew Williams.

Chapter 8 was first presented at the August 2002 Convention of the American Political Science Association in Boston, as a response to a paper by the late Thomas Franck. The exchange took place against the background of the then impending invasion of Iraq and was subsequently published, with excessive delay, in Terry Nardin and Melissa Williams, eds., Humanitarian Intervention, NOMOS vol. 47 (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Many thanks for very helpful criticisms and suggestions are due to Jerry Gaus, Seumas Miller, Terry Nardin, Dwight Newman, David Rodin, John Tasioulas, John Weckert, Leif Wenar and Melissa Williams. This paper, which has also appeared in Spanish, is complementary to my essay “Preempting Humanitarian Interventions,” in Ian Carter and Mario Ricciardi, eds., Freedom, Power and Political Morality: Essays for Felix Oppenheim (London: Palgrave, 2001).

Chapter 9 first appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy 5/2 (1997): 163–82. Many thanks to Dagfinn Follesdal for the kind invitation to join him at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, where this essay was written, to Sverker Gustavsson for essential materials, and to Robert Goodin for valuable comments. This essay is complementary to two others not included in this book: “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103 (1992): 48–75, explores the desirability of a multilayered global scheme of vertically dispersed sovereignty in which governmental authority and citizen loyalties would be widely distributed over a plurality of nested territorial units. “Self Constituting Constituencies to Enhance Freedom, Equality, and Participation in Democratic Procedures,” Theoria 99 (2002): 26–54, describes a system of large-scale democratic governance that, while preserving political parties, would afford citizens vastly more meaningful opportunities for substantive political participation.

General Introduction

As a child, I made a remarkable discovery. I found out that the country into which I had been born had, a few years earlier, unleashed a horrendous war on its neighbors and, during this war, had interned, enslaved and murdered unimaginably many Jewish and other civilians in camps. Every adult I knew had played a part in these events, in one way or another.

This discovery turned my world on its head. It was not a mere updating of information or a learning of new facts. It shattered what rudimentary order of the world I had begun to map out. In the world of my emergent understanding, it was inconceivable that the people around me could do such things to other human beings. My discovery of the Nazi crimes was the experience that I had misunderstood the world – completely.

Rebuilding involved much questioning: What then is the world like? How can I form reliable judgments about it when adult guidance is not trustworthy? Are flowers experiencing great sadness and pain when we cut them and sell them in shops? How would I be thinking about the war, the Jews, and the Slavic peoples, if Germany had won?

Children growing up in the affluent countries today may have a similar experience when they discover world poverty or one of its manifestations. They may learn about children elsewhere going hungry, chained to a loom, forced to be soldiers, sold into prostitution, dying of treatable diseases. And they may be stunned to find that the adults around them don’t care.

I imagine few children in today’s affluent countries have their emerging view of the world shattered by such discoveries. Being on the winning side makes a difference. With reassurance from all sides, it is easy to set aside nascent doubts and to join one of the reigning narratives on how these problems are intractable or disappearing, and on how our noble and advanced countries are doing all they can (or, at worst, a tiny bit less).

Being on the winning side also makes one wonder what the point would be of looking more closely. What do we have to fear from leaving the world’s poor to their fate? They can do us no harm. They cannot confront us, ask us uncomfortable questions, hold us to account. They won’t even get space in the history books – much less than the American Indians or the Australian Aboriginals. There will never be a monument to their suffering. A monument to the unknown child killed by the IMF, or by the WTO Treaty? It will not exist.1

This book is for those who want to look more closely, who want to understand our world and their own role within it. My account is not flattering: the global economic regime that our countries designed and impose kills more efficiently than the Nazi extermination camps; the daily suffering from poverty and disease greatly exceeds that caused by World War II in its darkest years. World poverty is actively perpetuated by our governments and officials, and knowingly so. We citizens, too, have enough information to know what is going on, or at least to find out easily, if we care. Our politicians celebrate themselves, and us, for our selfless “development assistance,” and we like to listen to these stories. But if we don’t shut our eyes, we also know that our efforts against poverty abroad are tiny compared to our means and tiny also relative to the poverty we systematically produce through unjust policies and social institutions. Still, the stories are useful for the children, as they would not understand why we act the way we do.

So don’t feel safe with the title. This book is not only about our politicians, about their corruption and their crimes against humanity. It is also about citizens, who are disregarding, trivializing, and condoning these crimes in the vague belief that we are benefiting from them. In this we get plenty of help from academia and the media, from people who know better but have more to gain by flattering us and serving our political elites than by seeking and speaking the truth. And the book is then also about the lies and deceptions, the hypocrisy, the carefully made-up statistics that keep us comfortably ignorant of what we are doing.

The central lie, the foundation of the others, is that we are moral people, who care about our moral responsibilities. If we were, we would take morality seriously in shaping foreign policy and in negotiating transnational institutional arrangements, especially those that affect the evolution of severe poverty. We would seek to develop a full understanding of morality’s demands on our conduct in these areas, and we would try to live up to these demands. In fact, we do no such thing even while we traffic heavily in moral language.

A few experts eschew moral language, holding that morality does not apply beyond our national borders. This is wrong. But these “realists” at least can provide an accurate analysis of what is driving our policies toward impoverished populations and an accurate view also of the deceptions and hypocrisies of their more ideological colleagues. Reading them is a relief from the usual deceptions and self-deceptions.

I have sketched the two main themes of the book: the monumental crime we are committing against the world’s poor and the monumental deception we are visiting upon ourselves and our children to cover up this crime. If you rank comfort above truth, you have reason not to read on. If you are a minimally moral person, one committed to work out what morality demands concretely, you can find here a second opinion about our culture and times. Think for yourself, read critically, accept nothing on faith from either side.

The book proceeds through a series of case studies. After a brief first chapter on the current global justice debate, chapter 2 explicates and supports my central claim: the dominant Western countries are designing and upholding global institutional arrangements, geared to their domestic economic elites, that foreseeably and avoidably produce massive deprivations in most of the much poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Chapter 3 looks at how the situation of the world’s poor is officially presented and tracked by the United Nations and the World Bank. What I document is appalling. While earnestly admonishing governments to live up to their commitment to halving world poverty by 2015, the UN has surreptitiously revised this goal twice to make it dramatically less ambitious. Turning a promised 50 percent reduction of the number of poor into a 20 percent reduction, the UN has added nearly half a billion to the number of those whose extreme poverty in 2015 will be deemed acceptable – indeed, will be celebrated as our achievement of the first Millennium Development Goal.

Half a billion more condemned to life-threatening poverty by our politicians – this corresponds to about 6 million additional premature deaths each year from poverty-related causes. One is reminded of the Wannsee Conference, where senior Nazi officials planned the deaths of millions as part of their “final solution.” Of course, there is an important difference. The German bureaucrats of 1942, and the Führer whom they sought to please, intended to get rid of the Jews and other people they deemed inferior. The UN bureaucrats of 2001, and the national politicians on whom they depend, harbor no ill will toward the world’s poor. Concerned for their careers and hence eager for our support, they merely do not care. This is a fine moral difference on the side of the agents. But it does not make the suffering and dying of the victims any less real.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the number of chronically undernourished people now exceeds 1 billion, for the first time in human history. Yet the World Bank (henceforth “the Bank”) reports impressive progress from the poverty front. Chapter 4 examines how the Bank is producing its figures. It shows that the Bank’s happy news depends decisively on fixing the international poverty line at an absurdly low level. It also shows that the Bank’s method is internally unreliable because it is excessively sensitive to the prices of commodities that are irrelevant for poverty avoidance and excessively sensitive also to the Bank’s arbitrary choice of base year for comparing the purchasing power of currencies. Chapter 4 also analyzes other, “multidimensional” measures of development, such as the UNDP’s Human Development Index. It concludes that a morally and empirically plausible measure of the extent and depth of human deprivation remains to be devised, offering some initial ideas toward the formulation of such a measure.

Chapter 5 looks at the stunning growth of global inequality, which in recent years has been driven by rapid intra-national polarization. Inequality is doubly related to poverty: empirically and mathematically. Empirically, the economic prospects of persons and groups are greatly affected by the institutional rules of their society and (increasingly) also by transnational, including global, institutional arrangements. All these institutional schemes are shaped and reshaped through political struggles that – democratic rhetoric notwithstanding – more closely approximate a “one dollar, one vote” principle. Large economic inequalities are then self-reinforcing: the more affluent corporations and states can bring their much greater power to bear in order to shape the rules so as to entrench and expand their advantage.

Mathematically, globalization’s compression of the relative position of the poor aggravates their deprivation. The bottom half of humankind has seen its share of global private wealth shrink to 1.1 percent and its share of global household income to 3 percent, while the corresponding shares of the top decile (tenth) of humankind have risen to 85.1 and 71.1 percent, respectively.2 So the top decile has 387 times the per capita wealth and 119 times the per capita income of the bottom half. Had the design of global institutional arrangements involved a little more concern for poverty avoidance, the share of the poorest half in global household income might well have sunk no lower than to 5 percent – high enough to avoid life-threatening poverty. Even if this protection of the poor had come entirely at the expense of the top decile, our share of global household income would still be 69.1 percent – and 69.1 times the per capita income of the poorest half. Would this not have been good enough for us? And are we leading better, happier lives with those extra 2 percent of global household income?

Chapter 6 raises an obvious yet neglected question to those who hold that abortion is wrong and believe that we all have a responsibility to prevent abortions (for instance, through the law): why not also accept an at least equally weighty responsibility to protect children who are dying at the rate of 25,000 daily from poverty-related causes? After refuting various defenses of the view that it makes sense to be more concerned with potential future citizens as yet unborn than with foreign children living in life-threatening poverty, I present several weighty reasons for the opposite conclusion: even those who believe that abortion is murder have much stronger reasons to join the battle against world poverty than to devote themselves to the cause of outlawing abortion. Being moral is not a matter of adopting some good cause we like. Rather, being serious about morality requires that we reflect carefully about our moral priorities and support the cause that matters most. In our world, this cause is the eradication of severe poverty.

Having lived through the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York City, I witnessed and shared the moral outrage that this mass murder of innocent people evoked. Chapter 7 explicates this moral response by explaining in detail why these attacks were such a horrendous wrong: the attackers either aimed to kill many innocent people or, at least, failed to make reasonable efforts to pursue their aims with a minimum loss of innocent lives. Moreover, the attackers perpetrated their attacks in the name of God without taking reasonable care to assure themselves that what they did really accords with His will.

Encouraged by legitimate moral outrage over these terrorist attacks, the United States and its allies unleashed a massive “war on terror” that copied the two great moral failings of the terrorists: they systematically refused to take reasonable care to exclude the innocent from the massive violence they saw fit to inflict in our name, thus subjecting thousands of wholly innocent people to grievous harm, including horrendous tortures. And they prosecuted this war with heavy appeals to morality without taking reasonable care to assure themselves that what they did was really morally justifiable. They acted under color of morality much like the terrorists had acted under color of religion. Widely condoned by the public while it was going on, the war on terror shows once more that we are interested in morality only insofar as it serves our interests – that we are not committed to constraining our own conduct, or that of our governments, by reference to the moral values we otherwise like to invoke.

Chapter 8 discusses another stand-out in the pantheon of hypocrisy: Kofi Annan’s appeal to the Rwandan genocide to support the view that the UN Charter’s tight constraints on military intervention should not be taken too seriously. Making it easier for the world’s sole remaining superpower to disregard the tedious requirement of UN Security Council authorization, and thus paving the way for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, this appeal is remarkable for two reasons. First, the suggestion that the Rwandan genocide was in any way facilitated by constraints of the UN Charter is a complete fantasy: there was no state willing to help stop the slaughter and, a fortiori, no state discouraged from doing so by legal concerns. Second, as head of UN Peacekeeping Operations, and again acting in behalf of the US (without consulting the Secretary-General of the UN), Kofi Annan was himself a main cause of the genocide by doing what he could to prevent UN peacekeepers in Rwanda from taking action to prevent the slaughter – action that, well within the authorized mission parameters, the commander on the ground, General Romeo Dallaire, was eager to take. We learn from the story how horrendously morality is abused by those in power, and how completely indifferent they are to its demands.

Chapter 9 relates the failures of our foreign policies back to the flaws of our domestic democratic institutions. Many accept that, as citizens of affluent and globally dominant countries, we share responsibility for the rules and policies that our governments are devising and pursuing in our name. But this responsibility seems thin and theoretical. For what can we really do to make a difference? To be sure, our countries call themselves democracies and have regular elections. But, really, legislative and executive decisions – especially with regard to foreign policy and international rule-making – are made by a tiny politico-economic elite trading favors and concessions through the intermediation of lobbyists and revolving doors. Despite the flattering slogans about all political power emanating from the people, in fact the people have very little say and many are disillusioned with politics and unwilling to make the effort to try to form, defend, and implement well-founded views on important political issues. Given the way our political systems have been organized, and given widespread resignation and active acceptance among other citizens, there is then no realistic prospect for us to moralize the foreign policies of our countries. We are thus not responsible for these policies in more than a nominal sense.

Such views are widely held among citizens of the more powerful Western countries in regard to their domestic politics. And these views indeed contain much truth. But they cannot relieve us of responsibility in the way suggested. To see this, consider that the situation of those pleading powerlessness is relevantly similar to the situation of a large majority of citizens. Each of them is powerless to affect foreign policy given that the other citizens are reluctant to support such efforts. So if any one is to be acquitted of responsibility, then all of them must be acquitted. And then we arrive at the absurd conclusion that a large majority of citizens are cleared of responsibility for their government’s foreign policies because they were unable to affect these policies. This conclusion is absurd because it is obviously possible for a large majority of citizens to affect, very fundamentally, both the foreign policies prosecuted by their government and also the way their country’s political process is structured. To be sure, to achieve such change these citizens must join together. But asking this of them is not asking too much, given the great harms at stake and given the comparatively low costs and negligible risk of political organization.

Again, this thought has a close analogue in the Nazi case. After the war, many Germans said that they had been opposed to Nazi violence but, given the willing collaboration of so many others, had been unable to do anything about the crimes their country was committing. If we suppose that most of these people were lying, we may perhaps excuse a few truthful Germans on the ground that they really could do nothing to mitigate the violence.3 But if we suppose that many millions were opposed to the Nazis, it is hard to excuse them on the ground that there was nothing they could do. This is reflected in how the Germans were judged after the war. And if Germans then were responsible for their country’s policies, then surely we are responsible now for our country’s policies: we are much more affluent than those Germans, have much better sources of information as well as means of communication and of political organization at our disposal, and are much better protected through a set of civil rights that are enforced effectively by an independent judiciary.

But how can we make politics more responsive to the citizens’ judgment and will? One great obstacle here is the widespread sense – nurtured by the elites – that such responsiveness is simply impossible. Modern societies are too large, too complex, too sophisticated for ordinary citizens to have a meaningful role in governing them; periodic input into who makes the decisions, that’s about as much as ordinary people can reasonably handle. If we are to discharge our responsibility to take on a more meaningful role in the political process, then we need to break through this supposed impossibility by imaginatively conceiving how our politics could be organized differently. Chapter 9 does this by focusing concretely on the example of the European Union and its much-lamented democratic deficit – showing how the EU could have been shaped to be more democratic and, more importantly, how it could have been shaped more democratically.

A philosopher by trade, I am often confronted by colleagues who, somewhat disdainfully, give me to understand that work like that presented in this book – and like that of specifying the Health Impact Fund proposal – is not really philosophy, that is, not something that academic philosophers ought to be doing. My response begins by pointing out that my work is perhaps more true to the historical roots of philosophy than much of what is done today in philosophy departments. “Philosophy” means “love of wisdom”; and wisdom, one might say, is understanding what matters. For many contemporaries, including many philosophers, the question what matters boils down to what we care about. This is a paradoxical reduction, because people – initially, certainly, when we begin our adult lives – care deeply that what we care about should be important: worth caring about.

Philosophers have not been much help, lately, in giving us ways of evaluating and critically modifying what we care about. Many have rejected the very search for such standards as inseparably tied to an outdated metaphysics or as incompatible with the pluralism of multicultural societies. And some have then seen it as their task to cure us of the ambition that their reductionism presents as incapable of fulfillment. These are fascinating views that deserve discussion. But I continue to believe that philosophers can illuminate what really matters. The best support for this belief comes not from abstract argument. It comes from showing by doing: from working through a problem so as to make evident its importance.

This book is devoted to one such problem: world poverty, the unjust global institutional arrangements that contribute to it, and our responsibility, as affluent countries’ citizens, for this injustice. An adequate treatment of this problem involves work not merely in moral or even political philosophy proper, but also in economics, health policy, political science, history, and the law – fields that produce ample data about the condition of our world as well as about causal relationships and historical-political possibilities. I do not claim to be an expert in these other fields. But I try to understand their relevant areas well enough to be able to analyze pertinent work there for errors and distortions and competently to collaborate with willing experts on the interdisciplinary work that is needed to show what progress toward global justice would look like and how it is possible.

Philosophical or not, this work is far too neglected and needs to be done. When the poorer half of humankind have been squeezed down below 3 percent of global household income, living in dire poverty and dying therefrom at the rate of 2,000 every hour, we cannot all just look the other way. As Albert Hirschman said to me, breaking into German in a conversation about the Spanish Civil War: “Da musste man dabeisein” – one just had to get involved. Our children should not grow up among killers.

* * * * * *

In 1999–2000, I had the humbling experience of working alongside Albert Hirschman (*1915). Fatherless and a refugee at eighteen, Hirschman fought fascism by serving in the Spanish Civil War and in the French and U.S. Armies, and he also worked with Varian Fry to help victims of Nazi persecution escape. He later lived in Latin America, where he analyzed the links among underdevelopment, oppression, and poverty in search of new ways for farmers and governments to overcome these evils. His amazing intellectual legacy, his fertile, illuminating, and wide-ranging scholarship, and his courageous opposition to injustice anywhere will always remain an inspiration for me.

Notes

1 In Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 104, I described such a monument. Built to resemble the Vietnam War Memorial, and listing the names of all those who have died from poverty-related causes since the end of the Cold War, this black granite wall would have to be 480 miles long, stretching from Detroit to New York, perhaps, or from Rome to Vienna. Between the appearance of that book and this later one, my imaginary wall will have grown another 60 miles or so – half a mile per week.

2 Wealth data, for the year 2000, are from Davies et al., The World Distribution of Household Wealth, Appendix 1, table 10a. Income data, for the year 2002, were kindly provided by Branko Milanovic (World Bank) and are on file with the author (see below sect. 5.4, table 5.7). Global inequality has sharply increased further in the period leading up to the global financial crisis toward the end of 2008, though accurate figures are not yet available.

3 We should remember, however, that many people in Germany and the occupied territories, like Oskar Schindler, managed – on their own and without taking excessive risks – to protect victims of the violence.

1

What Is Global Justice?

1.0 Introduction

A literature search on “global justice” finds this to be a newly prominent expression. There were more books and essays on global justice in the first few years of the new millennium than in the preceding one, at least as far as computers can tell. Of course, some of the broad topics currently debated under the heading of “global justice” have been discussed for centuries, back to the beginnings of civilization. But they were discussed under different labels, such as “international justice,” “international ethics,” and “the law of nations.” This chapter explores the significance of this shift in terminology. Having been involved in this shift for more than three decades, I realize that there is likely to be a personal element in my account of it, which is due to the specific motives and ideas that have animated my thinking and writing. This is not an objective scholarly report from a distance, which, in any case, would be hard to write at this early time.

For centuries, moral reflection on international relations was focused on matters of war and peace. These issues are still important and much discussed. Since World War II, however, other themes have become more prominent due to increasing global interdependence and an erosion of sovereignty. The United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflect efforts to establish globally uniform minimum standards for the treatment of citizens within their own countries. The Bretton Woods institutions and later the World Trade Organization powerfully shape the economic prospects of countries and their citizens. Global and regional organizations, most notably the UN Security Council and the European Union, have acquired political functions and powers that were traditionally thought to belong to national governments.

These developments are in part a response to the horrors of World War II. But they are also fueled by technological innovations that limit the control governments can exert within their jurisdictions. Thus, industrialization has massive effects that no country can avoid – effects on culture and expectations, on biodiversity, climate, oceans, and atmosphere. New communication technologies make it much harder to control the information available to a national population. And many of the goods demanded by more affluent consumers everywhere require ingredients imported from foreign lands. The traditional concerns with the just internal organization of societies and the moral rules governing warfare leave out some highly consequential features of the modern world.

1.1 The extent of global poverty

After some delay, academic moral reflection has responded to these developments. Beginning in the early 1970s, philosophers and others have asked probing questions about how the emergence of a post-Westphalian world modifies and enlarges the moral responsibilities of governments, corporations, and individuals. These debates were driven also by the realization that world poverty has overtaken war as the greatest source of avoidable human misery. Many more people – some 360 million – have died from hunger and remediable diseases in peacetime in the 20 years since the end of the Cold War than perished from wars, civil wars, and government repression over the entire twentieth century.4 And poverty continues unabated, as the official statistics amply confirm: 1,020 million human beings are chronically undernourished, 884 million lack access to safe water, and 2,500 million lack access to basic sanitation;5 2,000 million lack access to essential drugs;6 924 million lack adequate shelter and 1,600 million lack electricity;7 774 million adults are illiterate;8 and 218 million children are child laborers.9

Roughly one third of all human deaths, 18 million annually, are due to poverty-related causes, easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, cheap rehydration packs, vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines.10 People of color, females, and the very young are heavily overrepresented among the global poor, and hence also among those suffering the staggering effects of severe poverty. Children under the age of 5 account for over half, or 9.2 million, of the annual death toll from poverty-related causes.11 The overrepresentation of females is clearly documented.12

Such severe deficits in the fulfillment of social and economic human rights also bring further deficits in civil and political human rights in their wake. Very poor people – often physically and mentally stunted as a result of malnutrition in infancy, illiterate due to lack of schooling, and much preoccupied with their family’s survival – can cause little harm or benefit to the politicians and officials who rule them. Such rulers have far greater incentives to attend to the interests of agents more capable of reciprocation: the interests of affluent compatriots and foreigners, of domestic and multinational corporations, and of foreign governments.

1.2 The moral significance of global poverty

Three facts make the great ongoing catastrophe of human poverty deeply problematic, morally.

First, it occurs in the context of unprecedented global affluence that is easily sufficient to eradicate all life-threatening poverty. Suppose we think of the very poor narrowly as those who suffer the deprivations detailed above – lack of access to safe food and water, clothing, shelter, basic medical care, and basic education. This narrow and absolute definition of severe poverty corresponds roughly to the World Bank’s “$2.50 per day” poverty line, according to which a household is poor just in case the local cost of its entire consumption, per person per day, has less purchasing power than $2.50 had in the United States in 2005. Although 48 percent of the world’s population, 3,085 million human beings, were reportedly living below this poverty line in 200513 – on average, 45 percent below it – their collective shortfall from this line amounts to only 2 percent of global household income.14 A 2 percent shift in the distribution of global household income could wholly eradicate the severe poverty that currently blights the lives of nearly half the human population.

While the income ratio between the top and bottom decile of the human population is a staggering 273 : 1,15 their wealth ratio is ten times greater still. In 2000 the bottom half of the world’s adults together owned 1.1 percent of global wealth, with the bottom 10 percent having only 0.03 percent, while the top 10 percent had 85.1 percent and the top 1 percent had 39.9 percent.16 Severe poverty today is avoidable at a cost that is tiny in relation to the incomes and fortunes of the affluent – vastly smaller, for instance, than the Allies’ sacrifice in blood and treasure for victory in World War II.

Second, the unprecedented global inequalities just described are still increasing relentlessly. For the 1988–98 period, Branko Milanovic finds that, assessed in terms of purchasing power parities (PPPs), the Gini measure of inequality among persons worldwide increased from 62.2 to 64.1, and the Theil from 72.7 to 78.9.17 He adds that real incomes among the poorest 5 percent of world population (identified by PPP comparison) declined 20 percent during 1988–93 and another 23 percent during 1993–8, even while real global per capita income rose 5.2 percent and 4.8 percent respectively.18 I confirm and update his findings with other, more intuitive data below.19 There is a clear pattern: global inequality is increasing as the global poor are not participating proportionately in global economic growth.

Third, conditions of life anywhere on earth are today deeply affected by international interactions of many kinds and thus by the elaborate regime of treaties and conventions that profoundly and increasingly shape such interactions. Those who participate in this regime, especially in its design or imposition, are morally implicated in any contribution it makes to ever-increasing global economic inequality and to the consequent persistence of severe poverty.

1.3 From international to global justice

These plain facts about the contemporary world render obsolete the traditional sharp distinction between intra-national and international relations. Until the twentieth century, these were seen as constituting distinct worlds, the former inhabited by persons, households, corporations, and associations within one territorially bounded society, the latter inhabited by a small number of actors: sovereign states. National governments provided the link between these two worlds. On the inside, such a government was a uniquely important actor within the state, interacting with persons, households, corporations, and associations, and typically dominating these other actors by virtue of its special power and authority – its internal sovereignty. On the outside, the government was the state, recognized as entitled to act in its name, to make binding agreements on its behalf, and so on – its external sovereignty. Though linked in this way, the two worlds were seen as separate, and normative assessments unquestioningly took this separation for granted, sharply distinguishing two separate domains of moral theorizing.

Today, very much more is happening across national borders than merely interactions and relations among governments. For one thing, there are many additional important actors on the international scene: international agencies, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, as well as multinational corporations and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).20 Interactions and relations among states and these new actors are structured through highly complex systems of rules and practices, some with associated adjudication and enforcement mechanisms. Those actors and these rules powerfully influence the domestic life of national societies: through their impact on pollution and climate change, invasive diseases, conflict and violence, culture and information, technology, and (most profoundly) through market forces that condition access to capital and raw materials, export opportunities, domestic tax bases and tax rates, prices, wages, labor standards, and much else.

This double transformation of the traditional realm of international relations – the proliferation of international, supranational, and multinational actors, and the profound influence of transnational rules and of the systematic activities of these actors deep into the domestic life of national societies – is part of what is often meant by the vague term globalization. It helps explain why “global” is displacing “international” in both explanatory and moral theorizing. This terminological shift reflects that much more is happening across national borders than before. It also reflects that the very distinction between the national and international realms is dissolving. With national borders losing their causal and explanatory significance, it appears increasingly incongruous and dogmatic to insist on their traditional role as moral watersheds.

1.4 Interactional and institutional moral analysis

The emergence of global-justice talk is closely related to the increasing explanatory importance of social institutions. There are two distinct ways of looking at the events of our social world. On the one hand, we can see such events interactionally: as actions, and effects of actions performed by individual and collective agents. On the other hand, we can see them institutionally: as effects of how our social world is structured and organized – of our laws and conventions, practices and social institutions. These two ways of viewing entail different descriptions and explanations of social phenomena, and they also lead to two distinct kinds of moral analysis or moral diagnostics.

Take some morally salient event – for example, the fact that some particular child suffers from malnutrition, that some woman is unemployed, or that a man was hurt in a traffic accident. We can causally trace such events back to the conduct of individual and collective agents, including the person who is suffering the harm. Doing so involves making counterfactual statements about how things would or might have gone differently if this or that agent had acted in some other way. We can then sort through these counterfactual statements in order to determine whether any of the causally relevant agents ought to have acted differently and thus is partly or wholly at fault for the regrettable event. This will involve us in examining whether any such agents could have foreseen that their conduct would lead to the regrettable event and could also reasonably have averted the harm without causing substantial costs to themselves or to third parties. Inquiries of this kind might be referred to as interactional moral analysis or interactional moral diagnostics.

Often, regrettable events can also be traced back to standing features of the social system in which they occur: to its culture, for example, or to its institutional order. In this vein, one might causally trace child malnutrition back to high import duties on foodstuffs, unemployment to a restrictive monetary policy, and traffic accidents to the lack of regular motor vehicle safety inspections. Doing so involves making counterfactual statements about how things would or might have gone differently if this or that set of social rules had been different. We can then sort through these counterfactual statements in order to determine whether the causally relevant rules ought to have been different and whether anyone is responsible for defects in these rules that are partly or wholly to blame for the regrettable events. This will involve us in examining whether those responsible for the design of the relevant rules – for instance, Members of Parliament – could have foreseen that these rules would lead to harm and could reasonably have formulated them differently without causing substantial harm elsewhere. We might refer to inquiries of this kind as institutional moral analysis or institutional moral diagnostics.

Interactional moral analysis emerged quite early in the evolution of moral thought. Institutional moral analysis is more demanding, presupposing an understanding of the conventional (rather than natural or divine) nature of social rules as well as of their – often statistical – comparative effects. Even a mere 80 years ago, the poor and unemployed were still often seen as lazy and delinquent merely on the ground that others of equally humble origins had risen from dishwasher to millionaire. Many people then did not understand the structural constraints on social mobility: that the pathways to riches are limited and that the structure of prevailing markets for capital and labor unavoidably produce certain basic rates of (“structural”) unemployment and poverty. Nor did they understand that existing rates of unemployment and poverty could be influenced through intelligent redesign of the rules. Today, after Keynes, the US New Deal, and various similar national transformations that also include the Bolsa Família program in Brazil, these matters are well understood, and governments are held responsible for their decisions regarding institutional design and for the effects of such decisions on the fulfillment or frustration of human needs.

This understanding has been – belatedly, yet admirably – articulated in philosophy through John Rawls’s classic A Theory of Justice. Through this grand work, Rawls has firmly established social institutions as a distinct domain of moral assessment and has marked this domain terminologically by associating it with the term (social) justice. This terminological innovation has taken hold, by and large, at least in Anglophone philosophy. So the term justice is now predominant in the moral assessment of social rules (laws, practices, social conventions and institutions) and used only rarely in the moral assessment of the conduct and character of individual and collective agents. In the wake of Rawls the distinction between institutional and interactional moral analysis has come to be marked as a distinction between justice and ethics.

1.5 Global institutional analysis

We are quite familiar today with the focus of Rawls’s book: with institutional moral analysis applied to the internal organization of one state. Still in its infancy, however, is institutional moral analysis applied beyond the state. This time lag is hardly surprising, seeing that the realm of international relations is traditionally conceived as so much smaller and more surveyable than the vast and highly complex inner workings of a modern national society. We don’t need institutional moral analysis, it seems, for a world of a few dozen relevant actors in which, when bad things happen, it is usually pretty clear whose conduct is at fault. And Rawls himself, in his late work The Law of Peoples, explicitly shunned such analysis and confined himself to developing and defending a set of rules of good conduct for states.21

The phenomena of globalization, described above, show such an account to be deeply and increasingly inadequate to the world in which we live. It ignores the rising importance of transnational actors other than states as well as the increasingly profound effects international rules, practices, and actors have on the domestic life of national societies. Shaping the environment (e.g., global markets) in which national societies exist, such international rules and practices deeply shape these societies themselves: how they govern and tax themselves, how they organize education, health care, agriculture, and defense, and how they regulate foreign investment, intellectual property rights, and foreign trade.

Some of this influence is due to competitive pressures and transnational bargaining. Some of it works by affecting domestic incentives and power distributions: international rules that recognize any person or group exercising effective power in a less developed country as entitled to sell this country’s natural resources and to borrow and to import weapons in its name make it extremely tempting, especially in resource-rich such countries, to attempt to take power by force. These countries are therefore especially likely to experience coup attempts, civil wars, and repressive (often military) rule.

Such foreseeable effects of transnational institutional arrangements are surely relevant to their moral assessment. But other factors may be relevant as well: the (typically highly opaque and undemocratic) way such arrangements were created or emerged, for example, and also the extent to which those affected by them either accept them or seek their reform. The discourse about global justice is about this question, how to assess global (and, more broadly, transnational) institutional arrangements.

Reflecting the crumbling of the traditional separation of intra-national and international relations, the shift to the language of global justice extends institutional moral analysis to the whole field. We have already seen how this shift is fueled by the realization that the traditional conception of the world of international relations as inhabited only by states is rapidly losing its explanatory adequacy – through the emergence and increasing importance of transnational rules and through the creation and increasing stature on the international stage of non-state actors, such as multinational corporations, international agencies, regional organizations, and NGOs. As this traditional conception of international relations loses its grip, we should also realize, however, that its moral adequacy has always been lacking. It has never been plausible that the interests of states – that is, of governments – should furnish the only considerations that are morally relevant in international relations.22

Consider, for example, a long-term contract concerning the exportation of natural resources, which the government of some African country concludes with a rich Western state or one of its corporations. Within the traditional philosophical framework, it is self-evident that such an agreement must be honored: “People are to observe treaties and undertakings,” says Rawls’s second principle of state conduct, and the third one adds: “Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.”23 But here is the reality. The African government is corrupt and oppressive, and its continuation in power depends on the military. The sales it conducts impose severe environmental harms and hazards on the indigenous population. Yet, most of these people do not benefit, because the revenues are either embezzled by the small political elite or else spent on arms needed for political repression (arms mostly supplied by affluent Western states in accordance with other contracts executed, without coercion, between them and the African government.)

There is an obvious question here: by what right can a free and fair agreement between a military junta or strongman in Africa and some foreign government or corporation entitle these two parties to deprive the inhabitants of that African country of their natural resources and to despoil their environment?

This question is invisible so long as we think of international relations as a separate realm in which each state is identified with its government. Conversely, once we see the question, the old philosophical framework becomes manifestly untenable. We must then ask ourselves whether it is morally acceptable that the existing international order recognizes rulers – merely because they exercise effective power within a country and regardless of how they acquired or exercise such power – as entitled to confer legally valid property rights in this country’s resources and to dispose of the proceeds of such sales, to borrow in the country’s name and thereby to impose debt service obligations upon it, to sign treaties on the country’s behalf and thus to bind its present and future population, and to use state revenues to buy the means of internal repression. Such recognition accords international resource, borrowing, treaty, and arms privileges to many governments that are plainly illegitimate. These privileges are impoverishing, because their exercise often dispossesses a country’s people who are excluded from political participation as well as from the benefits of their government’s borrowing or resource sales. These privileges are moreover oppressive, because they often give illegitimate rulers access to the funds they need to keep themselves in power even against the will of the majority. And these privileges are disruptive, because they provide strong incentives toward the undemocratic acquisition and exercise of political power, resulting in the kinds of coups and civil wars that are so common in countries with a large resource sector.24

By breaking down the traditional separation of intra-national and international relations and extending institutional moral analysis to the whole field, the concept of global justice also makes visible how citizens of affluent countries are potentially implicated in the horrors so many must endure in the so-called less developed countries: how global institutional arrangements they uphold are implicated in the violence and hunger that are inflicted upon the global poor.

The old framework was comfortable: citizens of affluent countries share responsibility for the institutional order of their own society and for any harms this order may inflict upon their fellow citizens. They also share responsibility for their government’s acting honorably abroad by complying with reasonable international laws and conventions, especially those relating to warfare, and by honoring its contracts and treaties. In this traditional framework, such citizens generally bear no responsibility for the violence and poverty inflicted upon foreigners within the black box of their own state.

The new philosophical framework, associated with the expression “global justice,” is considerably less comfortable. Central to this framework is the causal impact of the design of the transnational institutional arrangements upon the conditions of life experienced by human beings worldwide. Since the end of the Cold War, major components of the global order – such as the global trading system and the rules governing military interventions – have been substantially redesigned, while other components – such as the international resource, borrowing, treaty, and arms privileges just discussed – have been left in place. There were many alternative ways in which such transnational institutional arrangements could have been shaped and reshaped when, after the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic powers found themselves in full control. And the question is, then: How would other paths of globalization have been different in their effects upon people worldwide, in their effects upon the incidence of violence, oppression, extreme poverty, and human trafficking for example? And how, in light of such a comparative-impact assessment, is the existing global order to be judged in moral terms?

1.6 The global institutional order contributes to severe poverty

The global institutional order is causally related to the incidence of morally significant harms in two main ways. First, its rules may affect individuals indirectly, by co-shaping the national institutional order under which they live. The four international privileges accorded even to highly illegitimate rulers provide an obvious example. By enabling despotic rulers and juntas to entrench themselves in power and by giving potential such oppressors strong incentives to try to take power by force, these privileges facilitate and foster oppressive and corrupt government in many less developed countries where the resource sector is a large part of the national economy and where ordinary citizens have few means to resist their oppression.

Secondly, the rules of the global institutional order may affect people more directly. Consider, for example, the current WTO treaty system, which permits the affluent countries to protect their markets against cheap imports (agricultural products, textiles and apparel, steel, and much else) through tariffs, anti-dumping duties, quotas, export credits, and huge subsidies to domestic producers. Such protectionist measures reduce the export opportunities from poor countries by constraining their exports into the affluent countries and also, in the case of subsidies, by allowing less efficient rich-country producers to undersell more efficient poor-country producers in world markets.25 In the absence of these constraints, poor countries would realize welfare gains in excess of $100 billion annually (comparable to current official development assistance or ODA)26 and reductions of several hundred million in the number of poor.27 The magnitude of this amount suggests that the WTO Treaty’s high tolerance for rich-country protectionism greatly aggravates severe poverty in the less developed countries. If the WTO treaty system did not allow the protectionist measures in question, there would be much less poverty in the world today.

Another important example of the direct impact of the global institutional order is the globalization of intellectual property rights through the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) component of the WTO Treaty. Under TRIPS, WTO members are required to adjust their domestic laws so as to grant 20-year monopoly patents on a wide range of innovations, which, most importantly, include advanced seeds and medicines. In this way, TRIPS has dramatically curtailed the access poor people have to cheap generic versions of advanced medicines. The absence of generic competition multiplies the prices of advanced medicines – often 10- to 15-fold – and thereby effectively excludes the poor.28 In addition, this globalized monopoly patent regime strongly discourages pharmaceutical innovators from doing any research and development focused on the diseases concentrated among the global poor – diseases that kill millions each year. It is obvious that pharmaceutical research could be incentivized differently: governments could reward any newly developed medicine in proportion to its impact on the global disease burden on condition that this medicine is sold at the (competitively determined) lowest feasible cost of production and distribution. Under this alternative regime, both deadly defects of the TRIPS regimes would be avoided: the price of advanced medicines would be vastly lower, which would greatly expand access to such medicines by the world’s poor, and there would be many new medicines developed for the neglected diseases that continue to ravage the world’s poorest populations.29

Much more could and should be said about these three examples: about the four privileges that fuel and perpetuate oppression and civil war in many poor countries, about the rules that shelter the protectionism practiced by the affluent countries, and about the rules that exclude the global poor from the benefits of pharmaceutical innovation. But the point here is not to demonstrate injustice, but merely to illustrate what institutional moral analysis applied to the global institutional order would look like. In the next chapter, I will take a closer look at the ways in which the global institutional order contributes to severe poverty.

1.7 Global poverty is foreseeable and avoidable