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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Some 2.5 billion human beings live in severe poverty, deprived of such essentials as adequate nutrition, safe drinking water, basic sanitation, adequate shelter, literacy, and basic health care. One third of all human deaths are from poverty-related causes: 18 million annually, including over 10 million children under five.
However huge in human terms, the world poverty problem is tiny economically. Just 1 percent of the national incomes of the high-income countries would suffice to end severe poverty worldwide. Yet, these countries, unwilling to bear an opportunity cost of this magnitude, continue to impose a grievously unjust global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably perpetuates the catastrophe. Most citizens of affluent countries believe that we are doing nothing wrong.
Thomas Pogge seeks to explain how this belief is sustained. He analyses how our moral and economic theorizing and our global economic order have adapted to make us appear disconnected from massive poverty abroad. Dispelling the illusion, he also offers a modest, widely sharable standard of global economic justice and makes detailed, realistic proposals toward fulfilling it.
Thoroughly updated, the second edition of this classic book incorporates responses to critics and a new chapter introducing Pogge's current work on pharmaceutical patent reform.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
General Introduction
I Some cautions about our moral judgments
II Four easy reasons to ignore world poverty
III Sophisticated defenses of our acquiescence in world poverty
IV Does our new global economic order really not harm the poor?
V Responsibilities and reforms
Notes
1 Human Flourishing and Universal Justice
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Social justice
1.2 Paternalism
1.3 Justice in first approximation
1.4 Essential refinements
1.5 Human rights
1.6 Specification of human rights and responsibilities for their realization
1.7 Conclusion
Notes
2 How Should Human Rights be Conceived?
2.0 Introduction
2.1 From natural law to rights
2.2 From natural rights to human rights
2.3 Official disrespect
2.4 The libertarian critique of social and economic rights
2.5 The critique of social and economic rights as “manifesto rights”
2.6 Disputes about kinds of human rights
Notes
3 Loopholes in Moralities
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Types of incentives
3.2 Loopholes
3.3 Social arrangements
3.4 Case 1: the converted apartment building
3.5 Case 2: the homelands policy of white South Africa
3.6 An objection
3.7 Strengthening
3.8 Fictional histories
3.9 Puzzles of equivalence
3.10 Conclusion
Notes
4 Moral Universalism and Global Economic Justice
4.0 Introduction
4.1 Moral universalism
4.2 Our moral assessments of national and global economic orders
4.3 Some factual background about the global economic order
4.4 Conceptions of national and global economic justice contrasted
4.5 Moral universalism and David Miller’s contextualism
4.6 Contextualist moral universalism and John Rawls’s moral conception
4.7 Rationalizing divergent moral assessments through a double standard
4.8 Rationalizing divergent moral assessments without a double standard
4.9 The causal role of global institutions in the persistence of severe poverty
4.10 Conclusion
Notes
5 The Bounds of Nationalism
5.0 Introduction
5.1 Common nationalism: priority for the interests of compatriots
5.2 Lofty nationalism: the justice-for-compatriots priority
5.3 Explanatory nationalism: the deep significance of national borders
5.4 Conclusion
Notes
6 Achieving Democracy
6.0 Introduction
6.1 The structure of the problem faced by fledgling democracies
6.2 Reducing the expected rewards of coups d’état
6.3 Undermining the borrowing privilege of authoritarian predators
6.4 Undermining the resource privilege of authoritarian predators
6.5 Conclusion
Notes
7 Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty
7.0 Introduction
7.1 Institutional cosmopolitanism based on human rights
7.2 The idea of state sovereignty
7.3 Some main reasons for a vertical dispersal of sovereignty
7.4 The shaping and reshaping of political units
7.5 Conclusion
Notes
8 Eradicating Systemic Poverty: Brief for a Global Resources Dividend
8.0 Introduction
8.1 Radical inequality and our responsibility
8.2 Three grounds of injustice
8.3 A moderate proposal
8.4 The moral argument for the proposed reform
8.5 Is the reform proposal realistic?
8.6 Conclusion
Notes
9 Pharmaceutical Innovation: Must We Exclude the Poor?
9.0 Introduction
9.1 The TRIPS Agreement and its aftermath
9.2 The argument from beneficial consequences
9.3 Toward a better way of stimulating research and development of essential medicines
9.4 Differential pricing
9.5 The public-good strategy for extending access to essential medicines
9.6 A full-pull plan for the provision of pharmaceuticals
9.7 Specifying and implementing the basic full-pull idea
9.8 Justifying the plan to affluent citizens and their representatives
Notes
Last Words
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
General Introduction
Begin Reading
Last Words
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Ling Ten-thousand now
World Poverty and Human Rights
Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms
Second Edition
Thomas Pogge
polity
Copyright © Thomas Pogge 2008
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.
Originally published in 2002 by Polity Press
This edition first published in 2008 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK.
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6064-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publishers have used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publishers have no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk
General Introduction
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
UDHR, Articles 25 and 281
The nine essays collected in this volume were written from 1990 to 2007. They develop different aspects of a normative position on global justice. The General Introduction states this position in a unified and non-technical way. With this overview, chapters can be read selectively and in any order. Chapters 1–3 are the most philosophical, discussing universal justice, human rights, and moral theorizing. Chapters 3–5 show that the common moral acceptance of the existing global order is incompatible with firmly entrenched moral convictions about interpersonal morality and domestic justice. Chapters 6–9 propose modest and feasible, but significant, global institutional reforms that would better align our international order with our moral values. These last four chapters offer the most accessible entry to the book.
This General Introduction has been improved by very helpful comments from Robert Amdur, Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, Paula Casal, Danielle Celermajer, Mona El-Ghobashy, Arthur Kuflik, Andy Kuper, Ling Tong, Kit Wellman, Leif Wenar, and Andrew Williams. I also want to thank Daniela Mitrovich for her substantial help in harmonizing the first eight chapters and in constructing the index.
I Some cautions about our moral judgments
Since the Enlightenment period, moral norms protecting the vulnerable and powerless have become increasingly constraining and increasingly effective. Slavery, autocracy, colonialism, and genocide – practiced openly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and for millennia before – are now outlawed and widely regarded as paradigms of injustice. Apparently, at least, humanity has made substantial moral progress in its response to these and other forms of harmful conduct and social organization.
Yet, how well do the vulnerable and powerless actually fare today? It is estimated that 830 million human beings are chronically undernourished, 1,100 million lack access to safe water, 2,600 million lack access to basic sanitation, 1,000 million lack adequate shelter, and 1,600 million lack electricity. About 2,000 million lack access to essential drugs, some 774 million adults are illiterate, and there are 218 million child laborers.2 These severe deprivations persist because people in the bottom half of the world’s population are too poor to protect themselves against them. As of 2004, the last year for which full World Bank data are now available, 2,533 million or 39.7 percent of humankind were reportedly living in severe poverty – precisely: in households whose consumption expenditure per person per year has less purchasing power than $785.76 had in the US in 1993. On average, the people living below this line are said to fall 41 percent below it. About 950 million of them are reported to be living on less than half, below the World Bank’s official extreme-poverty line. People so incredibly poor are exceedingly vulnerable to even minor changes in natural and social conditions as well as to many forms of exploitation and abuse. Each year, some 18 million of them die prematurely from poverty-related causes. This is one-third of all human deaths – 50,000 each day, including 29,000 children under age five.3
Such severe and widespread poverty persists while there is great and rising affluence elsewhere. The average consumption expenditure of citizens in high-income countries is about 30 times greater than that of the global poor in terms of purchasing power (relative to an international commodities basket) and about 120 times greater when the comparison is made at currency exchange rates. Assessed at such market rates, the 2,533 million poor together accounted for only about 1.67 percent of all household consumption expenditure in 2004, while the 1,004 million people in the high-income countries together accounted for 81 percent.4 Shifting 1/70 of the consumption expenditure from the latter group would provide the nearly $300 billion in additional annual consumption the former group needs to escape severe poverty.
In reality, however, the shift in global income goes the other way. Inequality continues to mount decade after decade as the affluent get richer and the poor remain at or below the subsistence minimum. Using World Bank data, we can calculate how the consumption expenditures of various percentiles of world population have developed over the 1984–2004 period. The data show a perfect pattern of increasing inequality. In the high-income OECD countries, household final consumption expenditure per capita (constant 2000 US dollars) rose 56.3 percent in real terms during these 20 years. The median consumption expenditure reportedly rose a respectable 48.6 percent, the twentieth percentile rose 36.2 percent, the tenth percentile rose 32.6 percent, and the bottom percentile rose a mere 9.6 percent over the entire 20-year period.5
This juxtaposition of great progress in our moral norms and conduct with a rather catastrophic moral situation on the ground raises two questions:
How can the severe poverty for half of humanity continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?
Why do we citizens of the affluent Western states not find it morally troubling, at least, that a world heavily dominated by us burdens so many people with such deficient and inferior starting positions?
6
Answers to the second question help answer the first. Severe poverty can continue at this level because we do not find its eradication morally compelling.7 And we cannot find its eradication morally compelling until we find its persistence and the relentless rise in global inequality troubling enough to warrant serious moral reflection.
To be sure, many among us know only the bare outlines of the problem. But this is mostly because those who do know more – economists and other academics, journalists, politicians – do not find it morally disturbing enough to highlight, publicize, and discuss. They do not see global poverty and inequality as morally important issues for us. To understand why this is so, one must examine their conscious and semi-conscious reasons for seeing things the way they do: the justifications they give themselves and others, or would give if pressed. Beginning with section II of this General Introduction, much of this book is such an examination.
To answer our two questions fully, one must also explore other causal factors that influence how our social world and moral values interact with each other. A rather too neat account of such other causal factors is Marx’s historical materialism, claiming that dominant conceptions of justice are shaped by the dominant group’s shared interests, which in turn are shaped by its specific role in controlling the means of economic production (capital, knowledge and know-how, labor power, land, and natural resources). Thus, historical materialists refuse to see the history of the last two and a half centuries as a success of moral effort and enlightenment: colonialism, slavery, and the subjection of women, together with the moralities condoning them, endured while they fostered technological growth and were abolished in law when they obstructed newly accessible, more effective ways of combining the factors of production through market institutions. Our shifting morality merely trails the shifting interests of those who control capital, technologies, land, and natural resources. Any protection and relief moral norms afford the weak and the poor is merely incidental.8
Historical materialism is surely too thin a theory to explain all changes in moral norms and values, or even just the major historical shifts. But it is undeniable that one’s interests and situation influence what one finds morally salient (worthy of moral attention), what notions of justice and ethics one finds appealing and compelling, and which reforms one regards as available rather than utopian. Consider whether it is unjust to deny basic health care to citizens on account of their inability to pay. A poor person is rather more likely than a rich one to find this question important and more likely also conscientiously to believe the affirmative. Such discrepancies may be greater when groups live in mutual isolation and lack vivid awareness of one another’s circumstances, experiences, and perspectives on the world. We live in extreme isolation from severe poverty. We do not know anyone earning less than $30 for a 72-hour week of hard, monotonous labor. The one-third of human beings who die from poverty-related causes includes no one we have ever spent time with. Nor do we know anyone who knows and cares about these deceased – someone scarred by the experience of losing a child to hunger, diarrhoea, or measles, for example. If we had such people as friends or neighbors, we would think harder about world poverty and work harder to help end this ongoing catastrophe.
One’s interests and situation also affect the concrete judgments one derives from one’s moral values. Unconsciously, at least, people tend to interpret their moral values in their own favor and tend to select, represent, and connect the facts so as to facilitate the desired concrete judgments. This rationalizing tendency is much stronger in people surrounded by others whose relevant interests resemble their own. Here each person’s desire to see the pursuit of these interests as morally defensible is reinforced by her peers’ expressed approval and like conduct. Regular direct contact with outsiders could show the members of such a group that its values – applied perhaps in light of a better or fuller understanding of the relevant facts – support different moral judgments. But few citizens of the affluent countries have such outside contacts which might interfere with their embrace of two common moral prejudices: (1) that the persistence of severe poverty abroad does not require our moral attention, and (2) that there is nothing seriously wrong, in regard to world poverty, with our conduct, policies, and the global economic institutions we forge.
By showing how these widely shared judgments are promoted by the causal factors sketched in the last two paragraphs, I have not yet refuted these judgments in any way. But those influences do suggest that these judgments require further thought, that we should not allow incipient doubts about them to be overwhelmed by the unconcern of nearly all our politicians, academics, and mass media.
Let me turn to another set of causal factors, which bear only on the first question, of how so much misery can persist despite great progress in moral norms, unprecedented technological advances, and solid global economic growth. Moral norms, designed to protect the livelihood and dignity of the vulnerable, place burdens on the strong. If such norms are compelling enough, the strong make efforts to comply. But they also, consciously or unconsciously, try to get around the norms by arranging their social world so as to minimize their burdens of compliance. Insofar as agents succeed in such norm avoidance, they can comply and still enjoy the advantages of their dominance. Such success, however, generally reduces not merely the costs and opportunity costs of moral norms for the strong, but also the protection these norms afford the weak.
This phenomenon is familiar from more formal, legal rules such as those of a tax code. Clever accountants for wealthy individuals and corporations are endlessly searching for loopholes and other methods of tax avoidance which keep their clients in compliance with the law and yet thwart legislative efforts at fine-tuning the distribution of tax burdens. Moral norms elicit similar strategic responses: corporations, concerned about harsh working conditions in a foreign plant, sell it and then buy its products from its new local owner. The so-called developing world has been similarly transformed from colonies into independent states. Many people there are still desperately poor and oppressed, and we still get the natural resources we need. But we now pay native rulers and “elites” for such imports and therefore are – or at least feel – morally disconnected from the misery of the locals.
So a suspicion, elaborated in chapter 3, is that the celebrated historic transformation of our moral norms has mostly produced cosmetic rearrangements. Imagine some visionary European statesman, in 1830 say, posing the question how the advanced states of Europe and North America can preserve and, if possible, expand their economic and political dominance over the rest of the world even while bringing themselves into compliance with the core norms of Enlightenment morality. Wouldn’t he be quite satisfied with how well these states did with respect to that task?
The actual transformation was not, of course, the result of such a deliberate plan or grand conspiracy. It would probably have been far less successful for us if it had been pursued according to a plan. It came about through the uncoordinated activities of many influential players – each seeking its own advantage, learning from its set-backs, processing new information, and strategically adjusting itself to compelling moral norms by seeking to find and to exploit moral loopholes and other methods of morality avoidance. An invisible hand, rather less benign than the one acclaimed by Adam Smith, ensures that the world, driven by these self-seeking efforts, equilibrates toward a mode of organization that gives the strong as much as possible while still allowing them to be in compliance with their moral norms. Such a process gravitates toward the worst of all possible worlds to which the strong can morally reconcile themselves.
The affluent Western states are no longer practicing slavery, colonialism, or genocide. But they still enjoy crushing economic, political, and military dominance over a world in which effective enslavement and genocides continue unabated. And a large proportion of humankind still can barely obtain enough to survive. The extent and severity of existing deprivations, contrasted with our vastly higher standard of living, suggest caution against thoughtless approval of our conduct, policies, and global institutions.
Moreover, how we assess ourselves depends on objective features: on the structure of the human world and on our role within it, as well as on subjective features: on how we direct our moral attention, on our conceptions of justice and ethics, and on how we apply these conceptions to the human world and to our role within it. Reflection on the causal influences affecting these five features yields additional caution against a hasty embrace of the two common prejudices: (1) that the persistence of severe poverty abroad does not require our moral attention, and (2) that there is nothing seriously wrong with our conduct, our policies, and the global economic institutions we forge and uphold. Given what is at stake, we cannot embrace them without exploring their plausibility – without examining our conscious and semi-conscious reasons for these judgments.
II Four easy reasons to ignore world poverty
What reasons do people in the developed West have for being unconcerned with the persistence of severe poverty abroad? The inquiry into this question faces a difficulty: those who judge an issue not worthy of moral attention cannot have an elaborate defense for this judgment because such a defense presupposes the very attention they fail to summon. And yet, there must be something in their moral outlook that explains why the basic data about poverty, which are known, do not seem morally salient to them. If something of this magnitude does not strike some people as worth serious inquiry and reflection, one would expect them to have at least a superficial reason. What superficial reasons do they have for not deeming vast global poverty and inequality important, and how well do these reasons stand up to critical reflection?
I have encountered four main such reasons. The first three nicely exemplify the three kinds of pessimism distinguished in Albert Hirschman’s wonderful analysis of reactionary rhetoric: futility, jeopardy, and perversity.9 The fourth reason is the optimistic belief that all is coming right anyway, even without any further effort on our part.
One easy assumption, exemplifying the futility thesis in Hirschman’s taxonomy, is that, as the history of failed attempts at development assistance illustrates, world poverty cannot be eradicated by “throwing money at the problem.” This assumption is helped by our perception of world poverty as one overwhelming – Herculean or rather Sisyphean – task to which we, as individuals or even as societies, cannot meaningfully contribute. We make a disaster-relief contribution after an earthquake and find that, two years later, the damaged city has been largely rebuilt, with our help. We make a contribution to poverty reduction and find that, two years later, the number of people living and dying in extreme poverty is still unimaginably large. The former contribution seems meaningful because we think of the task as limited to one disaster – rather than including the effects of all natural disasters, say. The latter contribution appears pointless. But such appearances arise from our conventional sorting categories. Seeing the global poor as one vast homogeneous mass, we overlook that saving ten children from a painful death by hunger does make a real difference, all the difference for these children, and that this difference is quite significant even when many other children remain hungry.
Now it is often said that our efforts do not even achieve small improvements on the poverty front – that even official development assistance (ODA) dished out in the tens of billions has not clearly done more good than harm. But, to the extent that this is true, it is not evidence for the prized conclusion because most such aid is not aimed at promoting development. Rather, our politicians allocate it to benefit those who are able and willing to reciprocate: export firms in the donor countries and political elites of strategically important developing states. This diagnosis is supported by a detailed study of how aid is actually allocated by the various “donor” countries (n. 335). It is also supported by the fact that ODA was sharply reduced after the end of the Cold War (n. 144), when our need for political support from the less developed states declined (while need among the global poor and our capacity to protect them increased). The diagnosis is further supported by the fact that only a fraction of ODA, under $7 billion in 2004, is specifically targeted toward meeting basic needs.10 The unimpressive results of ODA fail to show then that money cannot be used effectively for poverty reduction. In fact, the appropriately targeted portion of ODA has done a lot of good.
To be sure, good intentions do not always lead to success. Even the most dedicated anti-poverty organizations sometimes waste money and effort. But, if anything, this is a reason to think harder about world poverty and ways of attacking it, rather than less. Where corruption is an obstacle, we can try to reduce it, circumvent it, or focus our efforts elsewhere. If foreign donations of food depress demand, prices, and hence incentives for production in the target country, we can instead enhance the income of the poor. Where direct transfers to poor households create dependency, we can, targeting children especially, fund nutritional supplements, vaccination programs, decent health care, basic schooling, school lunches, safe water and sewage systems, housing, power plants and networks, banks and microlending, and road, rail, and communication links. Such projects augment the capacity of the poor to fend for themselves and their access to markets while also stimulating local production. Such projects, often publicly funded, played a major role in the eradication of poverty in the (now) affluent countries. And in presently poor regions, too, such projects have been successfully realized by UN agencies, NGOs, and individual donor states.
With regard to any such project, to be sure, there may always be some expert ready to speculate whether it may not have some unobvious bad effects elsewhere or later that neutralize the apparent good – and ready to argue perhaps that, appearances notwithstanding, public spending domestically (e.g. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal) or internationally (e.g. the Marshall Plan) did not contribute to the reduction of poverty in today’s affluent countries. However far-fetched, such arguments deserve a hearing, and one should try to learn from them how to identify, and to preempt and correct, unintended adverse effects. But such arguments cannot justify the quick and convenient conclusion that all possible poverty reduction projects would be wholly ineffective in each and every poor country.
Moreover, our financial contribution to overcoming world poverty need not take the form of spending and transfers. More effectively, perhaps, we can simply lighten the huge burdens we impose on the people of these countries: we can reduce the vast sums we extract as interest and repayment of debts and as monopoly rents on our “intellectual property” in seeds and drugs. We can pay for the education received in poor countries by skilled professionals we import. We can stop inviting corrupt money from poor countries into our banking systems. We can stop paying juntas and tyrants for driving “their” country into debt and selling us its natural resources. We can drive less hard a bargain in negotiations about the international trading and financial systems, perhaps agreeing to restructure the global institutional order to make it more hospitable to democratic government, economic growth and justice, and affordable health care and education in the poor countries. Making such concessions we would, for the sake of reducing world poverty, bear opportunity costs by not using our superior bargaining power to extract terms more favorable to ourselves. Such options, discussed throughout chapters 4–9, further undermine the easy “futility” assumption that the Western states simply cannot do anything toward reducing world poverty.
A second easy assumption is that world poverty is so gigantic a problem that it cannot be eradicated at a cost the rich societies could bear. This assumption, exemplifying the jeopardy thesis in Hirschman’s taxonomy of reactionary rhetoric, is widespread. Richard Rorty, for instance, has doubted that we can help the global poor by appealing to the claim that “a politically feasible project of egalitarian redistribution of wealth requires there to be enough money around to insure that, after the redistribution, the rich will still be able to recognize themselves – will still think their lives worth living.” “The rich parts of the world may be in the position of somebody proposing to share her one loaf of bread with a hundred starving people. Even if she does share, everybody, including herself, will starve anyway.”11 Although the relevant ratio is not even 1:3, let alone 1:100, what Rorty presumed seems obvious: ending severe poverty for over 2.5 billion human beings would put us, the 1 billion people in the high-income countries, in jeopardy, would sap our arts and culture and our capacity to achieve social justice at home. It would greatly damage our lives and communities and thus clearly is politically unfeasible.
Yet this presumption ignores the enormous extent of global inequality. As we have seen (n. 3), the aggregate shortfall of all these people in severe poverty amounts to barely $300 billion annually – well under 1 percent of the aggregate annual gross national incomes of the high-income economies. On any credible account of Rorty’s recognitional capacities, and ours, he and the rest of us could still recognize ourselves quite comfortably after accepting reforms that entail a 1 percent reduction in our standard of living for the sake of eradicating severe poverty worldwide.12 Indeed, in a sense of the word Rorty would not have allowed, we might recognize ourselves for the very first time.
A third easy assumption is that preventing poverty deaths is counterproductive – perverse – because it will lead to overpopulation and hence to more poverty deaths in the future.13 This assumption does not square with the facts. In the last few decades, the rise in the human population has been overwhelmed by enormous efficiency gains in food production, reflected in a 45 percent drop since 1980 in real prices of basic foodstuffs (n. 145). More importantly, there is now abundant evidence that birth rates tend to decline steeply wherever poverty is alleviated and women gain better economic opportunities, more control within their households, and better access to reproductive information and contraceptives. Accelerated progress against poverty and the subordination of women may actually be the best strategy against overpopulation and toward an early leveling-off of the human population around 10 billion.14 In any case, the available evidence does not support the conclusion that efforts to reduce severe poverty must multiply human suffering and deaths over time.
A fourth easy assumption expresses not pessimism about the task of poverty eradication but, on the contrary, great optimism: thanks in part perhaps to concerted efforts by governments of rich and poor countries, world poverty is rapidly disappearing anyway. So there is really nothing further we need do in this regard.
The popularity of this assumption among the affluent has little to do with actual trends. It is sustained by theoretical demonstrations of the benefits of globalization, by economists defining and measuring poverty in ways that show improvement (see text near nn. 18 and 23), and by the activist rhetoric of the world’s politicians. Ordinary citizens of the affluent countries are only too eager to believe.
Let us look at the activist rhetoric for a moment. At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, organized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the 186 participating governments agreed to “pledge our political will and our common and national commitment to achieving food security for all and to an on-going effort to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015.”15 Such strong words, denying the three pessimistic assumptions, encourage the belief that a major effort is underway to annihilate world poverty.
But, even if we take this pledge at face value, are we justified in concluding that world poverty is being taken care of and thus requires no attention from us? Imagine Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, responding to concern about the horrendous suffering Nazi Germany was inflicting on many of its citizens and on the rest of Europe, pledging American diplomacy and resources to the goal of reducing such suffering to half its current level … by 1961. Would this have been a morally adequate response? If not, why should the analogous 19-year plan of halving the even much greater suffering caused by world poverty be morally adequate? The 1996 plan envisaged that, even in 2015, there would still be 543.9 million extremely poor human beings and, assuming rough proportionality, 9 million annual poverty deaths. Are these levels we can condone? With a linear decline, implying a 474,000 annual reduction in the number of poverty deaths, the plan envisaged 250 million deaths from poverty-related causes over the 19-year plan period. Is so huge a death toll acceptable because these deaths would be occurring at a declining rate?
However grotesquely under-ambitious, the pledge of the 1996 World Food Summit promised much more than our leaders were willing to keep. The US immediately disowned responsibility, publishing an “Interpretive Statement” to the effect that “the attainment of any ‘right to food’ or ‘fundamental right to be free from hunger’ is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligations.”16 Then came the efforts to dilute the target. When formulating the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG-1) in the year 2000, the world’s governments subtly changed the language of the pledge, now promising to halve not the number, but the proportion of those living in extreme poverty, thus taking advantage of rapid population growth.17 This modification dilutes the target by relating the number of poor to a population whose growth, all by itself, lowers the proportion. In interpreting this diluted target, the United Nations shrewdly related the number of extremely poor not to the growing world population (as the MDG-1 text seems to demand) but to the faster-growing population of the less developed countries. Under its motto We the People, the UN also backdated the baseline to 1990, thereby capturing additional population growth as well as the 160 million reduction in extreme poverty that China had reportedly achieved in the decade before MDG-1 had been adopted. The following table shows the effect of these clever revisions.
The nine boldfaced entries in the top part of this table offer alternative baselines relative to which the target of halving world poverty by 2015 could have been defined. The bottom part of the table presents the corresponding 2015 targets, expressed in terms of how many millions of people the goal of “halving extreme poverty” allows us to leave trapped in extreme poverty in 2015. We see that the baseline incorporated into MDG-1 is the least ambitious. It envisages that, in 2015, those in extreme poverty will constitute no more than 15.109% of the population of the less developed world, that is, 905.2 million. As interpreted by the UN, MDG-1 thus promises to reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty by 16.9% (from 1,089.6 million in 2000, the year of the MDG declaration, to 905.2 million in 2015). The subtle reinterpretations – ignored by the media – have slashed by 361 million the 543.9 million reduction grandly promised at the 1996 World Food Summit and have thereby added these 361 million human beings to the number of those whose extreme poverty in 2015 is deemed morally acceptable.18
Ten years into the plan, it seems doubtful that even this dramatically diluted goal will be attained: the number of undernourished people is reported to be stagnant: “nearly 800 million” in 1996, 830 million in 2006.19 Further creative accounting will likely lead to official celebrations of a “mission accomplished” or nearly so, sustaining in affluent countries the belief that global poverty is rapidly disappearing and therefore does not require our attention. However popular, this belief is easily shown to be grossly mistaken.
The four easy assumptions I have briefly discussed provide superficial reasons that incline many in the affluent countries to disregard world poverty. None of these reasons can survive even a little reflective attention to the facts. They survive by discouraging such attention. The survival of such flimsy reasons confirms the cautions of section I: we cannot take for granted that our unreflective moral judgments regarding world poverty are well founded or reliable. We should suspend our acceptance of these judgments and reconsider them thoroughly.
III Sophisticated defenses of our acquiescence in world poverty
If the reasons for ignoring world poverty as not meriting moral attention are bad reasons, then the sheer magnitude of the problem requires that we give it careful thought. As we do so, the arguments of the preceding section provide a formidable challenge to the second prejudice: that there is nothing seriously wrong, in regard to world poverty, with our conduct, our policies, or the global economic structures we have forged. There are sophisticated thinkers prepared to meet this challenge. They know of the massive deprivations caused by global poverty, understand that this catastrophe is not already disappearing, acknowledge that our Western countries could do much to solve the problem at little cost to ourselves – and nonetheless argue that we have no strong obligations to do so. Let us look at these subtle and sophisticated defenses of the second prejudice.
Such a defense concedes that we could prevent much desperate poverty through more foreign aid or other redistributive mechanisms. But it takes such preventability to indicate not that we are actively causing poverty, but that we fail to contribute as much as we might to poverty eradication. This distinction is thought to have great moral significance: As individuals, we could do more to protect foreigners from life-threatening poverty than we are doing in fact. But failing to save lives is not morally on a par with killing. To be sure, it is morally better to do more. But if we do less or even nothing, we are not therefore responsible for any poverty deaths we might have prevented. The same holds for the conduct of our governments. And the point is thought to apply also to the influence we exert on the design of the global economic order: we affluent Western states could design this order to be more poverty avoiding (perhaps by including some redistributive tax scheme like the Tobin Tax). It would be good of us to do so. But a global order that includes no such effective redistributive mechanism is not therefore causally or morally responsible for any poverty such a mechanism might have prevented.
Skillful defenses of our acquiescence in world poverty typically also draw on the common belief that people may give priority to their compatriots, especially in the context of a system of competing states: it is permissible for us and our political representatives vigorously to pursue our interests within an adversarial system in which others and their representatives can vigorously pursue their interests. We and our politicians are not acting badly when we do much less than we might for foreigners, because our primary responsibility is to one another. In fact, we and our politicians might well be acting badly if we did not adequately prioritize the interests of our compatriots over those of foreigners.
This defense combines two claims. First, while it may be seriously wrong to harm foreigners by actively causing their severe poverty, it is not seriously wrong to fail to benefit foreigners by not preventing as much severe poverty abroad as we might. Second, as regards severe poverty abroad, we are not actively causing it but merely failing to prevent as much of it as we might.
Disputing the first claim, one might argue that the distinction between actively causing poverty and failing to prevent it has little or no moral importance. Allowing hunger to kill people whom one could easily save, even mere foreigners, is morally on a par with killing them, or at any rate little better.20 But I agree, on this point, with libertarians and defenders of the second prejudice that the distinction between actively causing poverty and merely failing to prevent it is morally significant in regard to both conduct and institutional design (section 1.4). Thus, I invoke and explicate both human rights and justice for the limited purpose of supporting negative duties, that is, duties not to harm that impose specific minimal constraints (more minimal in the case of human rights) on conduct that worsens the situation of others.
My response to the skillful defense challenges its second claim – specifically in regard to the global institutional order for which our governments, hence we, bear primary responsibility. I deny that our imposition of the existing global order is not actively causing poverty, not harming the poor. This challenge is formulated especially in chapters 3–5. I argue that the existence of an adversarial system can justify prioritizing fellow-members and group interests only if the institutional framework structuring the competition is minimally fair.
When groups competitively pursue their interests within a framework of rules, these rules themselves and their adjudication typically become objects of the competition and may then be deformed by stronger parties to the point where the framework becomes manifestly unfair. Such cases are familiar from domestic contexts: powerful corporations lobby for rules that stifle emergent competitors, incumbent political parties revise the electoral laws or districts to perpetuate their rule, wealthy litigants vastly outspend their opponents on jury specialists, expert witnesses, and complicated motions. Although they emerge from the competitive pursuit of group interests within an adversarial system, some such outcomes, and efforts to achieve and perpetuate them, are nonetheless morally condemned.
Implicit in our moral thinking and practice, there is then an important distinction – albeit not precisely formulated or well justified – between matters legitimately subject to change through competing group interests, on the one hand, and certain basic features of the institutional order requisite to preserve the fairness of the competition, on the other. I extend and apply this fundamental distinction to the global plane, arguing that any coercive institutional order must meet certain minimal conditions, which chapters 1–2 and 7 formulate in terms of human rights. The existing global institutional order falls short of meeting these conditions, on account of the excessive inequalities in bargaining power and the immense poverty and economic inequality it avoidably reproduces.
Even in a competitive context, the priority we may give to our compatriots is then limited in scope. We may not shape the rules framing this competition in our favor to the point where these rules violate basic standards of justice or fairness. Inflicting seriously unjust rules upon others is harming them. And when it comes to harming, the priority for the near and dear gives out. We may well have less reason to benefit foreigners than to confer equivalent benefits on our compatriots. But this asymmetry does not carry over from cases of assistance to duties not to harm: driving when drunk, for instance, is not morally more acceptable abroad, where one is endangering only foreigners. Generally, we have as much reason not to harm foreigners as we have not to inflict equivalent harms on compatriots. The priority for compatriots can thus help justify our conduct, our policies, and the global economic institutions we impose only insofar as we are not through their injustice harming the global poor.
My challenge to the skillful defense hinges then on whether the global institutional order in its present design is unjust and our imposition of it a harm done to the global poor. Much of this dispute is about the explanation of the persistence of severe poverty: why is global economic inequality increasing so rapidly that, despite an impressive rise in human affluence overall, hundreds of millions still live precariously on the brink of survival?
There is much work, by economists, historians, and others, on the causes of poverty. Nearly all of it examines how poverty has evolved in various countries and regions, seeking to determine which of the internationally diverse local factors explain relative successes and failures. Such work is of great significance for learning why poverty persists in some environments and not in others. It also lends credibility to the second claim of the skillful defense: if one can identify factors that are active in less developed countries where poverty persists and are absent in ones where poverty is disappearing, then, it seems, one has shown that poverty is caused by these national factors – and not by elements of the global institutional order.
However welcome and influential, this line of thought is fallacious. We can see this by considering a parallel case. There may be great variations in the performance of students in one class. These must be due in part to student-specific factors. Still, it does not follow that these “local” factors fully explain the performance of the class. Teacher and classroom quality, teaching times, reading materials, libraries, and other “global” factors may also play an important role. Dramatic contrasts of success and failure, among students or among less developed countries, do not then show global factors to be causally inert. In the former case, such global factors can greatly influence the overall progress of a class; they can influence the distribution of this progress by being differentially responsive to the needs and interests of different students; and they can affect the student-specific factors, as when a racist or sexist teacher de-motivates his black or female students. I will extensively discuss analogues of these three phenomena in the design of global institutional arrangements.
Lively disputes about national and local factors (inadvertently?) withdraw attention from foreign and global influences on the evolution of poverty. The heavy concentration of development economics on national development trajectories encourages the view, widespread in the affluent countries, that world poverty today can be fully explained in terms of national and local factors. This view, which I discuss under the label explanatory nationalism (esp. in sections 4.8 and 5.3), is further reinforced by our reluctance to see ourselves as causally connected to severe poverty and by the general cognitive tendency to overlook the causal significance of stable background factors in a diverse and changing situation.
Moreover, there are also good methodological reasons for the research bias toward national and local causes: there being only this one world to observe, it is hard to obtain solid evidence about how the overall incidence of poverty would have evolved differently if this or that global factor had been different. By contrast, solid evidence about the effects of national and local factors can be gleaned from many less developed countries and provinces that differ in their natural environment, history, culture, political and economic system, and government policies. To be sure, such evidence does not produce agreement: libertarian economists – holding up Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and lately China as their success stories – argue that the best way to expel human misery is economic growth, and the best way to achieve economic growth is to foster free enterprise with a minimum in taxes, regulations, and red tape. Others dispute that those success stories really exemplify laissez-faire social institutions and policies. And some development economists, celebrating Kerala’s example, advocate a greater role for government: in maintaining universal access to good public schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. Though such disputes are not easily settled, they are nonetheless rendered more interesting, useful, and intellectually satisfying by the availability of solid comparative evidence.
If true, explanatory nationalism would defeat my challenge by vindicating the second claim of the skillful defense: that the existing global order is not causing poverty, not harming the poor. A moment’s reflection reveals, however, that explanatory nationalism cannot be true. In the modern world, the traffic of international and intra-national economic transactions is profoundly shaped by an elaborate system of treaties and conventions about trade, investments, loans, patents, copyrights, trademarks, double taxation, labor standards, environmental protection, use of seabed resources, and much else. These different aspects of the present global institutional order realize highly specific design decisions within a vast space of alternative design possibilities. It is incredible on its face that all these alternative ways of structuring the world economy would have produced the same evolution in the overall incidence and geographical distribution of severe poverty worldwide. Moreover, there are significant international interdependencies and cross-border externalities some of which clearly aggravate the situation of the global poor.21 The skillful defense thus cannot plausibly argue that the policies and lifestyle of the affluent countries and the global institutional order they have forged do not affect the evolution of severe poverty in the less developed countries. The most it can hope to maintain is that such causal influence on the global poor should not count as harming them.
IV Does our new global economic order really not harm the poor?
Many critics of the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime are, and many more are dismissed as, opponents of open markets, free trade, or globalization. It is worth stressing that my critique involves no such opposition. I do not complain that the WTO regime opens markets too much, but that it has opened our markets too little and has thereby gained for us the benefits of free trade while withholding these benefits from the global poor. Poor populations continue to face great barriers to exporting their products, and even greater barriers to offering their services where these would fetch a decent income. And some competitive markets of vital importance to them – markets in generic versions of advanced medicines, for instance – have been shut down under WTO rules designed to facilitate global monopolies. I see the appalling trajectory of world poverty and global inequality since the end of the Cold War as a shocking indictment of one particular, especially brutal path of economic globalization that our governments have chosen to impose. But this is no reason to oppose any and all possible designs of an integrated global market economy under unified rules of universal scope. Indeed, chapters 6–9 outline not an alternative of greater mutual isolation, but a different path of globalization, involving political as well as economic integration, that would fulfill human rights worldwide and afford people everywhere an opportunity to share the benefits of global economic growth.
IV.1 Negative duties invoking a diachronic conception of harm
There is much discussion about whether the new global economic order benefits, or at least does not harm, the poor. There is also confusion about the meaning of this claim and of its notions of harm and benefit. A proper evaluation of the claim requires disentangling its different interpretations.
As standardly understood, harm and benefit are comparative notions suggesting that our new global economic order makes the poor, respectively, worse or better off. But worse or better off than what? In most ordinary uses of the words, the comparison implied is that with an earlier state of affairs. Making such a comparison, we would be asking about the effects on world poverty of the transition to the new global economic order. This suggests comparing the situation of the global poor under our new WTO regime either with the situation of the global poor before the transition or with the situation of the global poor as it would be now if the predecessor regime had remained in place.
Addressing the first of these comparisons, defenders of the WTO regime point to the decline in the number of people the World Bank counts as extremely poor. It is disturbing that this decline is heavily concentrated in one country: China. The number of extremely poor in the rest of the world is reported stagnant over 20 years. It is also disturbing that the number of severely poor is reportedly increasing even when China is included.22 Nonetheless, it is hard to dismiss a decline in extreme poverty, even a small one, as morally insignificant.
But has extreme poverty really been declining? There is reason to believe that the figures reported by the World Bank are unreliable. One main problem stems from the fact that the reported trend is highly sensitive to the level of the poverty line – a lower poverty line yields a “better” trend – and that the Bank’s chosen level seems too low. Living right at the extreme-poverty line, a US resident would, in 2007, be living on $564 for the entire year! When the Bank converts its poverty line into the currencies of other countries, many of the resulting national poverty lines are implausibly low to an even greater extent and thus represent an even more inadequate command over basic necessities than $564 annually represents in the US.23
Another problem with the appeal to declining poverty is that, even if the decline is real, it might be occurring despite, rather than because of, the new WTO regime. That you are getting closer to your destination does not show that the winds are in your favor – you may be making headway against headwinds. Analogously, our global order may be exacerbating poverty even while, thanks to other causal factors, world poverty is in decline. A decline in poverty since the transition to the WTO regime is quite compatible with the possibility that, without this transition, ordinary global economic growth would have produced an even larger decline.
One piece of evidence for these possibilities is that inequality among persons worldwide has been increasing dramatically in the relevant period (see 4.3.3 below); poverty trends would have been much better if the global poor had shared proportionately in global economic growth. Further evidence can be gleaned from The Economist, a magazine that, laboring to outdo all other news media in its defense of the WTO and in its vilification of protesters against it as enemies of the poor,24 can certainly not be accused of anti-WTO bias:
Rich countries cut their tariffs by less in the Uruguay Round than poor ones did. Since then, they have found new ways to close their markets, notably by imposing anti-dumping duties on imports they deem “unfairly cheap.” Rich countries are particularly protectionist in many of the sectors where developing countries are best able to compete, such as agriculture, textiles, and clothing. As a result, according to a new study by Thomas Hertel, of Purdue University, and Will Martin, of the World Bank, rich countries’ average tariffs on manufacturing imports from poor countries are four times higher than those on imports from other rich countries. This imposes a big burden on poor countries. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that they could export $700 billion more a year by 2005 if rich countries did more to open their markets. Poor countries are also hobbled by a lack of know-how. Many had little understanding of what they signed up to in the Uruguay Round. That ignorance is now costing them dear. Michael Finger of the World Bank and Philip Schuler of the University of Maryland estimate that implementing commitments to improve trade procedures and establish technical and intellectual-property standards can cost more than a year’s development budget for the poorest countries. Moreover, in those areas where poor countries could benefit from world trade rules, they are often unable to do so…. Of the WTO’s 134 members, 29 do not even have missions at its headquarters in Geneva. Many more can barely afford to bring cases to the WTO.25
This report makes clear that some of the rules negotiated in the Uruguay Round are very costly for the poor countries and their people. These rules exacerbate poverty and bring about additional deaths and suffering from poverty-related causes.
Defenders of the WTO will retort that, while the poor do not benefit from the adoption of each and every new rule and provision, they do benefit from the adoption of the WTO Agreement taken as a whole. If true, this response might help justify the institutional transition to the poor conceived as one pool. But even then, this defense remains deeply problematic: the global poor are a very large and diverse group. Many among them were net losers. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) component of the WTO Agreement, for example, has quite foreseeably been depriving millions of patients of access to generic versions of advanced medicines, which had been cheaply available in their countries before TRIPS-required legislative changes were put into effect. Large numbers of poor people have died as a result, and we cannot truthfully tell them that, though they did not benefit from TRIPS, they did benefit from the WTO Agreement as a whole.
WTO defenders can reply that, however regrettable these deaths may be, there would have been even more poverty and even more poverty deaths if the old regime had continued. The harms brought about by the transition to the new regime (e.g. people dying of poverty-related causes who would have survived had the old regime endured) are justified because they are outweighed by the benefits of this switch (people surviving who would have died had the old regime endured).
Assuming the facts are as alleged, this justification may make sense when advanced on behalf of a poor-country government facing a take-it-or-leave-it choice between a smaller number of poverty deaths after accepting the new regime and a larger number of poverty deaths after declining to join. For such a government, the foreseeable benefits to some of its poor citizens are inseparable from the foreseeable harms to others and, if the former are really substantially greater than the latter, it has reason to sign up.
