Essay: Thomas Pogge – Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Fam??lia 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
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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 intranational
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,
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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
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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?
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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 richcountry
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
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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
Insofar as the current design of the global institutional order does turn
out to entail substantial excesses of violence and severe poverty with
consequent excesses of mortality and morbidity (relative to some alternative
design), we might go on to ask who bears responsibility for the
existing design and whether these responsible parties could have foreseen
and could reasonably have avoided these excesses.
The governments of the more powerful developed countries, especially
the so-called G-7, have played the dominant role in designing the
post-Cold War global institutional order. In shaping this order, those
governments have given much weight to the interests of their domestic
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business and finance elites and rather little weight to the interests of
the poor and vulnerable populations of the less developed countries.
The resulting global institutional order is arguably unjust insofar as the
incidence of violence and severe poverty occurring under it is much
greater than would have been the case under an alternative order
whose design would have given greater weight to the interests of
the poor and vulnerable. As the G-7 countries are reasonably democratic,
their citizens share responsibility for the global order their governments
have built as well as for the comparative impact of this order
upon human lives. At least this is the kind of moral diagnosis that
moves center-stage as normative debates about international relations
shift from the international ethics to the global justice paradigm by
extending institutional moral analysis beyond the state.
Two objections are often advanced against this moral diagnosis
by defenders of the adequacy of the international-ethics paradigm.
Objection One asserts that the global institutional framework cannot
be unjust because its participants have consented to it ‘ volenti non fit
iniuria. Objection Two asserts that it cannot be wrong for the affluent
countries’ governments to design and impose the present global order
because their primary responsibility is to their own people, not to
foreigners. Let me conclude by briefly responding to these two objections
in turn.
Objection One holds that the global institutional order is immune
from moral criticism insofar as it has been freely consented to also by
the poorer and less powerful states. The objector would allow that, in
some cases, the consent given ‘ to the WTO treaty system, for example
‘ was perhaps problematic. He would be willing to entertain the possibility
that some weak states were negotiating under considerable
duress and also lacked the expertise to work out whether the asymmetrical
market access rules they were being offered were better or
worse for them than remaining outside the WTO. Our objector might
even be willing to consider that perhaps the bargaining power of states
entering the negotiations was inappropriately affected by historical
crimes, such as colonialism. Still, the objector would insist, insofar as
states have freely and competently consented to common rules, these
rules are morally unobjectionable.
A proponent of the new global-justice paradigm would reject this
reasoning as question-begging. The objection assumes what needs to
be shown: namely that the only morally relevant question about a
global institutional order is whether it does wrong to any of its member
states. This is precisely the point challenged by the global-justice paradigm,
with the claim that it is relevant for the moral assessment of a
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global institutional order how it treats individual human beings. As I
argue in the next chapter (section 2.4.2), insofar as the present design
of the global institutional order foreseeably produces a large excess of
avoidable mortality and morbidity, it cannot be justified through even
the unanimous consent of the world’s governments.
Objection Two holds that it is the very point and purpose of governments
to represent and promote the interests of their people. It is
therefore entirely appropriate and permissible for affluent countries’
governments to do their utmost to shape the global institutional order
in the best interest of their citizens.30
There is evidently some truth in this objection. Surely a government
is not required to give equal weight to the interests of all human beings
worldwide. Rather, it is permitted to be partial by showing special
concern for the interests of its own people, present, and future. But
there are obvious ethical limits to a government’s partiality; for
example, insofar as it is impermissible for a country’s citizens to kill
innocent foreigners in order to advance their economic interests, it
is likewise impermissible for these citizens’ government to do so on
their behalf.
The limits on permissible government partiality with regard to the
shaping of the global institutional order are less familiar but no less
compelling. Quite generally, partiality is legitimate only in the context
of a ‘level playing field,’ broadly conceived as including fair rules
impartially administered. This idea is familiar and widely accepted in
many contexts: it is permissible for persons to concentrate on promoting
their own interests, or those of their group, sports team, or relatives,
provided they do so in the context of a fair competition. Because
such a fair setting is a moral precondition for permissible partiality,
such partiality cannot extend to the subversion of the level playing
field. To the contrary, those who are partial in favor of their own
group must, as a condition of the permissibility of such partiality, also
be impartially concerned for preserving the fairness of the larger social
setting.
In a domestic setting, for example, it is entirely permissible for you
to concentrate your time and money on securing a good education for
your own children, at the expense of other children whose education
you could also promote. Yet it would be morally wrong for you to
seek to promote your children’s prospects by using your political influence
to oppose equal access to education for children whose gender,
color, religion, or class differs from that of your own children. In short:
partiality of concern is alright within a minimally fair setting, but not
alright when it seeks to undermine the minimal fairness of this setting
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24 What Is Global Justice?
itself. The minimal fairness of the terms of the competition must not
itself become an object of this competition. And the justice limit to a
government’s partiality in favor of its own citizens forbids, then,
partial conduct that undermines the minimal fairness of the global
institutional order. An appeal to permissible partiality cannot justify
the imposition, by the most powerful governments on the rest of the
world, of an unjust global institutional order under which a majority
of humankind is foreseeably and avoidably deprived of anything
resembling a fair start in life.
1.8 Conclusion
This chapter has sketched the philosophical framework associated
with the increasingly prominent expression ‘global justice.’ Distinctive
of this framework is the focus on the causal and moral analysis of
the global institutional order against the background of its feasible and
reachable alternatives. Within this general global-justice approach,
distinct conceptions of global justice will differ in the specific criteria
of global justice they propose. But such criteria will coincide in their
emphasis on the question of how well our global institutional order is
doing, compared to its feasible and reachable alternatives, in regard
to the fundamental human interests that matter from a moral point of
view. Extending institutional moral analysis beyond the state, this
question focuses attention on how today’s massive incidence of violence
and severe poverty, and the huge excesses of mortality and morbidity
they cause, might be avoided not merely through better
government behavior, domestically and internationally, but also, and
much more effectively, through global institutional reforms that
would, among other things, elevate such government behavior by
modifying the options governments have and the incentives they face.
The importance of this global-justice approach reaches well beyond
philosophy. It is crucial for enabling ordinary citizens ‘ in the developed
countries especially ‘ to come to an adequate understanding of
their moral situation and responsibilities. And it is very helpful also
for pushing social scientists, and development economists especially,
to overcome their bias toward explanatory nationalism, their tendency
to explain poverty and hunger exclusively in terms of causal factors
that are domestic to the societies in which they occur. However valid
and useful, such nationalist explanations must be complemented by
substantial inquiries into the comparative effects of global institutional
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What Is Global Justice? 25
factors on the incidence of severe poverty and (more generally) unfulfilled
human rights worldwide.
It is gratifying that the development of the global-justice approach
for once shows the owl of Minerva spreading its wings well before the
falling of dusk: that philosophy has been giving an important conceptual
impulse to economics, political science, and politics. What effect
this impulse will have, however, remains to be seen.
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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.
4 This latter death toll is thought to be about 200 million, including 17 and
60 million deaths in World Wars I and II (the concentration camps and
gulags included), 30 million deaths in Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958’
61), 20 million deaths due to repression under Stalin, 9 million deaths in
the Russian civil war (1917’22), 8 million deaths from King Leopold II’s
brutal exploitation of the Congo Free State (1886’1908), and 6 million
deaths in the Korean and Second Indochina (Vietnam) wars.
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Notes to pp. 11’13 205
5 FAO, ‘1.02 Billion People Hungry’; WHO and UNICEF, Progress on
Drinking Water and Sanitation, pp. 30 and 7.
6 Fogarty International Center, ‘Strategic Plan.’
7 UN-Habitat, The Challenge of Slums, p. vi; UN-Habitat, ‘Urban
Energy.’
8 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ‘Literacy Topic.’
9 See ILO, End of Child Labour, p. 6.
10 In 2004, there were about 59 million human deaths. The main causes
highly correlated with poverty were (with death tolls in thousands):
diarrhea (2,163) and malnutrition (487), perinatal (3,180) and maternal
conditions (527), childhood diseases (847 ‘ measles accounting for about
half), tuberculosis (1,464), malaria (889), meningitis (340), hepatitis (159),
tropical diseases (152), respiratory infections (4,259 ‘ mainly pneumonia),
HIV/AIDS (2,040) and sexually transmitted diseases (128) (WHO, Global
Burden of Disease, table A1, pp. 54’9). To be sure, some deaths from
these causes would still have occurred even in the absence of poverty. But
these are greatly outnumbered by the contribution that poverty makes to
deaths from globally common causes such as cancer, cardiovascular
disease, traffic accidents, and violence. It is likely then that rather more
than one third of all human lives are substantially shortened by severe
poverty.
11 Karwal, At General Assembly Event.
12 UNDP, Human Development Report 2003, pp. 310’30; UNRISD, Gender
Equality; Social Watch, Unkept Promises.
13 See Chen and Ravallion, ‘The Developing World Is Poorer than We
Thought,’ p. 45. The World Bank’s poverty lines are discussed in depth
in chs 3 and 4.
14 Calculated from data supplied by Branko Milanovic (World Bank). See
also below sect. 3.4, table 3.4.
15 Data from 2002, supplied by Branko Milanovic (World Bank). Using
exchange rate conversion, the top decile had 71.1 percent of global
household income versus 0.26 percent for the bottom decile. For more
comprehensive data, including from earlier years, see below sect. 5.4,
table 5.7, and Milanovic, Worlds Apart, pp. 107’8.
16 Davies et al., World Distribution of Household Wealth, Appendix 1, table
10a. Many economists find such comparison misleading, claiming that
they should instead be made in terms of PPPs, which would reduce these
ratios by a factor of about 2.5 (using the new PPPs for 2005, discussed
in sect. 4.2 below). However, actual exchange rates are the more
appropriate measure for assessing the influence (bargaining power and
expertise) that parties can bring to bear. Actual exchange rates are also
the appropriate measure for assessing the avoidability of poverty. For
comparing standards of living, going exchange rates are indeed
inappropriate. But general-consumption PPPs are also problematic for
the assessment of very low incomes because the consumption expenditure
pattern of the very poor differs greatly from the pattern of international
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206 Notes to pp. 13’20
consumption expenditure on which PPPs are based. This issue receives
detailed discussion below in ch. 4.
17 Milanovic, Worlds Apart, p. 108.
18 Ibid., see also below sect. 5.4, table 5.7.
19 Sect. 5.4, table 5.6.
20 The European Union, and supranational organizations more generally,
are the subject of ch. 9.
21 Rawls’s views on the (purely) domestic sources of deprivations are the
subject of sect. 2.2.
22 This insight is encapsulated in the remarkable Article 28 of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I discuss in detail in sect.
2.1.
23 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 37.
24 See Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, chs. 4 and 6 for a fuller
discussion.
25 These points are widely acknowledged by mainstream economists and
top officials of the international financial institutions. See, for example,
the speech of former World Bank Chief Economist Nick Stern, ‘Dynamic
Development.’ He stated that in 2002 the rich countries spent about $300
billion on export subsidies for agricultural products alone, roughly six
times their total development aid. He said that cows receive annual
subsidies of about $2,700 each in Japan and $900 in Europe ‘ far above
the annual income of most human beings. He also cited protectionist
anti-dumping actions, bureaucratic applications of safety and sanitation
standards, and textile tariffs and quotas as barriers to poor country
exports: ‘Every textile job in an industrialized country saved by these
barriers costs about 35 jobs in these industries in low-income countries.’
Stern was especially critical of escalating tariffs ‘ duties that are lowest
on unprocessed raw materials and rise sharply with each step of processing
and value added ‘ for undermining manufacturing and employment in
poor countries, thus helping to ‘confine Ghana and C??te D’Ivoire to the
export of unprocessed cocoa beans; Uganda and Kenya to the export of
raw coffee beans; and Mali and Burkina Faso to the export of raw
cotton.’ Full elimination of agricultural protection and production
subsidies in the rich countries would raise agricultural and food exports
from low and middle-income countries by 24% and total annual rural
income in these countries by about $60 billion (about three-quarters of
the global poor live in such rural areas) (World Bank, Cutting).
26 For 2008, the OECD reports ODA of $119.8 billion (OECD, Development
Aid), with about $12 billion of this spent on ‘basic social services’ (UN,
Millennium Development Goals Indicators). For additional detailed aid
statistics, see also Shah, US and Foreign Aid Assistance.
27 De C??rdoba and Vanzetti, ‘Now What?,’ table 12, p. 28, calculate
annual welfare gains of $135.3 billion for the less developed countries.
Cline, Trade Policy and Global Poverty, calculates $86.51 billion (table
4.1, p. 180) and, if the dynamic effect on productivity growth is included,
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Notes to pp. 20’36 207
$203 billion (in 1997 dollars, p. 255) associated with a poverty reduction
somewhere in the vicinity of 500 million people (table 5.3, p. 252, as
slightly revised in a subsequent ‘Technical Correction to the First
Printing’). The World Bank, Global Economic Prospects 2002, pp.
168’78, had earlier estimated a poverty reduction of 320 million. Both
estimates rely on a definition of poverty in terms of $2.00 PPP 1993, as
explained in ch. 4 below.
28 In Thailand, Sanofi-Aventis sold its cardiovascular disease medicine
Plavix for 70 baht ($2.20) per pill, some 6000% above the price at which
the Indian generic firm Emcure agreed to deliver the same medicine
(clopidogrel). See Oxfam, ‘Investing for Life.’
29 For further details, see Hollis and Pogge, Health Impact Fund, and
subsequent discussion papers available at http://www.healthimpactfund.org.
30 For a more elaborate discussion of this objection, see Pogge, World
Poverty and Human Rights, ch. 5.
31 I discuss the problem of terrorism and the ‘war on terror’ in ch. 7.
32 See sect. 1.4 above.
33 With the word ‘uncompensated,’ I mean to exempt people like Oskar
Schindler (as depicted in Spielberg’s movie). Through his manufacturing
activities and tax payments, Schindler cooperated in imposing the social
institutions and policies of Nazi Germany. But doing this allowed him to
compensate (more than adequately) for his contributions to harm through
protection efforts for its victims. His conduct complied with the negative
duties imposed on him by the human rights of the victims of the Third
Reich ‘ no less fully than if he had left Germany. In fact, Schindler did
much better by these victims than he would have done by emigrating.
34 The word ‘reasonably’ is meant to acknowledge not merely the limits of
human foresight, but also the possibility that the institutional reduction
of human-rights deficits might sometimes have high costs in terms of
culture, say, or the natural environment. It is best to avoid the claim that
human rights must never give way in such cases ‘ certainly in our world,
where human rights could be largely or fully realized through institutional
reforms that would not entail such high costs.
35 The next three sections are adapted from a longer essay: Pogge, ‘Severe
Poverty as a Human Rights Violation.’ UNESCO’s permission for this
adaptation is gratefully acknowledged.
36 Rawls, ‘Law of Peoples,’ p. 77.
37 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 108.
38 Ibid., pp. 37’8, 106’20.
39 World Bank, World Development Report 2009, p. 353.
40 Ibid.
41 For a brief, accessible account with examples, see Peterson, ‘American
Sugar Policy.’ See also endnote 25.
42 The content and impact of TRIPS, noted in ch. 1, are discussed in
UNDP, Human Development Report 2001, ch. 5; Correa, Intellectual
Property Rights; Juma, ‘Intellectual Property Rights’; Watal, ‘Access to
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