Global Justice, Poverty, and the International Economic Order
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What principles of justice ought to guide the evolution of international economic law? In his essay for this volume, Thomas Pogge argues that there is a moral duty on the part of affluent countries not to contribute to the design of a ‘global economic order that, continually and forseeably, produces vast excesses of severe poverty and premature poverty-related deaths’. According to Pogge, the existing international economic order represents a violation of this duty, and this violation, which is a human rights violation, leads to an obligation to compensate the world’s poor through, inter alia, foreign aid. Pogge suggests: ‘In the modern world, the traffic of international and even intra-national economic transactions is profoundly shaped by an elaborate system of treaties and conventions about trade, investments, loans, patents, copyrights, trademarks, double taxation, labour standards, environmental protection, use of seabed resources and much else. These different parts 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.’ While building on a widely shared moral intuition that the existence of extreme poverty is inhuman and wrongful, Pogge’s argument has, in fact, complex and contestable normative and empirical foundations. When Pogge claims that existing international economic law has contributed to or caused in part the existence of extreme poverty, what he is really saying is that had a different set of rules and institutions been devised for the international economic order, the worst forms of poverty could have been eliminated in great measure. He thus judges the existing order against an imaginary counter-vision of the international economic order. The affluent countries violated their duty not to contribute to extreme poverty globally through choosing a set of rules and institutions different from some imagined alternatives, which could have eliminated the most extreme forms of poverty. At first, Pogge seems to be asserting that evidence of enormous and increasing income and wealth inequalities alone proves that the existing rules and institutions are sub-optimal: ‘These data should suffice to refute the Panglossian view: the present design of the global order is not optimal in terms of poverty avoidance’ This seems to be question-begging if not an outright logical error: however lamentable the realities evoked by the data, they cannot in and of themselves ever establish that alternative rules and institutions are or were actually available that could have or could now avoid or lessen these outcomes. A further difficulty here is that increased income inequalities over a given time period might, on some theories of economic development, be necessary to produce in the long term increases in wealth that can ultimately lead to the elimination of extreme poverty. This possibility is suggested by some of the data Pogge cites: the number of the very poorest of the poor dropped during much of the period in question (those living below $1 a day), even if income inequalities increased more sharply. In earlier work, Pogge tended to favour Rawls’s difference principle as a basis for global justice: under this principle even quite extreme inequalities of outcome are acceptable if such inequalities maximize the primary social goods of the least advantaged of all. Rawls derived the difference principle from a particular method for establishing the rules of justice for social cooperation, the veil of ignorance, asking what rules reasonable persons would choose without knowing what endowments they might have, i.e. how disadvantaged or advantaged in society they would be due to morally arbitrary factors.
Source Publication
The Philosophy of International Law
Source Editors/Authors
Samantha Besson, John Tasioulas
Publication Date
2010
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L. and Teitel, Ruti, "Global Justice, Poverty, and the International Economic Order" (2010). Faculty Chapters. 858.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/858
