The Moral Demands of Global Justice
Pogge, Thomas W.
RETROSPECTIVES on the twentieth century give ample space to its horrors. Natural catastrophes are overshadowed by wars and other human-made disasters: six million murdered in the German...
...And such poverty may then entail not merely positive responsibilities for influential Brazilians and for us as potential helpers, but also negative responsibilities for influential Brazilians and for us as supporters of an economic order that reproduces massive starvation and poverty...
...Roughly one third of all human deaths, some fifty thousand daily or eighteen million annually, are due to poverty-related causes (WHO, Table 2...
...And $6 billion is not much to ask from the high-income countries, whose combined annual GNP in 1998 was $22,599 billion (WDR 231...
...UNICEF: The State of the World's Children 1998 (Oxford University Press, 1998...
...The common idea is that the United States is a solidaristic community whose members owe much more to one another than to outsiders...
...Obviously, the national border around our country plays a significant role in our moral thinking...
...And so the deaths, with occasional summits, can be expected to continue for a long time to come...
...Some professional economists invite skepticism about this assumption in three ways: by showing that some methods (for example, large-scale development aid) have not worked well...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 43...
...However such a minimal standard of decency might be formulated in detail (cf...
...The additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is...
...GLOBAL JUSTICE THOMAS W. POGGE teaches moral and political philosophy at Columbia University...
...This last figure takes account of the fact that, in the poor countries, only about twenty-five cents is needed, on average, to buy local currency that has as much purchasing power as one dollar has in the United States (cf...
...It is true that much so-called aid has been ineffective in eradicating poverty...
...Or are they perhaps too disturbing—deaths that, unlike the others, are not clearly someone else's responsibility...
...March 1999...
...Because of inflation in the intervening years, this level now corresponds to an annual per capita income of $560 at purchasing power parity or to an annual per capita income of $140 at current exchange rates...
...This outlay would not prevent us from meeting our responsibilities toward our compatriots, however expansively these may be conceived...
...As a share of GNP, this is 0.10 percent (versus 0.21 percent under Ronald Reagan in 1987-1988)—the lowest among developed countries, which have followed the U.S...
...Two out of five children in the developing world are stunted, one in three is underweight and one in ten is wasted" (FAO...
...We consider it intolerable that more than 800 million people throughout the world, and particularly in developing countries, do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs...
...And they happen in areas where we assume people have always been desperately poor...
...If these needs are not met, investment will flow elsewhere, and the enormous gap between rich and poor will continue to grow...
...Halving world hunger in nineteen years, after all, is glacial progress...
...Richard Rorty, "Who are We...
...But the real trend is more mixed...
...By living in the United States, we have accepted such responsibilities toward our compatriots...
...Yes, there are other poor countries whose rulers are more interested in keeping their poorer compatriots destitute, uneducated, impotent, dependent, and hence exploitable...
...Thomas W. Pogge, "A Global Resources Dividend" in David A. Crocker and Toby Linden, eds.: Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 501-536...
...WA—Nikos Alexandratos, ed.: World Agriculture: Toward 2010, an FAO Study (Chichester, UK: J. Wiley & Sons and Rome: FAO, 1995...
...To be sure, they recognize no moral responsibility to reduce world hunger immediately and rapidly...
...One could claim that our responsibilities toward foreigners are overridden by our responsibilities toward compatriots...
...but we have not accepted any such responsibilities toward foreigners...
...IS—"Interpretive Statement" filed by the U.S...
...Pogge...
...More important, such governments have little incentive to attend to the needs of their poor citizens, as their continuation in power depends on the local elite and on foreign governments and corporations...
...Once again, Rorty's apprehension looks vastly overblown...
...The fortunes of the ultrarich, in particular, have become enormous: "The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion...
...government published its own interpretation of this pledge: "the attainment of any 'right to adequate 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" (IS...
...and somewhat less, on average, in Western Europe (WDR, 230-1...
...Money can be more effectively spent, especially on local goods and services: enabling poor people to buy more and better foodstuffs and shelter, financing more and better schools and health services, and improving the local infrastructure (safe water, sanitation, electricity, road, rail links...
...DISSENT /Fall 2000 n 37 GLOBAL JUSTICE One quarter of all children between five and fourteen, 250 million in all, are compelled to work, often under harsh conditions, as soldiers, prostitutes, or domestic servants or in agriculture, construction, textile, or carpet production (ILO...
...And yet, in the period since the end of the cold war, the number of persons subsisting below the international poverty line "rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015" (WDR, 25...
...Few Americans would, I think, accept this disclaimer...
...Not even these governments—certainly not above characterizing things they don't want to do as things they cannot do—have endorsed the view that reducing world hunger is beyond our capacities...
...But this argument is unpromising because the global poor do not in fact have states and compatriots willing and able to secure their basic needs and also have not agreed to waive whatever claims they would otherwise have on us...
...MANY PEOPLE in the more affluent countries believe that severe global poverty is rapidly declining...
...There is in fact evidence for this assumption, as Brazil is the most unequal society on earth, with the highest fifth of incomes being thirty-two times the lowest fifth (this quintile ratio tends to be between four and ten for countries outside Latin America [HDR 1999, 146-9...
...This thought is suggested by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims that "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized," including 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" (articles 28 and 25...
...Branko Milanovic, "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone," World Bank, October 1999...
...Millions were killed in the Irish potato famine, in Stalin's forced collectivization, in Mao's Great Leap Forward, in contemporary North Korea, as well as in many other human-made disasters...
...Government in reference to the first paragraph of the Rome Declaration on World Food Security (http:// www.fas.usda.gov:80/icd/summit/interpre.html...
...The two cases are close in other respects as well: Brazil's per capita GNP is $4,570—versus the world's $4,890 (WDR, 230-1...
...dollar lost more than a quarter of its value between 1985 and 1993, this revision lowers the international poverty line by over 25 percent and thus conveniently reduces the number of global poor without cost to anyone...
...Rome Declaration on World Food Security (http:// www.fao.org/wfs/policy/english/96-3eng.htm...
...Rawls), it seems clear that Brazil, given its massive and avoidable poverty, would fail to qualify...
...Global income inequality is only slightly greater than Brazil's when incomes are scored in terms of purchasing power (though it is vastly greater when we score incomes in terms of exchange rates, as we should to obtain a rough measure of the price of reducing poverty...
...Doing that would make it harder for them to maintain their power without popular support and, most important, would greatly reduce the rewards of, and hence incentives toward, the undemocratic acquisition and unresponsive exercise of political power...
...Do we bear some responsibility for deaths due to extreme poverty abroad...
...And affluent states, too, have no interest in changing the rules so that ownership rights in natural resources cannot be acquired from tyrannical governments...
...Most of them probably agree with the No of their compatriots, but very few have taken the trouble to examine the question carefully enough to provide good reasons for this answer...
...somewhat more in Japan...
...Their rulers can sell the country's resources, buy arms and soldiers to maintain their rule, and amass personal fortunes...
...But I strongly disagree with the first point...
...Without a sense of moral responsibility for the global economic order we are imposing, there will not be the political will to reform this order, nor sufficient readiness by governments and individuals to mitigate its worst effects...
...WDR, 62...
...But this is hardly surprising, given that most of it has been 42 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 bilateral development aid focused on buying political support from foreign governments and domestic exporters...
...The aggregate income of the poorest quartile is less than 0.7 percent of the global social product, less than $210 billion out of nearly $30 trillion (WDR, 231...
...This response—that children must have their basic needs met—is one we would give unquestioningly in a domestic context...
...But even they are constrained to agree that, if such a responsibility existed, it is not defeated by any evident incapacity to fulfill it...
...But it is also different: by being less confined in space and time, even more devastating, and less recognized...
...The hunger reduction plan adopted in Rome implicitly envisions well over 200 million deaths from hunger and preventable diseases over the 1997-2015 plan period...
...Rome) The U.S...
...We do not perhaps know the best way to proceed, but we are not exactly clueless either and would learn much more in the course of making a serious and concerted effort...
...THE GROWING reluctance to spend money on reducing world hunger is associated with the increasingly popular idea that this goal is best achieved through investment rather than aid...
...Since the U.S...
...The U.S...
...International declarations, summits, and conventions devoted to the problem project a strong image of concerted action and brisk progress...
...less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world" (HDR 1998, 30...
...The study, completed in mid1998, estimated that the target could be reached with additional global assistance of [only] $2.6 billion annually...
...Confronted with this question, most respond with a firm No...
...Are they too humdrum, too ordinary, not shocking enough...
...USAID (hap ://www.info...
...Natural catastrophes are overshadowed by wars and other human-made disasters: six million murdered in the German Holocaust, thirty million starved to death in Mao's Great Leap Forward, eleven million wiped out by Josef Stalin, two million killed by the Khmer Rouge, half a million hacked to death in Rwanda, and so on...
...This level is specified in terms of a daily income with the purchasing power that one dollar had in the United States in 1985...
...life expectancy in both cases is sixtyseven years (HDR 1999, 135, 137...
...u s aid .gov/p ub s/c p98/ progprview.htm...
...But what exactly is its supposed moral significance...
...They have made the World Food Summit pledge and, in the case of the United States, argued in great detail that they can halve hunger by 2015 even more cheaply than the FAO has estimated...
...The trend in international inequality clearly shows the inadequacy of the rising-tide image: "The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960...
...When the income of the top tenth of humankind is one hundred times the income of the bottom quarter, when a third of all human deaths are due to poverty, and when aggregate global income is continuously rising, it would be ludicrous to claim that reducing poverty is demonstrably impossible...
...This great moral error, shared by most governments and citizens of the developed countries, is the principal obstacle to eradicating world hunger...
...The allocation of such funds is, moreover, governed by political considerations: only 21 percent goes to the forty-three least developed countries (HDR 2000, 218) and only 8.3 percent is spent on meeting basic needs (HDR 2000, 79...
...How does one examine such a question...
...FAO—UN Food and Agricultural Organization, at http:// www.fao.org/focus/e/sofi/child-e.htm...
...Missing from these retrospectives are the deaths from starvation and preventable diseases—world hunger for short— some two hundred million in just the few years since the end of the cold war...
...We are willing to respect other societies even if they do not realize, or even aspire to realize, full justice as we understand it...
...We would find it intolerable if, somewhere in the United States, infant mortality were 20 percent because of lack of food, safe water, basic sanitation, basic health services, and primary education...
...This reluctance is shared by ethicists, whose job it is to think about moral issues and responsibilities...
...Hunger will be erased through globalization and free markets...
...It also challenged the FAO's claim (WA ) that fulfilling the pledge would require all developed states combined to increase their development assistance in agriculture by $6 billion annually: "As part of the U.S...
...and by spirited disagreements about what is to be done (causing laypersons to shrug: "If even economists differ so sharply, then perhaps we had better do nothing...
...Now suppose the rich elite in Brazil maintain that they have no responsibilities with regard to the poor in their country because most Brazilians do not see themselves as members, GLOBAL JUSTICE with the poor, in one solidaristic community...
...In Brazil, 28.7 percent of the population lives below the international poverty line and 24 percent lack access to safe drinking water—versus 25 percent and 22 percent worldwide (HDR 1999, 146...
...IT IS OFTEN said that moral reflections on world hunger are worthless, because no one denies that hunger is bad and should not exist...
...We 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...
...Such apprehension may seem justified in view of the huge number of poor people, 1.5 billion below the international poverty line...
...But foreign investment will rarely create such conditions...
...But this idea is problematic...
...John Rawls, A Law of Peoples (Harvard University Press 1999...
...Action Plan on Food Security (http:// www.fas.usda.gov:80/icd/summit/usactplan.pdf...
...His work on this essay was supported by a grant from the Global Security and Sustainability Program of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation...
...But these deaths happen far away, to people we never encounter...
...There has been significant progress in the formulation and ratification of relevant documents, in the gathering and publication of statistical information, and even in reducing important aspects of poverty...
...HDR 1999, 22...
...The ongoing catastrophe of world hunger is of the same kind...
...This conclusion is reinforced by looking at inequalities in wealth...
...Following the GLOBAL JUSTICE end of the cold war, military expenditures declined from 4.7 percent of the global social product in 1985 to 2.9 percent in 1996 (HDR 1998, 197...
...It is hardly surprising that the global order reflects the interests of wealthy and powerful states...
...But this No comes very quickly and with a reluctance to delve more deeply into the reasons for it...
...It would reduce the top tenth of incomes by a mere 1 or 2 percent— hardly a serious threat to our culture and lifestyle...
...http://www.brown.edu/Departments/World_Hunger_ Program/hungerwebiHN/Articles/WFS/EDIT2.html...
...Such severe poverty has consequences: "Worldwide, 34,000 children under age five die daily from hunger and preventable diseases" (USA, iii...
...by arguing that the effects of individual variables in a highly complex system cannot be reliably measured (the clear benefits of Oxfam projects or Grameen Bank microlending to specific individuals may well be offset by their unknowable indirect effects...
...Many U.S...
...Thus the twenty-one donor states together spend $4.3 billion annually on meeting basic needs abroad, less than .08 cents per day for each person in the poorest quartile...
...With so much economic and technological progress, it seems reasonable to assume that a rising tide must be lifting all boats...
...It is more promising to back the claim by saying that responsibilities to provide any aid and support, beyond one's immediate family and beyond emergencies one immediately encounters, arise only through voluntary participation in a solidaristic community...
...Milanovic...
...So households in the poorest quartile of humankind cannot afford, per person per year, whatever basic necessities can be bought for $560 in the United States or for $140 in the average poor country...
...Why are these deaths not mentioned...
...This claim might be backed by saying that the responsibilities we would otherwise have are, in this case, canceled by the fact that starving foreigners have states and compatriots of their own who ought to provide the needed support...
...Instead of merely failing to help the poor, we may be involved in harming them through the imposition of a global economic order under which inequality increases so rapidly that the gains from economic progress are huge at the top and minuscule or nonexistent at the bottom of the global hierarchy (cf...
...But in fact, "The U.S...
...This fraction is so high because far more than a quarter of all human deaths, and births, occur in the poorest quartile due to the much shorter life expectancy among the poor...
...The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people" (HDR 1999, 3...
...One might have thought that, even if the FAO's proposed annual increase of $6 billion were to reduce hunger faster than planned, this should be no cause for regret...
...Action Plan on Food Security, USAID commissioned a separate study of the projected cost of meeting the World Food Summit target and a strategy for reaching this goal...
...USA—U.S...
...Such enormous inequality casts doubt upon 38 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 the common view that eradicating world hunger would be prohibitively expensive, that it would truly impoverish us and destroy our culture and lifestyle...
...As this article goes to press, I find that the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program have quietly redefined the international poverty line in terms of a daily income with the purchasing power that one dollar had in the United States in 1993 [HDR 2000, 4, 170f...
...Such a change would reduce the supply and hence increase the price of the resources we import...
...it will not help those children who now need food, safe water, basic sanitation, basic health services, and primary education...
...So the study proposes that the pledge be backed by only $3 rather than $7 annually for each malnourished person...
...Hans Reiss (Cambridge University Press, 1970...
...Immanuel Kant, Kant's Political Writings, ed...
...But we do believe that there are certain minimum conditions that any state—whether its people conceive it as a solidaristic community or not— must meet for it to deserve moral respect...
...But economic arrangements are often quite as effective...
...HDR 1999, 191...
...As article 28 suggests, the incidence of severe poverty is importantly influenced by the existing social and international order...
...A third response to the economists' smokescreen of skepticism goes back to Immanuel Kant, who argued that a morally mandated project may not be abandoned merely because, for all we currently know, it may be unachievable, but only if it is "demonstrably impossible" (Kant 89, 173-4...
...government has gone far out of its way to deny that the World Food Summit pledge, which calls hunger "intolerable" and "unacceptable," gives rise to any international obligations...
...Ricky Lam and Leonard Wantchekon, "Dictatorships as a Political Dutch Disease," working paper, Yale University, January 19, 1999...
...If they survive long enough, many of them will join the currently 850 million illiterate adults...
...To be sure, the global poor have their own governments...
...ILO—International Labor Organization at http:// www.ilo.org/public/english/270asie/feature/child.htm...
...Foreign investment and free markets can be helpful where a minimally adequate infrastructure is in place and the physical and mental development of prospective employees has not been permanently retarded through disease, malnutrition, and illiteracy...
...One percent of the developed countries' GNP—less than half the "peace dividend"— could greatly reduce world hunger within a few years, allowing expenditures to decline significantly thereafter (cf...
...These are considerably greater than inequalities in income, since well-off households typically have more net worth than annual income while poor households typically have less...
...It claims a third of all human deaths...
...Today, while the bottom quartile of humankind live on less than $140 per year, 1998 per capita gross national product (GNP) was $29,340 in the United States...
...Of a total of six billion human beings, one quarter live below the international poverty line (WDR, 25), "that income or expenditure level below which a minimum, nutritionally adequate diet plus essential non-food requirements are not affordable" (HDR 1996, 222...
...I certainly agree that we should think about this practical question and will speak to DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 41 GLOBAL JUSTICE it shortly...
...Some 840 million persons are today chronically malnourished, 880 million without access to health services, one billion without adequate shelter, 1.3 billion without access to safe drinking water, two billion without electricity, and 2.6 billion without access to basic sanitation (HDR 1998, 49...
...USA, Appendix A...
...ALTERNATiv., one could claim that we have no responsibilities to provide any aid and support beyond the solidaristic 40 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 national community we sustain with one another...
...In Brazil, 16 percent of all adults are illiterate—versus 22 percent worldwide...
...But this claim would be ineffective, because the cost of erasing world hunger is too small to entail any real losses for our compatriots...
...They like the global economic order just the way it is...
...In such cases, the least we should do is withdraw support from these rulers: by not letting them sell their country's resources to our firms, by not letting them borrow from our banks in their country's name, and by not letting them buy from our firms the arms they need to stay in power...
...They happen in social contexts whose dependence on the existing global order we do not understand...
...Moral Universalism and Economic Triage," Diogenes 173 (1996...
...The World Food Summit in Rome, organized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in November 1996, provides a telling example of prevailing official attitudes toward poverty eradication...
...lead by reducing their aggregate net ODA from 0.33 percent of their combined GNPs to 0.24 percent ($51.9 billion) during the same period (HDR 2000, 218...
...A shift in global income distribution that would double (or triple) their incomes entirely at our expense would still be quite minor...
...Estimates for earlier times are eleven to one for 1913, seven to one for 1870, and three to one for 1820 (HDR 1999, 3...
...But if the global economic order is at least as bad as Brazil's, must not the same judgment apply to it as well...
...The moral responsibility I assert presupposes that the governments and citizens of the developed countries can reduce world hunger through measures of reform and mitigation...
...Agency for International Development (USAID) administers America's foreign assistance programs, which account for less than one-half of 1% of the federal budget" (USAID...
...A third way of putting the cost of eradicating world hunger in perspective relates this cost to the so-called peace dividend...
...Its principal achievement was this pledge by the 186 participating governments: "We, the Heads of State and Government, or our representatives, gathered at the World Food Summit . . . reaffirm the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger...
...But almost all of them are too weak to exert any real influence on the organization of the global economy...
...Money spent to meet these needs would produce an advance that would help attract foreign investment, which could then sustain the advance on its own...
...This idea can be relevantly extended in two ways...
...Why are similar conditions abroad seen as so much more acceptable...
...This situation is unacceptable...
...But it is in fact grossly exaggerated because global income inequality is much larger than Rorty seems to realize...
...It is not surprising, then, that developing countries with rich natural resource endowments are especially likely to experience civil wars and undemocratic rule and hence achieve slower (if any) economic growth (Lam...
...Let us consider the disturbing thought...
...HDR—United Nations Development Program: Human Development Report (Oxford University Press...
...Clearly, our critical deficiency is not expertise but a sense of moral responsibility and, based thereon, the political will to fund basic development and push reforms in the global economic order...
...Net official development assistance (ODA) provided by the United States has fallen to under $9 billion in 1998, $32 per citizen...
...Sources Used in Order of First Appearance: WDR—World Bank: World Development Report 1999/ 2000 (Oxford University Press 1999), also available at http://www.worldbank.org/wdr/2000/fullreport.html...
...WDR, 25...
...We should instead think about the practical question: how hunger might best be erased...
...People can kill one another with bombs and machetes...
...One may begin by recapitulating the basic facts about world hunger...
...To examine this view, let us reflect on Brazil for a moment and assume that most Brazilians do not think of their country as a solidaristic community...
...Richard Rorty articulates such a view when he expresses doubt that we can help the global poor: "a politically feasible project of egalitarian redistribution of wealth requires there to be enough money around to ensure that, after the redistribution, the rich will still be able to recognize themselves—will still think their lives worth living" (Rorty, 14...
...WDR, 230-1...
...http://www.thehungersite.com . WHO: The World Health Report 1999 (http:// www.who.int/whr/1999...
...citizens apparently believe that a large proportion of the federal budget is already being spent on foreign aid...
...Dependent on our votes and taxes, our government, with its allies, works very hard to shape the rules for our benefit, as we can see from its response to the World Food Summit, from its successful renegotiation of the Law of the Seas Treaty, and from countless other examples...
...It seems unlikely, then, that the citizens and governments of the developed countries will be struck by the problem enough to recognize their responsibility...
...This decline currently produces an annual dividend of more than $500 billion annually—far more than the under $210 billion collective annual income of the poorest quartile...
...The freer, globalized markets of recent years have actually, thanks partly to the 1997-1998 global debt and currency crisis, produced a 25 percent increase in the DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 39 GLOBAL JUSTICE number of people living below the international poverty line (cf...
...Many governments of developing countries would welcome such funds and would contribute to making them effective, especially if their contribution were rewarded with continued funding...
...But this skepticism is rejected even by the governments of the affluent states...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
