World poverty, human rights, and global justice

Abstract

This dissertation aims to show that Thomas Pogge’s central contention – that citizens and governments of the affluent countries have unduly harmed the global poor through their collaboration in the imposition upon the latter an unjust global institutional scheme – remains sound despite the various criticisms his theory has provoked. In the first chapter, I will focus on elaborating and clarifying various important aspects of Pogge’s framework of institutional analysis: that an adequate institutional analysis must be comprehensive with regard to the objects being assessed, and it must be performed in a holistic manner. I will also critically examine and rebut the view that, in the absence of a world government, the project of global justice makes little, if any, sense.

In chapter two I will focus on three main criticisms that have been made against the moral substance of Pogge’s conception of global justice – his human-rights-based principle of global justice and his institutional construal of negative duty. The first criticism argues that Pogge’s notion of negative duty is unduly inflated and blurs the distinction between institutional harm-doing and –allowing. The second argues that Pogge’s theory is incomplete in relation to the goal of poverty eradication and should be supplemented with the notion of positive duty. The third argues that Pogge’s principle is over-demanding with regard to the affluent. I will contend that each of these three criticisms is flawed: the first criticism is flawed for it fails to properly interpret Pogge’s principle in light of the ecumenical argumentative strategy adopted by Pogge; the second is problematic for it tends to rely upon an underestimation of the extent to which the existing global order has unjustly contributed to world poverty; and the third criticism can be defused by our adopting a temporally extended construal of Pogge’s notion of a “pattern-preference”.