Thomas Pogge

Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty

The human future suddenly seems open. This is an inspiration; we can step back and think more freely. Instead of containment or detente, political scientists are discussing grand pictures: the end of history, or the inevitable proliferation and mutual pacifism of capitalist democracies. And politicians are speaking of a new world order. My inspiration is a little more concrete. After developing a rough, cosmopolitan specification of our task to promote moral progress, I offer an idea for gradual global institutional reform. Dispersing political authority over nested territorial units would decrease the intensity of the struggle for power and wealth within and among states, thereby reducing the incidence of war, poverty, and oppression. In such a multilayered scheme, borders could be redrawn more easily to accord with the aspirations of peoples and communities.

Priorities of Global Justice

One-third of all human deaths are due to poverty-related causes, to malnutrition and to diseases that can be prevented or cured cheaply. Yet our politicians, academics, and mass media show little concern for how such poverty might be reduced. They are more interested in possible military interventions to stop human rights violations in developing countries, even though such interventions – at best – produce smaller benefits at greater cost. This Western priority may be rooted in self-interest. But it engenders, and is sustained by, a deeply flawed moral presentation of global economic cooperation. The new global economic order we impose aggravates global inequality and reproduces severe poverty on a massive scale. On any plausible understanding of our moral values, the prevention of such poverty is our foremost responsibility.

Real World Justice

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. We citizens of the rich countries are conditioned to think of this problem as an occasion for assistance. Thanks in part to the rationalizations dispensed by our economists, most of us do not realize how deeply we are implicated, through the new global economic order our states have imposed, in this ongoing catastrophe. My sketch of how we are so implicated follows the argument of my book, World Poverty and Human Rights, but takes the form of a response to the book’s critics.

Assisting the Global Poor

In his book The Law of Peoples, John Rawls adds an eighth law to his previous account: “Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.” The addition is meant to show that Rawls’s proposal can give a plausible account of global economic justice, albeit a less egalitarian one than his cosmopolitan critics have been urging upon him. This newly added duty is, however, more than Rawls’s account can justify and less than what is needed to do justice to the problem of world poverty.

Unknown: The Extent, Distribution and Trend of Global Income Poverty

The estimates of the extent, distribution and trend of global income poverty provided in the World Banks World Development Reports for 1990 and 2000/01 are neither meaningful nor reliable. The Bank uses an arbitrary international poverty line unrelated to any clear conception of what poverty is. It employs a misleading and inaccurate measure of purchasing power equivalence that vitiates international and inter-temporal comparisons of income poverty. It extrapolates incorrectly from limited data and thereby creates an appearance of precision that masks the high probable error of its estimates. The systematic distortion introduced by these three flaws likely leads to a large understatement of the extent of global income poverty and to an incorrect inference that it has declined. A new methodology of global poverty assessment is feasible and necessary.

Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor

Various human rights are widely recognized in codified and customary international law. These human rights promise all human beings protection against specific severe harms that might be inflicted on them domestically or by foreigners. Yet international law also establishes and maintains institutional structures that greatly contribute to violations of these human rights: fundamental components of international law systematically obstruct the aspirations of poor populations for democratic self-government, civil rights, and minimal economic sufficiency. And central international organizations, such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank, are designed so that they systematically contribute to the persistence of severe poverty.

The Health Impact Fund: incentives for improving access to medicines

and development. However, present market forces and intellectual property rights provide little incentive for innovation in the diseases of low-income countries, such as diarrhoeal disease, lower respiratory tract infections, perinatal infections, Burkitt’s lymphoma, and other cancers prevalent in poor countries. Sir Andrew Witty, the global chief executive offi cer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), pledged 5 in February, 2009, to reduce prices of GSK’s patented drugs in developing countries, invest in local healthcare infrastructure, and form a patent pool to allow sharing of GSK-owned intellectual property. Critics have questioned whether such philanthropic measures are sustainable at a time when new drug development is slowing, 6 especially in the global economic downturn. 7 We propose the creation of the Health Impact Fund (HIF) as an enduring reform that would give pharmaceutical innovators stable fi nancial incentives to develop new medicines that have large eff ects on global health, and to sell them worldwide at no more than the lowest feasible cost of production and distribution. Spending on pharmaceuticals represents 66% of health expenditure in developing countries—often leading to household impoverishment during serious illness. 8,9

The international significance of human rights

A comparative examination of four alternative ways of understandingwhat human rights are supports an institutional understanding assuggested by Article 28 of the Universal Declaration: Human rightsare weighty moral claims on any coercively imposed institutionalorder, national or international (as Article 28 confirms). Any suchorder must afford the persons on whom it is imposed secure accessto the objects of their human rights. This understanding of humanrights is broadly sharable across cultures and narrows the philosophical and practical differences between the friends ofcivil and political and the champions of social, economic, andcultural human rights. When applied to the global institutionalorder, it provides a new argument for conceiving human rights asuniversal – and a new basis for criticizing this order as tooencouraging of oppression, corruption, and poverty in the developing countries: We have a negative duty not to cooperatein the imposition of this global order if feasible reforms ofit would significantly improve the realization of human rights.

Moral Universalism and Global Economic Justice

Moral universalism centrally involves the idea that the moral assessment of persons and their conduct, of social rules and states of affairs, must be based on fundamental principles that do not, explicitly or covertly, discriminate arbitrarily against particular persons or groups. This general idea is explicated in terms of three conditions. It is then applied to the discrepancy between our criteria of national and global economic justice. Most citizens of developed countries are unwilling to require of the global economic order what they assuredly require of any national economic order, for example, that its rules be under democratic control, that it preclude life-threatening poverty as far as is reasonably possible. Without a plausible justification, such a double standard constitutes covert arbitrary discrimination against the global poor.

Eradicating Systemic Poverty: Brief for a global resources dividend

Article 25: 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. Article 28: Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) In two earlier essays (Pogge, 1994, 1998a), I have sketched and defended the proposal of a global resources dividend. This proposal was meant to show that there are feasible alternative ways of organizing our global economic order, that the choice among these alternatives makes a substantial difference to how much severe poverty there is worldwide, and that there are weighty moral reasons to make this choice so as to minimize such poverty. My proposal has evoked some critical responses (Kesselring, 1997; Reichel, 1997; Crisp and Jamieson, 2000) and spirited defenses (Kreide, 1998; Mandle, 2000) in the academy. But if it is to help reduce severe poverty, the proposal must be convincing not only to academics, but also to the people in governments and international organizations who are practically involved in poverty eradication efforts. I am most grateful therefore for the opportunity to present a concise and improved version of the argument in this journal.