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‘To count people as moral equals is to treat nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender and ‘morally irrelevant’---as irrelevant to that equal standing.
Old Question (Bad)
Is nationality a ‘morally irrelevant characteristic’?
New Question (Better)
Is nationality morally irrelevant to how people of different nationalities should be treated or valued?
How is this relevant to Pogge on responsibility for poverty-caused harms?
Pogge’s Aim: Recap
Two perspectives on poverty-caused deaths.
needs-based
We citizens of affluent countries
have a positive duty to meet needs.
harm-based
We have a negative duty not to harm.
?
Reducing severe poverty abroad
at the expense of our own affluence
would not be generous on our part,
but is something we owe,
and our failure to do this
does make us morally responsible
for the continued deprivation of the poor.
cf Pogge, 2005
Pogge’s big idea
From weak assumptions about duties not to harm
it is possible to derive
a radical conclusion about redistribution.
Aside
Libertarians
‘Libertarianism is a family of views in political philosophy.
Libertarians strongly value individual freedom and see this as justifying strong protections for individual freedom.
[...] Libertarians usually see the kind of large-scale, coercive wealth redistribution in which contemporary welfare states engage as involving unjustified coercion.’
van der Vossen, 2019
Two perspectives on poverty-caused deaths.
needs-based
We citizens of affluent countries
have a positive duty to meet needs.
harm-based
We have a negative duty not to harm.
Pogge’s ‘central conclusion’
‘we, the citizens and governments of the affluent countries, in collusion with the ruling elites of many poor countries, are harming the global poor by imposing an unjust institutional order upon them‘
Pogge, 2005 p. 59
How is Nussbaums’s claim
about the moral relevance of nationality
relevant to Pogge
on responsibility for poverty-caused harms?
An Objection to Pogge
‘one can justify an economic order and the distribution it produces [...] by comparing them to feasible alternative institutional schemes and the distributional profiles they would produce.’
‘an economic order is unjust when it [...] foreseeably and avoidably gives rise to massive and severe human rights deficits’
‘There is a shared institutional order that is shaped by the better-off and imposed on the worse-off [...] This institutional order is implicated in the reproduction of radical inequality in that there is a feasible institutional alternative under which such severe and extensive poverty would not persist’
Pogge 2005, p. 4
I’ll explain, then ask you to explain.
Compare:
Distributive outcomes under the actual international order.
vs
Distributive outcomes likely under a fair international order.
The gap between the two sets of outcomes tells us the degree of responsibility of the actual order for the outcomes it is associated with
Patten, 2005 p. 23
example : asymmetric restrictions on trade
Patten’s objection
‘even in a fair international environment there is no guarantee that the policies needed to fight poverty will be introduced domestically ...
‘even fairly democratic countries, operating under an international set of rules that have been shaped for their own advantage, can routinely fail to enact policies designed to help their poorest and most marginalized citizens.’
Patten, pp. 23--4
under an ideally fair set of international rules, [...] there would still be significant numbers of desperately poor people in the world.
If we think only in terms of harm through unfair international agreements, ‘these victims of poverty do not count as “harmed” by the affluent countries.’
After reforming the international system, would the affluent have absolved themselves of complicity in the fate of the poor?
‘they would not have eradicated the most morally salient fact from a needs-based perspective---the fact of poverty.’
Patten’s dilemma for Pogge:
deny that there is an additional duty of assistance
Objection: ‘property and other rights of the privileged should not be regarded as so absolute as to override a duty to perform easy rescues’
allow that there is an additional duty of assistance
Pogge’s view then just amounts to saying that citizens of affluent countries should not only stop harming but should also help.
It is a partly needs-based, not an exclusively harm-based, argument.
Pogge’s reply
1. I do not accept a merely formal standard of justice
2. ‘the standard of social justice I invoke is a human rights standard’: a just institional order cannot ‘foreseeably reproduce avoidable human rights deficits on a massive scale’
3. This is ‘a negative constraint on which institutional schemes it is permissible to impose’, not an argument that there is a duty to help.
It’s not about you.
conclusion
Are ‘we, the citizens and governments of the affluent countries, in collusion with the ruling elites of many poor countries, [...] harming the global poor by imposing an unjust institutional order upon them‘ (Pogge, 2005 p. 59)?
Dilemma: After reforming the international system so that it is just, would the affluent have absolved themselves of complicity in the fate of the poor (Patten, 2005)?