Cosmopolitanism & Global Economic Inequality

5.2: Cosmopolitanism & Global Economic Inequality

Relevant Readings

  • Tan, What is this thing called Global Justice, chapters 2 & 3.
  • Armstrong, Global Distributive Justice.
  • Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, chapter 4.
  • Brock & Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism.
  • Brock (ed.), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism Again.
  • Focus on arguments by Thomas Pogge:
    • World Poverty & Human Rights (full theory, not online).
    • ‘Severe poverty as a Human Rights Violation’ (chapter 1 of Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right - https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000151826?posInSet=1&queryId=e5775d67-706c-4a94-8c57-4190b6c0c1ed)
    • ‘Assisting the Global Poor’ (PDF on Learning Central under Learning Materials / additional readings).

UDHR: Key Articles for Cosmopolitans

  • Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind.
  • Article 25: Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health care 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.
  • Pogge draws attention to Articles 25 & 28, arguing they make severe poverty a human rights violation, not just a deprivation.

Pogge’s Claim

  • We are familiar with the idea that we can save lives by giving to charity, or let people die by doing nothing.
  • However, Pogge makes a stronger assertion: most of us do not merely let people starve but also participate in starving them.
  • This is often met with indignation and denial.

Rights and Duties

  • Direct (positive) duties of global justice:
    • Based on the nature of human rights and respecting them.
    • Duties to promote, institutionalize, and preserve human rights.
  • Indirect (negative) duties of global justice:
    • Based on the need to avoid causing HARM by violating rights.
    • Key issue: whether we have a role in the violation of human rights in articles 25 & 28.
    • Harm imposes obligations (duties) and introduces responsibility for harm caused.
  • Pogge stresses indirect duties because arguments for negative duties are more widely accepted than those for positive duties.
  • Articles 25 & 28 imply correlative (matching) duties.

Are We Bystanders to Global Poverty?

Claims that we are merely bystanders to global poverty may be based on:
*Claim that we do no harm (trying to distinguish between action / omission)
*Explanatory nationalism – the ‘purely domestic (causation of ) poverty thesis’
*Claim that justice depends on strong moral ties of political association – duties apply only between fellow citizens (Rawls, Miller, Nagel)
*Claim that the wealthy are helpers, not harmers

  • Cosmopolitanism rejects these claims; we are implicated in the cause of poverty.

Arguments About Injustice

  • The social starting positions of the worse-off and the better-off have emerged from a single historical process that was pervaded by massive, grievous wrongs.
    • The effects of a common and violent history.
  • The better-off enjoy significant advantages in the use of a single natural resource base from whose benefits the worse-off are largely, and without compensation, excluded.
    • Uncompensated exclusion from the use of natural resources.
  • The effects of shared social institutions.
  • These points aim to show that we are all implicated in harming those in severe poverty.

Human Rights, Negative Duties, and Institutional Orders

  • A person’s human rights impose a negative duty on all other human agents not to participate in imposing an institutional order under which, foreseeably and avoidably, she lacks secure access to the objects of her human rights.
  • Those who participate in imposing an institutional order fulfill this negative duty only if they ensure that the rules they help impose afford those on whom they are imposed secure access to the objects of their human right.
  • Pogge's hypothesis: Any institutional order that foreseeably produces a reasonably avoidable excess of severe poverty and of mortality from poverty-related causes manifests a human rights violation on the part of those imposing this order.
  • He concludes that many of the 18 million poverty related deaths per year could be avoided by feasible alternatives designs for the global institutional order and so the continued imposition of the current order constitutes a massive violation of human rights.

Harm & the Global Economic Order (GEO)

  • We are harming the global poor by imposing on them an unjust global order under which the incidence of severe poverty, malnutrition, and premature death is foreseeably much higher than it would be under some feasible alternatives.
  • GEO - shaped and maintained by our representatives for our benefit.
  • If our government, acting in our name, are involved in shaping and upholding a GEO that causes the harms of severe poverty then:
    • We have positive duties of assistance (even if we were just bystanders).
    • We have negative duties of justice not to harm.
    • We have indirect duties to deal with the consequences of that harm (we are harmers, not just bystanders).
    • Reduce any future harm and compensate for harm already caused.
    • Do not take advantage of injustice at the expense of its victims.
    • Reform the GEO to avoid causing such harms in the future.

UN 'Human Development Report 1998'

  • Justice is affordable for all.
  • The additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly 40billionayear40 billion a year.
  • This is less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.

Addressing Injustice Through Institutional Change

  • Global Resource Dividend (GRD) vs Libertarian Property Rights
    • States who use or sell natural resources in their territory should share a small part of their value to be used toward ensuring all humanity can meet basic needs with dignity.
    • Based on an idea that the global poor own an inalienable stake in all limited natural resources, the GRD is a ‘dividend’ that recognizes their entitlement to share in the economic value of those resources.
  • Reforming the International Intellectual Property Regime (TRIPS)
    • Existing IP regime is morally problematic – pits the vital needs of poor patients against the need of pharma companies to recoup R&D by extending global patents and restricting the production of generic medicines.
    • Limits access of the poor and encourages focus on ‘diseases of the rich’.
    • Instead adopt a ‘public good strategy’:
      • Open access to new medicines as a public good.
      • Alternative incentives from public funds to reward development of essential medicines.
      • Prices become lower.
  • Obligations of justice to avoid inflicting unnecessary harm (thereby violating rights) by reforming institutions.

Cosmopolitanism Summary & Conclusions

Cosmopolitanism

  • Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are owed equal concern and respect and that there are principles of justice that apply equally to them all, as persons.

Rounding Up Some of the Arguments…

  • Arguments out of criticism of LOP
    • Liberal cosmopolitan global justice should be global liberal egalitarianism.
    • GJ should therefore focus on all persons as individuals, not as members of societies.
    • So, we shouldn’t accept without question the state (and border) system as is currently – all institutions are only instrumentally important.
  • Aspects focused on:
    • Equal moral concern for all persons is usually expressed through human rights guaranteeing basic human interests.
    • Concern for all persons will require economic redistribution between states.
    • It may also push towards the promotion of democratic governments as a way of institutionalizing limits on state power that human rights require.
    • So, all political institutions are of only instrumental (rather than intrinsic) importance.
    • Human rights express the idea of conditional (rather than absolute) sovereignty

Summary of Cosmopolitanism

  • Questions of ‘How should we act?’ are not just questions about our ‘interests’ but also about the right thing to do.
  • What should guide our decision-making (and that of our foreign policy makers) when asking ‘what should we do next in face of this international concern, and how can we justify our decision?’
  • We should be:
    • Individualist about the unit of moral concern.
    • Universalist about scope.
    • Generalist about obligations.
  • So that:
    • Freedom matters no matter who is deprived of it.
    • Suffering matters no matter where it happens.
    • Poverty matters whoever experiences it.
    • Dignity is something that everyone can reasonably expect.
  • These values, and the theory of Global Justice that follows, should guide our international politics.

Next Week

  • LIBERAL CRITICS OF COSMOPOLITAN GLOBAL JUSTICE