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. This problem is solvable, despite its magnitude.

This article approaches world poverty from the perspective of rectificatory justice and investigates whether the global rich can be said to have special obligations toward the global poor on the grounds that they have been harming them. The focus rests on the present situation, and more specifically on Thomas Pogge's thesis of a causal link between world poverty and the conduct of present citizens (and governments) in wealthy countries. I argue that, if Pogge does not want (...) his position to boil down to an institutional version of the ‘negative causation'-thesis – according to which one can cause harm simply by failing to alleviate it – and if he wants it to be accepted by those he seeks to convince – namely right-libertarians – he must specify that it is enough for institutions to be just that they do not actively deprive their members of the means of subsistence, even if many of them still do not have the capacity to enjoy the means of subsistence. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (3) 2007: pp. 252-270. (shrink)

With regard to the problem of world poverty, libertarian theories of corrective justice emphasize negative duties and the idea of responsibility whereas utilitarian theories of help concentrate on positive duties based on the capacity of the helper. Thomas Pogge has developed a revised model of compensation that entails positive obligations that are generated by negative duties. He intends to show that the affluent are violating their negative duties to ensure that their conduct will not harm others: They are (...) contributing to and profiting from an unjust global order. But the claim that negative duty generated positive obligations are more acceptable than positive duties is contestable. I examine whether Henry Shue’s model that is integrating negative duties and positive duties is more convincing concerning the foundation of positive duties to protect others. I defend the idea that there are positive duties of justice. This approach can integrate an allocation of positive duties via responsibility and maintain the advantage of an independent foundation of positive duties. (shrink)

Most cosmopolitans who are concerned about world poverty assume that for citizens of affluent societies, justice beyond national borders is a matter of their positive duty to provide aid to distant people suffering from severe poverty. This assumption is challenged by some authors, notably Tomas Pogge, who maintains that these citizens are actively involved in the incidence of poverty abroad and therefore neglect their negative duty of refraining from harming others. This paper examines the extent to (...) which it is pertinent to contend that citizens in economically advanced countries are morally liable for the impoverishment of a sizable population of the developing world. The contention in question can be interpreted in two nonexclusive ways. First, it might imply that historical injustices, including colonialism and slavery, contributed to both contemporary affluence in some parts of the world and poverty in others. Second, it could imply that the present global economic system, instituted and implemented by the governments of rich and powerful countries acting in the name of their citizens, is benefiting the citizens while harming the world’s disadvantaged. The author argues that the idea of reparation for historical injustices suffers from serious philosophical difficulties, including the non-identity problem presented by Derek Parfit, and thus fails to provide a satisfactory approach to the existing problem of poverty. This paper then examines the alleged liability of citizens in affluent countries, with a special reference to empirical observations on the policy process. The paper concludes by suggesting a twofold theory of global justice, which combines material, managerial, and moral assistances for a society lacking a competent government and proposes institutional reforms in the global order in order to achieve poverty reduction. (shrink)

What are the principles and practices that academic management programs need to educate Millennials on social responsibility and sustainability? What can universities do to instruct managers to solve complex ethical problems such as world poverty? The article suggests theoretical and practical insights for higher education management programs based on the principles and practices of developing socially responsible leaders. Through a review of The Principles of Responsible Management Education, the research invites academics and institutions to commit toward business ethics (...) and poverty alleviation. The author suggests how the process of adopting the principles and developing appropriate educational opportunities in line with these principles provides a space for ethical education for current generations. Participating academic institutions enter into a network of scholars and programs acting as positive agents for world benefit. The current world challenges of poverty, ethics and sustainability require committed academic institutions and rooted in the principles and practices of social and global responsibility for the 21st century. (shrink)

Nicole Hassoun has recently defended the view that the relatively affluent members of the world’s population are, prima facie, obligated to ensure that the global institutional system enables all people to meet their basic needs. This paper is a critical discussion of Hassoun’s argument in favor of this view. Hassoun’s argument is first presented. In sections three and four, I try to bring out a number of formal and informal problems with the argument. Section five discusses a number of (...) possible replies to the worries raised in section four. The conclusion of the paper is that Hassoun’s argument should be rejected. There are two independent and individually sufficient reasons for this conclusion: the argument is invalid and contains at least one false premise. (shrink)

Acting Now to End World Poverty Peter Singer. were our own, and we cannot deny that the suffering and death are bad. The second premise is also very difficult to reject, because it leaves us some wiggle room when it comes to situations in.

Book Information World Poverty and Human Rights. World Poverty and Human Rights Thomas Pogge Cambridge Polity Press 2002 vii + 284 Paperback US$28, £18 By Thomas Pogge. Polity Press. Cambridge. Pp. vii + 284. Paperback:US$28, £18.

In this paper we make an argument for limiting veterinary expenditure on companion animals. The argument combines two principles: the obligation to give and the self-consciousness requirement. In line with the former, we ought to give money to organisations helping to alleviate preventable suffering and death in developing countries; the latter states that it is only intrinsically wrong to painlessly kill an individual that is self-conscious. Combined, the two principles inform an argument along the following lines: rather than spending inordinate (...) amounts of money on veterinary care when a companion animal is sick or injured, it is better to give the money to an aid organisation and painlessly kill the animal. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is recognized as one of the first philosophers who wrote systematically about global justice and world peace. In the current debate on global justice he is mostly appealed to by critics of extensive duties of global justice. However, I show in this paper that an analysis of Kant’s late work on rights and justice provides ample resources for disagreeing with those who take Kant to call for only modest changes in global politics. Kant’s comments in the Doctrine (...) of Right clarify that he thinks we need a coercively enforced global civil condition. But his work also contains ideas that imply that within such a global legal order there must be no extreme forms of poverty and inequality, and that the current holdings of states are by no means conclusive possessions without confirmation by the global legal order we have a duty to establish. Thus, this paper challenges the prevailing interpretation of Kant as a conservative thinker about global justice that is held, for instance, by the leading contemporary liberal thinkers such as John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and Ronald Dworkin. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge’s "World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan responsibilities and Reforms" is a seminal contribution to the debate on global justice. In this review paper, I undertake a kind of stock-taking exercise in which the main components of Pogge’s position on global justuce and world poverty are outlined. I then critically discuss some important criticisms of Pogge's position.

While global poverty is the key moral problem of our times, social scientists are far from reaching a consensus on the causes of this disaster and philosophers disagree on the related responsibilities. One important contribution toward an enlarged understanding is offered by Thomas Pogge in World Poverty and Human Rights. The present paper discusses critically Pogge's contribution and attempts to distinguish the valuable intuitions from the unwarranted conclusions that could be derived from them and that Pogge himself (...) suggests at times. Foremost among these is the thesis that minor changes of the present global order would suffice to remove most world poverty. While it is sceptical about this strong conclusion, the paper confirms, unlike preceding discussions of World Poverty and Human Rights, the book's basic philosophical conclusion, namely, that affluent individuals and governments hold negative obligations toward the global poor. (shrink)

This article discusses the question of poverty and wealth in light of several theses put forward by Larry Temkin. The claim that there is a sort of cosmic injustice involved when great disparities of ability or of wealth are found. He is concerned especially about disparities that are undeserved. It is agreed that this is unfortunate, but not agreed that they are unjust in a sense that supports the imposition of rectification on anyone else. Nor is poverty typically (...) "undeserved" in the only really relevant sense: the poor simply do not produce enough to earn them high incomes, and probably correct incomes they derive are indeed what such efforts are worth in the circumstances. That persons with very low incomes may merit our sympathy is accepted, but sympathy leads to charity, rather than to the involuntary exploitation of the better off. The essay concludes with further observations about the relevance of free markets, and points to the iniquities of the restrictions on commerce that are the most potent source of perpetuated poverty today. (shrink)

Since his Realizing Rawls a decade and a half ago, Thomas Pogge has established himself as one of the most important and influential writers on the subject of global justice in contemporary philosophy. World Poverty and Human Rights is a valuable collection of some of his essays written during 1990–2001. These essays cover various central topics of global justice—from fundamental philosophical ones, such as the concept of justice and human rights and the universalistic nature of moral reasoning, to (...) the more concrete questions of global institutional reforms. The specific topics addressed include human rights, nationalism, state sovereignty and cosmopolitanism, global democratic deficit, and Pogge’s original proposal for a global resource dividend that will provide a global development fund through taxing natural resource extraction. An unfortunate omission here is the absence of Pogge’s essay-length commentary on John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples. Although there are extensive discussions of Rawls in the book, including this essay would have helped the reader better situate Pogge’s account of global justice against Rawls’s well-known theory. (shrink)

One objection that has been consistently raised for theorists who are committed to the idea that we have a positive duty to aid the global poor is the overdemandingness objection. This article is a critical discussion of this objection. First, the objection is laid out in some detail. A number of influential attempts to meet the overdemandingness objection are then discussed, and it is argued that they all fail in their intended purpose. The conclusion of the article is not that (...) the overdemandingness objection cannot be met. Rather, the conclusion is that the overdemandingness objection constitutes a serious challenge to anyone who accepts the objection and goes beyond the standard libertarian doctrine and commits herself to the existence of positive duties to aid the global poor. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 38-44, January 2022.

In the Brazilian film "Central Station," Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles (...) down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old to be adopted —he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora resolves to take the boy back. (shrink)

Challenges to the exercise of the basic socio-economic rights of half the global population give rise to some of the most pressing issues today. This timely book focuses on world poverty, providing a systematic exposition of the evolving legal responsibility of the international community of states to cooperate in addressing the structural obstacles that contribute to this injustice. This book analyzes the approach, contribution, and current limitations of the international law of human rights to the manifestations of (...) class='Hi'>world poverty, inviting the reader to rethink human rights, and, in particular, the framing of responsibilities that are essential to their contemporary protection. (shrink)

This paper begins with Peter Singer’s argument from utilitarianism that we should sacrifice anything we don’t need to relatively cheaply save lives in the Third World. It responds by arguing that utilitarianism is an incomplete moral system, for it requires us to view the world impartially and see each being as equally important, when we are necessarily partial to certain others (family, for example) because, among other things, we learn how to care for a starving boy thousands of (...) miles away by first learning what caring means from those closer to us. It then concludes that a more complete way to describe our morality is to see it as a balance between our separate senses of partiality and impartiality, with Aristotle’s concept of moral judgment governing between the two. (shrink)

In the Brazilian film "Central Station," Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles (...) down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old to be adopted —he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora resolves to take the boy back. (shrink)

Challenges to the exercise of the basic socio-economic rights of half the global population give rise to some of the most pressing issues today. This timely book focuses on world poverty, providing a systematic exposition of the evolving legal responsibility of the international community of states to cooperate in addressing the structural obstacles that contribute to this injustice. This book analyzes the approach, contribution, and current limitations of the international law of human rights to the manifestations of (...) class='Hi'>world poverty, inviting the reader to rethink human rights, and, in particular, the framing of responsibilities that are essential to their contemporary protection. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory discussion of questions about three moral duties in the context of global poverty: the duty to aid; the duty not to harm; and the duty to promote just global institutions.

In a pessimistic view, the world is a series of struggles and sufferings. The tribulations are inevitable to man’s life for he is in the world. Pandemic, poverty and corruption are the most prominent and prevailing faces of struggles in the world. It affects the individual’s lives deeply for it undercuts the experience of being alive and free. It weakens man’s appreciation of moments due to misery. The conflicts in the world holds man to appreciate (...) moments for they are occupied on their functionality. The world simply becomes a mechanical for the people lives like a machine where working is much important than reflecting. These problematic figures were paralleled to Gabriel Marcel’s concept of broken world. The paper tends to justify that the world is broken for the reason that first, its problems that could be seen in the contemporary world as pandemic, poverty and corruption. Second, man becomes alienated from himself for he ceases on living due to this problematic world. This paper also ventured to Gabriel Marcel’s concept of broken world which eventually paralleled to the mainstream problems in contemporary world. The author intended to present a pessimistic view about the world which he claimed to be mad and broken. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain some of the ramifications of globalization processes for the pressing problem of increasing global poverty. It distinguishes two competing approaches to explaining the causes of poverty-related injustice and justifying conceptions of obligations towards the poor. A first approach, the assistance approach, is mainly directed at identifying inappropriate worldwide income and asset distribution; the other, the causal approach focuses on the effects international regulations have on people’s lives. This article explains that both approaches depend (...) on the interpretation of the current state of economic and political interdependence. It is argued that both conceptions have their pitfalls, but that from a theoretical as well as pragmatic point of view, it makes sense to defend an ‘integrated’ perspective that also takes into account the responsibility of non-state actors. (shrink)

World Crisis and Underdevelopment examines the impact of poverty and other global crises in generating forms of structural coercion that cause agential and societal underdevelopment. It draws from discourse ethics and recognition theory in criticizing injustices and pathologies associated with underdevelopment. Its scope is comprehensive, encompassing discussions about development science, philosophical anthropology, global migration, global capitalism and economic markets, human rights, international legal institutions, democratic politics and legitimation, world religions and secularization, and moral philosophy in its many (...) varieties. (shrink)

The modern literature on responding to global poverty is over fifty years old and has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent analytical political theorists of the age, including Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. Yet in spite of this extraordinary concentration of brainpower, the problem of global poverty has quite clearly not been solved or, indeed, adequately defined. We are therefore entitled to ask two questions of any new (...) contribution to this literature: first, what does it have to offer that past work does not; and second, what reason is there to think that, this time, it will truly make a difference. These questions will be posed below, but before undertaking this task it may be useful to offer an overview of the field, with particular attention to why the problem of global poverty seems so intractable. (shrink)

In this book, the author presents two worldviews. The first is the theocentric view of divine providence: God governs and is involved in the development of the world, including that of the animal kingdom. The second worldview is atheistic-materialistic and secular. It regards the abundance of different life forms, human society, economics, beliefs, and emotions as the products of one factor: matter and its movement. Through an analysis of the foundations and assumptions of the secular worldview, the author demonstrates (...) its weakness and lack of rational basis. (shrink)

The large number of hungry people in a global economy based on industrialization, privatization, and free trade raises the question of the ethical dimensions of the worsening food crisis in the world in general and in developing countries in particular. Who bears the moral responsibility for the tragic situation in Africa and Asia where people are starving due to poverty? Who is morally responsible for their poverty - the hungry people themselves? the international community? any particular agency (...) or institution? In the context of Article 3 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security" (UNDHR, 1948), the ethical question of poverty and hunger becomes a major human concern that should be discussed publicly and resolved by whatever means available. But how can the poor and hungry realize their right to life and security if their very survival is at stake? This paper maintains that responsibility for global poverty at present lies in recent neo-liberal trends in the global economy and with those individuals and organizations who, though small in number, have acquired a disproportionate share of the world's assets and financial resources. That being the case, it is suggested that our monetary and financial policies are in need of drastic changes with regard to global responsibility towards the hungry and impoverished. (shrink)

This article argues that there is no sound basis for thinking that we have a general and strong duty to rectify disparities of wealth around the world, apart from the special case where some become wealthy by theft or fraud. The nearest thing we have to a rational morality for all has to be built on the interests of all, and they include substantial freedoms, but not substantial entitlements to others' assistance. It is also pointed out that the situation (...) of the world's poor is not that of victims of disasters, but simply of less-developed technology, which can be repaired by full and free trade relations with others. The true savior of the world's poor is the businessman, not the missionary. What we do need to do is strike down barriers to commerce, rather than requisition "aid.". (shrink)