World Poverty as a Problem of Justice? A Critical Comparison of Three Approaches

Abstract

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.In this paper, I want to critically examine the idea that some forms of world poverty can be understood as outcomes of structural injustice that violates subsistence rights that should be guaranteed by institutions. In the first part of my paper I will present the crucial points of this discussion by introducing two alternative approaches: (a) classical liberalism with the idea of corrective justice, and (b) utilitarianism with the idea of individual positive duties. In the second part, I will introduce Thomas Pogge's recent attempt to show that positive obligations arise for the affluent inhabitants of industrialized countries to compensate for the violation of a negative duty not to harm the poor by imposing an unjust global economic order on them. But as a detailed debate has shown, Pogge's claim that our duties with regard to the poverty problem are primarily negative is not convincing. I want to defend the idea that positive duties of protection and assistance are important duties Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2008) 11:15-36

Confining Pogge’s Analysis of Global Poverty to Genuinely Negative Duties

“…My argument is not meant to deny that whenever an institutional structure foreseeably results in a situation in which some are in severe poverty there is a duty, sometimes negative, sometimes positive, not to participate in that structure, provided there is a reasonable alternative that would foreseeably avoid or lessen the poverty. 45 As discussed in Section 2, this sort of perspective is endorsed by Cohen (2010), Satz (2005), Mieth (2008) and Lichtenberg (2010).…”

“…6 of justice will include at least this much. 5 I believe Patten (2005) was the first to raise an objection of this sort against Pogge's analysis, and it has since been echoed by Gilabert (2004) (who acknowledges being influenced by Patten's prepublication presentation of his paper), Mieth (2008), Tan (2010), and Barry and Øverland (forthcoming). Barry and Øverland's discussion of the issue has the most in common with mine, in which I will attempt to identify precisely where and how Pogge makes the shift from negative to positive duties, with the aim of showing how his analysis can be revised to avoid this shift and thereby yield substantial conclusions about genuinely negative duties to the poor.…”

“…Scheffler raises some concerns about the appropriateness of this tendency, but also argues that it has such powerful phenomenological roots that we are unlikely to be able to overcome it. Later in this section I will consider concerns raised by Mieth (2008) and Lichtenberg (2010) about whether the negative institutional duties that are the focal point of Pogge's analysis are as motivationally efficacious as traditional negative duties. 8 Notice that even those who are committed to denying a fundamental distinction between acts and omissions typically either "argue back" to a derived distinction (as Schefller (2001: 35) puts it) or see themselves as owing an explanation for why so many find the distinction intuitively plausible.…”

“…It is possible that the shift from direct obligations to institutional obligations degrades stringency to such an extent that even if (1) is more stringent than (2), and (3) derives its stringency from (1), (3) may be no more stringent than (2). This possibility is related to objections against Pogge's focus on negative institutional duties that are raised by Mieth (2008), Lichtenberg (2010), Schaber (2011) and Barry and Øverland (forthcoming). I will address their objections later in this section.…”

“…Corinna Mieth (2008) presses this objection against Pogge, arguing that traditional negative duties enjoy greater stringency largely in virtue of the fact that, in contrast to traditional positive duties, they require only that one avoid certain well-defined actions, and are therefore less restrictive of individual liberty. 13 But, Mieth contends, Pogge's negative institutional duties do not fit this description.…”