Proefschrift--Letteren--Leiden, 1978. / Résumé en néerlandais. Bibliogr. p. XI-XII. Index.

Thomas Pogge has famously argued that the present arrangement of international institutions that allows for human rights violations to occur on an ongoing basis is unjust, and further, that powerful states that create and maintain these institutions are responsible for the resulting human rights violations. By setting the rules of economic and political interaction in the global forum, the world’s rich and powerful stack the deck against the global poor, making sustainable development difficult and making extreme poverty, malnutrition, and premature death common outcomes. Pogge concludes that this implication of responsibility creates a moral requirement for powerful nations to take immediate steps to reform the global institutional order in such a way as to minimize the number of foreseeable human rights violations that occur within it. I believe that Pogge is only partly correct in his analysis. In this paper, I argue that the global institutional order, which is comprised of a complex web of global and regional organizations with both political and economic aims, is not unjust as Pogge suggests. However, even if the maintenance of these institutions does not constitute an injustice, I believe that there remains an important sense in which powerful states that support the present arrangement of international institutions are responsible for ongoing subsistence rights violations. Establishing this responsibility means that states that continue to support present institutions are then also morally responsible for ensuring these human rights violations are remedied as a matter of justice. In his 2007 book National Responsibility and Global Justice, David Miller provides the sort of account of responsibility that I believe is lacking in Pogge’s work. Differentiating between moral responsibility, outcome responsibility, and causal responsibility, Miller shows that what we mean when we determine a party is “responsible” for a particular outcome can depend on several factors, viz., the foreseeability and the justification for harm. I argue that the sorts of remedies that are required in cases of moral responsibility, outcome responsibility, and causal responsibility turn out to be quite different from one another. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-24 23:40:45.915

Thomas Pogge proposes the Health Impact Fund (HIF) as a realistic, feasible reform to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would incentivize pharmaceutical research and reward innovation for medicines based on their impact on the global burden of disease. Pogge advances a human rights-based argument to show that the HIF is a morally required addition to the current pharmaceutical patent regime. One objection to his human rights argument comes from a libertarian appeal to property rights. Pogge’s response to the libertarian leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that libertarianism is incompatible with any system of intellectual property rights. This paper will show how Pogge fails to distinguish between what I call status quo and revisionist libertarian positions on intellectual property. Making this distinction, I maintain, would strengthen the human rights argument and allow Pogge to avoid the counterintuitive conclusion of his response to the libertarian.

If morally arbitrary features (that is, blind brute luck) should have no impact on the distribution of wealth, then the vast inequality and the disparity in life prospects between countries is a moral catastrophe; birthplace is completely based on luck, and yet has an enormous impact on life prospects. I contend that those in affluent countries, who have benefited from the luck of birthplace, ought to work towards a more egalitarian world, in which luck plays as little a role in life prospects as possible.

In this paper I compare and critically evaluate Sreenivasan’s and Pogge’s conceptions of global justice. While Sreenivasan holds that all the currently existing theories of global justice agree that wealthy countries should transfer at least a portion of their wealth to the poor, Pogge claims that all the currently existing theories of global justice agree that wealthy countries should stop harming poor ones in the first place. In this paper I shall try to show (i) that Sreenivasan’s proposal, as presented in his articles, is broad enough to be acceptable by some international distributive justice theories, but not all of them, (ii) that Pogge’s proposal is broader than Sreenivasan, in the sense that it aims to gain support from all the different conceptions of international distributive justice, but it depends on the claim that developed countries are currently harming the global poor—a claim that I will try to defend–, and (iii) that Pogge’s and Sreenivasan’s view are compatible. In fact, if Sreenivasan added Pogge’s central claim of his argument to his own proposal, the scope of theories that he could gain support from would be much broader. / En este artículo comparo y evalúo críticamente las concepciones sobre la justicia global de Sreenivasan y Pogge. Mientras Sreenivasan sostiene que todas las teorías sobre la justicia global actualmente existentes concuerdan en que los países ricos deberían transferir al menos una porción de sus riquezas a los pobres, Pogge reclama que todas las teorías sobre la justicia global concuerdan en que los países ricos deberían dejar de dañar a los pobres en primer lugar. En este artículo, trataré de mostrar (i) que la propuesta de Sreenivasan, como es presentada en sus artículos, es lo suficientemente amplia como para ser aceptable para algunas teorías de justicia internacional distributiva, pero no para todas ellas; (ii) que la propuesta de Pogge es más amplia que la de Sreenivasan, en el sentido de que aspira a obtener sustento en todas las diversas concepciones de justicia internacional distributiva,pero depende de la afirmación de que los países desarrollados dañan actualmentea la pobreza global –una afirmación que intentaré defender–; y (iii) que la visión de Pogge y Sreenivasan son compatibles. De hecho, si Sreenivasan asumiera la afirmación central del argumento de Pogge en su propia propuesta, el alcance delas teorías desde las que él podría ganar sustento sería mucho más amplio.

Global poverty is a pressing moral issue that necessitates serious moral reflection. It is inextricably connected with the issue of global justice. In today’s world where there are obvious extreme economic inequalities that impoverishes millions of people in many poor countries, the need for a sound principle of global justice is morally necessary. This thesis proposes Thomas Pogge’s idea of cosmopolitan justice as a feasible and relevant theory which can help and guide in alleviating severe worldwide poverty. Pogge emphasizes the stringent negative duty not to impose, sustain and profit from a global order that deprives the poor of their basic necessities necessary for them to lead a worthwhile human life. Many people are not aware that in participating in an unjust global order, they seriously harm the global poor more than their failure to provide assistance for the poor’s basic needs. So the greater responsibility of restructuring global order in order to meet the demands of global justice lies mainly in the hands of developed nations and their citizens who have profited from the present global arrangement and who have more than adequate means to help those who are deeply affected by extreme global economic inequalities. The stronger obligation not to harm the global poor must be performed by those who make decisions and policies at the global institutional level. They are the ones who decide the fate of the global poor and they are the ones who can easily change the rules underlying the present global order. The first step to poverty eradication and the overseeing that continuous efforts are exerted to realize this aim of helping the global poor are theirs to perform immediately. This task is not optional. It is urgent and a moral necessity.

In his landmark work World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge offers a novel approach to understanding the nature and extent of the obligations that citizens of wealthy states owe to their less fortunate counterparts in poor states. Pogge argues that the wealthy have weighty obligations to aid the global poor because the wealthy coercively impose institutions on the poor that leave their human rights, particularly their subsistence rights avoidably unfulfilled. Thus, Pogge claims that the wealthy states' obligations to the poor are ultimately generated by their negative duties, that is, their duties to refrain from harming. In this essay, I argue that Pogge cannot successfully appeal to negative duties in way that would appease his critics because his notion of a negative duty is seriously indeterminate, so much so as to compromise his ability to plausibly appeal to it.

<p>Global poverty is a pressing moral issue that necessitates serious moral reflection. It is inextricably connected with the issue of global justice. In today’s world where there are obvious extreme economic inequalities that impoverishes millions of people in many poor countries, the need for a sound principle of global justice is morally necessary. This thesis proposes Thomas Pogge’s idea of cosmopolitan justice as a feasible and relevant theory which can help and guide in alleviating severe worldwide poverty. Pogge emphasizes the stringent negative duty not to impose, sustain and profit from a global order that deprives the poor of their basic necessities necessary for them to lead a worthwhile human life. Many people are not aware that in participating in an unjust global order, they seriously harm the global poor more than their failure to provide assistance for the poor’s basic needs. So the greater responsibility of restructuring global order in order to meet the demands of global justice lies mainly in the hands of developed nations and their citizens who have profited from the present global arrangement and who have more than adequate means to help those who are deeply affected by extreme global economic inequalities. The stronger obligation not to harm the global poor must be performed by those who make decisions and policies at the global institutional level. They are the ones who decide the fate of the global poor and they are the ones who can easily change the rules underlying the present global order. The first step to poverty eradication and the overseeing that continuous efforts are exerted to realize this aim of helping the global poor are theirs to perform immediately. This task is not optional. It is urgent and a moral necessity.</p>

In an attempt to illustrate that the developed world has obligations to alleviate severe poverty, Thomas Pogge created a theory driven by human rights to focus on negative rights and duties of the avoidance of harm. His theory of global justice is developed on a minimalist account of what it means to harm. For him, the violation of the negative duty not to harm constitutes an injustice. This injustice is enacted against the citizens of developing nations by the global institutional order. Citizens of the developed world are perpetuating injustice by harming individuals through the imposition of a global order that avoidably causes human rights deficits without due compensation or reform to policies. Many critics take issue with his definition of harm as focused on negative rights, as well as find his theory of causation troublesome. His critics largely object to his assertion that the developed world causally contributes to severe poverty. Critiques of Pogge attempt to demonstrate that it is not the case that the developed world is causally responsible for severe poverty. In doing so, some make reference to domestic factors within developing nations, which they claim Pogge largely neglects. Others argue that the current global institutional order benefits developing nations. Furthermore, some of his critics engage with the normative demands that follow from his argument. They claim he has a minimal definition of harm and injustice that leads to unmanageable maximal obligations. Conversely, there are claims his argument leads to normative demands that are insufficient in redressing injustices. I argue that Pogge’s theory of global justice has developed the foundation necessary to motivate affluent nations to establish a minimally just global institutional order that avoids the perpetuation of avoidable human rights violations. This foundation elucidates and establishes, through the global institutional order, an overarching causal relationship between the world’s affluent nations and the severely poor. This relationship, despite critiques, is essential in order to illustrate that developed world citizens do indeed contribute to severe poverty and so must take action to establish a minimally just institutional order. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2009-02-02 16:07:34.355

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.