Thomas Pogge Real World Justice

Zhanel Suleimenova

PHIL_231

Text Analysis #2

One of the most perceptible and large-scale global justice problems we face today is the issue of global poverty. What should we do with 1 billion of people who live in extreme poverty? And who is responsible for that pattern? Thomas Pogge in his book World Poverty and Human Rights (2002), as well as in response essay for book’s critique Real World Justice (2005), argues that the global rich have a duty to eliminate extreme poverty in the world. Pogges means is to demonstrate that we, the citizens of rich countries, have an obligation to eliminate the extreme poverty, not because the sense of helping those in need when we are better-off , but because we are violating a principle of justice,

Radical inequality is ‘the worse-off are very badly off in absolute terms […] in relative terms – very much worse-off than many others’ (2005,37). Additionally, this inequality is pervasive and avoidable, thus the rich can improve the situation of the poor without becoming poor. To justify his arguments he presents in parallel three seconds steps of the argument to show how existing radical inequalities make us harm the poor. The first strand of the second step attempts to address the readers attracted to historical-entitlement conceptions of justice, Pogge argue that radical inequality was built up in the colonization era, especially in case with Sub-Saharan African continent, when contemporary rich countries were trading their people, destroying their cultures and institutions, and using their raw materials. Thus, we, people of rich countries, violated our negative duties, which stands for the idea to do not harm others. In the second strand of his argument, Pogge accounts to the Lockeans. He explains that ‘the better-off – we are harming the worse-off insofar as the radical inequality we uphold excludes the global poor from a proportional share of the world’s natural resources and any equivalent substitute’ (2005, 40). The third strand addresses the consequentialists. It emphasizes that we are harming the worse-off by collaborating and

However, how exactly I personally ‘uphold’ and ‘implicate’ these institutions? According to Ci (2010) from the legal perspective, if I and other citizens of the rich countries are participants in this crime by paying taxes to the government, it does not legally enough to insist that I personally account to the violations of my negative duties. I commit to my government to save my positive duties, without violating my negative duties. The fact that “we” as a communal violated our negative duties towards foreigners does not mean that the individual members of these communal violated its negative duties. Instead, I suggest to Pogge to provide more specific arguments which will explain how exactly “we” harm the global poor, not by means of our collective action. Because for me it actually makes sense that we are explicitly responsible for the poor being a poor. Nevertheless, I agree with Pogge’s idea of our negative duties, also I believe that we, as having our positive duties, ought to help others. Even if the practice of foreign aid shows that it is not working, we still need to help the poorest countries by means of helping them to achieve their positive duties as well. Not just helping them by providing goods (humanitarian aid) or money (Official Development Assistance), we should create incentives for them to