Lecture 4A (Pogge = Deontology, Global)

We → citizens of developed countries who have sufficient mental maturity, education and political opportunities to share responsibility for their government’s foreign policy

Poor → an individual who does not have access to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family

1. Non-fulfillment of human right

2. Certain causal responsibility of human agents for this non-fulfillment

- it lacks the means to defend their legal rights

- it lacks the right to secure access to an adequate standard of living

1.It is of great importance that human beings should have secure access to this object

2. These important interests justify some significant duties on the part of other human agents to ensure that human beings actually have secure access to the objects of their human rights

Respect the right (by not preventing someone from having this right)

Protect the right (make sure that the other doesn’t take away the right)

Fulfill the right (Engage in activities to make the right work)

Inalienable (you cannot lose it)

Internationally recognized

Self-restraint

Independent existence from (internaional) law

when you are not helping/not preventing somethings bad from happening

→ Interactional variety, where the individual or collective human agent do things that will avoidably deprive human beings of secure access to the object of their human rights

→ Institutional variety, where the human agents design and impose institutional arrangements that will avoidably deprive human beings of secure access to their human rights

unjust supranational institutional arrangements cause hr violations as well!!!!!!

Short answer: No.

The rich only get richer and the poor only poorer, even though the situation of the poor is slightly getting better. Supranational laws etc. are made in not-transparent, undemocratic ways because the poor have no way of influencing the supranational negotiations, while the very rich do.

Not increasing development aid → develop institutional reforms that would reduce the headwind against the poor and eventually turn it off

The world’s leading governments could mainstream the imperative of poverty avoidance

→ put foreign aid higher on the list

-> Change the attitudes towards poverty

→ having citizens organize themselves

→ feeling responsibility towards impoverished countries

we are actively harming people when we seize the authority to design and impose social institutions and then fail to shape these institutions so that human rights are realized under them insofar as this is reasonably possible

singer: positive duties (help the poor)

pogge: negative duties (do not harm the poor)

the special obligation of an actor to alter a specific bad situation that is not shared with other actors

human rights are rights we have “simply in virtue of being human”

they are the rights needed to protect the “dignity of the human person”.

• “men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others”

• “A conception of social justice, then, is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed.”

Rawls’s explanatory nationalism focuses on the quality of domestic institutions.

Pogge’s explanatory globalism emphasizes the global institutional order as the main explanation of poverty in developing countries

Rawls emphasizes the responsibility of domestic governments for the plight of their citizens.

Pogge emphasizes the responsibility of affluent governments for creating an unjust global institutional order

minimal duty:

one state should help another state just enough, to get that other state rolling again, so that they have enough resources to start again

1. It is backward looking: it looks at events that already have occurred, and seeks to find a causal connection between specific action(s) and the resulting harm.

2. It seeks to assign responsibility to one or a specific set of agents, absolving responsibility of all other possible candidates for the fault.

3. It determines how the person who is responsible can rectify for the harm by giving the proper compensation

you have to compensate for the harm you inflicted, in stead of you have to help someone.

with negative duties (corrective justice) you owe someone something ... guilty

he never really shows how the international factors he emphasizes account for global poverty

Negative duties cannot be established in general, but only in actual and concrete cases.

Human rights perspective

institutional instead of an interactional perspective.

negative duty not to enforce an unjust system of rules (WTO, TRIPPS) upon the global poor.