SYMPOSIUM

World Poverty and Human RightsThomas Pogge

Despite a high and growing globalaverage income, billions of humanbeings are still condemned to life-

long severe poverty, with all its attendantevils of low life expectancy, social exclusion,ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effec-tive enslavement. The annual death toll frompoverty-related causes is around 18 million,or one-third of all human deaths, whichadds up to approximately 270 million deathssince the end of the Cold War.1

This problem is hardly unsolvable, inspite of its magnitude. Though constituting44 percent of the world’s population, the2,735 million people the World Bank countsas living below its more generous $2 per dayinternational poverty line consume only 1.3percent of the global product, and wouldneed just 1 percent more to escape povertyso defined.2 The high-income countries,with 955 million citizens, by contrast, haveabout 81 percent of the global product.3

With our average per capita income nearly180 times greater than that of the poor (atmarket exchange rates), we could eradicatesevere poverty worldwide if we chose totry—in fact, we could have eradicated itdecades ago.

Citizens of the rich countries are, how-ever, conditioned to downplay the severityand persistence of world poverty and tothink of it as an occasion for minor charita-ble assistance. Thanks in part to the ration-alizations dispensed by our economists,most of us believe that severe poverty and its

persistence are due exclusively to localcauses. Few realize that severe poverty is anongoing harm we inflict upon the globalpoor. If more of us understood the truemagnitude of the problem of poverty andour causal involvement in it, we might dowhat is necessary to eradicate it.

That world poverty is an ongoing harmwe inflict seems completely incredible tomost citizens of the affluent countries.We call it tragic that the basic human rightsof so many remain unfulfilled, and are will-ing to admit that we should do more to help.But it is unthinkable to us that we areactively responsible for this catastrophe. Ifwe were, then we, civilized and sophisticated

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1 World Health Organization, World Health Report 2004(Geneva: WHO, 2004), Annex Table 2; available atwww.who.int/whr/2004.2 For detailed income poverty figures, see Shaohua Chenand Martin Ravallion, “How Have the World’s PoorestFared since the Early 1980s?” World Bank ResearchObserver 19, no. 2 (2004), p. 153; also available atwbro.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/19/2/141(reporting 2001 data). Ravallion and Chen have man-aged the World Bank’s income poverty assessments forwell over a decade. My estimate of the poors’ share ofthe global product is justified in Thomas W. Pogge,“TheFirst UN Millennium Development Goal: A Cause forCelebration?” Journal of Human Development 5, no. 3(2004), p. 387. For a methodological critique of theWorld Bank’s poverty statistics, see “The First UN Mil-lennium Development Goal,” pp. 381–85, based on myjoint work with Sanjay G. Reddy, “How Not to Countthe Poor”; available at www.socialanalysis.org.3 World Bank, World Development Report 2003 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 235 (giving datafor 2001).

Ethics F International Affairs 19, no. 1 (2005).All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or utilized in any form without the written permission of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

denizens of the developed countries, wouldbe guilty of the largest crime against human-ity ever committed, the death toll of whichexceeds, every week, that of the recenttsunami and, every three years, that ofWorld War II, the concentration camps andgulags included. What could be more pre-posterous?

But think about the unthinkable for amoment. Are there steps the affluent coun-tries could take to reduce severe povertyabroad? It seems very likely that there are,given the enormous inequalities in incomeand wealth already mentioned. The com-mon assumption, however, is that reducingsevere poverty abroad at the expense of ourown affluence would be generous on ourpart, not something we owe, and that ourfailure to do this is thus at most a lack of gen-erosity that does not make us morallyresponsible for the continued deprivation ofthe poor.

I deny this popular assumption. I denythat the 955 million citizens of the affluentcountries are morally entitled to their 81 per-cent of the global product in the face of threetimes as many people mired in severepoverty. Is this denial really so preposterousthat one need not consider the arguments inits support? Does not the radical inequalitybetween our wealth and their dire need atleast put the burden on us to show why weshould be morally entitled to so much whilethey have so little? In World Poverty andHuman Rights,4 I dispute the popularassumption by showing that the usual waysof justifying our great advantage fail.My argument poses three mutually inde-pendent challenges.

ACTUAL HISTORY

Many believe that the radical inequality weface can be justified by reference to how it

evolved, for example through differences indiligence, culture, and social institutions,soil, climate, or fortune. I challenge this sortof justification by invoking the commonand very violent history through which thepresent radical inequality accumulated.Much of it was built up in the colonial era,when today’s affluent countries ruledtoday’s poor regions of the world: tradingtheir people like cattle, destroying theirpolitical institutions and cultures, takingtheir lands and natural resources, and forc-ing products and customs upon them. Irecount these historical facts specifically forreaders who believe that even the most rad-ical inequality is morally justifiable if itevolved in a benign way. Such readers dis-agree about the conditions a historicalprocess must meet for it to justify such vastinequalities in life chances. But I can bypassthese disagreements because the actual his-torical crimes were so horrendous, diverse,and consequential that no historical entitle-ment conception could credibly support theview that our common history was suffi-ciently benign to justify today’s hugeinequality in starting places.

Challenges such as this are often dis-missed with the lazy response that we can-not be held responsible for what others didlong ago. This response is true but irrele-vant. We indeed cannot inherit responsibil-ity for our forefathers’ sins. But how thencan we plausibly claim the fruits of theirsins? How can we have been entitled to thegreat head start our countries enjoyed goinginto the postcolonial period, which hasallowed us to dominate and shape the

2 Thomas Pogge

4 Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights:Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge:Polity Press, 2002). All in-text citation references are tothis book.

world? And how can we be entitled to thehuge advantages over the global poor weconsequently enjoy from birth? The histori-cal path from which our exceptional afflu-ence arose greatly weakens our moral claimto it—certainly in the face of those whomthe same historical process has deliveredinto conditions of acute deprivation. They,the global poor, have a much stronger moralclaim to that 1 percent of the global productthey need to meet their basic needs than weaffluent have to take 81 rather than 80 per-cent for ourselves. Thus, I write, “A morallydeeply tarnished history must not be allowedto result in radical inequality” (p. 203).

FICTIONAL HISTORIES

Since my first challenge addressed adherentsof historical entitlement conceptions of jus-tice, it may leave others unmoved. Theseothers may believe that it is permissible touphold any economic distribution, no mat-ter how skewed, if merely it could have comeabout on a morally acceptable path. Theyinsist that we are entitled to keep and defendwhat we possess, even at the cost of millionsof deaths each year, unless there is conclu-sive proof that, without the horrors of theEuropean conquests, severe poverty world-wide would be substantially less today.

Now, any distribution, however unequal,could be the outcome of a sequence of vol-untary bets or gambles. Appeal to such a fic-tional history would “justify” anything andwould thus be wholly implausible. JohnLocke does much better, holding that a fic-tional history can justify the status quo onlyif the changes in holdings and social rules itinvolves are ones that all participants couldhave rationally agreed to. He also holds thatin a state of nature persons would be entitledto a proportional share of the world’s natu-ral resources. Whoever deprives others of

“enough and as good”—either through uni-lateral appropriations or through institu-tional arrangements, such as a radicallyinegalitarian property regime—harms themin violation of a negative duty. For Locke, thejustice of any institutional order thusdepends on whether the worst-off under itare at least as well off as people would be ina state of nature with a proportionalresource share.5 This baseline is imprecise,to be sure, but it suffices for my second chal-lenge: however one may want to imagine astate of nature among human beings on thisplanet, one could not realistically conceive itas involving suffering and early deaths onthe scale we are witnessing today. Only athoroughly organized state of civilizationcan produce such horrendous misery andsustain an enduring poverty death toll of 18million annually. The existing distribution isthen morally unacceptable on Lockeangrounds insofar as, I point out, “the better-off enjoy significant advantages in the use ofa single natural resource base from whosebenefits the worse-off are largely, and with-out compensation, excluded” (p. 202).

The attempt to justify today’s coercivelyupheld radical inequality by appeal to somemorally acceptable fictional historicalprocess that might have led to it thus fails aswell. On Locke’s permissive account, a smallelite may appropriate all of the huge cooper-ative surplus produced by modern socialorganization. But this elite must not enlargeits share even further by reducing the poorbelow the state-of-nature baseline to capturemore than the entire cooperative surplus.The citizens and governments of the affluentstates are violating this negative duty whenwe, in collaboration with the ruling cliques

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5 For a fuller reading of Locke’s argument, see Pogge,World Poverty and Human Rights, ch. 5.

of many poor countries, coercively excludethe global poor from a proportional resourceshare and any equivalent substitute.

PRESENT GLOBAL INSTITUTIONALARRANGEMENTS

A third way of thinking about the justice ofa radical inequality involves reflection onthe institutional rules that give rise to it.Using this approach, one can justify an economic order and the distribution it pro-duces (irrespective of historical considera-tions) by comparing them to feasiblealternative institutional schemes and the dis-tributional profiles they would produce.Many broadly consequentialist and contrac-tualist conceptions of justice exemplify thisapproach. They differ in how they charac-terize the relevant affected parties (groups,persons, time slices of persons, and so on),in the metric they employ for measuringhow well off such parties are (in terms ofsocial primary goods, capabilities, welfare,and so forth), and in how they aggregatesuch information about well-being into anoverall assessment (for example, by averag-ing, or in some egalitarian, prioritarian, orsufficientarian way). These conceptionsconsequently disagree about how economicinstitutions should be best shaped undermodern conditions. But I can bypass suchdisagreements insofar as these conceptionsagree that an economic order is unjust whenit—like the systems of serfdom and forcedlabor prevailing in feudal Russia orFrance—foreseeably and avoidably givesrise to massive and severe human rightsdeficits. My third challenge, addressed toadherents of broadly consequentialist andcontractualist conceptions of justice, is thatwe are preserving our great economicadvantages by imposing a global economicorder that is unjust in view of the massive

and avoidable deprivations it foreseeablyreproduces: “There is a shared institutionalorder that is shaped by the better-off andimposed on the worse-off,” I contend. “Thisinstitutional order is implicated in thereproduction of radical inequality in thatthere is a feasible institutional alternativeunder which such severe and extensivepoverty would not persist. The radicalinequality cannot be traced to extra-socialfactors (such as genetic handicaps or naturaldisasters) which, as such, affect differenthuman beings differentially” (p. 199).

THREE NOTIONS OF HARM

These three challenges converge on the con-clusion that the global poor have a com-pelling moral claim to some of our affluenceand that we, by denying them what they aremorally entitled to and urgently need, areactively contributing to their deprivations.Still, these challenges are addressed to differ-ent audiences and thus appeal to diverse andmutually inconsistent moral conceptions.

They also deploy different notions ofharm. In most ordinary contexts, the word“harm” is understood in a historical sense,either diachronically or subjunctively:someone is harmed when she is renderedworse off than she was at some earlier time,or than she would have been had some ear-lier arrangements continued undisturbed.My first two challenges conceive harm inthis ordinary way, and then conceive justice,at least partly, in terms of harm: we arebehaving unjustly toward the global poor byimposing on them the lasting effects of his-torical crimes, or by holding them belowany credible state-of-nature baseline. Butmy third challenge does not conceive justiceand injustice in terms of an independentlyspecified notion of harm. Rather, it relatesthe concepts of harm and justice in the

4 Thomas Pogge

opposite way, conceiving harm in terms ofan independently specified conception ofsocial justice: we are harming the globalpoor if and insofar as we collaborate inimposing an unjust global institutionalorder upon them. And this institutionalorder is definitely unjust if and insofar as itforeseeably perpetuates large-scale humanrights deficits that would be reasonablyavoidable through feasible institutionalmodifications.6

The third challenge is empirically moredemanding than the other two. It requiresme to substantiate three claims: Globalinstitutional arrangements are causallyimplicated in the reproduction of massivesevere poverty. Governments of our affluentcountries bear primary responsibility forthese global institutional arrangements andcan foresee their detrimental effects. Andmany citizens of these affluent countriesbear responsibility for the global institu-tional arrangements their governments havenegotiated in their names.

TWO MAIN INNOVATIONS

In defending these three claims, my view onthese more empirical matters is as oddlyperpendicular to the usual empirical debatesas my diagnosis of our moral relation to theproblem of world poverty is to the usualmoral debates.

The usual moral debates concern thestringency of our moral duties to help thepoor abroad. Most of us believe that theseduties are rather feeble, meaning that it isn’tvery wrong of us to give no help at all.Against this popular view, some (PeterSinger, Henry Shue, Peter Unger) haveargued that our positive duties are quitestringent and quite demanding; and others(such as Liam Murphy) have defended anintermediate view according to which our

positive duties, insofar as they are quitestringent, are not very demanding. Leavingthis whole debate to one side, I focus onwhat it ignores: our moral duties not toharm. We do, of course, have positive dutiesto rescue people from life-threateningpoverty. But it can be misleading to focus onthem when more stringent negative dutiesare also in play: duties not to expose peopleto life-threatening poverty and duties toshield them from harms for which we wouldbe actively responsible.

The usual empirical debates concern howdeveloping countries should design theireconomic institutions and policies in orderto reduce severe poverty within their bor-ders. The received wisdom (often pointingto Hong Kong and, lately, China) is that theyshould opt for free and open markets with aminimum in taxes and regulations so as toattract investment and to stimulate growth.But some influential economists call forextensive government investment in educa-tion, health care, and infrastructure (asillustrated by the example of the Indian stateof Kerala), or for some protectionist meas-ures to “incubate” fledgling niche industriesuntil they become internationally competi-tive (as illustrated by the example of SouthKorea). Leaving these debates to one side, Ifocus once more on what is typicallyignored: the role that the design of the global

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6 One might say that the existing global order is notunjust if the only feasible institutional modificationsthat could substantially reduce the offensive depriva-tions would be extremely costly in terms of culture, say,or the natural environment. I preempt such objectionsby inserting the word “reasonably.” Broadly consequen-tialist and contractualist conceptions of justice agreethat an institutional order that foreseeably gives rise tomassive severe deprivations is unjust if there are feasi-ble institutional modifications that foreseeably wouldgreatly reduce these deprivations without adding otherharms of comparable magnitude.

institutional order plays in the persistenceof severe poverty.

Thanks to the inattention of our econo-mists, many believe that the existing globalinstitutional order plays no role in the per-sistence of severe poverty, but rather thatnational differences are the key factors. Such“explanatory nationalism” (p. 139ff.) appearsjustified by the dramatic performance differ-entials among developing countries, withpoverty rapidly disappearing in some andincreasing in others. Cases of the latter kindusually display plenty of incompetence, cor-ruption, and oppression by ruling elites,which seem to give us all the explanation weneed to understand why severe poverty persists there.

But consider this analogy. Suppose thereare great performance differentials amongthe students in a class, with some improvinggreatly while many others learn little ornothing. And suppose the latter students donot do their readings and skip many classes.This case surely shows that local, student-specific factors play a role in explaining academic success. But it decidedly fails toshow that global factors (the quality ofteaching, textbooks, classroom, and soforth) play no such role. A better teachermight well greatly improve the performanceof the class by eliciting stronger studentinterest in the subject and hence betterattendance and preparation.

Once we break free from explanatorynationalism, global factors relevant to thepersistence of severe poverty are easy to find.In the WTO negotiations, the affluent coun-tries insisted on continued and asymmetri-cal protections of their markets throughtariffs, quotas, anti-dumping duties, exportcredits, and huge subsidies to domestic pro-ducers. Such protectionism provides a com-pelling illustration of the hypocrisy of therich states that insist and command that

their own exports be received with openmarkets (pp. 15–20). And it greatly impairsexport opportunities for the very poorestcountries and regions. If the rich countriesscrapped their protectionist barriers againstimports from poor countries, the popula-tions of the latter would benefit greatly:hundreds of millions would escape unem-ployment, wage levels would rise substan-tially, and incoming export revenues wouldbe higher by hundreds of billions of dollarseach year.

The same rich states also insist that theirintellectual property rights—ever-expand-ing in scope and duration—must be vigor-ously enforced in the poor countries. Musicand software, production processes, words,seeds, biological species, and drugs—for allthese, and more, rents must be paid to thecorporations of the rich countries as a con-dition for (still multiply restricted) access totheir markets. Millions would be saved fromdiseases and death if generic producerscould freely manufacture and market life-saving drugs in the poor countries.7

While charging billions for their intellec-tual property, the rich countries pay nothingfor the externalities they impose throughtheir vastly disproportional contributions toglobal pollution and resource depletion.The global poor benefit least, if at all, frompolluting activities, and also are least able toprotect themselves from the impact suchpollution has on their health and on theirnatural environment (such as flooding dueto rising sea levels). It is true, of course, thatwe pay for the vast quantities of naturalresources we import. But such paymentscannot make up for the price effects of ourinordinate consumption, which restrict the

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7 See Thomas W. Pogge, “Human Rights and GlobalHealth,” Metaphilosophy 36, nos. 1–2 (2005), pp.182–209.

consumption possibilities of the global pooras well as the development possibilities ofthe poorer countries and regions (in com-parison to the opportunities our countriescould take advantage of at a comparablestage of economic development).

More important, the payments we makefor resource imports go to the rulers of theresource-rich countries, with no concernabout whether they are democraticallyelected or at least minimally attentive to theneeds of the people they rule. It is on the basisof effective power alone that we recognizeany such ruler as entitled to sell us theresources of “his” country and to borrow,undertake treaty commitments, and buyarms in its name. These internationalresource, borrowing, treaty, and arms privi-leges we extend to such rulers are quiteadvantageous to them, providing them withthe money and arms they need to stay inpower—often with great brutality and negli-gible popular support. These privileges arealso quite convenient to us, securing ourresource imports from poor countries irre-spective of who may rule them and howbadly. But these privileges have devastatingeffects on the global poor by enabling cor-rupt rulers to oppress them, to exclude themfrom the benefits of their countries’ naturalresources, and to saddle them with hugedebts and onerous treaty obligations. By sub-stantially augmenting the perks of govern-mental power, these same privileges alsogreatly strengthen the incentives to attemptto take power by force, thereby fosteringcoups, civil wars, and interstate wars in thepoor countries and regions—especially inAfrica, which has many desperately poor butresource-rich countries, where the resource

sector constitutes a large part of the grossdomestic product.

Reflection on the popular view that severepoverty persists in many poor countriesbecause they govern themselves so poorlyshows, then, that it is evidence not for butagainst explanatory nationalism. The popula-tions of most of the countries in which severepoverty persists or increases do not “governthemselves” poorly, but are very poorly gov-erned, and much against their will. They arehelplessly exposed to such “government”because the rich states recognize their rulers asentitled to rule on the basis of effective poweralone. We pay these rulers for their people’sresources, often advancing them large sumsagainst the collateral of future exports, and weeagerly sell them the advanced weaponry onwhich their continued rule all too oftendepends. Yes, severe poverty is fueled by localmisrule. But such local misrule is fueled, inturn, by global rules that we impose and fromwhich we benefit greatly.

Once this causal nexus between our globalinstitutional order and the persistence ofsevere poverty is understood, the injustice ofthat order, and of our imposition of it,becomes visible:“What entitles a small globalelite—the citizens of the rich countries andthe holders of political and economic powerin the resource-rich developing countries—to enforce a global property scheme underwhich we may claim the world’s naturalresources for ourselves and can distributethese among ourselves on mutually agree-able terms?” I ask. “How, for instance, canour ever so free and fair agreements withtyrants give us property rights in crude oil,thereby dispossessing the local populationand the rest of humankind?” (p. 142).

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