Name- Victorious Chaturvedi

Roll no- Pol/19/6

Submitted to- Dr. Tripurari Sharan

TOPIC- Thomas Pogge’s Views on Global Justice

Global justice is a theory that exists within the broader school of cosmopolitanism, which focuses on
the importance of the individual as opposed to the state, community or culture. Cosmopolitans take
the individual as their starting point because they believe that all human beings have equal moral
worth and therefore have the right to equal moral consideration.

This focus on the moral importance of the individual has led some cosmopolitan scholars like
Thomas Pogge to critically engage with theories of justice, which are traditionally confined to the
state and contained within the realm of political and not international theory. This endeavour has
led to the theory of global justice. Some of the biggest concerns of this theory centres on the
recognition of the widespread poverty, hunger and homelessness and alienation from the
government, as well as the increasing wage gaps.

Reasons for Global Injustice

According to Thomas Pogge, the global institutional order is most responsible for injustice on the
global level. In what he refers to as the international resource privilege and the international
borrowing privilege, Pogge shows how the global institutional order causes and engenders injustice.
He argues that regardless of how any group comes to power, how it exercises power and whether
the citizenry supports or opposes it, as long as such group has the preponderance of the means of
coercion or near monopoly of force within the state, it is internationally recognized as the legitimate
government of the state. Although the nature of such group coming to power, the nature of its
exercise of power and the opposition of it by the citizenry make it illegitimate, by recognizing such
group as the legitimate government, the international community consequently bestows upon it two
crucial privileges namely the international borrowing privilege and the international resource
privilege.

To illustrate how developed countries determine the economic conditions of poor countries to a
large extent, Pogge employed the notions of international borrowing privilege and international
resource privilege which can be explained in the following way. The international community often
pays no attention to the fact that a leadership of a poor country is corrupt, dictatorial, etc. As long as
the leadership is in charge of the state, it is recognized and accepted by the international community
as having the legitimate authority at once to sell the resources of the state that is international
resource privilege and to borrow on behalf of the state that is international borrowing privilege.

International Resource Privilege

As usually happens in poor states with corrupt leaders, a huge part of the funds realized from the
selling of the resources goes into the private pockets of the corrupt leaders and so also a huge
percentage of any money borrowed goes into their private pockets at the expense of the people.
These two situations worsen the condition of poor states and encourage rogues to want to come to
power because of the benefits.
Even when a democratic leader eventually comes to power, they will be left with a huge debt to pay
and sometimes depleted resources. These international privileges are particularly relevant to Sub-
Saharan Africa especially Nigeria, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) etc. On the
international resource privilege which confers the property rights of the resources of a state on any
regime irrespective of how illegitimately the regime came to power, Sub-Saharan African dictators,
cronies of dictators, and warlords have capitalised on their resource privileges to sustain their
regimes, sponsor conflicts and lead lavish lifestyles.

International Borrowing Privilege

Concerning the international borrowing privilege which confers the right to borrow in the name of a
state and on behalf of its citizens on any regime irrespective of how illegitimately the regime came
to power, this has terrible consequences for poor countries. This borrowing privilege incentivises
potential coup plotters and dictators to seize power because they know doing so will give them
access to huge amounts of money. When in power, illegitimate rulers completely control the credit
of a country. So, these rulers can always borrow money in the name of their countries. Although
they often embezzle the money they borrow or use it to sustain their regimes, it is their countries
that are saddled with the responsibility of settling the debt.

Negative Duty of Global Institutions

In view of the negative effects of the international resource privilege and the international
borrowing privilege, Pogge asserts that individuals and collectives or institutions globally have the
negative duty to desist from imposing on the less privileged of the world an institutional scheme that
is unjust. For Pogge, in a globalised world that is interdependent, the global institutional order
enormously affects peoples’ lives. In order to safeguard the welfare and interests of peoples, there
must be a paradigm of human rights that regulates the global institutional order and it must be
imposed on the global order. The human rights paradigm he advocates is the one that will involve
radical institutional reform which will result in reconfiguring the current Westphalian system into
what he terms dispersion of sovereignty. This reform, Pogge argues, will eradicate abject poverty
and minimise injustice.

Pogge argues that the current global system – the Westphalian system of nation-states – is a
contributing factor to the problem of global injustice in our world. According to Pogge, “A global
institutional scheme is imposed by all of us on each of us. It is imposed on us in that we cannot
simply drop out and renounce participation. This fact is most significant in the case of the scheme’s
most disadvantaged participants, who are literally being forced, ultimately with resort to violence, to
abide by the going ground rules”. Furthermore, he argues that due to the dynamics of the
international system in which rich and powerful states are at advantage while poor and non-
powerful states are at disadvantage, the former and their citizens are part of the cause of global
injustice and are thus morally responsible for it. Hence, they have a duty towards those who are
globally disadvantaged.
Since institutions are not natural but social, are brought into existence through our plans and
actions, we are thus responsible for their existence. And since they have led to dismal conditions on
the global level, we are also responsible for those dismal conditions. Hence, the onus, in moral
terms, is on us to remedy those dismal conditions and to desist from causing and engendering those
dismal conditions. However, Pogge stresses a negative duty rather than a positive duty on the side of
the advantaged, and consequently a negative right rather than a positive right on the side of the
disadvantaged. He stresses that we ought to desist from acting the way we act that makes the global
order unjust and consequently makes some people and parts of the world disadvantaged.

Duty of Developed World

For Pogge, given the fact that some individuals and parts of the world, namely the developed world,
are very wealthy and powerful, nearly everything they do impact significantly on living conditions of
other parts of the world, namely the developing world. And given the fact that these individuals and
the developed world are very wealthy and powerful, they “are in a unique position to take up the
theoretical and practical task of institutional reform.” Nevertheless, as individuals, for Pogge, we
cannot really do much on our own (interactionally) to change the global structure that leads to
global disadvantages for the worst-off.

In other words, the malaise of the global structure cannot be corrected by the direct (interactional)
effort of individuals. Hence, he argues that the task of the individual is to advocate institutions -
particularly global institutions - that can restructure the global system and help correct the problem
of global injustice.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the crust of Pogge’s argument is that there should be a global institutional reform of
the global institutional order and the onus is on those who perpetrate global institutional injustice.
These perpetrators of global institutional injustice need to desist from perpetrating global
institutional injustice; hence their negative duty to stop inflicting injustice on the worse-off and
worst-off individuals and parts of the world.