Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric

285 Pages·2010·1 MB·English

by  Thomas W. Pogge

Politics as Usual
To Albert Hirschman
Courageous Cosmopolitan
Politics as Usual
What Lies Behind the
Pro-Poor Rhetoric
Thomas Pogge
polity
Copyright © Thomas Pogge 2010
The right of Thomas Pogge to be identifi ed as Author of this Work has
been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
First published in 2010 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3892-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3893-5(pb)
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
General Introduction 1
1 What Is Global Justice? 10
1.0 Introduction 10
1.1 The extent of global poverty 11
1.2 The moral signifi cance of global poverty 12
1.3 From international to global justice 13
1.4 Interactional and institutional moral analysis 14
1.5 Global institutional analysis 16
1.6 The global institutional order contributes to severe
poverty 20
1.7 Global poverty is foreseeable and avoidable 21
1.8 Conclusion 24
2 Recognized and Violated by International Law:
The Human Rights of the Global Poor 26
2.0 Introduction 26
2.1 Human rights and correlative duties 26
2.2 The purely domestic poverty thesis 32
2.3 The Panglossian view of the present global order 34
2.4 Is the present global order merely less benefi cial than
it might be? 36
2.5 The present global order massively violates human rights 50
2.6 The promise of global institutional reform 52
vi Contents
3 The First UN Millennium Development Goal:
A Cause for Celebration? 57
3.0 Introduction 57
3.1 Refl ection one – on halving world poverty 58
3.2 Refl ection two – on tracking poverty by counting
the poor 62
3.3 Refl ection three – on where the line is drawn 65
3.4 Refl ection four – on relating the IPL to the global
product 69
3.5 Concluding thoughts 71
4 Developing Morally Plausible Indices of Poverty and
Gender Equity: A Research Program 75
4.0 Introduction 75
4.1 How the World Bank is tracking poverty by counting
people below some IPL 78
4.2 The problematic reliance on CPIs and PPPs 79
4.3 Tracking development with the HDI and gender equity
with the GDI 86
4.4 Toward new indices of development, poverty, and
gender equity 90
5 Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends
and Political Choices 93
5.0 Introduction 93
5.1 Who benefi ts from recent growth? 95
5.2 Intra-national inequality 97
5.3 Growth and poverty in China 100
5.4 Global inequality 103
5.5 What next? 107
6 Dworkin, the Abortion Battle, and Global Poverty 110
6.0 Introduction 110
6.1 Dworkin’s problematic reconstruction of the pro-life
perspective 113
6.2 Review of the alleged inconsistencies of the pro-life
perspective 116
6.3 The search for common ground 120
6.4 Global poverty as a competing moral priority from the
pro-life perspective 123
Contents vii
6.5 Comparing the responsibilities for abortion and global
poverty 126
6.6 Objections to the comparative moral priority of poverty 129
6.7 Conclusions 134
7 Making War on Terrorists: Refl ections on Harming
the Innocent 137
7.0 Introduction 137
7.1 The uses of terrorism for politicians and the media 138
7.2 Public support for anti-terror policies 140
7.3 One failure in the moral justifi cation for terrorism 141
7.4 Other problems for the moral justifi cation of terrorism 145
7.5 Taking morality seriously 147
7.6 Acting under color of morality 150
7.7 The measures taken in our name 153
7.8 How do we justify our policies? 161
8 Moralizing Humanitarian Intervention: Why Jurying Fails
and How Law Can Work 165
8.0 Introduction 165
8.1 The amazing appeal to the Rwandan genocide 166
8.2 Would an intervention to stop the Rwandan genocide
really have been illegal? 170
8.3 Humanitarian heroes fettered by legal niceties? 172
8.4 The jurying model 175
8.5 How to think about improving the international
legal order 178
9 Creating Supranational Institutions Democratically:
Refl ections on the European Union’s “Democratic Defi cit” 183
9.0 Introduction 183
9.1 The Maastricht verdict of the German Constitutional
Court 184
9.2 Why the people allegedly cannot play a role in shaping
political institutions 188
9.3 The constitutive features of the Union 191
9.4 Concluding remarks 202
Notes 204
Bibliography 242
Index 259
Acknowledgments
This book owes much to Matt Peterson who has not only critically
supported my work on chapters 4, 5, and 7, but has also played a major
role in selecting, adapting, and updating all the component essays and
in weaving them together into a coherent volume. We also have Matt
to thank for the bibliography and the index.
Chapter 1 originally appeared as an essay under the same title in
Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge, eds., Real World Justice
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). It has also appeared in Chinese and
Spanish, and has been heavily revised for this book.
Chapter 2 is an updated version of an essay fi rst published under the
same title in the Leiden Journal of International Law 18/4 (2005):
717–45, as part of a Symposium on Cosmopolitism, Global Justice,
and International Law. It has also appeared in Portuguese, Spanish,
French, German, and Czech. Many thanks to Roland Pierik for very
helpful comments and suggestions.
Chapter 3 was fi rst presented at the University of Oslo as the fi rst Oslo
Lecture in Moral Philosophy on September 11, 2003, and then pub-
lished, under its present title, in the Journal of Human Development 5
(2004): 377–97. It has also appeared in German and Spanish. Based
on a new set of purchasing power parities (PPPs), the World Bank, in