Rigorist cosmopolitanism: a Kantian alternative to Pogge*

[This is the penultimate version of the article which

appeared in Politics, Philosophy & Economics. For the final version

go to

http://ppe.sagepub.com/content/12/3/260]

* Many people have generously given from their time to comment on the themes of this article, whether in conversation or in writing. Vittorio Hosle entertained the original idea, and fellow members of his Notre Dame Kant seminar (Summer 2010) helped in forming the article’s early stages. Ruth Abbey, Yehonatan Alsheh, Faisal Baluch, Josh Cohen, AmitavaDutt, Liz Ellis, Beth Gee, Eva Erman, Burke Hendrix, Kathrin Kranz, AlexLevitov, Lukas Meyer, Charles Mills, Uri Nili, Cameron O’Bannon, Dan Philpott, Verena Risse, Zach Shemtob, Ed Song, Felix Valenzuela, ErnestoVerdeja, Laura Weis, Paul Weithman, Leif Wenar, and Michael Zuckert all provided useful advice, as did three anonymous reviewers for the journal. Fred D’Agostino encouraged the project throughout. Special thanks go to Thomas Pogge and Christian Siller.

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Rigorist cosmopolitanism: a Kantian alternative to Pogge

What does it mean to “harm”? This question is particularly

important in a global context. Proof that a society is

harming non-compatriots is a much stronger trigger for

action than the accusation that it is merely failing to

help. In the latter case the excuses are well-known: our

citizens ought to come first; foreigners’ plight is the

result of and should be attended to by their own

governments; our ability to help is limited anyway - and the

list goes on.1 Whether or not such excuses withstand close

scrutiny, they indicate the added global value of negative

duties not to harm, as distinct from positive duties to

help. Duties not to harm others do not leave any room for

“near and dear” objections, nor to they allow the offender

to pass the buck to someone else. If you are harming others

it is you who ought to stop, and this kind of duty is just

as strong abroad as it is at home. An argument from negative

duties thus has a strategic advantage at the global level.

Taking this advantage as its point of departure, this

article critically engages Thomas Pogge’s unique conception

2

of negative duties, the most important attempt to bring such

duties to the heart of the global justice debate.2 Pogge has

been insisting that we, citizens of affluent democracies

through our elected governments, impose manifestly unjust

global institutions on the world’s poor, and that in doing

so we violate our duty of forbearance towards them. Since

the 1970s scholars have conceived democracies’ global duties

as primarily positive duties to help. We ought to help the

global poor, Peter Singer for example famously argued, just

as a by-passer ought to help a child drowning in a shallow

pond.3 Pogge, however, has been claiming that we are not

innocent by-passers: we (along with others) threw the child

into the water. Much before helping, we are morally

responsible for extreme poverty because we are harming the

world’s deprived.

My purpose here is to show that while Pogge is right to

orient global moral claims around negative duties not to

harm, he is mistaken in departing from the standard

understanding of these duties. Pogge ties negative duties to

global institutions, but I will argue that truly negative

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duties cannot apply to such institutions. In order to retain

the global force of negative duties, we need to dissociate

these duties from global institutions: each society’s

negative duty to stop harming specific other societies ought

to be seen as independent of global institutional change.4

In terms of the (already extensive) “Pogge debate” this

claim is significant since while Pogge’s accusations have

received much scrutiny, most of his critics have been

questioning the empirical part of these accusations,

concerning the actual causes of global poverty, giving far

less attention to the philosophical basis of his position.5

The few critics who have commented on Pogge’s philosophical

underpinnings have tended to dismiss the negative duties

strategy as fundamentally misguided, seeing the distinction

between positive and negative duties as misleading and/or as

irrelevant.6 Though I agree with the critics that an

explicit reliance on positive duties is necessary in very

specific cases, I believe they crucially miss the strategic

advantages of negative duties.7 Accordingly, I will argue

that the most fundamental problem with Pogge’s account is

4

not that it focuses on negative duties, but rather that it

cannot retain their unique force.

However, my critique goes beyond the dispute on Pogge’s

thesis. If my argument is convincing, then global theory and

practice as a whole needs to shift towards an inward-look.

Each democratic society ought to stop harming for the sake

of its own moral integrity, independently of the victims’

prospects or the conduct of other democracies. This

appeal to self-reform will often take an explicitly Kantian

form, specifically following what Pogge has called Kant’s

“rigorism.” The term, as Pogge uses it and as I will employ

it here, refers to a demand to act that is independent of others’

behavior. Rigorism is embodied in the categorical

imperative’s call, as Pogge put it, to “act right here and

now as if the world conformed to my ideal of the realm of

ends,”8 even if others do not act in the same fashion. Pogge

claimed (already in the 1980s) that Kantian rigorism gives

excessive attention to our moral stature at the expense of

real world consequences, and that we must “attempt to be of

practical worth to others, rather than be overly concerned

5

with the moral worth of ourselves.”9 In contrast, I seek to

show that rigorism has profound normative and practical

value, mainly since negative duties are rigorist duties: much of their

strength derives precisely from the demand to avoid certain

actions independently of how others act. This demand forms the

basis of what I will call rigorist cosmopolitanism.

The presentation of this cosmopolitanism proceeds as

follows. The first, main section surveys Pogge’s key ideas

(sub-section 1.1), and then presents two theoretical

critiques against Poggean negative duties. One critique

(1.2) concerns their features. Pogge, I will try to show,

loses the appeal of negative duties by taking away their

rigorist elements. Poggean negative duties are outcome-

oriented, pointing to a specific state of affairs to be

achieved, yet much of the distinct force of negative duties

derives from them being agent-oriented, pointing to specific

actions that each agent ought to avoid and is capable of

avoiding independently of the overall state of affairs.10

The other theoretical criticism (1.3) concerns the

logic through which Pogge arrives at his version of negative

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duties. Pogge claims that agents have a negative duty to

enact and support just institutions since institutions are

necessary to specify their key rights and correlative

negative duties. I dispute the idea that global institutions

indeed perform such a specification task. The full range of1 One recalls Yes Prime Minister’s satirical portrayal of Foreign Officeresponse to appeals for help by small and weak societies: “We give themevery support short of help…we follow the standard four stage strategyin time of crisis: in stage one we say nothing is going to happen. Stagetwo, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothingabout it. In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something aboutit, but there's nothing we can do. Stage four, we say maybe there wassomething we could have done, but it's too late now.” Whether there is adeep gap between satire and reality remains an open question. SeeJonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay, The Complete Yes Prime Minister (London: BBCBooks, 1989), Chap. 6 – “A victory for Democracy.” 2 Pogge’s works referenced below in abbreviated form are:AD = “Achieving democracy,” Ethics and International Affairs 21 (2007): 249-273;AWV = “Are we violating the human rights of the global poor?,” Yale HumanRights & Development Law Journal 2 (2011); CS = “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103 (1992): 48-75;EGL = ”An Egalitarian Law of Peoples,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 23 (1994):195-224IC = “The Incoherence between Rawls's Theories of Justice,” Fordham LawReview 72 (2003-4): 1739-1759;IKR = “Is Kant’s Rechtslehre a ‘Comprehensive Liberalism’?,” in MarkTimmons (ed), Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002): 133-158.KEM = “Kant on Ends and the Meaning of Life” in Andrews Reath, BarbaraHerman, Christine M. Korsgaard, (eds.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays forJohn Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 361-387;KI = “The Kantian Interpretation of Justice as Fairness,” Zeitschrift fürphilosophische Forschung 35 (1981): 47-65;KTJ = “Kant’s Theory of Justice,” Kant-Studien 79 (1988): 407-433.KVJ = “Kant’s Vision of a Just World Order,” in Tom Hill, ed.: BlackwellCompanion to Kant’s Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009);RIJ = “Rawls on international justice: a critical study,” The PhilosophicalQuarterly 51 (2001): 246-253;RPR = “Responsibilities for Poverty-Related Ill Health,” Ethics &International Affairs 16 (2002): 71-79;RR = Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989);

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individuals’ rights and duties is already specified by their

respective body-politics, leaving no similar role for global

institutions. At the same time, the core rights and

correlative negative duties of the body politic itself, as a

collective agent vis-à-vis similar agents, can be knownRTC = “Severe Poverty as a Violation of Negative Duties: a reply tocritics,” Ethics & International Affairs 19 (2005): 55-83. RVI = “Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights ofthe Global Poor,” Leiden Journal of International Law 18 (2005): 717–45;SPH = “Severe Poverty as Human Rights Violation,” in Pogge (ed.),Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right – who owes what to the very poor? (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007): 11-54;TCI = “The Categorical Imperative,” in Paul Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Groundworkof the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 1998): 189-213;TPC = “Reply to critics,” in Alison Jagger (ed.), Thomas Pogge and His Critics(London: Polity, 2010).WPHR = World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).3 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and PublicAffairs (1972): 229-243. 4 Like Pogge, I will be focusing here on the responsibility of affluent democratic societies. I will generally use “democratic states,” “democratic body-politic” and “democratic societies” interchangeably. This focus assumes (again with Pogge) that democratic citizens ought to be held collectively responsible for their governments’ actions. I say more on this point below. The most recent account of democratic collective responsibility can be found in Anna Stilz, “Collective Responsibility and the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (2011): 190–208.5 The critics’ main accusations against Pogge currently include aproblematic notion of individual responsibility for the structure of theglobal economy; a latent egalitarian threshold of just distribution thathas to be much less minimalist than how it is presented by Pogge; andproblematic predictions regarding expected poverty alleviation followingchanges in global rules and regulations. My argument has certain pointsin common with some of these criticisms, yet, to the best of myknowledge, its shift away from a focus on poverty is distinct. Some ofthe main examples for the Pogge literature preceding Pogge and His Criticsare Allen Patten, “Should We Stop Thinking about Poverty in Terms ofHelping the Poor?,” Ethics & International Affairs 19 (2005): 19–27; RowanCruft, “Human Rights and Positive Duties,” Ethics & International Affairs 19(2005): 29-37; Debra Satz, “What Do We Owe the Global Poor?,” Ethics &

8

independently of global institutions. Both the features and

the derivation of Pogge’s negative duties are therefore

deficient. This means that in order to preserve the

strategic advantage of negative duties we must return to

their rigorist original (1.4): we must see global negative

duties as applying to the relations between specific

sovereign societies as unitary agents rather than to global

International Affairs 19 (2005): 47–54; Mathias Risse, “How Does the GlobalOrder Harm the Poor?,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 349–76; MagnusReitberger, “Poverty, negative duties and the global institutionalorder,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 7 (2008): 379-402.6 Aside from the examples mentioned above, Allen Buchanan and, withparticular force, Joshua Cohen, have been making such critiques. SeeBuchanan’s Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for InternationalLaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 4; Cohen,“Philosophy, Social Science, Global Poverty,” in Jagger, Pogge and HisCritics.7 Objections from a Singer-like direction notwithstanding, I thereforethink Pogge is exactly right when he says, for instance, the following:“Many believe that one has much stronger moral reasons to help neighborsin distress than to help total strangers who live very far from one’sown home and with whom one is sharing no bonds of language, culture,religion, or nationality. But few would endorse a similar gradient forour duties not to harm: the moral reasons to refrain from drunk drivingdo not become much weaker when we are briefly working in India orholidaying in Indonesia.” TPC, 212. Note that it is clearly consistentto assert both the existence of positive duties and the superior strength ofnegative duties. 8 KI, 58.9 KI, 64.10 In making this claim I will be assuming throughout, with Pogge, a separation between duty and obligation. Certain obligations that one can voluntarily undertake do generate a commitment to ensure certain outcomes (I am under obligation to supply you with pencils if I voluntarily signed a contract committing me to this supply, but I cannothave a negative duty to enter into such a contract). For Pogge’s latest discussion of duties as distinct from obligations see AWV.

9

institutions. The second

section shows how rigorist duties can ground a call for

extensive global reform, based on Pogge’s own accusations

concerning democracies’ conferral of trading privileges upon

dictators who embezzle state resources. Pogge situates these

privileges within his conception of negative duties, yet I

argue that democratic complicity in dictators’ theft is

essentially a rigorist problem. Each democracy ought to

boycott embezzling dictators, simply in order to cease its

own complicity in their theft, independently of broader change

in global institutions.11 The third section presents the

normative, empirical and strategic advantages of this

rigorist rationale. Here I highlight an “overlapping

consensus” between statists and cosmopolitans, and the

avoidance of some of Pogge’s key difficulties, including

11 Since Pogge also gives significant weight to national property rightsI generally put aside here potential challenges as to the basis of theserights and the related original “constitution of the demos.” On the former point see David Miller, “Property and Territory: Locke, Kant, andSteiner,” Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (2010): 90-109; Anna Stilz, “Why DoStates Have Territorial Rights?,” International Theory 1 (2009): 185-213. For the latter see Robert Goodin, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests,and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): 40-68; Sofia Näsström, "The Legitimacy of the People," Political Theory 35 (2007): 624-658.

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collective action issues and uncertainty about the domestic

impact of global rule changes. The fourth section

anticipates Poggean objections to the rigorist view,

concerning indifference to poverty (4.1), feasibility (4.2),

and, instead of a conclusion, lack of “true

cosmopolitanism.”

Before moving to the discussion itself, a few prefatory

remarks are in order, first regarding Kant. The differences

between Pogge’s approach and the rigorist alternative

reflect different sources of Kantian inspiration. While

Pogge’s basic philosophical commitments have been and remain

deeply Kantian, their focus has shifted throughout the

years, emphasizing potential insights from Kant’s political

writings and marginalizing the Kantian ethics that motivate

the rigorist alternative.12 What I am challenging is this

marginalization, not the accuracy of Pogge’s reading of

Kant. The Kantian dispute here is about relevance for

12 This focus allows me to put aside here potential consequentialistresponses to Pogge, and arrange my discussion largely (even if notentirely) in deontological terms, without attempting in any way tosettle broader disputes in normative ethics between deontological andconsequentialist positions.

11

contemporary political philosophy, not about the history of

ideas.13

A second point concerns terminology. Pogge contrasts

his “institutional” approach with an “interactional” view

that focuses on rules of conduct for specific agents. I

largely avoid these terms mainly since my approach is not

“anti-institutional” in one important sense: I agree with

Pogge that as a unitary agent, the (institution that is) the

democratic body politic can violate negative duties and

ought to be held collectively responsible for such

violations. But I wish to show that these violations occur

only through interactions between specific individuals or

states, not through global institutions. The body politic

“harms” only through its conduct towards specific political

13 That is why I do not enter here the vast secondary literature on Kantor make arguments as to what Kant “really meant.” In fact, many of theKant quotations used here, for example, are also used by Pogge. Inaddition, I do endorse some of Pogge’s key arguments regarding necessaryadaptations to Kant, revising for example Kant’s untenable call forabsolute submission to the existing regime, as well as his outdatedinsistence on the indivisibility of sovereignty, attacked by Pogge inKTJ, KVJ, respectively. For a more historical, interpretative analysisof related themes see Kok Chor-Tan, "Kantian Ethics and Global Justice,"Social Theory and Practice 23 (1997): 53-73.

12

communities, just as individuals harm other specific

individuals.

Finally, this dispute assumes as background two points

of agreement with Pogge. One is the stipulation of democracy

- free and fair elections with a rule of law - as a standard

of legitimacy.14 The other is the conviction that global

political philosophy must be centered on non-ideal theory.15

The content and priorities of this theory, however, remain

different, first and foremost because of a different

understanding of the ways in which democracies are currently

harming other societies.

1. Pogge’s negative duties

1.1 Pogge’s rationale

Given the pressing problem of extreme poverty, Pogge aims to

establish socio-economic rights as generating negative

14 This is a very minimal threshold, and I certainly agree with Poggethat “genuine democracy requires much more.” (AD, 249) But thisthreshold still embodies the “logic of equality” that is oftenassociated with democracy. The term comes from Robert Dahl’s On Democracy(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 10.15 Cf. TPC ,231-232. Both the non-ideal focus and the idea of democraticlegitimacy distinguish my view from Rawls’ Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1999). I put aside here the Rawls-Poggedebate, since Pogge’s institutional conception is explicitly meant to bemore minimalist than (without forsaking) the global egalitarianism hehas defended against Rawls.

13

duties, that is, duties that do not go against “the grain of

the Anglo-American moral and legal tradition, in which it is

often denied that persons have duties to protect and aid

other persons in distress.”16 In particular, the socio-

economic rights stipulated in the Universal Deceleration of Human

Rights (UDHR), including the rights to “social security, rest

and leisure, adequate standard of living [and] education,”

are often seen as triggering only positive duties. Pogge

believes that is why these rights are often dismissed

(especially by those of libertarian sensitivities) as a

vague moral ambition rather than a binding requirement -

mere “manifesto rights”17 that cannot be legitimately

enforced. Accordingly, a key component of Pogge’s

philosophical project since the 1980s has been to show that

socio-economic rights rest on “persons’ negative claim not to

be made victims of unjust institutions.”18

In order for this statement to hold and ground a call

for global reform, Pogge must establish the following three

16 RR, 34.17 WPHR, 64.18 RR, 34.

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claims: (1) that persons have negative rather than positive

duties to enact and comply with just institutions; (2) that

there is a morally significant analogy between domestic and

global institutions; and (3) that there is a minimalist

standard of fairness according to which current global

institutions can be deemed unjust.

Pogge argues that persons have negative duties to enact

and support just institutions since the full content of

individual rights and duties cannot be known solely through

rules of personal conduct, apart from institutions. If

politics means asking “who gets what, when, how,”19 rules of

conduct alone cannot give the answer: individual ethics

cannot solve the distribution and coordination problems of

the public realm.

The categorical imperative (CI) demonstrates the

difficulty: it might be a valuable guide for interactions

among individuals, but it is not a useful political guide. It

is “not unfair,” Pogge believes, to attribute to Kant’s

ethics the “rather naïve hope” that “if only everyone could

19 This is Harold Laswell’s classic definition. See his Politics:Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw Hill, 1936).

15

be brought to make individual practical decisions in terms

of the categorical imperative, the problem of social justice

would take care of itself.”20 The CI can secure the ethical

behavior of each individual, but this does not mean securing

political justice. This is true not only because

distributive political questions remain even when all

individuals act out of duty, but also because the scope of

individual freedom that all must respect remains undefined:

“the moral law underdetermines the realm of ends.”21

However, according to Pogge’s reading, Kant’s political

writings, in particular the Metaphysics of Morals, avoid the

problematic thought that political justice can be reduced to

aggregate ethics. Kant is cognizant here that political

disputes will remain, “however well disposed and law-abiding

men might be”22 in the private realm. This recognition

generates the idea that institutions are indispensable: even

if I wish to act for the sake of duty and fully respect your

rights, I do not know how to do this outside of an

institutional framework specifying what your full rights are

20 KI, 58.21 KEM, 378.

16

and what are my correlative duties. Pogge can therefore

deduce from Kant’s political writings, first, that “morality

can be realized only in a juridical state;”23 and second,

that this realization is a matter of negative rather than

positive duty: we clearly “need shared institutions to avoid

invading one another’s freedom. And we [therefore] have a

negative duty to comply with such existing institutions,

whenever non-compliance can succeed only if like non-

compliance by others is constrained.”24

Once individuals have a negative rather than positive

duty towards institutions, they also become right-bearers –

and therefore also bearers of negative duties to respect

rights - by virtue of cooperating with others under a shared

coercive institutional order. For Pogge this means that

human rights represent “moral claims on the organization of one’s

society.” By asserting a human right to X, one is asserting

that

any society or other social system, insofar as this isreasonably possible, ought to be so (re)organized thatall its members have secure access to X, with

17

“security” always understood as especially sensitive toperson’s risk of being denied X or deprived of Xofficially: by the government or its agents orofficials. Avoiding security of access, beyond certainplausibly attainable thresholds, constitutes officialdisrespect and stains the society’s human-rightsrecord.25

The second step consists of applying this institutional

understanding of rights and correlative duties to the global

level. Unsurprisingly, this step is inspired by Kantian

22 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Mary Gregor (trans., ed.),Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),6:312, §44.Other Kant works used here are:Common Saying = “On the common saying: that may be correct in theory,but it is of no use in practice,” in Gregor, Kant’s Practical Philosophy, 273-309; G = “Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals,” in Gregor, Kant’s PracticalPhilosophy, 37-108;Idea = “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” inH.S Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991), 41-53;KPV = Critique of Practical Reason, trans. ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997);KU = Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer andEric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);Enlightenment = “What is Enlightenment,” in Gregor, Kant’s Practical Philosophy,15-24;Peace = “Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch,” in Gregor, Kant’sPractical Philosophy, 311-351. 23 KEM, 379. Pogge’s choice to rely on Kant’s political theory overKant’s ethics is evident for example in his argument that Kant’sRechtslehre does not depend on his transcendental idealism. See IKR.24 WPHR, 137. All italics are mine unless noted otherwise.25 WPHR, 64. I put aside in my analysis below the concept of “officialdisrespect,” also since Pogge himself has recently emphasized that thisterm is used merely to make “a linguistic point about how the concept ofhuman rights is generally understood, and not a substantive point aboutthe relative severity of various crimes.” TPC, 197.

18

cosmopolitanism. Explicitly evoking Kant’s terms, Pogge

asserts that as long as “humankind does not enter a

‘universal cosmopolitan condition’, does not organize itself

into a ‘moral whole’…it shall not be moralized.”26 It

follows that the institutional understanding of human rights

cannot be territorially limited – that “persons share

responsibility for official disrespect of human rights

within any coercive institutional order they are involved in

upholding.”27 Empirically, this insistence generates claims

about global justice since Pogge considers it evident that a

coercive institutional global order exists: “it is

undeniable that, today and in the foreseeable future, there

is a global institutional order that importantly affects the

options and incentives societies and their rulers face in

their relations with one another and even affects profoundly

the domestic institutions and cultures of especially the

smaller and weaker societies.”28

26 KEM, 380, quoting Idea, 8:28, 8:21, 8:26, respectively. 27 WPHR, 64.28 IC, 1751-1752.

19

The third and last step relies on the preceding claims

to evaluate the present global institutional order as

manifestly unjust. Pogge targets global regulations and

organizations, from the WTO through the World Bank and IMF

to the G8, as the main foundations of this order, and also

as the main culprits skewing it in favor of the global rich

against the global poor, in ways ranging from the rules

allocating control over national resources (discussed below)

to “quotas, tariffs, anti-dumping duties, export credits,

and huge subsidies to domestic producers…that poor countries

are not permitted, or cannot afford, to match.”29 These and

other global institutions lock poor nations into a

devastating bargaining power disadvantage. Pogge judges this

to be criminal unfairness on the part of the imposing

affluent nations, seeing it as a key contributor to the

problem of extreme poverty. Global institutions, he insists,

limit, in a clear and foreseeable way, the poor’s access to

the provisions of the UDHR, thus sharing much of the blame

for the poverty-related death toll that “matches, every

three years, the entire death toll of World War II,

20

concentration camps and gulags included.”30 Pogge is adamant

we can design a different institutional order that will

generate very different outcomes for the global poor, and

secure their access to UDHR provisions, merely through

“minor modifications in the global order that would entail

at most slight reductions in the incomes of the affluent.”31

By failing to do so, we monumentally violate our negative

duty of justice.

29 SPH, 44.30 SPH, 30.31 SPH, 30.

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1.2 Missing rigorist features

Having sketched Pogge’s conception of negative duties, I

turn to challenge this conception in two main stages. In

this sub-section I temporarily assume that Pogge’s

derivation of his variant of negative duties succeeds, and

question the value of this success. In the next section I

will argue that the derivation itself does not succeed.

Let us begin with what Pogge’s argument fails to

achieve. Pogge’s account fails to maintain the distinctive

features of negative duties which generate their strategic

advantages. More specifically, Pogge deprives negative

duties of their distinctiveness by depriving them of their

rigorism. Rigorism disappears since Pogge’s negative duties

are not agent-oriented but outcome-oriented.

To evince the impact of this shift, let us compare two

domestic economic cases. One is a familiar negative duty -

the agent-oriented duty not to steal. The other is the

outcome-oriented responsibility that democratic citizens

have, to design the basic structure of their society in a

way that will ensure their fellow citizens’ access to

22

certain material goods. Pogge argues that the latter

responsibility as well must be conceived as a negative duty.32

Yet this responsibility, being outcome rather than agent-

centered, lacks at least four rigorist features that give

negative duties particular weight.

First, one could argue that negative duties derive much

of their distinctiveness from being agent-specific in a way

that isolates each of their bearers from others’ conduct.

One’s negative duty holds independently of what anyone else

may or may not do. But, examining our two examples, we find

that only the rigorist duty not to steal is agent-specific;

the responsibility to design a just basic structure is not.

Second, if each agent bearing negative duties can satisfy

them independently of others’ behavior, then the duty must

be action-specific. This feature as well applies only to the

duty not to steal, not to the institutional

responsibility.33 Jack knows exactly what he must (not) do

in order to avoid stealing from Jill. But no specific action

32 In explicit contrast to Rawls. Cf. AWV. 33 This is not to deny that certain positive duties can also be agent-specific. I believe it is largely the combination of the four features that makes negative duties distinct.

23

on his part can guarantee political institutions that will

provide Jill with access to material goods.34

Third, concurrently, negative duties also derive much

of their force from being finite. Jack knows he has satisfied

his negative duty once he has avoided theft, regardless of

how others behave. But the responsibility to design

institutions that secure access to resources cannot be

nearly as finite: an endless number of events outside of

Jack’s control may alter institutional conditions and

specifically Jill’s access. Under Pogge’s view, such

alterations can make a fulfilled negative duty unfulfilled:

since the institutional responsibility is to ensure a

certain outcome, once the outcome is not present the

responsibility is not satisfied. Yet it makes little sense

to say that a satisfied negative duty can become unfulfilled

because of anything other than the responsible agent’s

actions. That other citizens voted to abolish progressive

34 There is also a lasting indeterminacy here regarding the precise formof institutions. If a society secures for its members a formally equalopportunity to attain all of the UHDR provisions, but does not activelyprovide them, is it really a “human rights violator?” Did the economicpolicy of the pre-New-Deal United States violate human rights (meaningthat all citizens could legitimately disobey government?)

24

taxation, or that a natural disaster has struck (a non-

institutional factor that Pogge’s view arguably cannot

conceptualize),35 may change Jill’s economic fortunes, but

this cannot plausibly change the status of Jack’s negative

duty towards her, assuming he did not change his conduct. We

would ordinarily think that whether Jack satisfies his

negative duty towards Jill cannot depend on what outcomes

Jill enjoys: this question depends only on whether or not

Jack himself is harming Jill (here by stealing from her).

Negative duties are especially strong also because only the

responsible agent can influence their status.36

35 Indeed, our moral intuitions might point us to assist others at leastwhen their very existence is in danger even following a completely non-institutional cause – due to a massive scale earth quake in Haiti, forinstance. David Miller also makes this point in the introduction to hisNational Responsibilities and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2007). Pogge might respond that a major part of Haiti’s tragedy followsfrom earlier institutional factors which carry much responsibility forthe country’s abysmal poverty, and that we should shift attention from“assistance ex post [to] (often more cost-effective) prevention ex ante;”(AWV) but this past-looking perspective still does not fully answer avery concrete challenge in the present. 36 Someone might object that under conditions of extreme scarcity (for instance, a small desert community with heavily constrained water supply), others’ use of the scarce resources does influence my negative duties by shaping the constraints on my actions. But rather than debating whether “leaving enough and as good” for others can really be defined as a negative duty, I simply make here the standard Rawlsian assumption of conditions of moderate scarcity. See Rawls, A theory of justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, revised edition, 1999), 110.

25

Finally, one could argue that negative duties are

particularly powerful because they are binary. I either

satisfied my negative duty entirely or not at all: I

attacked you or I did not. I cannot “semi-assault” anyone.

Jack either steals from Jill or he does not. There is no

“middle category” here. The institutional responsibility, in

contrast, is a continuum rather than a binary matter - it

can allow for gradations in a way that a standard negative

duty cannot. Jack’s institutional responsibility of justice

towards Jill can be partially fulfilled.37

These rigorist points should already cast doubt on

Pogge’s effort to employ the superior force of negative

duties. Even if Pogge’s derivation of his duties succeeds,

he still cannot achieve what he needs to achieve.38 But in

order to fully address Pogge’s negative duties, one must

37 To give the most important example, an institutional order can be legitimate even if it is not fully just. Distributive justice might require robustly egalitarian arrangements, but a distribution that guarantees, for instance, a minimal “safety-net” can be legitimate (alsobecause it stems from a legitimate democratic procedure) even when it isfar from full justice. Furthermore, such a legitimate-yet-unjust order still imposes strong negative duties on individual agents: its legitimacy still binds individual agents not to violate the property rights it defines.

26

also analyze their derivation - the logic grounding them. I

now turn to argue that this logic does not hold.

1.3 Does Pogge’s logic work?

Pogge’s logic, as the presentation above indicates, hinges

on the claim that agents cannot know crucial parts of their

rights and correlative negative duties without shared

institutions. I wish to dispute the relevance of this claim

for global institutions.39

One important problem with the claim follows from the

core value of normative individualism, to which Pogge, like

all liberals, is committed.40 If what we want of

institutions is to specify (and enforce) the full range of

individuals’ rights and duties, and if this is what domestic

38 Though it should be obvious that I am not denying that institutional responsibilities can be weighty. Consider an example Pogge has been using repeatedly – the institutional responsibility of white citizens for the perpetuation of slavery (Cf. RR, 27). I fully agree with Pogge that I am deeply morally blameworthy not only if I personally hold slaves, but also if I am a sovereign member of a society whose laws explicitly defend slavery. In the latter case I am failing to satisfy what might be called my sovereign responsibility. But why not say that this failure of mine is simply a failure to fulfill a particularly urgent positive duty? Or perhaps even say that institutional responsibilities, unlike interactional duties, cannot be neatly conceptualized through the positive/negative distinction (even while the sovereign body politic as a unitary agent can have clear “positive” and “negative” duties externally)?

27

institutions do, why do we need global institutions? Or, at

the very least, why do we need to assume a direct analogy

between the functions of domestic and global institutions?

If domestic institutions already “take care” of individuals’

needs, we simply do not need robust global ones.41

Now, a Poggean response might be that just as we need a

domestic institutional order to know the rights and duties

of individuals operating within it, so we need a global

institutional order to know the rights and duties of states

operating within it. I suspect that such a response cannot

39 I note only parenthetically that libertarians – an important audiencefor Pogge – will dispute the claim already for domestic politics. Since Pogge does not directly engage the idea of individual self-ownership, libertarians can deem his position question-begging. From a libertarian perspective all rights and correlative duties are essentially pre-political and known prior to political institutions. It therefore remains unclear how self-owners should be understood as having negative duties towards any political institutions. I do not pursue this point further since I have no intention of defending libertarianism. As the argument will show in a moment, unlike libertarians I believe there is aclear difference between bodily rights that are pre-political and property rights that must be seen as positive, the result of regulation by the body politic. 40 For instance in his many criticisms of Rawls for failing to haveindividuals as parties to the global original position. Cf. IC, 1745. 41 To be sure, we are likely to call on those societies that securetheir members’ rights and duties to assist those burdened societies whofail to do so. But such a Rawlsian “duty of assistance,” being adistinctly positive one, is clearly not what Pogge wants to achieve. Forthis point in the context of Pogge’s debate with Rawls see my “A Poggeanpassport for fairness? Why Rawls’ Theory of Justice did not become global,”Ethics & Global Politics 3 (2010), at 289-290.

28

be reconciled with normative individualism. But even putting

this aside, the analogy does not hold. The main reason is

the different role that sovereignty plays at the domestic

and the global level. I agree with Pogge that sovereign

institutions are required to specify the full range of

individuals’ rights and correlative duties, particularly

when it comes to questions of property that are obviously a

central concern here; a sovereign body politic is indeed

required to define citizens’ property rights. Yet

sovereignty itself represents a claim to property, in at

least three ways that generate a disanalogy between the

domestic and the global.

First, if it is the task of sovereign institutions to

specify the scope and content of citizens’ property rights,

then the sovereign body politic itself must be seen as

having prior ownership of the resources within its

jurisdiction.42 Second, this jurisdiction must remain

territorially limited. Pogge argues that we can imagine

different modes of sovereignty than those that exist today –

for instance dispersing sovereignty both below and above the

29

level of current states.43 Yet as long as Pogge (like the

vast majority of cosmopolitans) does not defend world

government, there can be no global enforcer, and without

such enforcer, separate sovereign powers must remain,

protecting separate territories – that is, separate

properties.44 Third, the property rights embodied in state

sovereignty can be known prior to global institutions since

they are similar in an important sense to individuals’

bodily rights. We clearly do not need institutions to know

that persons have an exclusive right over their body.

Infringements upon bodily integrity constitute a human

right violation - a right that all human beings have qua

human beings, independently of any institutions they may or

may not share.45 Analogously, states’ rights to territorial

integrity precede global institutions. A body-politic does

not need to share global institutions with another sovereign

community to know that the other community has the right not

to be involuntarily deprived of its territory or the

resources it contains.

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This connection between property and sovereignty will

later prove crucial in a very direct manner, but at this

point I wish to highlight the fact sovereignty matters also

in a broader sense, relating to democratic global

responsibility as a whole. Domestically, sovereign

responsibility is active and collective: citizens

collectively specify and enforce the full range of their

rights and duties as subjects. Globally, however, sovereign

responsibility is predominantly passive and individual, a

negative duty of forbearance on the part of a unitary agent,

to avoid impinging upon the autonomy of another such

agent.46 The core of global politics is currently, and is

likely to remain in the enduring lack of a global sovereign,

international politics, that is, a web of bilateral interactions between

unitary agents.

Concrete examples of this picture follow, but I should

first note why this picture is so significant. If it is

accurate, then in order to discern global “harm” we ought to

take precisely the Kantian step that Pogge has argued we

should not take: to disaggregate core political questions of

31

global justice into separate questions of individual

morality. We need to break down global problems into the

separate ethical behavior of each agent, with the relevant

agent being not individuals but democratic states. Such

breakdown would mean returning to rigorist duties – ones that42 I take this to be Rousseau’s view. See my “Democraticdisengagement: towards Rousseauian global reform,”International Theory 3 (2011): 355-389. The equation of jurisdictionwith ownership might seem problematic to those who believe, like AllenBuchanan for example, that we must distinguish “between the people’srelationship to public land (a relationship of property ownership) andtheir relationship to the whole territory of the state (which includesprivate as well as public land).” But original public ownership isperfectly compatible with the liberal belief, also noted by Buchanan,that “any just society will have a prominent place for privateproperty,” as a necessary outcome of the body politic’s commitment torespect and promote individual autonomy. I do not develop this pointfurther since I take Pogge’s view here to be essentially the same. SeeBuchanan, “The making and unmaking of boundaries: what liberalism has tosay,” in Allen Buchanan and Margaret Moore (eds.,) States, nations, and borders(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 231-261, at 233-234.43 As Pogge suggests in CS.44 A point emphasized in Leif Wenar, “Why Rawls is Not a CosmopolitanEgalitarian,” in Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (ed.), Rawls’ Law of Peoples: ARealistic Utopia? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 108. While the rigoristposition shares much with Wenar’s view of international affairs, Wenarexplicitly rejects the idea of democracy as a standard of legitimacy,and also focuses on problems in Pogge that I find less essential, suchas the impossibility of withdrawal from an institutional order, which Iargue may apply to individuals but not necessarily to states. See Wenar,“Realistic reform of international trade in resources,” in Jagger, Poggeand His critics, and my “Conceptualizing the curse: Two views on ourresponsibility for the resource curse,” Ethics & Global Politics 4 (2011): 103-124. 45 If I assault you on a desert island I violate your human rights evenif we do not share any institutions at all. On this point see alsoBuchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination, 97. Note that this meansthat the idea that rights ground institutions and not nice versa cannotbe completely discounted, as Pogge himself has come to concede. Cf. RTC,65-66.

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are not outcome but agent-centered. This return, I now turn

to argue through the examples, is the only way to employ the

distinct global force of negative duties.

1.4 Global negative duties as aggregate ethics

Negative duties cannot exist unless specific agents are

identified as responsible for specific harms. In

international affairs, states are held responsible as

unitary agents for harms they cause, and this responsibility

is rigorist, agent-oriented and independent of global

institutions. War represents the most classic example. When

country X invades country Y with predatory intent, it

violates not Pogge’s version of negative duties, but a

classic rigorist duty not to harm another specific agent.

There is no need for overarching global institutions to

define such an act as “harm.”47 But Pogge’s outcome-oriented

duties cannot feature either when third party responsibility

is considered. If country X is invading country Y, with

46 This does not exclude the idea that tangible threats to the“existential minimum” abroad may generate positive duties, as discussedbelow.

33

country Z doing nothing to help the victim, there might be a

moral failure here on the part of Z, but it cannot be

understood in terms of negative duties, even if the new

global order resulting from the aggression is indeed less

just. The worsening of the global state of affairs cannot

imply a negative-duties problem for the sovereign citizens

of country Z. It is simply not their government that is the

culprit. Not only as multiple individuals, but also as a

unitary agent, they did not act aggressively. They might be

violating a positive but not a negative duty: they are

failing to help, but they are not harming.

Yet Pogge’s account encounters difficulties even if it

is one’s own government which is harming. Even here, Pogge’s

conclusion would still be different from “forbearance.”

Imagine you are a citizen of a democratic country that,

during the 1980s, had decided to boycott the Apartheid

regime, simply in order not to be complicit in any way in

the survival of a morally abominable government in South

Africa. Most would think that this step should satisfy any

and all possible negative duties. The citizens of the

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boycotting country, as a collective agent, have decided to

withdraw any form of support for a clearly illegitimate

regime; therefore they can no longer be held accountable for

its presence. Pogge can respond to this scenario in two

ways. First, he can accept such a boycott as satisfying

negative duties. But this means accepting a rigorist duty of

forbearance, one that is agent rather than outcome-oriented.

This duty says nothing about changing outcomes – it does not

require changing other agents’ behavior, broader

institutions, or the victim’s condition.

47 The ongoing debate regarding the need for overarching institutions insuch cases has to do solely with enforcement bodies needed to prevent orcorrect harms, not with identifying certain acts as harms. Cf. AllenBuchanan and Robert Keohane’s “The Preventive Use of Force: ACosmopolitan Institutional Proposal,” Ethics and International Affairs 18 (2004):1-22. Existing enforcement bodies like NATO, in turn, can clearly beseen as a web of bilateral contracts multiplied through formalinstitutions simply for the sake of efficiency (reducing transactioncosts for example). A point in many ways granted even by the mostardent believers in the force of international institutions. See RobertO. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist theory,”International Security 20 (1995): 39-51. Note also that the fact thatinternational organizations generate their own dynamics and derivativeorganizations that exceed national borders does not really showotherwise. For this claim see Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, “ExtraRempublicam Nulla Justitia?,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 34 (2006): 147–75. Itis contrasted by realists who insist – rather plausibly – thatinternational organizations depend on powerful states and have nomeaningful existence independently of the balance of power. Cf. JohnMearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,”International Security 19 (1994): 5-49.

35

Alternatively, Pogge may insist that the boycotting

country does not yet comply with its negative duties. But

then his approach seems, yet again, too open-ended. It fails

to capture the powerful moral intuition, according to which

if an agent ceases to violate the rights of another (and,

where applicable, offers due compensation), its negative

duty not to harm is satisfied, independently of any broader

change. It might certainly be possible to establish that

democracies have a duty to contribute to the reform of

regimes they already boycott. But such a duty simply cannot

be defined as a negative one. Insofar as Pogge wants to

appeal only to negative duties, a rigorist duty to disengage

from illegitimate regimes will have to do.

Now, Pogge might grant the above points when it comes

to issues like war and peace or particular cases like the

Apartheid, yet insist on the necessity of his brand of

negative duties when it comes to global trade. But if a

society’s negative duty can only be to avoid certain actions

rather than to bring about a state of affairs, this

insistence as well is unconvincing. Trade can be seen as a

36

morally neutral possibility, not as a subject of justice.

Country X does not have a “negative duty” to trade with

country Y, just like you do not have a “negative duty” to

trade with your neighbor. Threatening your neighbor will be

violating negative duties, yet global trade, in Michael

Blake’s words, “is a matter of offers, not of threats.”48

Pogge will object that many of the patterns of current

global trade do amount to threats. If you make to your

neighbor “an offer he cannot refuse” then you are

threatening him in a morally damning way, and this, Pogge

argues, is what affluent countries do vis-à-vis the poor

nations, for instance when it comes to WTO rules:

Poor countries need trade for development. They do notget fair trading opportunities under the WTO regime; but onethat failed to sign up would find its tradingopportunities even more severely curtailed. Any poorcountry is forced to decide about whether to sign up tothe WTO rules against the background of other rulesthat it cannot escape that make it extremely costly notto sign up. One such rule is, for instance, that thepeople and firms of poor countries may not freely offertheir products and services to people in rich countries[while] the property rights of rich countrycorporations must be respected and enforced…poor-country governments must help collect rents for [the

48 Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,”Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 292.

37

rich] corporations, thereby driving up the cost ofpharmaceuticals and foodstuffs for their ownpopulations…this calamity is due to a rule that therich countries impose unilaterally.49

There is surely much truth in this depiction of global

trade. Yet however accurate factually, this picture, once

more, cannot give rise to negative duties in any

recognizable sense. The expressions “fair trading

opportunities” and “unilateral imposition” show why. Had

there been a single sovereign community unilaterally

imposing the WTO rules on the world’s deprived, the claim

from negative duties might begin to seem more plausible. But

given international anarchy, there can be no such single

imposer, and therefore no agent-centered duty.50

Mirroring the domestic criticism offered above, we can

add that all of the other features that distinguish negative

duties are absent as well, given that “fair trade” for Pogge

must “secure” for the world’s poor access to the items

listed in the UDHR. The duty to reform global trade to as to

49 SPH, 43. 50 In this context see also the exchange between Wenar and Pogge on the question of international anarchy: Wenar, Realistic reform, 131; TPC, 222.

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fulfill the UDHR criteria for the world’s deprived is not

action-specific, not finite, and not binary.

Given the huge number of agents that take part in the

global institutional order, the institutional responsibility

here is not action-specific, since no particular

modification of the global order, surely not by any single

agent operating alone, can directly ensure the required

state of affairs. Pogge, as noted above, insists that minor

modifications in the global order would suffice to fulfill

the rights enumerated in the UDHR. Yet several critics

continue to maintain that there is little empirical backing

for this claim, in particular because it cannot be shown

that global reforms would suffice to induce domestic

political change.51 Furthermore, with a billion persons

starving around the world,52 the gap between UDHR standards

51 Cf. Patten, Helping the Poor, and even more so Cohen, Philosophy, SocialScience, Global Poverty. The problem here is philosophical, not just empirical.As Wenar emphasizes, “in order to carry through on his harm argument,Pogge must show not only that current global rules generate very badconsequences, but that we can be fairly certain that different ruleswould do better.” Wenar, Realistic reform, 127. 52 See “Food Production Must Double by 2050 to Meet Demand From World’s Growing Population,” UN General Assembly Press Release, October 9, 2009, at http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/gaef3242.doc.htm; Pogge, Severe Poverty, 30.

39

and current conditions is so enormous that it is far from

clear that any specific agent can do nearly “enough,” can

reach by itself the goal Pogge sets, of halving extreme

poverty by changing its core causes. Finally, the very

possibility of gradations here shows why the institutional

responsibility cannot be binary. None of this is to say that

many of the reforms Pogge advocates – for instance regarding

the aforementioned trade quotas, tariffs and subsidies –

should not be undertaken with the hope for better outcomes

for the poor. But, given all the above, such reforms are

much more appropriately seen as positive rather than

negative duties.

Let us take stock. We have seen that unlike Pogge’s

view, the rigorist position captures the distinctive

features of negative duties. We have also seen why global

negative duties must be rigorist. This rigorism lays the

basis for disaggregating global politics, as a web of

bilateral ties, into the distinct interactions of specific

states. Now we need to ask what global reform ought to stem

40

from the rigorist view of global politics as aggregate

ethics.

2. Rigorist reform: national property and global theft

I argue that dramatic global change can and should be

grounded in rigorist duties. Such change does not require

overhauling global institutions. Rather, it consists of

affirming in practice a specific right already recognized

formally in existing international institutions – a people’s

right to control the resources found within its territory.

This right is founded on sovereign property in the most

direct, literal sense.

The idea that the people legitimately own their state’s

resources, including its revenue, its territory and the

natural resources this territory contains, is pivotal for

the basic norms of global politics.53 These norms also fit

simple common judgment: we often say that certain goods and

territories rightly “belong” to this or that nation, and

when we do so, we necessarily speak in the language of

national ownership. Three points follow.

41

First, national resources cannot be legitimately taken

through violence by anyone – not by foreigners but also not

by rulers. National resources belong to the people, not to those who wield

effective power. Unless the body politic legitimately – that

is, democratically – transfers ownership over its resources

to individual agents, these resources may not be taken from

it. Bashar al-Assad for instance cannot acquire ownership in

the oil of the Syrian people simply because he has enough

tanks, any more than I can acquire ownership in your house

simply because I manage to keep you out of it. Such cases

present not legitimate sale and ownership but theft, if not

armed robbery.

Second, there are significant negative duties imposed

here on purchasers. If I sell the house I robbed from you to

a millionaire who knows I have no valid title to the house,

the millionaire, just like me, is violating a negative duty

– in his case not to be materially complicit in theft.

Third, both the robbery and the complicity can be understood

as rigorist problems. These are violations of a truly

negative duty, one that can be satisfied independently of

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how other agents behave exactly because it is agent-

specific, action-specific, finite, and binary.

That is why it is especially important for our purposes

that complicity in theft of other peoples’ resources is

crucial to Pogge’s own indictment of the global economic

order. Key to this indictment is the claim that while

national property rights are recognized on paper, they are

systemically violated in practice. Governments worldwide

confer a “resource privilege” on every regime they

officially recognize, which “includes the power to effect

legally valid transfers of ownership rights,” producing a

stark contradiction with any tenable understanding of state

property as owned by the people:

A group that overpowers the guards and takes control ofa warehouse may be able to give some of the merchandise

53 Cf. Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and PoliticalRights:“1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of thatright they freely determine their political status and freely pursuetheir economic, social and cultural development. 2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their naturalwealth and resources. . .”For the full text see http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htmNote also that while the above problem of fair trade hinges oninstitutions which poor nations “cannot escape,” the right of nationalownership of resources is one that the world’s poor, in many casesliterally, fought for, as essential to casting away colonial yoke. SeeWenar, Realistic Reform, 129-130.

43

to others, accepting money in exchange. But the fencewho pays them becomes merely the possessor, not theowner, of the loot. Contrast this with a group thatoverpowers an elected government and takes control of acountry. Such a group, too, can give away some of thecountry’s natural resources, accepting money inexchange. In this case, however, the purchaser acquiresnot merely possession, but all the rights and libertiesof ownership, which are supposed to be — and actuallyare — protected and enforced by all other states’courts and police forces.54

This, however, is not just a global problem. It is also,

fundamentally, our problem. As Pogge put it even more

recently:

We authorize our firms to acquire natural resourcesfrom tyrants and we protect their property rights inresources so acquired. We purchase what our firmsproduce out of such resources and thereby encouragethem to act as authorized. In these ways we recognizethe authority of tyrants to sell the natural resourcesof the countries they rule…How [for instance] can therebe a moral difference between paying the Saudi clan orGeneral Sani Abacha…and stealing the oil outright?55

We, through our elected governments, therefore harm other

nations by illicitly trading in what belongs to them. This

charge is simple and powerful. Yet there is no need to base

it on Pogge’s variant of negative duties. Rather, the charge

54 RVI, 737.

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can and should be completely grounded in rigorism: each body

politic as a unitary agent has a duty not to be complicit in

theft from another. Each affluent democracy ought to outlaw

such illicit trade within its jurisdiction – boycotting,

refusing to recognize dictators as legitimate in selling

their peoples’ resources. This duty holds independently of the

behavior of other democracies, or the hopes for reform of

the boycotted regimes. One ought not to steal, independently

of the prospects for improvement in the victim’s condition,

and even if others continue stealing. The normative

rationale here therefore comes exactly from the Kantian

rigorism that Pogge marginalizes: the conviction that there

is inherent moral value in doing what is right for the sake

55 World Poverty and Human Rights, Second edition (London: Polity Press, 2008), 142, 148. As Jiwei Ci notes, Pogge is not explicit on whether themain institutional division is economic or political (Ci, “What negativeduties,” in Jagger, Pogge and his critics, 88-89), and this quote also brings out a part of the tension between these dimensions. If the main divisionis economic, and if eradicating poverty is the top priority, then it is rather clear that cooperation with “distributive dictatorships” like theSaudi one should continue, regardless of the fact that the “Saudi clan” lacks the democracy which Pogge himself asserts as a standard of legitimacy. If, alternatively, the main division is political, then the fact that Saudi Arabia is very likely to become poor following a boycottstill should not allow the Royal Family to maintain its trading privileges. Since my focus here is more conceptual, I do not pursue thisproblem further.

45

of duty, even when all others continue to do what is wrong.

This is the basis of global rigorist reform.

3. The advantages of global rigorism

There are several normative, empirical and strategic

advantages (joining the arguments already made) to thinking

about global reform in rigorist rather than in Pogge’s

terms. First, normatively, the insistence throughout that

rigorist negative duties are far weightier than

institutional responsibilities receives here concrete

expression, in the comparison between the problem of fair

trade and that of illicit trade. Negotiating unfairly might

be wrong, yet, Bertolt Brecht notwithstanding, material

complicity in theft – at times even armed robbery – is

surely much worse.56 This intuitive distinction is

strengthened by the fact that while the theft allegation can

reasonably be met independently of the fairness problem, the

opposite is not true. It can make sense to stop our

56 Brecht’s MacHeath asks rhetorically “Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?” Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera(trans. Non Worrall, Nick Worrall, London: Methuen, 2005).

46

complicity in the theft of national resources, by

prohibiting our corporations from trading with those regimes

that clearly rob their population’s resources, even without

a renegotiation of WTO and IMF regulations, for instance;

but it makes little sense to reform these regulations while

at the same time continuing trade with regimes that only use

it to get richer at their population’s expense. Whatever

“fairness” in global trade might mean, the moral imperative

for each democracy to amend its own particular interactions

is clearly more immediate: “the priority in reforming global

commerce,” as Leif Wenar eloquently writes, “is not to

replace “free trade” with “fair trade.” The priority is to

create trade where now there is theft.”57 Continuing this

theft while pursuing fair trade reform is akin to providing

water drops to the deprived with one hand while taking their

oceans with the other.58

57 Wenar, “Property rights and the resource curse,” Philosophy & Public Affairs36 (2008): 2. 58 This image is inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Autumn of the Patriarch,reaching a fantastic crescendo when the United States takes from thearchetype Caribbean dictator the Caribbean sea "in numbered pieces toplant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, theytook it away with everything it had inside…with the reflection of ourcities, our timid drowned people...” Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch(trans. Gregory Rabassa, New York: Harper and Raw, 1976).

47

To demonstrate the problem of global theft and robbery

and justify these strong terms, it might be useful to

consider some all-too-vivid empirical examples. Theft is

evident even in supposedly “benign” dictatorships: consider

Egypt, where the people are still looking for the fortune

that the now-deposed Mubarak has stashed in Western bank

accounts, or Russia, regarding which only the foreign press

is free to report that (even under a conservative estimate

that has by all likelihood been exceeded already) strongman

Vladimir Putin’s holdings are worth $40 billion, unlikely to

result solely from prudent investment policies.59 Yet our

complicity in such massive scale theft is even worse when

considering how it has been intimately connected, in other

countries, to some of the most horrific political conditions

imaginable. Consider children abducted from schools by the

tens of thousands to serve as slaves picking Uzbekistan’s

“white gold;”60 child-soldiers shooting and amputating the

48

local population away from Sierra Leone’s diamond fields;

Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, richer than the queen of

England, buying personal jets with oil revenue ensured by

Western corporations while three quarters of his population

is living on less than a dollar a day; the most dreadful

atrocities in Darfur, funded by the same “black gold” going

to the same corporations; or “Africa’s world war” in the

Congo, where women are raped with bayonets and clubs by

militiamen who kill more than a thousand people every day,

“fighting over the minerals used to make chips for cell

phones and laptops.”61

In all of these cases, so badly stricken by the man-

made “resource curse,” our violation of basic rigorist

duties is dramatically tangible. And the conviction that

this problem should be the focus of our efforts is

strengthened, not weakened, by its sheer scale. Employing

59 See Luke Harding, “Putin, the Kremlin Power Struggle and the $40bnFortune,” The Guardian, December 21, 2007.<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/21/russia.topstories3>60 Nick Mathiason, “Uzbekistan forced to stop child labour,” Guardian, May24 2009 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/24/retail-ethicalbusiness61 Wenar, Property Rights, 6. See also my “Humanitarian disintervention,”Journal of Global Ethics 7 (2011): 31-44.

49

only the worst category of the Freedom House index to

designate the regimes that clearly steal their population’s

resources, and looking solely at oil imports into the United

States, Wenar finds that

international corporations illicitly transport into theUnited States over 600 million barrels of oil eachyear. This is 12.7 percent of U.S. oil imports: morethan one barrel in eight. Most of this petroleum isrefined into gasoline and diesel; the rest is used inmaking a vast range of consumer products from clothing,cosmetics, and medicines to toys, asphalt, and ink.Even under empirical assumptions that are favorable tothe international resource corporations, and evenwithin a very permissive construal of the legal rules,it is beyond doubt that there is a massive flow ofstolen goods into the United States every year.62

Now, Pogge would of course endorse a strong commitment to

change this condition. Yet focusing on such a commitment –

as we should do on rigorist grounds – would seriously

marginalize Poggean duties not only philosophically, but

also practically.

First, to continue with the empirical dimension,

assuming that the urgency of each democracy tending to its

own complicity in oppressors’ theft is recognized, it is not

clear how much room is left for the kind of reform generated

62 Wenar, Property Rights, 25.

50

by Pogge’s distinct brand of negative duties. The impact of

the elimination of protectionist trade barriers,63 for

instance, might very well be eclipsed by a democratic

decision to boycott robbing regimes worldwide. Second, the

rigorist reform manages to bracket the empirical challenge

repeatedly posed to Pogge, as to whether the changes he

advocates will really induce domestic change in the scale to

which he aspires. Under the rigorist view this problem does

not arise, since the motivation for undertaking reform is

fundamentally inward-looking: the demand is to stop stealing

simply because stealing is wrong.64 This demand no longer

hinges on the ability to change others’ condition.

These differences also shift the reform’s strategic

focus. First, the rigorist alternative produces a call for

drastic change on the basis of premises that statists can

accept. Usually, the more “statist” one is in the global

63 For the dispute on this impact see TPC, 182-184. 64 The common sense of even a “child of eight years old,” as Kantinsists in the Common Saying, shows that stealing the deposit of adeceased man is wrong even when one is in dire need and the deceased’sheirs are “rich, uncharitable, thoroughly extravagant and luxurious.”Will not that be even truer with the case at hand? When Kant says thatthe violation of duty in such cases makes a man “worthless although hehas filled his purse” (KPV, 5:37), is this really just excessiveattention to one’s own moral worth?

51

justice debate, the more one tends to endorse the status

quo. If a call for unprecedented change, in the form of

democracies seeking to disengage from dictatorships, can be

based on the most statist premises like national property,

then there is a possibility of an “overlapping consensus” on

the need for major global transformation that is more solid

than that which Pogge’s version of negative duties can

achieve.65 A second

strategic benefit follows directly from the rigorist

regaining of the force of negative duties, and has to do

with collective action problems. It might be impossible for

a single country to unilaterally guarantee any standard of

fairness in international commerce as a whole, but it is

possible for a single country to decide not to partake in

theft. Such rigorism does not play any part in Pogge’s

65 In emphasizing this need to find common ground with statist views, myapproach has certain affinities with what Lea Ypi calls “statistcosmopolitanism.” However, Ypi explicitly tries to conceive globaldistributive justice in ideal terms and state agency in non-ideal ones,while I take the exact opposite path. See Lea Ypi, “StatistCosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 16 (2008): 48–71; Ypi, “Onthe Confusion between Ideal and Non-ideal in Recent Debates on GlobalJustice,” Political Studies 58 (2010): 536-555. Alongside Rawls and Blake, aclear formulation of the statist position is found in Thomas Nagel’s“The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (2005): 113-147.

52

proposal for how to handle the property rights problem,

precisely because he conceives the problem in outcome-

oriented rather than agent-oriented terms. It follows that

the rigorist alternative can push for immediate steps more

easily than Pogge, since it frees particular democracies

from dependence on others’ behavior. Pogge himself

recognizes the threat the “sucker exemption”66 (or “buck

passing”) problem of collective action poses to his theory:

even when all relevant parties agree that “something needs

to be done,” there is rarely agreement about who should “do

something.” Rigorism avoids the problem: it leaves no doubt

as to where the buck stops.

However, this avoidance seems to come at a price. As

portrayed so far, rigorist cosmopolitanism does seem to

display excessive attention to our own moral worth, and

little if any attention to others’ practical needs. Most

importantly, I have said nothing so far to explain what

duties we do have regarding global extreme poverty. This

objection must be handled, since a complete indifference to

66 See WPHR, 128, 212-213.

53

poverty would indeed exhibit the aloofness that Pogge

identifies in “excessive” preoccupation with one’s “clean

hands.”67

4. Anticipating Poggean objections

4.1 Rigorist cosmopolitanism as broadly deontological

Rigorist cosmopolitanism anticipates the objection from

extreme poverty by adopting a broadly rather than purely

deontological approach.68 This cosmopolitanism is broadly

deontological in the sense that it takes extremities into

account: though we have a duty not to cooperate with

severely repressive regimes, there are very specific

exceptional circumstances, which both generate positive

duties, and allow us to override our negative duties. These

circumstances include a massive threat of death, enslavement, or

damage to bodily integrity.69 These extremities derive from the

following Kantian question: can one consistently will a

world in which others do not help to prevent massive scale

67 KI, 64.

54

death, threat to bodily integrity or enslavement at a

negligible cost for themselves?

The answer ought to be “no.” One needs to exercise

reason in order to even ask this question as a real guidance

for action, but anyone who is enslaved, who is commanded by

the reason of another, let alone anyone who is dead, cannot

use reason in such a way to begin with. Here reason

effectively obliterates itself to a degree that constitutes

a contradiction in will.70 Death, damage to the body and

68 This and the following paragraph build upon my “Our problem of globaljustice,” Social Theory and Practice 37 (2011): 629-653. 69 Kant explicitly considers duties of beneficence both in the Groundworkand in The Metaphysics of Morals. But aside from the fact that Kant’sargument there is famously susceptible to consequentialist responses (inparticular the argument in G, 423), there is the further differencethat these positive duties are postulated here as capable of trumping ournegative duties – hence the special need to delineate these positiveduties in the most concrete way possible. Thus my account can justifythe U.S. and U.K cooperating with Stalin against Hitler, while pureKantian deontology would presumably not recognize any such “supremeemergency.” The notion of “supreme emergency” can be found in MichaelWalzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, third edition, 2000),that explicitly treats World War II as the “paradigmatic case” of a justwar. For other Kantian perspectives on the themes discussed here seeShelly Kagan’s distinction between “moderate” and “absolutist”deontology, in his Normative Ethics (Boulder: Westview, 1998), section 3.2;Christine M. Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing withEvil,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15 (1986): 325-349; Onora O’Neill,“Kantian Approaches to some Famine Problems,” in Tom Regan (Ed.), Mattersof Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980): 285–294.70 It can be argued that we despise torture, for example, preciselybecause it destroys the very core of what it means to be a human being –it uses reason against itself, making the victim her own tormentor. SeeDavid Sussman’s analysis in his “What’s wrong with Torture,” Philosophyand Public Affairs 33 (2005): 1-33.

55

enslavement are therefore fundamentally different from any

other form of suffering. And so, to return specifically to

the global context, it is not clear that we have an

immediate duty to provide education, for instance, to a

distant villager neglected by a government that steals its

people’s resources. But we do have a positive immediate duty

to provide his region, within reasonable costs, with food

and medical equipment in case of dire need.

Two differences in comparison to Pogge are worth

stressing here. First, unlike Pogge, The rigorist position

distinguishes much more explicitly between poverty as such and

poverty as a threat to survival. The immediate threat is poverty as

a threat to survival, and this problem must be countered

with massive humanitarian support. Second, in contrast to

Pogge I stress that our duty to provide such support must

also be a positive one: the violation of negative duties is a

sufficient but not necessary condition for us to tend to the

survival of 50,000 people who currently die of poverty every

day.71

56

Admittedly, the rigorist marginalization of poverty

might seem strongly counter-intuitive. However, it can in

fact draw on Pogge’s own theory. Discussing justice related

to health, for example, Pogge is emphatic that “the strength

of our moral reasons to prevent or to mitigate particular

medical conditions does not depend only on what one might

call distributional factors [the impact of our policy on

others]... Rather, it depends also on relational factors,

that is, on how we are related to the medical conditions

they suffer.”72 Concurrently, “treating recipients justly

does not,” he insists,

…boil down to promoting the best distribution amongthem—what matters is how social rules treat, not howthey affect, the set of recipients. This simple thoughthas been remarkably neglected in contemporary work onsocial justice. It is not surprising, of course, thatit plays no role in consequentialist theorizing.Consequentialists, after all, hold that social rules(as well as persons and their conduct) should be judgedby their impact on the overall outcome, irrespective ofhow they produce these effects.73

71 In this I follow Pablo Gilabert, “The Duty to Eradicate GlobalPoverty: Positive or Negative?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2005): 537–550. The staggering number of 50,000 daily poverty deaths comes fromSPH, 30.72 RPR, 71.

57

Unsurprisingly, Pogge makes this deontological insistence

only within his account of negative duties. Yet the

“relational” insight has an even more natural place within

the rigorist account, demanding of each democracy to focus

on how it treats others, independently of how others are affected

materially. What justification can Pogge have for avoiding

this rigorist rationale? At the most practical level, the

justification would likely be that the rigorist view is

unfeasible, since no country in the world enjoys the means

necessary to unilaterally disengage from dictatorships.74

But is that the case?

73 RPR, 77. In line with what was said above, it is outside the scope ofthis article to ask whether there is a cogent consequentialist responsehere. An example of a consequentialist view that attempts to incorporateconsiderations of processes is Amartya Sen’s distinction between“culmination outcome” and “comprehensive outcome,” for instance in his“Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason,” Journal of Philosophy XCVII(2000): 477-502, and recently in The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: MA, HarvardUniversity Press, 2009). 74 Pogge seems to imply such a thought when discussing individual withdrawal strategies yet failing to mention any “state withdrawal,” in TPC, 196.

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4.2 The feasibility of rigorism

The defense of the rigorist alternative as a feasible

project begins by limiting the scope of the objection.

First, with regards to powerful dictatorships, the rigorist

perspective does not ignore at all the fact that only a

critical mass of democracies, working together, can make

rigorism possible. The simple answer is that the resulting

coordination problems between democracies are exactly those

facing Pogge’s view as well, as Pogge himself admits.75

Second, there are hardly any feasibility issues when one is

talking about minor autocracies. Here the duty not to be

complicit in the regime’s theft can be fulfilled by each

democracy separately (to recall the “sucker exemption”

avoidance).

Yet perhaps someone arguing on Pogge’s behalf would

also claim that we cannot limit our duties towards distant

others to ensuring their survival, bodily integrity and

freedom from slavery – that working to ensure their

existence does not really ensure anything like a truly human

75 See WPHR, 128, 212-213.

59

life, even if these are necessary conditions for such life

that are consistent in their deontological basis. But here

it is the rigorist alternative that can claim greater

feasibility. It is highly questionable that affluent nations

can ensure by themselves the full UDHR standards for the

world’s deprived,76 especially given that many of the UDHR

components (for instance access to education) clearly depend

on domestic institutions that outsiders cannot replace nor

easily alter. Subjecting democracies’ conduct to UDHR goals

thus exemplifies the indeterminacy of the will (to return to

the Kantian vocabulary) once made contingent upon achieving

consequences that are beyond the agent’s sphere of control.

In contrast, the conditions necessary for the rigorist view

are far more attainable, since they depend solely upon

affluent democracies themselves.

This is true, first, in terms of assistance to others.

Today humanitarian assistance, understood most robustly, can

prevent at least the deadly results of poverty, even if many

76 I am not arguing that Pogge himself is committed to the claim that the affluent nations can do this - I am only anticipating here an objection with broadly Poggean overtones.

60

around the world shall remain very poor indeed, and even

when discussing, specifically, the practical difficulties of

providing support for populations living under boycotted

regimes.77 Second, one of the main reasons for this

confidence is the unprecedented prominence of liberal

democracies in world affairs, crucial also with regard to

the changes democracies must undertake before they can

disengage from powerful, particularly oil rich

dictatorships. These changes can be pursued by democracies

possessing the vast majority of the world’s economic and

technological resources,78 who can commit themselves, for

example, to developing alternative energy sources.79 The

democratic duty not to be complicit in dictators’ theft

therefore cannot be discounted simply on “feasibility

grounds.” To say “we wish we could act morally but this will

require too much effort given existing conditions” is,

surely from a Kantian viewpoint, self-incurred immaturity –

the exact opposite of enlightenment.80 Such abdication of

moral responsibility is not sober pragmatism but plain moral

laziness,81 especially given democracies’ power.82

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It should be clear that this emphasis on democracies’

aggregated geopolitical clout is not in any way to a

concession towards Pogge’s view: such an emphasis is

perfectly compatible with a rigorist understanding of global

politics, conceiving the relations between states mainly as

a web of bilateral interactions between specific unitary

agents. Of course boycotts have a much higher likelihood of

taking place and being sustained through a shared democratic

decision to pursue global institutional change. But they can

also be understood as an aggregation of decisions by

individual states that coincide due to shared values.

This perspective makes sense not only descriptively and

strategically, but also normatively. From a rigorist

viewpoint, a given democracy’s decision whether or not to

legitimize oppressors must not be held hostage to how other

democracies act. That the corporations of another country

are allowed to maintain their complicity in de-facto massive

scale theft from Congo does not give your government license

to condone such complicity when it comes to the corporations

based in its territory. To be sure, a series of decisions by

62

democracies not to allow their corporations to trade in

stolen goods is likely to represent a concerted effort

resulting from (often complex) coordination. But at bottom

we still have here an aggregation of individual decisions by

77 Note, first, that these difficulties exist independently of anyboycott, and that such a boycott does not necessarily preventhumanitarian assistance from arriving. Pogge himself discusses similarpoints in WPHR, 206, and discusses airlifts in AWV. 78 In congruence, one could say, with Kant’s “perpetual peace”predictions. On liberal democracies’ unprecedented accumulated strengthsee among others John J. Davenport, “For a Federation of Democracies,”Ethics and International Affairs 23 (2009), athttp://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/23_1/roundtable/006Democracies, it is crucial to remember, extend far beyond any“civilizational” lines, to include not only the U.S and Western Europe,but also powerhouses from Japan and India to Brazil. On the latter’srise see Leslie Elliott Armijo and Sean W. Burges, ‘Brazil, theEntrepreneurial and Democratic BRIC’, Polity, 42 (2010): 14-37. 79 Recall that the United States, practically by itself, developed anatomic bomb in five years by putting the world’s best scientists in thedesert. It put a man on the moon when less than a decade before thelanding, following Kennedy’s famous declaration, no one knew how thisgoal could be achieved. Yet today it spends a 170 times less ondeveloping alternative energy sources than it does in Iraq andAfghanistan. On the war costs see Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilme, “Thethree trillion dollar war,” Times Online, February 23, 2008 at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3419840.ece;On alternative energy research expenditure: PEW 2009 report, “Who’swinning the Clean Energy Race, Growth, Competition and Opportunity inthe World’s Largest Economies.” Athttp://www.pewglobalwarming.org/cleanenergyeconomy/pdf/PewG-20Report.pdfAlso Simon Rogers, “How China overtook the US in renewable energy,” TheGuardian, March 25, 2010. at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/mar/25/china-renewable-energy-pew-research 80 Most famously in Enlightenment, 8:35. 81 Cf. G, 4:394.82 This responsibility can be satisfied by powerful democratic statesthrough political decisions, even when it is impractical to think it can

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specific states as to how to interact with other individual

states. Global reform remains primarily a rigorist matter.

This should suffice to defend the feasibility and

coherence of rigorism, which calls for far-reaching global

change even under profoundly statist premises. Yet a final

Poggean objection against this statism can still be

expected: that a theory which condemns a significant portion

of humankind to bare survival, even if it displays a

commitment to ensure this survival, cannot be seen as

cosmopolitan at all. Instead of a conclusion, I now turn to

an epistemological answer to this challenge, this time

deriving Kantian inspiration from the relation between the

duties of the present and the future.

Instead of a Conclusion – what we know about global justice

be entirely satisfied by individual democratic citizens as consumers. Icould be using a laptop full of tainted minerals to type this veryessay, and you could be using one to read it. But the solution cannot becomplete or realistic if we only boycott the relevant manufacturer asindividuals, laudable as this may be (though perhaps not even obligatoryinsofar as we are bona fide purchasers). That is why the individualactions of each consumer are not my focus here: the main attentionshould not be on a personal decision by each consumer to stay away fromall computers, but on a political decision by each democracy to stay awayfrom dictatorships.

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The rigorist approach defended here is not indifferent to

the broader autonomy of “distant” others. Rigorist

cosmopolitanism remains fully committed, just like Pogge, to

the Kantian ideal of an entire humanity that is not merely

surviving but is fully autonomous and “thinks for itself.”83

The highest end of humankind remains the complete

development of reason “not in the individual,” or even in a

specific portion of the globe, “but only in the species" as

a whole;84 humanity’s final end must include “each rational

being under the moral laws.”85 Yet unlike Pogge, I believe

we can approach this goal while maintaining Kantian rigorism

as an essential political guide, since it tells us what our

first, monumental step towards the highest good must be.

This step follows from the inward look of the CI itself, and

its rigorist demand that Pogge has repeatedly found

problematic – for you “to focus upon your duties and me upon

mine,”86 extended here under the rigorist view to democratic

societies.

83 KEM, 381. 84 Idea, 8:1885KU, 5: 448.86 KEM, 373.

65

This demand does not neglect the pursuit of others’

full autonomy. Rather, it calls for patience with regard to

how to achieve this goal, due to epistemological reasons.

The first step towards global justice must be stopping our own

massive scale complicity in the illicit trade of

illegitimate regimes. But this is certainly not the last

one. My only claim is that we must be cautious since we cannot know

what the second step will require. If the rigorist call for

democratic disengagement from severely oppressive regimes

will be universalized – as it ought to be – the result would

be an unprecedented democratic bloc. The rise of such a bloc

would constitute nothing less than the most radical

reorganization of international affairs in history. The

implications of such disengagement will be so tremendous

that we cannot even begin to recognize the picture that will

follow. Perhaps at least some dictatorships, given the

critical mass of democracies boycotting them, will collapse

following democratic boycotts and pave the way to forms of

government that treat man as “more than a machine, in a

66

manner appropriate to his dignity.”87 But the call for

boycott cannot depend on such hopes. We can only speculate

about the future, not conceptualize it. Too many basic facts

remain unknown: trying to philosophize past world-historical

events before they occur is simply jumping ahead of our

time.

This call for epistemic humility is accompanied by a

Kantian recognition of the fact that in such a manifestly

unjust world as ours, rigorism, even when specifying, as

Pogge emphasizes, only what is permissible rather than

obligatory,88 will suffice to guide us by fixing our

attention on the many impermissible actions in which we are

taking part. Thus we can maintain the – ironically sad –

hope that duty will point the way: "what one must do to

remain on the path of duty…for that and thus for the final

end reason always shines enough light ahead."89 At each step

we ought to remain duty-bound: politics must, at each point,

“bend its knee” before morals.90 And it is our morals that87 Enlightenment, 8:42.88 Cf. TCI, 190; see also Christine Korsgaard, “Kant’s analysis ofObligation,” in Guyer, Kant’s Groundwork, 68.89 Peace, 8: 370.90 Peace, 8: 386

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must come first, not the morality of others - even if hope

remains that others will follow.

The conclusion, then, is that before reforming the

world, we need to reform ourselves. Not because of global

institutions, nor because of skepticism or indifference to

the fate of others, but simply because doing what is right,

even while others continue to do what is clearly wrong, and

even while it may not solve the problem of global justice

immediately, is a precondition for addressing that problem.

Achieving rightness is not righteousness, nor petty moral

luxury, but a tremendous feat. Reinvigorating Kantian ethics

allows us to see the force and urgency of our own self-

reform. Full global justice, humanity as a whole arriving at

its highest end, will have to wait countless generations, if

not forever. But our own change can and must start in our

own lifetime.

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Notes

69