Enforcing the Global Economic Order, Violating the Rights of the Poor, and Breaching Negative Duties? Pogge, Collective Agency, and Global Poverty

Thomas Pogge has argued, famously, that “we” are harming the global poor. Indeed, we are not only harming them; we are violating their rights insofar as we uphold an unjust international order which provides a legal and economic framework within which individuals and groups can and do deprive such individuals of their lives, liberty, and property. The rights we are violating are ones whose existence Pogge takes to be relatively uncontroversial: rights to life, property, free assembly, and the like, rather than so-called “subsistence rights” whose existence is sometimes taken to be more controversial. Pogge also holds that in violating these rights, we are failing to fulfil duties: not simply positive duties, such as duties of assistance, but also negative duties, like the duty not to kill, or the duty not to endanger life. In an arresting image, Pogge suggests that our relationship to the world’s poor is not like that of a passer-by who fails to come to the assistance of a victim of a hit-and-run accident perpetrated by another driver, but more like that of someone who is (at best) culpably negligent in causing an accident, and then fails to do anything to remedy the situation. In this article, I shall be primarily concerned with what I shall call the “Negative Duty Claim”: