The Solution to World Poverty and Human Rights Presented by Singer

World Poverty and Human Rights is written by Thomas Pogge. In this paper, he shows us a fact that the 2,735 million people which is constituting 44 percent of the world’s population only earn 1.3 percent of the global product and 955 million citizens from the high-income countries have about 81 percent of the global product. However, citizens of the rich countries are conditioned to downplay the severity and persistence of world poverty and think of it as an occasion for minor charitable assistance. What’s more, most people believe that the local causes exclusively severe poverty and its persistence. Thomas Pogge thinks severe poverty is an ongoing harm we inflict upon the global poor and we have active responsibility for this catastrophe, even though it is incredible for us. Why aren’t there steps the affluent countries could take to reduce severe poverty abroad? In fact, most people accept a common assumption that reducing severe poverty abroad ate the expense of our own affluence is generous, not their duty. Thomas Pogge deny this popular assumption and mount three mutually independent challenges to it. The three aspects are actual history, fictional histories and present global institutional arrangements.

Three Mutually Independent Challenges

Thomas Pogge disputes a popular belief that the radical inequality we face can be justified by reference to how it evolved, for example through differences in diligence, culture, and social institutions, soil, climate, or fortune. He doubts about this sort of justification because of the common and very violent history that today’s affluent countries ruled today’s poor regions of the world and took anything except poverty: trading poor people, destroying the political institutions and cultures, taking the lands and natural resources, and forcing products and customs. Thus, the huge inequality in today began from the actual historical crimes which were horrendous, diverse and consequential.

But there is a problem. Although citizens of the rich countries admit their forefather’s sins, they cannot inherit responsibility for these because we cannot be held responsible for what others did long ago. However, the sins are still here and we get today because of the fruits. Consequently, Thomas Pogge declare, “A morally deeply tarnished history must not be allowed to result in radical inequality”.

The first challenge addressed adherents of historical entitlement conceptions of justice, so Thomas Pogge poses the second challenge against others. These other believe that we are entitled to keep and defend what we possess and it is possible that there still is severe poverty worldwide without the horrors of the European conquests. It means we get unequal distribution because we lost voluntary bets or gambles.

Thomas Pogge thinks it is wholly implausible if a fictional history can “justify” anything. In John Locke’s opinion, a fictional history can justify the status quo but the situation is that all participants have rationally agreed about the changes in holdings and social rules, and people can proportionally share the natural resource of the world. The baseline is imprecise but it accords with Thomas Pogge’s second challenge: if there is a state of nature among human beings in the world, we still could not realistically conceive the suffering and early deaths what we are witnessing today. And he points out, about the use of a single natural resource, the great advantages are belonged to the rich countries, and the poor countries don’t obtain any compensation. The attempt to justify today's coercively upheld radical inequality by appeal to fictional historical process actually fails.

About the justice of a radical inequality, reflecting on the institutional rules is the third way. People use this approach to justify an economic order and the distribution it produces by comparing them to feasible alternative institutional schemes and the distributional profiles they would produce. Many broadly consequentialist and contractual conceptions of justice support this approach. However, about how economic institution should be best shaped under modern conditions, these conceptions consequently disagree. Thomas Pogge think an economic order is unjust when it foreseeably and avoidably gives rise to massive and severe human rights deficits. Thomas Pogge poses the third challenge: it is unjust and the massive and avoidable deprivations will show up if we impose a global economic order in order to keep the great economic advantages.

Three Notions of Harm

From three challenges, we get the conclusion that citizens of the rich countries deny a compelling moral claim which is a right of the global poor. Three mutually independent challenges appeal to diverse and mutually inconsistent moral conceptions because of different audiences, and also deploy different notions of harm. The first two challenges conceive harm in an ordinary way and conceive justice in terms of harm. The third challenge relates the concepts of harm and justice in the opposite way and conceive harm in terms of an independently specified conception of social justice. The third challenge is empirically more demanding than the other two because of three claims:

1. Global institutional arrangements are causally implicated in the reproduction of massive severe poverty.
2. Governments of our affluent countries bear primary responsibility for these global institutional arrangements and can foresee their detrimental effects.
3. Many citizens of these affluent countries bear responsibility for the global institutional arrangements their governments have negotiated in their names.

Two Main Innovators

The usual moral debates concern the stringency of our moral duties to help the poor abroad. In popular view, these duties are rather feeble, and it means that it is not very wrong if we give no help to the poor. Against this popular view, some like Peter Singer, Henry Shue and Peter Unger think that our positive duties are quite stringent and quite demanding. Peter Singer offers the Principle of Sacrifice - If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought to do. Against Peter Singer, Richard W. Miller poses the Principle of Sympathy - One's underlying disposition to respond to neediness as such ought to be sufficiently demanding that giving which would express greater underlying concern would impose a significant risk of worsening one's life, if one fulfilled all further responsibilities; and it need not be any more demanding than this. In Miller’s mind, we don’t need to help they if it makes our life to be obviously worse. Thomas Pogge admits that we have positive duties to rescue people from life threatening poverty. But we should not forget more stringent negative duties are also in play.

The usual empirical debates concern how developing countries should design their economic institutions and policies in order to reduce severe poverty within their borders. Opting for free and opening markets with a minimum in taxes and regulations so as to attract investment and to stimulate growth is the received wisdom. However, there are some appeals from the influential economists against the received wisdom: extensive government investment in education, health care and infrastructures; some protectionist measures to incubate fledgling niche industries until they become internationally competitive. In Thomas Pogge’s view, we should focus on what is typically ignored, not these debates: the role that the design of the global institutional order plays in the persistence of severe poverty.

For many people, the existing global institutional order plays no role in the persistence of severe poverty, but rather that national differences are the key factors. “Explanatory nationalism” appears justified by the dramatic performance differentials among developing countries, with poverty rapidly disappearing in some and increasing in some. Cases of this usually display plenty of incompetence, corruption, and oppression by ruling elites, which seem to give us all the explanation. There is a problem which we need to understand: Why do severe poverty persist there? Suppose there are some students improving greatly and many others learn little or nothing in a class. And the latter students do not do their reading and skip many classes. Then, local student-specific factors play a role in explaining academic success. However, the problem is that it decidedly fails to show that global factors.

It is easy to find global factors which is relevant to the persistence of severe poverty if we give up the explanatory nationalism. In the WTO negotiations, protectionism provided that the rich countries insist and command that open market received their own exports. If the rich countries scrapped their protectionist barriers against imports from poor countries, people can get their jobs, wage levels would rise, and income would be higher. Millions would be saved from diseases and death because of manufacturing and marketing lifesaving drugs in the poor countries. It is no doubt that the rich countries pay nothing for the vast quantities of natural resources we import, but there still is the price effect of our inordinate consumption.

It is more important that we pay the rulers of the resource-rich countries for our resource imports. The rulers get the international resource, borrowing, treaty, and arms privileges from people, and then they were provided the money and arms. The global poor is suffering huge debts and onerous treaty obligations because of these privileges of rich countries. The privileges also greatly strengthen the incentives to attempt to take power by force.

It is evidence against explanatory nationalism that severe poverty persists in many poor countries because of the failed government. The rich states recognize their rulers are able to rule on the basis of effective power alone. Poor countries pay for the rich countries. Severe poverty is fueled by local misrule. Most citizens of affluent countries believe that we are doing nothing wrong. Peter Singer poses the Principle of Sacrifice and point out it is our duty to prevent something very bad from happening. However, it is hard to convince people because in mind of most people, everyone has a duty not to spend money on luxuries or frills, and to use the savings due to abstinence to help those in dire need. Thomas Pogge challenges the popular belief and we still have the duty for global poor because rich countries make this situation - the 2,735 million people which is constituting 44 percent of the world’s population only earn the 1.3 percent of the global product and 955 million citizens from the high-income countries have about 81 percent of the global product.