How Global Inequality Matters

Richard W. Miller

In what ways, to what extent, and on what grounds do people in developed countries have a political duty to reduce global economic inequality? The reduction of this inequality can gure in their responsibilities in a variety of ways. Any duty of people in developed countries to relieve neediness in the world at large entails a lessening of inequality. Any duty of theirs to discourage domination and promote willing cooperation as a basis for interactions across borders is a reason to do something to reduce inequalities that get in the way of these goals. Finally, there may be contexts in which they have a duty to reduce certain material inequalities to avoid inequity, the wrongful maintenance of an excessive share. In Globalizing Justice, I have argued that people in developed countries have demanding duties to reduce global inequality of all three kinds, so that substantial reduction of economic inequality is outcome, means, and goal. Sometimes, these responsibilities would impose serious costs on a signicant number of people in developed countries. Taken together, they would have vast benets for people in developing countries. But even when the duty is comparative, aimed at equity, the target is typically limited to relief of needs. Moreover, the miscellaneous duties contributing to the reduction of global inequality are not consequences of any underlying global distributive principle regulating whole life prospects in the world at large. This is true even if domestic egalitarian distributive principles of a Rawlsian sort describe what fellow-members of modern political societies owe to one another. Within the realm of the politically feasible, the similarities in these moral commitments to Gillian Brocks, in Global Justice, and Darrel Moellendorfs, in Global Inequality Matters, make the three of us allies. But my ultimate moral requirements are less demanding, a difference that reects large disagreements about the basis for transnational political duties to reduce economic inequality. My own view is fundamentally pluralist and relational. The vast unmet transnational duties to reduce inequalities mainly reect current abuses of power in which individuals, rms, or governments in developed countries take advantage of people in developing countries, deriving benets from their inferior capacity to pursue their interests in cross-border interactions in ways that show inadequate regard for their autonomy and equal worth. The requirements of respect for persons that are violated depend on the nature of the specic interactions, in ways that strongly restrict the extent of the required reduction of inequality. In developing this case for limited inequality-reducing political concern, I will try to do
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justice both to the differences in reasons and demands that separate the three of us and to our ultimate alliance. Benecence in Moderation Moderateness about general benecence is a rst step in developing my pluralist, largely relational view of duties to reduce inequality. In contrast, a stringent duty (say) to do whatever can be done to relieve burdens of brute bad luck, with priorities for the heaviest burdens, the most common burdens, and the most effective relief, would shape the whole project of transnational concern on a single non-relational comparative basis. The moderate account that I have defended centers on what I call the Principle of Sympathy: one must display an underlying concern for neediness as such sufciently great that more concern would impose a signicant risk of worsening ones life if one met ones other responsibilities. There is no general duty to have any greater concern, and one has a broad prerogative to discharge this duty by contributing to worthy causes close to ones heart that do not provide the most relief of the worlds gravest needs. Granted, concern for the most relief of the gravest needs is the default position in the project of Sympathy, authoritative unless it is displaced by special responsibilities, strong attachments, and life projects pursuing worthwhile goals. This certainly sustains a non-trivial transnational political duty of concern. The severest needs are concentrated in developing countries. Action by governments of developed countries advances vital large-scale projects of relief, reduces neglect of the shared default responsibility among their citizens, and makes fulllment of responsibilities by some less apt to be a source of competitive loss to others who retain what they should have contributed. Still, legitimate self-concern, acceptable personal commitments, and special responsibilities impose strict limits on the underlying duty to help the neediest just on account of their needs. This position ts widely shared judgments of the difference between equal respect and equal concern, such as the judgment that parents in developed countries properly value their special relationship to their children, rather than showing disrespect for children in developing countries, when they provide their kids with ordinary comforts or an expensive, edifying college education rather than using the money to help meet urgent health needs of those foreign children. Still, such a limited political duty to help the neediest might seem to conict with respect for persons because of the scope it gives to morally arbitrary differences. We do not deserve our initial advantages or disadvantages. The initial advantages that typically separate people born in rich countries from people in poor ones are prime examples. It might seem to follow that we must be willing to give up benets depending on these advantages, when we choose what political measures to support. However, undeserved initial advantages, say, from especially benecial upbringing or early environment, are not, just by that token, illegitimately obtained. People can rightly refuse to give up benets from their making good use of undeserved advantages that did not result from unfair imposition, domination,

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destruction, or manipulation. These ways of acquiring advantages do not just consist of enjoying brute luck that is better than others. Duties and Relationships In the turn toward relationships that is now needed to expand inequalityreducing duties, acknowledgment of worldwide economic interdependence based on commerce, in which some have more desirable goods to offer than others, will not, by itself, add much. After all, such interdependence was deep among the tribes of Bronze Age Europe, without generating any such intertribal duty. What does generate vast unmet duties whose fulllment would substantially reduce inequality are the far-ung abuses of power in which people, rms, and governments currently take advantage of people in developing countries. Here are some leading examples. Transnational Exploitation Globalization is not mere expansion and deepening of transnational commerce. It generates transactions between people and rms in developed countries and people in developing countries that are immorally exploitive unless benets of commerce are used to relieve desperate needs. In transnational manufacturing, those rms often extract benets from inferior bargaining power due to competition among those in desperate need. Using someones weakness to get ones way always stands in need of justication to reconcile it with respect for the person who is forced to defer by her circumstances. The fact that the weaker party would be worse off in the absence of interaction is not justication enough. One might as well claim that a tyrant may extract tribute to sustain a luxurious court so long as in his absence his subjects would be worsened by anarchy. The basic, though defeasible rule is that benets from exploiting others bargaining weakness ought to be returned to relieve the underlying desperate neediness. An individual rm may be in no position to do this on its own without excessive costs to the needy through cutbacks in employment. In such cases, regulation by labor standards is sometimes the answer. But even when it is not, people in developed countries who benet on balance as consumers and investors have a duty to relieve the desperate neediness they would otherwise live off of. Fulllment of this duty would reduce global inequality. But vast gaps between the well-off and the miserable would remain. People are exploited when their transactions reect their inferior capacity to get payment from others reecting the usefulness of what they offer to others, not when they simply get less because they have less to offer. Employment in the sites of desperate neediness has less to offer, at a given wage, on account of local deciencies in skills, supplies, equipment, repair, coordination, infrastructure, access to the best markets, and the rule of law.

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The Global Trade Regime Apart from its impact on transnational production and exchange, the contrast between desperate neediness in developing countries and the economic resources of developed countries also plays a role in shaping the institutional framework of globalization. In the crucial negotiations, above all the Uruguay Round, which created the current framework, developed countries, led by the United States, shaped a joint commitment of governments to restrict their exercise of legitimate prerogatives, through threats to withhold desperately needed access to their markets. The steering of negotiations by threats that manipulate needs is unjust subordination unless it is a way of achieving an arrangement, which all could willingly accept in reasonable deliberations, in which each government fullls its responsibilities both to its own citizenry and to the other participants in the negotiations. When this is not the outcome, the limitations of general benecence are no defense: no one has a right to benet from unjust domination. This criterion of willing responsible acceptance creates a requirement of special concern for the suffering of the poor. Suppose that a government of a poor country is faced with a proposed trade regime under which its citizens suffer much more than under an alternative regime that provides their country with greater trade access to other countries, permits wider recourse by their government to measures it regards as useful means of overcoming economic burdens, or provides more resources for alleviating harms of disruption from imposed trade policies. Unless further, especially morally serious considerations are in play (which would include worse losses for needier people), this government could not responsibly justify to those it represents willing acceptance of this burdensome limitation of its prerogatives. The constraint could only be justied as acquiescence to threats, not as the responsible expression of relevant values shared with fellow-deliberators. Here, a duty of concern is based on equity. But the duty depends on neediness, and it is restricted by the scope of the regime. It extends no farther than the impact of the choices among constraints to be jointly imposed by those who are to limit their prerogatives. If the poorest countries were exempted wholesale from all constraints in the global framework, they could not complain of having been forced to give up too much, yet they would still be extremely poor.

Steering the Course of Development Another important example of a transnational process that generates an inequality-reducing duty is the steering of courses of development by developed countries led by the United States. The World Banks and IMFs use of conditions on desperately needed loans to shift over seventy countries toward greater reliance on market forces and away from state-directed development is the current paradigm of this domineering inuence. The benets of this altered political framework for self-advancement to the people of developing countries are, to put it

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mildly, subject to dispute. In an extensive comparison of IMF-adjusted with otherwise similar non-adjusted countries, Przeworski and Vreeland estimate that being under an IMF structural adjustment program lowered growth by 1.5% on average.1 But there is no doubt that the course of development that has been promoted has vastly expanded the global opportunities of transnational corporations based in the United States and other important developed economies and reduced prospects for deant independence of governments of developing countries, which no longer occupy the commanding heights of their own economies. This initiative creates a duty to advance the goals of development, drawing resources from these gains from steering its course. When the United States changes the local course of development by manipulating local incapacities, it acquires a share of the local governments duty to act as an agent of those whose terms of life are shaped. Beyond administrative expenses, its benets from these initiatives should be treated as their resources. Otherwise, in taking advantage of peoples incapacity to set the course of development of their society, the United States takes advantage of them. So more should be done because of what has been done, reducing global inequalities. Still, the goal is to meet the basic needs that are to be fullled through development and which were manipulated in imposing a course of development. Further equalization is not required. Add due concern for harms from greenhouse gas emissions and duties to make good damage from uninvited violent intrusions in developing countries. (Here, for the rst time, negative responsibilities to reduce harm have priority. But in general, demanding transnational responsibilities are relational, not negative.) Add special obligations to citizens of client regimes, on the part of governments that prop them up. The whole network of duty-generating relationships binds developed countries to all developing countries, often with multiple tiesexcept, perhaps, for a few impoverished and isolated outliers, untouched by abuses of power, on which the Principle of Sympathy should concentrate. None of these duties imposes a preferred global distributive pattern of life prospects. Yet political realities make those guided by these duties close allies of those promoting cosmopolitan distributive standards, not just in particular campaigns but also in general perspectives. For there is a need to set priorities in seeking to reduce global injustices, and, here, impartial weighing of burdens comes into play. None of the inequality-reducing duties to avoid taking advantage will be fullled in our lifetimes. Struggling against the obstacles of power and neglect, the global social movement against injustice ought to give priority to the gravest burdens of injustice, to the most extensive, and to those most effectively relieved. When these considerations conict (say, because what is best for most of the global poor is not best for the poorest), choosing behind a veil of ignorance of which situation is ones own would be a fair way of adjudicating trade-offs. To this practical alliance with advocates of cosmopolitan distributive justice, one can add a shared aspiration to ultimate reduction of global inequality as a means of reducing abuses of power. If many people in some countries are severely needy, far more so than people in a few others whose technologies, markets,

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banks, and currencies are vital to the rest, the temptations to take advantage of them will be irresistible. So a proper valuing of cooperation will dictate an aspiration eventually to eliminate such stark inequalitiesbut not to eliminate all that mark a signicant difference in personal prosperity. Equality within Borders One question that might be raised about this pluralist, relational, moderate perspective on global inequality is how well it combines with the Rawlsian egalitarian view of domestic justice that Brock, Moellendorf, and I share. (The answer will help in assessing Rawlss legacy, as his reluctance to extrapolate his domestic egalitarianism worldwide is often seen as a failure of nerve.) Suppose you think that Rawls was right about what citizens of modern governments owe to one another: if foreigners are put to one side, their political duties are determined by principles that they would choose in the original position, and this choice would result in his special conception of justice, including fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle in that order of priority. Wouldnt it be arbitrary not to extend that perspective and those principles worldwide? What is so special about modern sovereign government? There are imaginable circumstances in which something that might be called a sovereign government does not sustain Rawlss moral apparatus. If farmers in a valley just use political coercion to stop murder, rape, and theft and to solve public goods problems in keeping dykes repaired, no such moral consequences follow. But in modern circumstances (and most premodern ones, as well), governments properly aim to promote the interests of people in their territory through diverse, shifting, wide-ranging legislation of rights and responsibilities, coordination, maintenance, and start-up of all sorts of facilities for transportation, communication, education, research, protection and insurance, and scal and monetary policies. A government with this broad authority is in the interest of all. But the particular ways in which this broad authority is exercised can benet some much more than others. Indeed, while it is in the interest of all to grant their government authority to advance the interests of its citizens, some will lose out in nearly every particular exercise of this authority, because their skills, location, needs, or the goals with which they identify are less wellsuited to the generally progressive alternative than to the situation that was changed. The broad scope of a modern governments proper authority creates a correspondingly broad requirement of fairness that makes the original position, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle parts of justice. The imposition of political authority is unjust if the imposed arrangements are unfair. One cannot achieve fairness in the general project of betterment through a rule that each contribute in proportion to what she receives. For this would beg the question of the fairness of the public enterprise as a whole. As Rawls insists in response to David Gauthiers equation of social fairness with mutual benet, abilities to

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contribute and needs and desires determining what counts as contribution and benet are themselves importantly determined by the selection among opportunities, rights, and responsibilities in the exercise of authority whose fairness is being judged.2 To ensure that the imposed arrangements, which deeply shape capacities, needs, and desires, are not imposed unfairly, one must apply principles that would be chosen by all on whom the arrangements are imposed if they advanced morally appropriate interests behind a veil of ignorance of their own capacities, needs, and desires. Because the mere fact of global commerce does not impose any such broad, deep, and enduring authority, it provides no basis for a global original position. The domineering inuence that actually crosses borders adds a great deal more to the urgency and scope of transnational duties of concern, but not enough to spread the domestic original position worldwide. Admittedly, mere global commerce involves the exercise of authority to enforce exclusive property rights, preventing foreigners as well as compatriots from coming and taking. If foreigners are desperately poor and cannot meet basic needs of themselves and their dependents, perhaps their coming and taking luxuries, comforts, even resources that would be used for worthy cultural goals, to relieve this desperation would not be wrong as such. But this does not mean that the exclusion inherent in mere commerce is unfairly imposed. People may, without wrongdoing, act to prevent others from unilaterally interfering with their innocently going about their business in pursuit of legitimate interests, even if they do not offer the others an arrangement that they could willingly support. In the past, poor pastoralists have sometimes raided better-off agricultural communities to relieve dire poverty in times of famine. One can accept that their conduct is morally permissible under the circumstances without also condemning the farmers for defensive measures needed to preserve their more comfortable way of life. In protecting their standard of living, they refuse to take on a burdensome responsibility, independent of what they have done or received, to help others cope with their own dire burdens. They offer fair terms of interaction if they offer to exchange their commodities with what the herders have to sell and to provide help and refuge of nonburdensome kinds, on the understanding that nothing more will be given or taken. Still, their offer can reasonably be rejected by the herders, as imposing a constraint that they could not self-respectfully impose on themselves. In this case, a fair offer is fairly rejected. Of course, we should actively hope for a world in which imposed terms of interaction are willingly, self-respectfully supported by all. This aspiration is properly expressed in doing something to relieve the concentration of desperate neediness in some countries that gets in the way of such general acceptability. Still, doing something is not the same as doing whatever one can, and desperate neediness is not essential to genuine economic inequality. Some can enjoy much more prosperity than others on the basis of superior initial advantages in a world in which the worst off do not have unmet needs that justify taking what the better off have legitimately acquired.

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The Original Position and the Cosmopolitanism of Needs This view of global justice differs from Gillian Brocks in denying that our transnational duties are determined by a globalized original position: apart from special relationships, a commitment to this much impartiality is too much to demand from the advantaged, and actual relationships do not sustain this demand. Yet I agree with her distinctive claim, in her book, about what follows from reliance on a global original position: not a global extrapolation of Rawlss conception of domestic justice, but principles of justice requiring doing what can be done to meet basic needs, without a further imperative of equality. However, our shared rejection of common assumptions about what follows from globalizing the original position is motivated by very different considerations. In her book, she appeals to intriguing empirical ndings about what subjects choose in experimental settings.3 Instead, in support of our common conclusions, I would appeal to interests that guide choice behind the veil of ignorance in Rawlss domestic original position. In the original position, choice behind the veil of ignorance is guided by distinctive fundamental interests, interests that we must treat as important in deliberations over basic political principles that express full and equal respect for all. Domestically, these include an interest in self-reliance, in getting ahead on ones own steam, which elevates protection of personal property to the list of basic liberties, and an interest in association, effective engagement in valued relationships such as the mutual caring of intimates, which requires extensive scope for parental nurturance. If the original position is extended worldwide, then these equality-restricting interests ought to be extended to embrace distinctive relations to ones political society.4 Fellow-members of sovereign citizenries typically devote energy and attention, take risks, and make sacrices in a collective project of advancing prosperity and justice in their territory. The fundamental interest in self-reliance ought to be extended to include an interest in collective self-reliance in these endeavors. Not to want prospects of self-advancement among those with whom one is engaged in the civic endeavor to reect sacrices, risks, and choices in this endeavor, as opposed to outside aid, shows a lack of self-respect.5 The fundamental interest in mutual concern in valued relationships also has a compelling extension. Effective engagement with others in shaping benecial lifelong terms of self-advancement, in a process requiring sacrice and trust, properly gives rise to special mutual concern among associates. Loyalty to a shared vital project merits personal loyalty, if the project is worthwhile. So concern for fellow-citizens engaged in a joint project of local prosperity and justice should, like concern for family and friends, be specially valued in the choice determining what global political arrangements are best. Rawls speaks of the mutual concern appropriate to civic association as civic friendship.6 A fundamental interest in friendship is not properly expressed in a policy of leaving a friend in the lurch whenever enticed by the opportunity to help more disadvantaged strangers.

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When fundamental interests in collective self-reliance and civic friendship are combined with the absence of domestic close-knittedness in economic prospects among people in different countries and the special costs of equipping people for the best positions worldwide, these factors block the global extrapolation of the difference principle and domestic requirements of fair equality of opportunity, in a global original position. But the cosmopolitanism of need is quite another matter. The interest in shaping the contours of ones own life that requires protection of achievements also requires protection against a situation in which ones life is dominated by a struggle for mere survival, rather than advancement of ones distinctive life goals. The interest in mutual concern in valued relationships requires protection of ones own efforts to take care of others in those relationships, but if a dependent could not thrive on the basis of ones own efforts, the same interest calls for help from others in nurturance. Sovereign self-reliance and civic friendship may make compatriots the rst resort in rising above these thresholds of neediness. But it would show a lack of self-respect, an obsessive pursuit of independence detached from the sources of its value, not to seek outside help as a last resort. Thus, fundamental interests that ought to be pursued in a global original position will lead to the choice of principles requiring the relief of abject poverty, even though principles of equality do not globalize. For reasons that I have sketched, I think that commitment to the impartiality of the global original position is, in fact, too much to ask of the global advantaged. Still, terms of interaction that are not justiable in this way are terms that the disadvantaged cannot wholeheartedly embrace while taking their interests and autonomy to be just as important as others. So a world in which the global terms of interaction would be chosen behind a global veil of ignorance is part of an ideal of global civic friendship to which we should aspire. The Limits of Global Economic Association In Darrel Moellendorfs book, Global Inequality Matters, he is less committed to globalizing Rawlss domestic original position than he seemed to be in Cosmopolitan Justice,7 so our disagreement is not the one that separates Brock and me. Rather, it concerns parallels that he evokes and I deny between the exercise of authority by a modern government and modern engagement in global commerce. Moellendorf says that global economic association is so non-voluntary and has such an important impact on participants that those who are advantaged must be able to offer a reasonable justication to the disadvantaged for not changing current laws and policies, and have a duty to make changes to reduce inequality otherwise. Of course, I agree. His characterizations of global economic association tend to assimilate its project to the broad, deep, enduring exercise of authority to promote the common good that I associated with modern government. (Minus political coercion. But political coercion was not essential to my story.) The global economic association is one of those associations that coordinate and regulate the

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employment of the joint effort of its members. It involves the organization of the division of labor and entitlements to capital assets . . . directs the deployment of labor and capital for the production of goods and services that benet its members.8 In this context, these dead metaphors of provision, direction, regulation, and organization are potentially misleading. In conditions of mere global economic interdependence, those who are advantaged might offer a reasonable justication to disadvantaged foreigners, which presupposes that advantages and disadvantages, capacities, desires, and contributions do not literally depend on provision and legislation imposed by a common authority: Our advantages are due to arrangements that we did not impose on you, apart from your exclusion from results of our legitimate efforts at improvement, including the activities of our compatriots acting through our government. We have helped you in nonburdensome ways. So we have no responsibility to take on further burdens. (If there is a whiff of natural property rights here, so be it.) Admittedly, the exercises of power and authority that actually reach across borders, which exceed mere economic association, make this response inadequate. But their scope is limited to specic exercises of power and authority and typically attends to basic needs. They push beyond the moral demands of mere economic association without reaching the deep, extensive exercise of authority suggested by Moellendorfs characterizations. In his discussion of the lack of comprehensiveness of global institutions, Moellendorf usually seems to be open to my construal of the moral limits of global economic association. But if he is, I do not see the basis for his claim that participants in the association have a political duty to ensure global equality of opportunity so that differences in initial condition do not affect opportunities across a wide range of goods including income and wealth.9 This is supposed to reect the demands of equal respect in our global economic association. But provision and regulation by common authorities in the global association are not extensive and deep enough to sustain such a wide-ranging principle of equal opportunity. The globalization of egalitarian justice requires the exaggeration of the moral importance of transnational interactions. The correction of current transnational abuses of power would not t global life prospects to those standards of equality. But fullling the unmet duties that are generated by those abuses would enormously help the disadvantaged, reducing the inequalities that most concern Gillian Brock, Darrel Moellendorf, and me. Notes
1

See Adam Przeworski and James Vreeland, The Effect of IMF Programs on Economic Growth, Journal of Development Economics 62 (2000): 297, 399402. 2 See John Rawls, The Basic Structure as Subject, in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 269f., 27779.

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See Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5457. Among other concerns, I worry that the subjects in these ndings opted for a qualied maximization of average utilitya standard that she does not, in any case, apply globallyin an experiment in which they were not attending to morally salient features of global interactions. 4 Rawls is especially emphatic about the special role and moral nature of fundamental interests in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001 [based on lectures written in the 1980s]). See, for example, pp. 85, 87, 107, 141. On pp. 114 and 139, what I have called the fundamental interest in self-reliance gures as a basis for rights to personal property. The importance of what I have called the fundamental interest in association is afrmed in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 52227 and Political Liberalism, 221, 420. Other readings of Rawls would not place so much emphasis on these specic fundamental interests, although I think they would be prominent in any interpretation tting the full range of his views of justice, domestic and global. In general, the controversy over global justice among those sympathetic to Rawls domestic position may turn out to be most useful in illuminating Rawlss approach to domestic justice. 5 In terms of Rawlss very short list of the fundamental interests of a people in The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), this would violate proper patriotism, pride in ones peoples accomplishments, whose expression is a fundamental interest because of its role in proper self-respect. See pp. 34f., 44. 6 See, for example, A Theory of Justice, 5; The Idea of Public Reason Revisited [originally 1997], in Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 579. 7 See, for example, Darrel Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002), 1618, 7981. 8 See Darrel Moellendorf, Global Inequality Matters (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 52, 58. 9 Ibid., 75.