SHOULD WE STOP THINKING ABOUT POVERTY IN

TERMS OF HELPING THE POOR?

ON POGGE:
 Pogge sides with libertarians that the most stringent obligation of the well-off is to avoid harming the
poor
o However, he disagrees with them on a fundamental point:
 He thinks that this NORMATIVELY MINIMALIST PREMISE can be used to derive a
FAIRLY MAXIMALIST CONCLUSION ABOUT OUR OBLIGATIONS to the global poor
 Because we are HARMING the global poor

PATTEN’S ARGUMENTS
 Finding A Baseline For Judgments About Harm
o On trying to establish what the ‘just set of institutions’ are that Pogge uses as his baseline
under the subjunctive
 What exactly establishes this baseline?
 PROCEDURAL INTERPRETATION
o defined in terms of the presence of a set of fair institutions of
international law, trade, finance, and so on
o Imagine a set of rules that Pogge might define as fair
 No agricultural subsidies, no unfair tariff rules (or even no
tariffs!), that sort of thing
 Saying that this would fix all of the problems in
the world is NOT CREDIBLE because it ignores
the reality that there are domestic factors
involved in the reproduction of poverty
o Changing the international rules would
not necessarily mean these domestic
changes would occur
o If a large number of people remained in poverty AFTER the
adjustments to the international system, they would no longer be
HARMED by the Global Rich
 In this case, would this absolve them of all responsibilities
to eradicate poverty?
 SUBSTANTIVE INTERPRETATION
o ‘it involves the realization of certain distributive
outcomes, namely those in which nobody falls
avoidably below a minimal level of access to essential
goods’
o Basically, it seems to put the focus on the condition of the worst
off in society
 Imagine two societies, Rich and Poor
 The relations between them are governed by a fair set of
rules in that they don’t systematically harm the poor’s
chances of succeeding
 Poor might still be Poor, Rich might be Rich
 Are the Rich countries obligated to accept a set
of conditions which might systematically
disadvantage themselves to bring the Poor
country out of poverty?