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R - D W O G P A R ?: Isse O E WE THE Lobal OOR Ssistance OR Ectification

The document discusses different views on whether developed countries owe a duty to the global poor to assist or rectify injustice. It outlines Thomas Pogge's view that the global order harms the poor by comparing their condition today to what it would be without the current system. However, simply showing that another system could produce less poverty does not prove that the current order is responsible for harm. The document examines different conceptions of how to measure harm over time and acknowledges limitations in determining what the state of the poor would be under counterfactual scenarios without colonialism and the current global order.

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Angus Dutton
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55 views2 pages

R - D W O G P A R ?: Isse O E WE THE Lobal OOR Ssistance OR Ectification

The document discusses different views on whether developed countries owe a duty to the global poor to assist or rectify injustice. It outlines Thomas Pogge's view that the global order harms the poor by comparing their condition today to what it would be without the current system. However, simply showing that another system could produce less poverty does not prove that the current order is responsible for harm. The document examines different conceptions of how to measure harm over time and acknowledges limitations in determining what the state of the poor would be under counterfactual scenarios without colonialism and the current global order.

Uploaded by

Angus Dutton
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

RISSE – DO WE OWE THE GLOBAL POOR ASSISTANCE

OR RECTIFICATION?

ON POGGE:
 Pogge argues “the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries”
 Our duty towards the global poor is therefore not to assist them but to rectify injustice”

ON THE DIFFERENT BENCHMARKS:


HISTORICALLY
o A wealth of statistics indicate that the global poor are in a better position today than they
were 100 years ago
 Less people live on $1 on a day, literacy rates have exploded, etc.
o What does this show:
 According to what I shall call the LINEAR CONCEPTION OF DIACHRONIC HARM:
 According to one conception of Pogge’s diachronic harm, the benchmark
we should use for assessing harm requires comparing the condition of the
poor today to the condition of the poor under the last regime
o According these statistics, coupled with a linear conception of diachronic harm, THE
CURRENT GLOBAL ORDER DOES NOT HARM THE GLOBAL POOR

PROBLEMS WITH USING THE LINEAR CONCEPTION OF HARM TO ARGUE WE ARE NOT HARMING THE POOR:

 African-Americans were better off under Jim Crow laws than they were under slavery
o This doesn’t mean America wasn’t ‘harming’ them

COUNTERFACTUALS
 According to the COUNTERFACTUAL CONCEPTION OF DIACHRONIC HARM:
o Assessing whether we are harming them requires us to compare the state of the global poor
today with what would have been the state should the current global order never had been
imposed
 Why we can’t do this:
o We cannot run counterfactuals of this sort:
 Yes, you might be able to make a claim about Poland’s development if it hadn’t
joined the EU
 This is by holding other factors constant
 But in the case of global justice:
 You cannot hold other factors constant because you have nothing to
compare it to! You can’t work out the impact of other effects
 In order to make this claim, you must be sure that the state of the global poor
would be better than had colonialism never existed
 We can, for the purposes of this thought experiment, ignore the many
injustices that were committed in colonialism’s name: it is merely about
comparing the situation as it would be TODAY
SUBJUNCTIVE CONCEPTION OF HARM
 References to a state of nature wherein the world is better than it is now IS NOT ENOUGH to prove
that we are committing harm
o ‘They cannot distinguish between the view that the global order harms developing socieities
(Pogge’s view) and any other view explaining how the present magnitude of global poverty
could have arisen’
o References to other possible world’s only shows that things in this world are not as they
should be – this DOES NOT REVEAL WHO IS TO BLAME FOR IT

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