Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric

by Thomas W. Pogge

Worldwide, human lives are rapidly improving. Education, health-care, technology, and political participation are becoming ever more universal, empowering human beings everywhere to enjoy security, economic sufficiency, equal citizenship, and a life in dignity. To be sure, there are some specially difficult areas disfavoured by climate, geography, local diseases, unenlightened cultures or political tyranny. Here progress is slow, and there may be set-backs. But the affluent states and many international organizations are working steadily to extend the blessings of modernity through trade and generous development assistance, and it won't be long until the last pockets of severe oppression and poverty are gone. Heavily promoted by Western governments and media, this comforting view of the world is widely shared, at least among the affluent. Pogge's new book presents an alternative view: Poverty and oppression persist on a massive scale; political and economic inequalities are rising dramatically both intra-nationally and globally. The affluent states and the international organizations they control knowingly contribute greatly to these evils - selfishly promoting rules and policies harmful to the poor while hypocritically pretending to set and promote ambitious development goals. Pogge's case studies include the $1/day poverty measurement exercise, the cosmetic statistics behind the first Millennium Development Goal, the War on Terror, and the proposed relaxation of the constraints on humanitarian intervention. A powerful moral analysis that shows what Western states would do if they really cared about the values they profess.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Poverty, Economics

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2010

About the author

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and currently Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University and Research Director at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation supervised by John Rawls. Pogge serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs journal, Ethics & International Affairs, and is an Ethics and Debt Project participant.

Pogge has written extensively on political philosophy, especially on Rawls, Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitanism, and, more recently, extreme poverty. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is widely regarded as one of the most important works on global justice. Pogge's work has been, along with that of Charles Beitz, one of the most important in the "first wave" of work on global justice. Yet what makes Pogge's contribution to the debate on global justice and the eradication of world poverty original is his emphasis on negative duties rather than on the positive duties stressed by Beitz. According to Pogge, the global rich have a stringent duty of justice to take decisive steps toward the eradication of global poverty primarily because they have violated the negative duty not to contribute to the imposition of a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably renders the basic socioeconomic rights of other human beings unfulfilled, and not because they must honor a positive duty to help others in need when they can at little cost to themselves. Recently, Pogge's argument has been aggressively critiqued by Joshua Cohen

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a rewrite of the initial impressions I posted about this book. Let me say firstly, I deeply sympathize with this author's basic premise that structural inequalities in the global economic system are primarily to blame for the incidence of extreme poverty among much of the world's population. However, I am sorry to say that Pogge does not do his reputation much good with this book. This is essentially a collection of essays masquerading as a book. The chapters do not make up a coherent whole, but are rather a collection of disjointed essays woven into an artificial whole to which a shrill and polemical preface has been added. Someone looking for an introduction to Pogge's thought would be best advised to look elsewhere.

My main criticism of Pogge would be that he is straying into fields with their own established methodologies without establishing a mastery of those fields. The question of what is to be done to alleviate global poverty is closely related to that of what can be done. The first is properly a philosophical question. But the second involves factual issues best answered by fields such as political science and economics. Pogge fails to convince that the solutions he suggests are based on sound social science, and will actually have the results he hopes for.

A second problem would be that Pogge is caught somewhere in between academic philosophy and a popular moral appeal. As such, he (like his mentor Rawls) is open to Nietzsche's famous quip about Kant: that he proves the common people right in terms that the common people can't understand. Rawlsian contract theory assumes the ethic of reciprocity: the "Golden Rule". Without the ethic of reciprocity, Rawls' idea of the original position would lack its moral force. But, since the ethic of reciprocity is sufficient in itself to support a duty to help the world's least fortunate and to correct systemic inequalities, why do we need to erect such an elaborate philosophical structure as Rawls'? Rather, someone in Pogge's place could more effectively make their appeal directly to the public in moral terms that are commonly held and widely understood.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clear, logical explanation of the causes of global poverty.