Global Justice, Poverty and the International Economic Order

What principles of justice ought to guide the evolution of international economic law? In his essay for this volume, Thomas Pogge argues that there is a moral duty on the part of affluent countries not to contribute to the design of a ‘global economic order that, continually and forseeably, produces vast excesses of severe poverty and premature poverty-related deaths’.1 According to Pogge, the existing international economic order represents a violation of this duty, and this violation, which is a human rights violation, leads to an obligation to compensate the world’s poor through, inter alia, foreign aid. Pogge suggests: In the modern world, the traffic of international and even intra-national economic transactions is profoundly shaped by an elaborate system of treaties and conventions about trade, investments, loans, patents, copyrights, trademarks, double taxation, labour standards, environmental protection, use of seabed resources and much else. These different parts of the present global institutional order realize highly specific design decisions within a vast space of alternative design possibilities. It is incredible on its face that all these alternative ways of structuring the world economy would have produced the same evolution in the overall incidence and geographical distribution of severe poverty.