Thomas Pogge: Principles of Global Justice

Thomas Pogge identifies three primary areas of concern: 1. International justice, 2. International ethics, and 3. The rights of nations.

Two Approaches to Moral Justice

There are two distinct ways to approach the problems of moral justice:

• Interactive Analysis: This focuses on the actions and effects produced by individual and collective agents. It looks for flaws within the agents and their relationships.
• Institutional Moral Analysis: This examines the effects of how our social world is structured, including our laws, conventions, social institutions, and practices. We look for flaws in the rules and institutional designs.

Intra-national and Inter-national Perspectives

• Intra-national: A world inhabited by people, families, corporations, and associations within a territorially defined society.
• Inter-national: A world inhabited by a small number of actors, specifically sovereign states.

The Global Concept of Justice

The global concept of justice breaks the traditional separation between the intra-national and the international. This separation is challenged by two main factors:

1. The appearance of multinational companies, international organizations, and regional associations.
2. A lack of moral adequacy: It has never been plausible that the interests of states (i.e., governments) provide the only morally relevant considerations.

Global Justice and the Global Institutional Order

The global institutional order is related to the incidence of moral damage in two ways:

• Direct Impact: Its rules may directly affect the population (e.g., protectionism).
• Indirect Impact: Its standards may indirectly affect the population (e.g., international benefits and debt resources granted to despotic rulers).

Objections to the Idea of Global Justice

1. First Objection: The institutional order was freely consented to by the poor and less powerful.
2. Second Objection: The rationale and the purpose of government is to represent and protect the interests of its people; therefore, it is understandable that rich countries do everything possible to set the global institutional order in pursuit of the best interests of their citizens.

However, there are ethical limits to government bias. For instance, it is not permissible for a government to murder innocents in the name of the welfare of its citizens. Regarding institutional boundaries, bias is only legitimate in the context of "equality of conditions."