What do we owe the world’s poor? International justice in an era of globalisation Toon Vandevelde Katholieke Universiteit Leuven ABSTRACT. In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale. However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice. If the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. KEYWORDS. Globalisation, Distributive Justice, Beneficence, Development aid, Rawlsianism, Cosmopolitanism

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here was a time when the topic of justice was a monopoly of the left. The theme was encapsulated in the rhetoric of class struggle and in a culture of resistance against the rich and powerful. International justice was put on the agenda above all by the extreme left. The splitting off of the communists from the socialist international at the beginning of the twentieth century had much to do with the all but abandonment of the goal of world revolution, and social democracy only too gladly buckled down to building up and subsequently defending the national welfare state. Towards the end of the twentieth century the language of justice threatened also to become discredited by the growing realisation that communism – albeit in the name of the highest ideals – had brought ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ETHICS NETWORK 12, no. 4 (2005): 481-496. Doi: 10.2143/EP.12.4.2004794 © 2005 by European Centre for Ethics, K.U.Leuven. All rights reserved.

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about the worst evils imaginable: bureaucracy, tyranny, the Gulag. Generations of the militant left discovered that their commitment to a just world had been betrayed by the very organisations they had set up for that purpose. However, moral indignation about suffering and injustice did not disappear; instead people now directed their altruistic and militant energies more towards causes where they felt that they could do good in an unambivalent way. The era of humanitarian action had dawned: directly alleviating emergencies, feeding the hungry, and stopping atrocities now became the objectives of public action. Theories about the necessity of structural reorganisation in the world disappeared into the background. Emergency aid organisations superseded the developmental NGOs in the charity stakes.1 It is to the credit of John Rawls that in his 1971 publication, Theory of Justice, he developed a new vocabulary to express a theory of distributive justice, separate from its Marxist background. Sartre’s proclamation of 1968 that “Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time” now sounds like an echo from a distant past. Liberalism has become the unsurpassable horizon of our time, not so much the economic liberalism beloved only by the free market, but a political liberalism that tries to bring about a synthesis of freedom and equality. It is Rawls who gave the impetus to this development. This is not to say that all political philosophers have become Rawlsians but rather that they all feel obliged to place themselves in relation to liberalism. It is symptomatic that famous critics of Rawls, such as Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, in the end also admit to belonging more or less to the liberal tradition. What is characteristic of this liberalism is primarily the recognition of the priority of individual civil rights over other social objectives such as economic growth and prosperity. Consequently, equality of opportunity becomes an objective in a just society and important positions in society must be open to everybody. Finally, there is the difference principle: inequalities in income or wealth can be tolerated only if they can also benefit the weakest in society. However, absolute income equality would severely paralyse

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people’s motivation to work and make an effort. A certain degree of income inequality can stimulate economic growth, but in a just society there must be a considerable trickle-down effect – through the spontaneous working of the market or through governmental redistribution – so that minimum wage earners can also profit from increasing productivity.

RAWLS’ LAW OF PEOPLES Rawls worked out his theory of justice for a more or less autarchic national state. Various writers tried to extend Rawls’ theory to the domain of international justice, but in 1999 Rawls himself published a book on the subject, The Law of Peoples.2 Here he distinguishes four types of people. First are the liberal peoples who are organised more or less according to the principles of domestic justice advocated in the Theory of Justice. The category of decent peoples is broader. They respect the independence of other peoples and their foreign policies do not harbour any aggressive intentions; however, they do not necessarily have a liberal democracy on the domestic front with, for example, their hierarchical political systems. In such an illiberal decent state, citizens indeed have some influence on policy, but only via a graduated representation, such as in a guild society. They can make their voices heard and their interests are taken into account, but not necessarily on the basis of equality. The respect for diversity and pluralism in the world means that these societies also must be able to endorse international law and their own singularity must be respected. That is no longer the case with the so-called “outlaw states.” Moreover, “burdened societies,” that is, very poor communities without the resources to develop decent institutions, are not yet part of the “Society of Peoples.” Note that Rawls always talks about peoples and not about states. In this way he sets himself against the ‘realistic’ outlook of international relations, which claims that states must use all their resources for their own interests and that they may, if necessary, wage war

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against their competitors in order to safeguard those interests. In opposition to this, Rawls wishes to develop a normative theory for an ideal world that would consist of peoples with a decent constitution and respect for human rights as well as fellow feeling and “common sympathies.”3 The issue here concerns a “realistic utopia”4 that, just as in the Theory of Justice, calls upon the device of the original position. The idea is that in reflecting on the principles of a just world we must abstract from the actual power relations between peoples. However, in The Law of Peoples the participants in the hypothetical consultation are not the citizens of a global society but the representatives of the decent peoples of the world. Here Rawls sides from the beginning with the camp of philosophers who attribute an ethical significance to the diversity of separate societies, thereby rejecting cosmopolitanism. According to Rawls, the principles of global justice that would be endorsed in the original position, would agree for the most part with the traditional basic rules of international law. These include the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other peoples and the right to self-defence against foreign aggression. Only in this last case can war be justified, but if war is waged then limits must also be imposed (the ius in bello). What is new is that Rawls endorses the possibility of economic sanctions and even of armed humanitarian intervention in the case of extreme or long-lasting violations of human rights. Thus, in contrast to what was formerly believed, the sovereignty of the people is not absolute. Finally, it is important to note that Rawls believes richer peoples have the duty to help peoples living in unfavourable circumstances. The first objective of international law is to bring about peace and to protect it and that presupposes that non-decent regimes be eliminated. Decent peoples indeed do not by definition wage any aggressive wars and Rawls cites historical evidence to show that in practice countries that are more or less democratic and respect human rights on the domestic front are not bellicose. Outlaw nations can then be forced to change their political regimes so that they no longer pose a threat to other countries and their own citizens, while

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poor peoples must be helped to enable them to build up and maintain decent institutions. It is precisely this last point that has raised heated discussion among political philosophers. Indeed, Rawls’ law of peoples does not even mention the difference principle or the notion of distributive justice. Nowhere is it said that the world’s inequality can be tolerated only if it benefits the poorest and weakest peoples. The world would undoubtedly appear far better if the greatest poverty were eliminated and if developing countries were in a position to maintain reasonable social order, but is this objective not too modest? Unsympathetic readers see Rawls’ indictment of outlaw peoples as anticipating Bush’s doctrine of the preemptive strike, and indeed they dismiss the whole purpose of The Law of Peoples itself as an ideological defence of the position of the rich. Does Rawls not here legitimate a world order in which only the sharpest edges have been softened but that yet continues to be characterised by a high degree of inequality? In any case, according to the logic of Rawls’ law of peoples, domestic justice seems to be of interest only as an instrument, that is only in so far as it is necessary for international stability. Many commentators are of the view that Rawls is wrong from the beginning in thinking of international justice from the viewpoint of collectivities rather than of individual rights. Cosmopolitanism, however, has its own problems, which we will address shortly. At the very least, it is interesting to see how far it is possible and plausible to amend Rawls’ theory from within its own logic. We will first give an overview of the various positions that have been taken in philosophical debates about international justice.

A GLOBAL BASIC STRUCTURE? Rawls is also a child of his times. He follows the thinking about justice characteristic of economists in the early 1970s and to some extent still today. People work together in economic relations and thus produce a

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social surplus. The problem of justice arises when that surplus must be divided among the various cooperating members of that society. Distributive justice thus concerns the basic structure of the society, the manner in which the most important institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties as well as the profits of social cooperation.5 Until the 1960s people believed that national states were sufficiently autonomous to determine their own economic policy and to develop institutions that interpreted justice in their own way. States still have that freedom to a certain degree today and there are still many varying models of social protection, even within Europe, but globalisation has limited the freedom of individual states. Industrial activities continue to be outsourced to low-wage countries, and fiscal competition is increasing, as is the transnational rivalry to attract large investors to one’s own land or region. What is still more important is that because of the continual extension of transnational economic networks, a global basic structure has emerged. The wealth that is produced is increasingly the result of anonymous economic and political institutions operating on a global level. In the past, in most agrarian societies very small communities cooperated closely and distrusted the big outside world. Today, the traditional villages with their own economic infrastructure have disappeared in Belgium and are disappearing very quickly elsewhere, and are being replaced by a world market. Clearly, in the process gigantic production profits and probably equally great ecological problems have been created. The question is how these advantages and disadvantages should be shared between the peoples and individuals of the world. In other words, according to the inner logic of Rawls’ argument, a theory of international distributive justice needs to be drawn up that would supplement the demands of domestic justice. The question now is if Rawls’ basic principles will allow such a theory to be developed. Let us say that in the Rawlsian context there is no problem in thinking about the rights of peoples and individuals who are well embedded in the international division of labour. Chinese textile

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workers in the export sector, South Korean workers in Nike factories, and South African mine workers all work to create wealth on a global level and thus can claim rights to their fair share of that wealth. Their lot is also determined by global trade organisations, financial markets, international labour agreements and the norms that the multinationals themselves establish, sometimes under the influence of consumer organisations and third world NGOs. The existence of a global basic structure induces the creation of global institutions, through which the Rawlsian principles of (domestic) justice, human rights, equal opportunities, and the difference principle can be enforced on a world level. These claims are all the more convincing because they are an extension of most people’s spontaneous intuitions about justice. In fact they rest on the notion of reciprocity: whoever contributes to the general good must be fairly compensated. The other side of the coin is that this view of justice seems very productionistic: only those who contribute are respected. The question is what obligations do we have towards people and groups who have nothing to offer to the world market. A large number of people are barely involved in the world economy and often these are precisely the poorest of all. If sub-Saharan Africa – with the possible exception of South Africa – were to disappear tomorrow, the rest of humanity would hardly feel it. Antiglobalists argue that globalisation creates poverty and that is partly correct: old trades and inefficient production methods are indeed often driven out of competition. But the opposite is equally true: poverty can often be attributed to a deficiency in globalisation and is then the result of an inadequate involvement in the world economy. Furthermore, an analogous problem comes to the fore in Rawls’ theory of domestic justice: what do we owe to handicapped people, for example? Or to people who on their own are not in a position to earn an income in the market? Rawls agrees that it would indeed be extraordinarily heartless to propose that people who do not produce anything also do not have any rights, but he can think of the obligations

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towards these people only as a secondary consideration, as a later corrective to the working of his principles of justice.6 Various arguments could be introduced to take into account the interests of outsiders to the world market. The argument can be made, for example, that indeed they do not contribute to the creation of a surplus for the world economy, but that they do extensively suffer from the negative effects of globalisation. Their former way of life is often rendered impossible, and their products are not worth anything any longer. Their environment is contaminated by the mining industry or by oil extraction. The common lands from which they made a subsistence living are being privatised or taken over by large scale, mechanised agriculture. A general principle now obtains that insists compensation be paid wherever damage is done. This principle can even possibly be put forward within the context of an extreme liberalism (American libertarianism). In Anarchy, State and Utopia Robert Nozick tries to explain how in a hypothetical state of nature people could decide to set up a state through voluntary protective associations. Most likely, such protective agencies would form spontaneously, one of which would, in time, get the upper hand while the others would be taken over. So that this would become a true state, distinguished by its monopoly over the legitimate coercive force in its territory, a solution has to be found for the stubborn outsiders who hold on to their natural right to private judicial procedures. These people are not asking that institutions be set up, but because they exist the exercise of their natural rights is much more difficult, if not impossible. Having considered many arguments, Nozick decides that these people may be subjected to the authority of the dominant protective association, but that they must be compensated for that infringement of their free will, for example by being offered free protection. In an analogous way, those marginalised by globalisation must be compensated for the fact that something has happened to them that they have not asked for – for example, by being allowed a number of rights.7

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COSMOPOLITANISM An adherent of cosmopolitanism would dismiss Rawlsian thinking completely. The most extreme example is Martha Nussbaum. She believes that all living beings, and not just humans, have the right to develop their basic capacities as much as possible. Inspired by Aristotle and by the economist Amartya Sen, she tries to make concrete the notion of human value by drawing up a list of important things that every person should be able to do (“central human capabilities”). This “thick vague theory of the human good”8 is so general that it should have universal application. The manner in which a society concretely puts these “basic capabilities” at the disposal of its citizens can vary widely, but every human being should be able to claim the corresponding rights, possibly also vis-à-vis transnational institutions. Sen situates the provision of “basic capabilities” in a consequentialist framework. The issue here concerns a series of policy objectives between which compromises are possible and very likely unavoidable. Nussbaum to the contrary argues from a strictly ethical point of view. The respect for the “basic capabilities” of humans and animals is imperative in an absolute way for every social order. The result of this is that Nussbaum is not in a position to define priorities. Every individual being deserves every opportunity to develop him/herself as much as possible and Nussbaum’s examples in connection with handicapped people show that this can go very far indeed. She is somewhat more modest in relation to “the global poor”: they must be given the most fundamental opportunities to live a fully human life. But the domain of obligations with regard to non-human animals again seems completely incalculable. Nussbaum is so generous that she seems to ignore the basic premise of every conception of justice, that is the problem of scarcity. Not only does she not rank rights and duties in order of urgency, but furthermore she gives absolutely no attention to what in the literature is called ‘moral hazard’: the fact that people who consider themselves to be insured against a certain risk often take fewer precautions to avoid that risk. Help can indeed make people depend-

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ent or can encourage irresponsible behaviour. We know that this is a serious problem in rich welfare states, but there are also known cases of developing countries where bad governance induces greater generosity from donors, which, on the one hand, alleviates the greatest needs of the poorest people, but which also weakens the pressure to adjust policy. Cosmopolitanism calls on the principle of solidarity on the basis of a common humanity. There is now an extensive literature on the question whether that demand must be met by the duty to do justice or the duty to do good.9 The latter option seems more voluntary than the first, but the first is also not without problems. Thinking about justice indeed assumes perfect rights and duties. If somebody steals my property, then I can go to the police and demand my property rights. But to whom can a hungry person go to demand the right not to perish of hunger? Such a right is nevertheless taken up in many international treaties. Yet, is it not gratuitous and indeed hypocritical to legislate rights that mean nothing in practice? Conversely I cannot help all the hungry of the world for long: they are far too numerous and most are too far away. My duty to help the hungry is thus underdetermined and as such more of a beneficence obligation than a strict obligation to do justice. Now, one could argue that the increasing efficiency of international institutions and NGOs in specifying, distributing, and implementing those beneficence obligations changes them into justice obligations. This, however, would mean that justice depends on the actual means that structures and institutions have to make rights claimable. In a certain sense this is probably the case. Our duty to help becomes more pressing if the possibility of doing so becomes more actual. Still there is something absurd in a theory that would deduce moral duties from an actual state of affairs. To the contrary, must not people be able to give independent moral reasons for why something must be claimable as a right? Here we are referred again to the discussion above about the existence of a global basic structure, the damage principle and the existence of rights that are intrinsically tied to the human condition itself, a sort of natural justice foundation for our justice obligations.

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I am inclined to classify the argument for solidarity with the poor on the basis of our common humanity under the beneficence obligation. That is not a minor consideration. What is at issue here is indeed a duty, one that rests on a powerful principle that says that we are morally obliged to help those in great need insofar as the costs and risks do not become too considerable for ourselves. We expect that others would do the same for us were we to find ourselves in dire circumstances. This is the principle of mutual help, which in relation to strangers is also called the Good Samaritan principle. The strongest argument for supporting international justice obligations would lie in the fact that rich countries have a causal responsibility for the bad conditions in which so many poor live. The history of colonisation, imperialism, and exploitation spring to mind here. However, the more the colonial era becomes a thing of the past, the weaker becomes this argument. Furthermore, it is a difficult argument to uphold when the local elites have governed their countries so badly since independence that the situation there has become much worse than it was in the time of the colonial governors. Allen Buchanan criticises Rawls for attaching more importance to domestic factors– the lack of good governance – than to external factors in explaining under-development.10 I think that Rawls indeed is too optimistic when he says that there is no country so poor in means that it cannot build up any well-ordered society.11 Some countries in the Sahel region for instance are overpopulated semi-deserts. They have so few resources that they will never be able to feed their populations without external aid, or at least not within the foreseeable future. However, empirical evidence shows that development aid helps only those countries that help themselves. Somewhat good governance is a necessary precondition for development, but unfortunately ‘enough’ it is not a sufficient condition. Recent history has shown that there are no simple recipes for development. International institutions are eager to spread good practices all over the world. Sometimes this works quite well, but very often what works well in one social context turns out to be a disaster when implemented in other societies. Differences in cultural

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background are important here (and difficult to manage). Moreover, success stories in development are always rather ambivalent, making it difficult to derive clear lessons from them. Take China for instance, where huge growth rates seem to have been bought at the price of incredible environmental damage, despotism, and a crude denial of the most basic human rights. And is the reduction of absolute poverty in the last twenty years in China mainly the result of allowing private land ownership in the countryside, or of opening up to the global economy? We have outlined above a second argument in favor of granting international rights of justice. Globalisation has marginalised large groups of powerless people who have not asked for this fate. This leads to an obligation to do justice to compensate them for this. The question is how far that duty extends. The peoples and societies of the South cannot be easily required to integrate completely into the world market and global community. To do so, Rawls would rightly argue, would be to do damage to the pluralism of the world. Some peoples and groups are undoubtedly inclined to reject tout court the Western model of development and perhaps even every development. Beyond our duties arising out of human solidarity, justice would then demand that the world system be further opened up for those wishing to integrate with it. This sounds vague perhaps, but then again perhaps it is not good to make all the rights and duties with respect to the poor of the world strictly enforceable. Compare this with the right to work written into the constitutions of many European countries. This right does not mean that an unemployed person can just go and demand a job of his/her choice or according to his/her capabilities from the government or some other employer; even less does it mean that the government can oblige someone to accept a particular job. In the legal literature, the right to work is known as a meta-right, which places on the authorities of a country the obligation to carry out a policy of full employment as efficiently as possible. To the degree that international institutions also exist, for example on the European level, to which the national authorities have to report on their

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performance in this area and on their future plans, pressure is also exerted to put this right to work into effect. Analogous to this, the right not to suffer hunger, the right to education, and basic health care, or more generally the right to be integrated into the world system in a more favourable manner can also be seen as meta-rights. There is a corresponding duty to set up institutions that will execute these rights in as reasonable a manner as possible.12 In fact, the international community has taken an important step in that direction with the Millenium Development Goals. Characteristic of the emphasis that international institutions put on basic rights and basic capabilities is the fact that they hardly speak anymore about development, but only about ‘poverty reduction.’

BLIND SPOTS What is striking is that in philosophical discussions about international justice relatively little reference is made to actual data or to the insights of economics, cultural anthropology, or sociology. This sometimes leads to blind spots. Often philosophers seem to assume that the solution for the problem of poverty on a world scale is merely a matter of transferring wealth from the rich to the poor. Empirical studies, however, show that there is hardly any relation between development and the amount of development aid. Anthropologists also remind us that gifts that cannot be returned are mostly seen as humiliating and those who have to live from donations view themselves as beggars. Disinterested altruism is not necessarily good. However, those who are given credit that they later have to pay back can hold their heads high; indeed, they have been given a trust and it is their responsibility not to betray this. Since enough grain can be produced in the United States, Australia and Europe to maintain the population of the whole world, it is not unthinkable that international charitable institutions would distribute this among the ‘global poor’. But, this is undoubtedly a recipe for nurturing huge rancour.

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Helping and giving, in other words, are extremely delicate matters. Perhaps development is as much a cultural as an economic problem, a problem of recognition as well as of scarcity. One would expect that philosophers would interest themselves in precisely this problem of recognition, but instead they have classified it under the heading of multiculturalism. Specialists of distributive justice pay hardly any attention to this issue. However, perhaps the whole problem of development is less a problem of economic exploitation than of one-sided donations. The centre of the world system has everything to offer to the periphery: a superior technology, democracy, efficient organisational techniques, desirable consumer goods, good advice in abundance and with good intentions as well. In the meantime, the rich countries evince very little interest in anything coming from the South – at the most in some world music, and somewhat cheap exoticism, and certainly not in what the South has in abundance, namely people who would like to migrate to a richer country. This lack of interest underpins many of the frustrations in the Arab world also. That philosophers rarely read economic literature can also be seen in their unquestioning acceptance of the assumption that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. This topic has been the subject of intense discussion among economists in recent years. A quasi-consensus seems to have been reached that the percentage of extremely poor people in the world’s population (subsisting on less than $1 per day) has been halved in the last twenty years and that even the absolute numbers of the poor have dwindled in the same period, breaking a trend that has persisted for 200 years. To be sure, this is above all the effect of the economic successes in China, India and South-East Asia; the rest of the picture, above all in Africa, is not so rosy. Still, it is remarkable that especially those countries that have opened themselves up to the world market seem to be doing well.13 Antiglobalist supporters are right to accuse globalisation of cultural breakdown, but their economic diagnoses are much more debatable. Indeed, a certain political correctness seems to be at play here at times. The general view seems to be that only catastrophic news will stim-

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ulate people’s interest in and generosity towards the world’s poorest. I doubt this. The level of commitment to the world’s poor would rise if it could be proved that their situation is not completely hopeless and that aid would help under certain preconditions. Economists have also attempted in a no-nonsense way to de-ideologise the problem of international justice. According to them, problems must be tackled on the level on which they appear: local problems should be handled by local authorities with the help of local taxes, national problems on the national level. Similarly, global problems must be dealt with by global institutions, which must also be able to raise their own taxes, or at least have their own sources of income at their disposal. Hence, economists argue that transnational ecological problems – such as greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain, the contaminations of the seas and water supplies, desertification, the problems of development – as well as international conflict prevention should be tackled with Tobin taxes or taxes on CO2 emissions.14 Given that in general these problems affect the weakest more than the strong, this almost amounts to a (partial) implementation of the difference principle. Respect for justice here simply means that ‘free-riding’ is made unattractive on the international level. This is not a metaphysical or conceptual question, but a matter of consistency and efficiency. Of course, efficiency also poses problems. Removing trade barriers is clearly more efficient than giving development aid. But to whom should development aid preferably go, if it is in fact available? The difference principle would of course suggest it should go to the poorest of all, but these people are often the most difficult to help. Projects in sub-Saharan Africa fail far more often than elsewhere, but that is perhaps a symptom of the scale of the problems there. The criterion of efficiency would dictate that we should rather help those countries that already can to some extent help themselves. These countries can absorb aid best and use it in a productive way. Moreover, such aid makes itself redundant in the end. Still, despite the criterion of efficiency, from an ethical perspective we are inclined to direct at least some

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aid towards the poorest of all. Of course, sympathy reflexes (those doing badly are victims who must be helped) or the beneficence obligation plays more of a role here than the cold virtue of justice. All aid has its drawbacks. Those who cannot accept this thought will turn their eyes away from the misery that they cannot stop. But those who do not want to do this – humanitarian organisations for example – are often confronted with a heart-breaking choice: how great can they allow drawbacks to be, before they will put a stop to aid?

NOTES 1. For an analysis of humanitarianism, see A. Finkielkraut, L’humanité perdue (Paris: 1997). 2. J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 3. Ibid, 23. Rawls here cites J.S. Mill. For an intelligent discussion, see C.R. Beitz, “Rawls’ Law of Peoples,” in Ethics 110 (2000): 669-696. 4. Ibid, 11. 5. I here paraphrase J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 7. 6. See M.C. Nussbaum, M.C., “Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004), 413-507. 7. A remark by my colleague, André Van de Putte, inspired this analogy with Nozick. 8. M.C. Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in Liberalism and the Good, eds. R.B. Douglas, G. Mara, and H. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 203-252. 9. S. Loriaux, Beneficence and Distributive Justice in a Globalising World, unpublished manuscript. 10. A. Buchanan, “Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World,” in Ethics 110 (2000): 704. 11. If this was so, then ‘burdened societies’ would hardly exist and Rawls’ theory would be even more inegalitarian that it already is. 12. Thomas Pogge defends an institutional understanding of human rights that is not far from my position here in T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights - Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 13. F. Bourguignon, and M. Morrison, “Inequality among World Citizens: 1820 -1992,” in American Economic Review, 92 (2002) 4, 727-744; S. Chen, and M. Ravallion, How have the world’s poorest fared since the early 1980s?, World Bank mimeo (2004); B. Capéau, A. Decoster, “The Rise or Fall of World Inequality - Big Issue or Apparent Controversy,” in Tijdschrift voor Economie en Management, XLVIII (2003) 4, 547 – 572; D. Dollar, Globalization, Poverty and Inequality since 1980, World Bank mimeo (2004). 14. See Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, ed. I. Kaul (New York: 1999).

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