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Global Distributive Justice After Rawls: a Modified Poggean Argument for How We Harm the World's Poorest" (2011)

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Global Distributive Justice After Rawls: a Modified Poggean Argument for How We Harm the World's Poorest Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2011 Global Distributive Justice After Rawls: A Modified oggeanP Argument for How We Harm the World's Poorest Mark Chakoian Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Chakoian, Mark, "Global Distributive Justice After Rawls: A Modified Poggean Argument for How We Harm the World's Poorest" (2011). Dissertations. 211. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/211 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2011 Mark Chakoian LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AFTER RAWLS: A MODIFIED POGGEAN ARGUMENT FOR HOW WE HARM THE WORLD‘S POOREST A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY MARK CHAKOIAN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2011 Copyright by Mark Chakoian, 2011 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My extreme gratitude goes to my director, David Ingram, for all of his help. I would also like to thank my readers, David Schweickart and Tom Wren, along with the other members of my proposal committee, Tom Carson and Diana Meyers, who helped me to better formulate my project. I would also like to thank Andrew Cutrofello, for helping me to figure out what I really wanted to write about. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their unconditional support. iii PREFACE In 2004, I entered Loyola‘s doctoral program in philosophy. I had just completed my undergraduate work at Bradley University. Majoring in mathematics at Bradley, I soon discovered philosophy through my choice of electives and added it as a second major. The philosophy program at Bradley was small, with two dedicated professors. The first philosopher I fell in love with was Heidegger, and I decided to pursue graduate work in continental philosophy. Considering myself a continental philosopher and Heideggerian, as a graduate student at Loyola I also pursued another side of philosophy out of personal interest: social and political. Living in Chicago, Race Theory struck me as being particularly interesting and important, and it was on Charles Mills‘ Blackness Visible that I wrote my Master‘s paper. When I finished my coursework, I began discussing a dissertation on Heidegger with one of my professors; when she left the department, I took a step back to reconsider what my doctoral project would be. As a senior at Bradley University, I had taken a philosophy seminar on cosmopolitanism. In it, my professor posed the question of whether it was just to buy a can of cola (such as the one he always had in hand), when that dollar could provide life-saving support to a needy child. Thinking through this at the time, I concluded that justice and morality were relative terms, and that those with the money made the rules. That basic question, however, stuck with me; as I continued into my graduate studies, I couldn‘t shake the feeling that the money I was living on could be better spent saving the lives of others. I iv soon began considering other ways that my actions impacted those around me: the environmental impact of the meat I consumed, the consequences of the runoff from pesticides and fertilizers used to grow the food I ate, the conditions of the factories where my clothes were produced. I did not connect my lifestyle changes to philosophy until I began reconsidering my dissertation topic: could an argument be made that justified, or even demanded, that we live our lives with an eye to our impacts on others? In my pursuit of this question I came across the work of Thomas Pogge. As I considered the ways that this basic argument could take shape—that we have obligations to live our lives differently because of the ways that we harm others—I narrowed the scope of my dissertation to be an analysis and reformulation of Pogge‘s main argument from World Poverty and Human Rights. As my research continues, I turn to the other implications of negative-duty arguments: How do we harm others through actions that we consider to be commonplace? How do the affluent within our own society harm the worst off within it? Is it possible for individuals today to live without harming others, and what are the implications if it is not? v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii PREFACE iv LIST OF TABLES viii LIST OF FIGURES ix INTRODUCTION 1 Summary of Chapters 2 Final Remarks 8 CHAPTER ONE: RAWLS AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE 9 Introduction 9 A Theory of Justice 10 Freeman‘s Defense of Rawls 21 Peoples as Masters of their Own Fates 44 A Fully Veiled Duty 49 Preliminary Conclusions 51 CHAPTER TWO: SINGER AND OUR OBLIGATIONS TO THE WORLD‘S POOREST 60 Introduction 60 Positive Duties 62 Three Kinds of Duty 78 CHAPTER THREE: TWO WAYS WE HARM THE WORST OFF: UPHOLDING THE UNJUST RESULTS OF OUR SHARED HISTORY AND EXCLUSION FROM A COMMON RESOURCE POOL 93 Introduction 93 Defending the Argument from Harm 94 Our Shared Violent History 100 Exclusion from a Shared Resource Pool 126 CHAPTER FOUR: TWO WAYS WE HARM THE WORST OFF: OUR GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGES 138 Shared Global Institutions 138 Convergence Theory 163 Environmental Harm 166 Convergence Theory Revisited 177 CHAPTER FIVE: A MODEST PROPOSAL 181 A Modest Proposal 184 The Connection of the GRD to the Poggean Argument 197 vi Objections to the GRD 205 Toward a New Proposal 218 Conclusion 222 CONCLUSION 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY 226 VITA 232 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Global Resource Consumption 131 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The Intersection of the Harms Described by the Three Strands 165 Figure 2. World Maps with Nations Scaled to Reflect Carbon Emissions and Per Capita Mortality from Climate Change 176 Figure 3. The Intersection of the Convergence of the Harms Described by the Three Original Sub-arguments with the Harms Described by the Environmental Argument 179 Figure 4. Changes to the Intersection of the Harms Described by the Three Sub-arguments as Environmental Harms are Included 180 Figure 5. Projected Revenue Streams Resulting from the Implementation of the GRD 210 ix INTRODUCTION In December of 2004, a tsunami struck the coast of Indonesia and other nations, killing 230,000 people. The world responded quickly and generously, donating more than $11 billion.1 In January of 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, also killing 230,000.2 Less than a week later, the American Red Cross had collected $105 million in individual donations, $22 million of which came via their new ‗text to donate‘ system.3 Eventually the international response to the earthquake totaled $10 billion in pledges and donations from governments and international organizations.4 In each of the weeks following the 2004 tsunami and 2010 earthquake, more people around the world died of (other) poverty-related causes than died as a result of either disaster. In the five years between the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 earthquake, some 90 million people died from poverty related causes. I am by no means suggesting that these events are not tragic, but their scale is miniscule in comparison to the horrors of world poverty, which kills some 50,000 people every day. Those dying in this way are human beings: they are individuals with families and aspirations. Many of them are children, and almost all of them could be saved. 1 Tom Wright, ―UN Failed to Coordinate Tsunami Relief, Red Cross Report Says,‖ New York Times, October 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/world/asia/05iht-relief.html. 2 Henry Fountain, ―In Studying Haiti, a New Angle on an Earthquake‘s Intensity,‖ New York Times, October 18, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/19quake.html. 3 Stephanie Strom, ―A Deluge of Donations via Text Messages,‖ New York Times, January 9 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/us/19charity.html. 4 Neil MacFarquhar, ―Skepticism on Pledges for Haiti,‖ New York Times, March 31, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/world/americas/01haiti.html. 1 2 The project that follows is about the nature of our obligations to the world‘s worst off people: more specifically, it is an assessment of Thomas Pogge‘s argument that we have substantial negative duties to the extremely impoverished. Pogge‘s understanding of our duties in this area stands in marked contrast to most mainstream views. Some would say that we have no relationship to these people; their dying may be a tragedy, but it is the unfortunate result of an overpopulated world and is not anything that we can be held accountable for. Others would say that only the leaders of the nations in which the impoverished live might be responsible: they have developed national institutions that benefit themselves instead of their people, and they have forged a path of corruption instead of creating the structures necessary for success. Those who do ascribe us responsibility tend to focus on our positive duties to the worst off: when we hear news of an event of any sort that kills 50,000 people, we have a natural inclination to aid those who have survived. Pogge makes a stronger claim: poverty is something that we contribute to. According to this view, each and every one of us is taking part in causing the deaths of 18 million people every year.
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