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Human Rights and Positive Duties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Rowan Cruft
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Extract

In World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response to positive duties to assist the global poor, or they could be justified on consequentialist grounds as likely to promote collective welfare. Perhaps they could even be justified on virtue-theoretic grounds as proposals that a just or benevolent person would endorse. But Pogge presents them as a response to the violation of negative duties; this makes the need for such remedial policies especially morally urgent—on a par with the obligations of killers to take measures to stop killing.

In this essay, I focus on the claim that responsibility for world poverty should be conceived in terms of a violation of negative duties. I follow Pogge in distinguishing two questions (p. 134): What kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) would we be subject to in a just global society where everyone fulfilled their duty and there was no significant risk of injustice? And what kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) do we face given that our global society falls short of the just society?

I tackle these questions in reverse order below. I argue, in contrast to Pogge, that positive duties are relevant to our answers to both questions.

Type
Response To World Poverty and Human Rights
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 29 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2005

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References

1 Pogge, Thomas W., World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002Google Scholar), ch. 6,7, and 8. All in-text citation references are to this book.

2 See, e.g., Gewirth, Alan, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 33–38Google Scholar; and O'Neill, Onora, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 128–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, e.g., Narveson, Jan, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 57Google Scholar.

4 This is a common assumption, implicit in the work of many writers. It is explicit in Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pp. 57–58; and Jordan, Jeff, “Why Negative Rights Only?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 29, no. 2 (1991), pp. 245–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Cruft, Rowan, ‘Rights: Beyond Interest Theory and Will Theory?” Law and Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2004), pp. 359–60Google Scholar.

6 See also Pogge's acknowledgment that “to be sure, promoting institutional reform is doing something (positive). But the obligation to do so may nonetheless be negative for those who would otherwise, through their involvement in upholding the relevant institutional order, be harming its victims” (p. 172). Here the duty to campaign for institutional reform is presented as a derivative duty triggered by the violation of more fundamental negative duties.

7 It is not clear whether I should hold other-directed precautionary duties to ensure merely that the rights of members of my community are not violated by other members of my community, or whether I should hold other-directed precautionary duties to ensure that the rights of any person (inside or outside my community) are not violated by any other person. Because Pogge argues forcefully that the relevant “community” today encompasses the entire interdependent global economy (e.g., pp. 15–20), it is not necessary to resolve these questions about the scope of other-directed precautionary duties.

8 See, e.g., Gewirth, The Community of Rights, ch. 2.

9 The interpretation of Locke on p. 138 especially lends itself to a “left-libertarian” reading. For similar approaches, see Steiner, Hillel, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994Google Scholar); and Otsuka, Michael, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

10 Joseph Raz offers an individualistic theory of rights when he writes that X has a right if “an aspect of X's well-being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty.” See Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 166Google Scholar. On Raz's view, as expressed here, for each right the right-holder's interest (rather than her Poggean basic need) is of sufficient importance on its own to constitute a justifying reason for the existence of that right, independently of whether the right would serve the collective interest. Several theorists have drawn attention to the inadequacy of non-individualistic accounts of human rights—such accounts would deny human rights to people whenever this would best serve collective goals. See, e.g., Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 27Google Scholar.