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Poverty Alleviation, Global Justice, and the Real World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

Chris Brown
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Extract

The modern literature on responding to global poverty is over fifty years old and has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent analytical political theorists of the age, including Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. Yet in spite of this extraordinary concentration of brainpower, the problem of global poverty has quite clearly not been solved or, indeed, adequately defined. We are therefore entitled to ask two questions of any new contribution to this literature: first, what does it have to offer that past work does not; and second, what reason is there to think that, this time, it will truly make a difference. These questions will be posed below, but before undertaking this task it may be useful to offer an overview of the field, with particular attention to why the problem of global poverty seems so intractable.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , Fall 2017 , pp. 357 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 See Barry, Brian, “Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective,” in Barry, Brian, Democracy, Power and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations, 2nd edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Caney, Simon, Justice Beyond Borders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Pogge, Thomas, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972), pp. 229–43Google Scholar.

2 There are obvious differences between the issues of global justice, global inequality, and global poverty, but here these terms are used as more or less synonymous unless indicated otherwise.

3 See, most recently, The Most Good You Can Do (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)Google ScholarPubMed.

4 Rawls, A Theory of Justice. The details of this contract, the “veil of ignorance,” and of Rawls's Law of Peoples need not concern us here. Interested readers may refer to Brown, Chris, “John Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples,’ and International Political Theory,” Ethics & International Affairs 14, no. 1 (2000), pp. 125–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For an elaboration of this position, see Williams, Huw Lloyd, On Rawls, Development and Global Justice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Pogge, Realizing Rawls.

7 Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations.

8 Barry, Democracy, Power and Justice.

9 Beitz, Charles, “Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment,” Journal of Philosophy 80, no. 10 (1983), pp. 591–600 Google Scholar; and O'Neill, Onora, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

10 Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights.

11 Nagel, Thomas, “The Problem with Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005), pp. 113–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), ch. 1Google Scholar.

13 Edmonds, David, Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

14 For a key text on revisionist just war theory, see McMahan, Jeff, Killing in War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Collier, Paul, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

16 See, for example, Wenar, Leif, “Property Rights and the Resource Curse,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, no. 1 (2008), pp. 2–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See Huw Lloyd Williams, On Rawls, Development and Global Justice.