Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to life long severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. The annual death toll from poverty-related causes is around 18 million, or one-third of all human deaths, which adds up to approximately 270 million deaths since the end of the Cold War.

The war in Iraq has reignited the passionate humanitarian intervention debate. President George W. Bush surprised many observers in his second inaugural address when he promised to oppose tyranny and oppression, and this in a world not always willing or ready to join in that fight. Humanitarian intervention is again on the forefront of world politics.

The central contention of this essay is that a just cause for war is a wrong that is of a type that can make those responsible for it morally liable to military attack as a means of preventing or rectifying it. This claim has many implications that conflict with assumptions of the currently orthodox theory of the just war. Among the implications explored in the text are that the requirement of just cause is logically and morally prior to all the other requirements of a just war, that this requirement governs all phases of a war and not just the resort to war, that it is thus impermissible to continue to fight a war once the just cause or causes have been achieved, that it is impermissible to fight at all in a war that lacks a just cause, that just cause is a restriction on the type of aim that may be pursued by means of war and is not a matter of scale, that a war that lacks a just cause may be morally justified even if it is not just, and that a belligerent can pursue both just and unjust causes in the same war, which may then have elements or phases that are just and other elements or phases that are unjust.

The question of the legitimacy of preventive war has been at the center of the debate about the proper response to terrorism and the legitimacy of the Iraq War. One side has argued that preventive war is a legitimate and necessary tool for nations to use in defense against terrorists; the other side has claimed that war is permissible only in self-defense, and that therefore the preventive use of military force is unjustified both legally and morally. In this essay I attempt to clarify the terms of this debate by demonstrating that neither side is precisely correct. Both under Just War Doctrine and common sense morality, preventive war is indeed justifiable, so long as it satisfies the basic requirements for going to war such as necessity and proportionality. However, under the current international law regime governed by the United Nations Charter, the use of preventive international force is restricted to the Security Council alone. Individual nation states are permitted to use international force only in self-defense. The rise of international terrorism does not by itself change this situation; preventive force against terrorist organization is permissible and appropriate, but it must be authorized by the Security Council in order to be legitimate. Only if the Council proved wholly ineffective in exercising its authority would the right to preventive war revert to individual nations. For all the shortcomings of the United Nations, however, I argue we have not reached a state of total breakdown of international authority sufficient to justify a return to the legitimacy of unilateral preventive war.

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreaking World Poverty and Human Rights is that the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but to rectify injustice. But does the global order harm the poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false.

Fernando Tesón offers two “humanitarian rationales” for the war in Iraq. The first, which he calls the “narrow” rationale, is that the war was fought to overthrow a tyrant. The second, “grand,” rationale is that it was fought as part of a strategy for defending the United States by establishing democratic regimes in the Middle East and throughout the world–peacefully, if possible, but by force if necessary. Both rationales strain the traditional understanding of humanitarian intervention.

It would be rather unusual for someone to argue publicly that the world's rich have no obligations at all with respect to the global poor. Many, however, claim that the obligations of the affluent countries are both fairly weak and minimal. This claim is typically arrived at via two premises: one is normative, the other factual. The normative premise asserts that while we are under a strict obligation not to harm others, the obligation to benefit people who we have not harmed is rather weak (and is, for instance, best left to private charitable efforts rather than government action or institutional reform). The factual premise is that the affluent are not, individually or collectively, harming the world's poor by causing their poverty (p. 12). Following Thomas Pogge, I will sometimes refer to this view simply as “libertarianism.” According to a second view, which I shall call the “need-based” view, we have a very strong and extensive set of duties to come to the assistance of the global poor: duties that are grounded in the neediness of the poor. In its most pure form, this view rejects altogether the ethical significance of the distinction between harming and failing to help. On a morally demanding version of the need-based view we have duties of assistance to anyone who is worse off than us, not merely those who are severely in need.

Fernando R. Tesón replies to Terry Nardin's critique

Just war theorists contended that weapons are illegitimate unless they can be used in such a way so as to distinguish combatants from noncombatants. Contemporary international legal theory also draws heavily on the principle of discrimination. The Geneva Convention (IV), as interpreted in the Second Protocol of 1977, says: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack…Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.” In both the Just War tradition and contemporary international law, the main justification for such a principle has to do with noncombatant immunity, the idea that only those who are combatants can legitimately be attacked in war. The principle of discrimination also relies on the idea that it is possible to distinguish, in a morally significant way, those classes or groups of people who participate in wars from those who do not. The categories of “civilian” or “soldier,”“combatant” or “noncombatant,” are thought to be stable. Yet, the case of the naked soldier taking a bath challenges such stability in a way that illustrates the serious conceptual and normative problems with identifying such social groups. In this paper I argue that, because of these problems, the traditional principle of discrimination offers no clear, morally relevant, line between those who fight and those who do not. Nonetheless, I argue that a distinction of this sort should be maintained, although one that will restrict tactics in war far more than is normally recognized.

What does the world's engagement with the unfolding crisis in Darfur tell us about the impact of the Iraq war on the norm of humanitarian intervention? Is a global consensus about a “responsibility to protect” more or less likely? There are at least three potential answers to these questions. Some argue that the merging of strategic interests and humanitarian goods amplified by the intervention in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the world's most powerful states will act to prevent or halt humanitarian crises. Others insist that the widespread perception that the United States and its allies “abused” humanitarian justifications to legitimate its invasion of Iraq has set back efforts to build a global consensus about humanitarian action. A third group argues that the “responsibility to protect” inhibits the potential for abuse and, as a result, consensus is likely to strengthen post-Iraq for precisely this reason. Through a detailed study of the international engagement with Darfur, I suggest that the latter two arguments have merit but need to be adjusted. I argue that the humanitarian intervention norm has changed in two subtle ways. First, while the strength of the norm itself has not changed, the credibility of the United States and U.K. as “norm carriers” has been significantly undermined. Second, while the “responsibility to protect” has been invoked to support international activism, it has also re-legitimated anti-interventionist arguments.

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.

Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimization of women by Non-western cultures. In this paper, I argue that conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries primarily as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures presents an understanding of their situation that is crucially incomplete. This incomplete understanding distorts Western theorists comprehension of our moral relationship to women elsewhere in the world and so of our theoretical task. It also impoverishes our assumptions about the intercultural dialogue necessary to promote global justice for women.

Since the September 11 attacks, a new security agenda has swept aside much of the old sensitivity and apathy about intervening in “failing” states. The war on terror has redefined “governance” from concentrating on issues of economic viability and popular rights to a focus on the capacity of states to generate sufficient “order” to deter or capture the agents of the new transnational security threats: terrorists, smugglers, money launderers, the carriers of zoonotic disease. As part of this process, the governance standards of other states became part of Western states' own security agendas, generating new, self-interested incentives for aid and intervention. In this article, I explore the possibilities for developing a realist-informed normative framework for humanitarian intervention in the context of the post–September 11international concern with transnational threats.

Environmentalists argue that we need to reduce population and consumption to protect the environment, and that this is something we can all do by individually choosing to have smaller families and buying fewer products. This article questions the ecological effects of such choice. When people have fewer children or reduce their consumption, they save money. What they then do with this money is crucial to the consequences of their actions. If they place it in conventional financial mechanisms, such as banks or stocks, they merely shift the locale of environmental harm since these mechanisms, within a capitalist economy, redeploy savings into further investment and productivity. For individual lifestyle choices to make a difference, environmentalists must find ways of linking such choices to efforts aimed at changing the nature of capitalist economies. If we had effective public policies that redistributed income, forced polluters to pay for the harm they cause, mandated more environmentally friendly technologies, and reduced the workday in the richer parts of the world, we could alter the way we live our material lives.

Contrasting his own position with that of those who conceive the moral challenge of global poverty in terms of a positive duty to help, Thomas Pogge suggests that “we may be failing to fulfill our stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from [emphasis added] the unjust impoverishment of others” (p. 197). We should conceive of our individual donations and of possible institutionalized initiatives to eradicate poverty not as helping the poor but “as protecting them from the effects of global rules whose injustice benefits us and is our responsibility” (p. 23, emphasis added). Pogge also claims that such activities should be understood in terms of compensation: “The word ‘compensate’ is meant to indicate that how much one should be willing to contribute toward reforming unjust institutions and toward mitigating the harms they cause depends on how much one is contributing to, and benefiting from, their maintenance” (p. 50, emphasis added).

In characterizing wrongful involvement in an unjust social order and the compensatory duties that arise from it, Pogge refers to the terms contribution/responsibility as well as to benefit/profit (the latter are used interchangeably). The first of these factors is unobjectionable: we can take it for granted that there is a negative duty not to contribute to injustice and that those who are responsible for harmful institutions should compensate their victims. I want to raise doubts, however, about the role that Pogge assigns to benefiting from injustice in the determination of our duties toward the victims of injustice. I shall do so by challenging his claim that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice, and that the role that benefiting from injustice plays in determining our duties to work toward reforming unjust practices and mitigating their harmful effects is best understood in terms of compensation.

In his provocative book World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge employs two distinct argumentative strategies. The first is ecumenical: Pogge makes powerful arguments for redressing world poverty that aim to appeal to persons with divergent views regarding its causes, and also for the nature and extent of our obligations to the global poor. This is an extremely important part of his book: World Poverty and Human Rights argues that on any reasonable moral theory and across a wide range of views of the ultimate causes of world poverty, we will be seen to have obligations to the world's poor. Pogge's ecumenical argument shows that one does not have to accept a principle of global equality of resources in order to conclude that we have a general obligation to aid other human beings in severe need. I will discuss this strategy of argument at the end of my essay.

In his second and main argumentative strategy, Pogge defends a distinctive normative and empirical perspective. For, at the heart of the book is the thesis that we in the developed countries have special obligations to end world poverty because we have significantly contributed to its existence. Pogge argues for a causal contribution principle, which holds that we are morally responsible for world poverty because and to the extent that we have caused it.

Pogge also argues that our obligations not to harm others apply universally and are stronger than the obligations we have to provide aid. In fact, on Pogge's view global justice involves solely this negative duty—a duty not to inflict harm on others. The central innovation of the book is to defend a normative premise typically associated with libertarianism—that we have strong duties not to harm but only weak duties to benefit people we have not harmed—and conjoin it with an empirical claim to generate an argument for radical global redistribution.

Although there is much else of interest in World Poverty and Human Rights, particularly Pogge's specific policy proposals to diminish global poverty, the causal contribution thesis and the identification of a duty not to harm as the fundamental principle of justice arguably form its intellectual core and central innovations. In this comment, I will critique both Pogge's use of the causal contribution principle as well as his attempt to derive all of our obligations to the global poor from the need to refrain from harming others.

When I think of the challenges facing international society in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, two images come to mind. The first, a work of postcard art, depicts a screenprint of the Statue of Liberty, with a twist. In the place of her striking face and radiating crown appears a decidedly masculine image: that of a helmeted marine, grim and tight-jawed, a cigarette poking insolently from his lips. The caption reads, in bold white capitals on black, “PEACE,” and beneath it another phrase, asterisked: “conditions apply.” The second is a newspaper photograph of a young woman in New York taken during the global demonstrations against the war in February 2003. She has been called out of the march by the photographer and stands, at once defiant and bewildered, against a row of mounted police. Rugged up against the winter cold, she holds a placard upon which she has written a question: “Perpetual war for perpetual peace?”

There is much that is interesting in Anthony Burke's essay. Unfortunately, Burke is unable to resist hyperbolic language and too readily substitutes rhetorical onslaught for compelling argument. For example, those he criticizes as being neo-imperialists in liberal internationalist clothing are many times over said to present “disturbing” or “disturbing indeed” arguments. We are told that liberty is a “hermaphrodite”; that the war on terrorism constitutes “the democracy that slaughters, the liberator that tortures” (p. 73), as if Abu Ghraib is standard policy rather than aberration and the deaths of civilians intentional rather than a tragic unintended consequence of fighting. Burke's opponents, he says, deploy “notoriously vague” and “fear-soaked rhetoric” as they “scandalously” mimic the ICISS report's title (p. 76). Citing Jürgen Habermas, he calls the war against Saddam Hussein an “unimaginable break” with existing norms (pp. 75, 76). This suggests that there are “imaginable breaks,” but we do not know anything about the criteria he is applying. Reserving sunny language for his own proposed alternatives, Burke blasts the idea of state sovereignty itself as “violent and exclusivist,” and “linger[ing], like a latent illness, in the very depths of modern cosmopolitanism” (p. 74). These excesses are distracting and cloud the observations in his essay that are perceptive and deserve serious consideration.

Mathias Risse discusses whether the global system of territorial sovereignty that emerged in the fifteenth century can be said to harm the poorer societies. This question is distinct from the question I raise in my book—namely, whether present citizens of the affluent countries, in collusion with the ruling elites of most poor countries, are harming the global poor. These questions are different, because present citizens of the affluent countries bear responsibility only for the recent design of the global institutional order. The effects of the states system as it was shaped before 1980, say, is thus of little relevance to the question I have raised. A further difference is that whereas Risse's discussion focuses on the well-being of societies, typically assessed by their GNP per capita, my discussion focuses on the well-being of individual human beings. This difference is significant because what enriches a poor country (in terms of GNP per capita) all too often impoverishes the vast majority of its inhabitants, as I discuss with the example of Nigeria's oil revenues (pp. 112–14).

My focus is then on the present situation, on the radical inequality between the bottom half of humankind, suffering severe poverty, and those in the top seventh, whose per capita share of the global product is 180 times greater than theirs (at market exchange rates). This radical inequality and the continuous misery and death toll it engenders are foreseeably reproduced under the present global institutional order as we have shaped it. And most of it could be avoided, I hold, if this global order had been, or were to be, designed differently. The feasibility of a more poverty-avoiding alternative design of the global institutional order shows, I argue, that the present design is unjust and that, by imposing it, we are harming the global poor by foreseeably subjecting them to avoidable severe poverty.