What we owe to the global poor

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 9, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 81-117

  Risse, Mathias ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Duties to the global poor; Global justice; Institutions; John Rawls; Poverty

Indexed keywords

EID: 36749005818     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-004-3321-z     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. Many thanks for helpful comments or discussion of this material to Abena Asare, Charles Beitz, Eric Cavallero, Michael Ignatieff, Simon Keller, Hélène Landemore, Thomas Pogge, Sanjay Reddy, Ani Satz, Leif Wenar, Members of the Faculty Seminar of the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University, and audiences at a panel on "Political Philosophy and Development Economics" (held during the convention of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Pasadena, March 2004), and at the conference on "The Theory and Practice of Equality" (Harvard University, April 2004). Thanks to Lant Pritchett, Ricardo Hausmann, and Dani Rodrik for conversations about development. The original title of this study was "What Do we Know about What Makes Societies Rich or Poor, and Does it Matter for Global Justice: Rawls, Institutions, and Our Duties to the Global Poor." That title gives a good preview of what is to come.
2. The Millennium Goals (to be reached by 2015) are: to cut in half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty; to achieve universal primary education and gender equality in education; to accomplish a three-fourths decline in maternal mortality and a two-thirds decline in mortality among children under five; to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and to assist AIDS orphans; to improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers. See the United Nations website for a progress report: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index. html.
3. For the Zedillo report, see http:// www.un.org/reports/financing/.
4. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 108.
5. Rawls, The Law of Peoples. Well-ordered societies are liberal or decent peoples. Liberal peoples have "a reasonably just constitutional democratic government that serves their fundamental interests; citizens combined by what Mill calls 'common sympathies;' and finally, a moral nature" (p. 24).
6. Decent societies meet basic requirements of "political right and justice and lead its people to honor a reasonable and just law for the Society of Peoples" (pp. 59 - 60).
7. Many considerations bearing on what well-ordered societies owe burdened societies coincide with those bearing on what developed countries owe developing countries. While there are differences because "well-ordered" societies are defined in terms of their political nature, whereas "developed" societies are defined in terms of their economic level, I treat these questions as roughly interchangeable for purposes of exploring what duties societies have towards each other. Yet one important question not fitting in here is whether the global order as such harms developing (burdened) societies. I discuss this question in Risse, "Does the Global Order Harm the Poor? Some Reflections" (unpublished). I write crudely about developed/industrialized/rich societies (or countries) in opposition to developing societies/countries, but this simplicity should do no harm.
8. The reason why empirical matters are central for assessing what the global poor are owed is this: many agree that there is a duty to support the global poor, with disagreement remaining about the nature of this duty (normative question). Once such a duty is in place, we must ask more precisely about its content, which draws onthe question of what makes countries wealthy (empirical). (By "nature" of the duty I mean whether it is a positive or negative duty, and by "content" I mean whether it is a duty to transfer resources, assist in building institutions, etc. A positive duty requires us to do something good for somebody else, whereas negative duties require not to do something bad.) What it makes sense to impose as a duty must be influenced by what makes countries do well. The content of the duty, in turn, affects its scope and limits (normative). At any rate, it should be plausible that sensible views on what societies owe to each other must be informed by views on what determines growth. If geography is economic destiny, it is implausible to claim that some countries are poor because others impose an economic system that harms them. Yet then the moral arbitrariness of geography generates a positive duty to help them. If growth depends on domestic institutions, development aid should take the form of support in building institutions, rather than resource transfer. If geography trumps, we may be able to say that "it is the fault of developed countries that certain institutions are in place now" (they derive from colonialism), but that does not entail that "it is their fault that developing countries are poor." If institutions trump, the inference holds. So, indeed, what determines the wealth of nations bears on what societies owe to each other.
9. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999);
10. John Gallup, Jeffrey Sachs, and Andrew Mellinger, "Geography and Economic Development," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper w6849 (1998);
11. and Jeffrey Sachs, "Tropical Underdevelopment," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper w81119 (2001).
12. See Jeffrey Frankel and David Roemer, "Does Trade Cause Growth?" American Economic Review 89 (1999), pp. 379-399;
13. and Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, "Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 5398 (1995). Policy makers from World Bank, IMF, WTO, and OECD frequently argue that integration into the world economy is the way to prosperity.
14. See Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
15. David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998);
16. Robert Hall and Chad Jones, "Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per Worker Than Others?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (1999), pp. 83-116;
17. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, "Botswana: An African Success Story," in Dani Rodrik (ed.), In Search of Prosperity: Analytical Narratives on Economic Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) pp. 80-123;
18. Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian and Francesco Trebbi, "Institutions Rule: The Primary of Institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development" (http://ksghome.harvard.edu/̃.drodrik.academic.ksg/ papers.html).
19. The importance of domestic institutions is also discussed in the 2003 World Economic Outlook, Chapter 3, which includes a good review of the recent literature and an illustration of the importance of institutions: calculations show (p. 106) that an improvement of institutional development from its current average to that of developing Asia implies an 80% increase in per capita income for Sub- Saharan Africa: from $800 to over $1400.
20. that an improvement of institutional development from its current average to that of developing Asia implies an 80% increase in per capita income for Sub- Saharan Africa: from $800 to over $1400. (For measuring institutional quality, see p. 119, Appendix 3.1.)
21. Although we are here assuming a stance in an empirical debate that is far from closed, that stance should be plausible enough to warrant an investigation of its normative implications. At the same time, possible empirical advancements would leave at least the arguments in Sections 3 and 4 largely unchanged (i.e., the arguments against further-reaching duties beyond the duties to support in institution-building and the arguments assessing why there is any duty of assistance to begin with). I say "largely" because the arguments would then obviously have to be reformulated in a manner that does not presuppose anymore that the content of the duty to the poor is support in institution-building.
22. To explain: a simple linear regression model looks like this: y = b0 + b1 x + u. That is, we are explaining a function y (the dependent variable) in terms of a function x (the independent or explanatory variable), for instance, prices of houses in terms of their square footage. Function u is the error term, while b0 is an additive constant and b1 is a coefficient. To be sure that x explains y, we must be sure that there is no other variable z "hidden" in the error term correlated with x and that thus explains the allegedly explanatory variable. If there is such a z, we call x an endogenous variable; otherwise it is exogenous. Suppose we want to explain y = economic growth in terms of x = institutional quality. How can we make sure that institutional quality is not itself explained by some z (like geography) hidden in the error term? How can we make sure institutional quality is exogenous, not endogenous? We can do so by choosing a so-called instrumental variable z for x. That is, we look for a z correlated with x and that thus can substitute for x, but is uncorrelated with error term u and thus does not leave the explanatory work for other variables hidden in u. As far as institutional quality is concerned, this was achieved only recently [see Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson and Simon Johnson, "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation," American Economic Review 91 (2001), pp. 1369-1401].
23. Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi, "Institutions Rule," forthcoming.
24. Rodrik et al., "Institutions Rule," builds on a significant amount of earlier work, and conduct both robustness tests and discussions of related results, all of which confirms their findings.
25. For that reason, reference to these social-science results will in particular not show why we should not now start making massive transfers to the global poor, regardless of whether they contribute to institution building. It will not be until Subsection 4.1 that we will have resources to explain why we should indeed not make such transfers.
26. See Rodrik (ed.), In Search of Prosperity, p. 10.
27. I do so following Acemoglu et al., "Botswana."
28. Botswana also shows that development does not reduce to growth: but these results stimulate hope that other things will change too. Another example is Vietnam [see Lant Pritchett, "A Toy Collection, a Socialist Star and a Democratic Dud: Growth Theory, Vietnam, and the Philippines," in Dani Rodrik (ed.), In Search of Prosperity, pp. 123-152].
29. Freeman and Lindauer argue that economic success in Africa depends on institutional quality [see Richard Freeman and David Lindauer, "Why Not Africa?" National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 6942 (1999)].
30. Van de Walle and Johnston concur [see Nicolas van de Walle and Timothy Johnston, Improving Aid to Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)].
31. See North, Institutions, p. 3.
32. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 47-48, defines institutions similarly. One concern about the institutional stance developed with such a broad definition of institutions in the background is that the thesis "economic growth depends critically on institutions" becomes rather unspecific. However, this concern arises with regard to the practical impact of the institutional stance more than within the confines of our current theoretical debate. What matters, for our purposes, about the three views we have introduced is that geography traces growth to environmental influences, whereas institutions traces it to what one society "does with others," and institutions to "what individuals in a given society do with each other."
33. "Emergence" and "persistence" of institutions must be kept apart more than the account above suggests. It might well be possible for outsiders to force the emergence of a certain set of institutions that would not have otherwise emerged, but then can (and need to be) maintained by the indigenous population. Think of the imposition of democratic structures in Japan at the end of World War II. Still, situations in which outsiders can impose institutions in this manner will tend to be cataclysmic moments, such as the one just mentioned, and thus be rather rare.
34. Van de Walle and Johnston, Improving Aid to Africa, pp. 2-3, argue that institutions in Africa founded on substantial donor support are weak and dependent on outside resources.
35. The 2002 World Development Report Building Institutions for Markets elaborates on the theme discussed above and provides literature references.
36. The World Bank Research Report Assessing Aid finds that financial aid works in good policy environments; improvements in economic institutions and policies are key to a quantum leap in poverty reduction; effective aid complements private investment; the value of development projects is to strengthen institutions and policies so that services can be effectively delivered; an active civil society improves public services; aid can nurture reform even in highly distorted environments - but it requires patience and focus on ideas not money [World Bank, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 2-4].
37. Assessing Aid points out that the following three measures are unlikely to work: large amounts of money; buying reform (i.e., conditional lending not supported by a domestic movement); focusing on individual projects (World Bank, Assessing Aid, p. 103).
38. Pogge argues as if one may simply bypass governments (institutional structures) and start a project regardless of domestic support [Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Pres. 2002), p. 206].
39. Yet such projects tend to fall apart as soon as the donor moves out. Van de Walle and Johnston claim that the proliferation of stand-alone projects not tied into a general improvement of infrastructure and institutions is a key weakness of aid to Africa. An earlier influential expression of this view is Tamar Tendler, Inside Foreign Aid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
40. Leif Wenar questions the claim that "small sacrifices bring great benefit" by displaying how difficult it is to determine the effects of contributions to aid efforts, and in the process surveys a considerable amount of empirical literature expressing skepticism about aid (Leif Wenar, "What We Owe to Distant Others," Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, forthcoming).
41. Pogge takes up the theme that "world poverty cannot be eradicated by 'throwing money atthe problem"' (Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 8). He rejects that claim by reference to the facts that much development aid has been given for strategic reasons, and that only a rather small percentage share was allocated to the least developed countries. However, the 1998 World Bank Report and van de Walle and Johnston are also well aware of these facts - but these facts simply do not refute the claim that Pogge dismisses.
42. Views following Peter Singer often speak as if the problems of the world could be solved if only rich Westerners were willing to make that sort of sacrifice [Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229-243;
43. Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), however, shows a considerable awareness of the practical obstacles to such a view].
44. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 169.
45. See Loren Lomasky, "Towards a Liberal Theory of National Boundaries," in David Miller and Sohail Hashmi (eds.), Boundaries and Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 55-79.
46. The term "classical liberalism" should be clear enough for our purposes, but see p. 75, to see what he means by it. One may argue against all this, though, that peoples (plural!) as such have claims to equal treatment to such an extent that they have claims to economic equality regardless of institutional performance and of issues of individual responsibility. That sort of collectivist stance, however, just strikes me as independently implausible.
47. At the same time, it is a bit hard to assess how urgent this instability concern really would be in a world in which quality institutions are pervasive. It seems that people's self-esteem and ambitions are very much shaped by their immediate environment, rather than by other societies [Robert H. Frank, Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), on such themes]. However, it is hard to predict the impact of an ever-more interconnected world on these phenomena (think of widely-transmitted Western Television or widely-shown movies, etc.)
48. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 111, italics provided.
49. Charles Beitz, "Rawls's 'Law of Peoples,"' Ethics 110 (2000), provided pp. 690- 692.
50. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,
51. and Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
52. According to Sen, famines are not problems of food production, but political and economic disasters. It is by reference to Landes that Rawls asserts there is no need to discuss Beitz's resource distribution principle [see Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)].
53. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 108.
54. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 143-144.
55. Will Kymlicka is a recent proponent of the view that parties to the original position would choose some form of redistributive tax - perhaps a global resource tax - which requires wealthier countries to share their wealth with poorer countries. The goal would be to ensure that all people are able to live a decent life in their country of birth, without having to leave their culture and move to another country to gain access to a fair share of resources. [Will Kymlicka, "Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal-Egalitarian Perspective," in David Miller and S. H. Hashmi (eds.), Boundaries and Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 249-275]. Following the argument of this section, it seems Kymlicka should focus on institution- building and think of such a tax only in purely instrumental terms.
56. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 113-115.
57. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 27f., 107.
58. While page 28 of The Law of Peoples discusses relative and not absolute economic standing, page 34 argues that liberal peoples do not have a conception of the good. These passages themselves do not entail that Rawls thinks that peoples are unconcerned with their absolute standing. Wenar, for one, understands him to be arguing that [Leif Wenar, "The Legitimacy of Peoples," in Pablo de Greiff and Ciaran Cronin (eds.), Global Justice and Transnational Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 53-76]., If Rawls does not mean this, the objection I am about to make does not apply: but then this whole approach does not explain why there should be no redistributive duties.
59. Wenar, "The Legitimacy of Peoples," also notes this, but does not criticize it. Pogge also discusses the assumption that peoples only care about being well-ordered [Thomas Pogge, "An Egalitarian Law of Peoples," Philosophy and Public Affairs 23 (1994) pp. 195-224].
60. What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. To achieve this state of things great wealth is not necessary. In fact, beyond some point it is more likely to be a positive hindrance, a meaningless distraction at best if not a temptation to indulgence and emptiness. [Rawls, A Theory of Justice (second edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 257-258]
61. Pogge and Beitz have long insisted that there is a kind of global basic structure; [Beitz, Political Theory, Part III, Sections 3 and 4,
62. and Beitz, "International Liberalism and Distributive Justice: A Survey of Recent Thought," World Politics 51 (1999), pp. 269-296;
63. Alan Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World," Ethics 110 (2000), pp. 697-721].
64. Debra Satz, "Equality of What Among Whom? Thoughts on Cosmopolitanism, Statism, and Nationalism," in Ian Shapiro and Lea Brilmayer (eds.), Global Justice (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
65. Michael Blake, "Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy," Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001), pp. 257-297.
66. Note that the terms "coercive structure" and "cooperative structure" are not used in a mutually exclusive sense. Social institutions are often both cooperative in the sense that they involve collaboration among individuals to their mutual benefit, and at the same time they are coercive by limiting the participants' autonomy. Note also that it is indeed in this "autonomy-constraining" sense that I use the term "coercive" here: in particular, there should be no immediate association with "oppressive" relationships.
67. I refer here to "citizens" vs. "non-citizens" and thereby oversimplify the debate. After all, in addition to the citizens living in a country there are also other residents, and their existence, just like questions of immigration, complicates matters. But for our current purposes, I will ignore these complications. The following quote from Christopher Jencks illustrates nicely how the need for justification of domestic policies arises: Almost everyone who studies the causes of economic inequality agrees that by far the most important reason for the differences between rich democracies is that their governments adopt different economic policies. (⋯) A number of rich countries have centralized wage bargaining, which almost always compresses the distribution of earnings. Many rich democracies also make unionization easy, which also tends to compress the wage distribution. Some rich democracies transfer a lot of money to people who are retired, unemployed, sick, or permanently disabled, while others are far less generous. The United States is unusually unequal partly because it makes little effort to limit wage inequality: the minimum wage is low, and American law makes unionization relatively difficult. In addition, the United States transfers less money to those who are not working than most other rich democracies. [Christopher Jencks, "Does Inequality Matter?" Daedalus131 (2002) pp, 49-65, 52f] Jencks here offers a list of economic and legal arrangements that must be justifiable to the citizens of a country (and with regard to which states differ significantly) - but not to anybody else.
68. Beitz, "Rawls's 'Law of Peoples,"' p. 694.
69. The Basel example also lends itself to this objection. Suppose that the Swiss economy, for some reason, suffers severe harm, so that many Swiss workers have no reasonable alternative to seeking employment in the neighboring countries. Suppose somebody living in Basel crosses the border each day to work for a French company, and that the company has a policy of paying Swiss workers half what it pays equivalent French workers. Does this not seem unfair, and does it not mean that this Swiss citizen has a morally legitimate claim to compensation from the company? I think he does have such a claim, and it is a claim that he has in virtue of doing the same work for less pay. However, suppose that the relative social status of his French co-workers for their income is higher than his social status in Switzerland. The view above entails that he does not have any legitimate complaint about that, nor does he have a legitimate say in how the French can bequeath or otherwise transfer their money. There is no need for the French laws regulating property to be justifiable to him. Whatever claims he has, he has in virtue of being a worker of that company, and the only regulations that must be justifiable to him are those that apply to his role as a worker in that company.
70. John Ruggie, "American Exceptionalism, Exemptionalism, and Global Governance," in Michael Ignatieff (ed.), American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). See page 27 of the paper as found on Ruggie's webpage in February 2004 (http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ cbg/ director.htm) as well as the following related statement in Anne-Marie Slaughter: [G]overnance without government is governance without power, and government without power rarely works. Many pressing international and domestic problems result from states' insufficient power to establish order, build infrastructure, and provide minimum social services. Private actors may take up some slack, but there is no substitute for the state.
71. [Anne-Marie Slaughter, "The Real New World Order," Foreign Affairs 76 (1997), pp. 183-195]
72. This is a remark from an author who does by no means wish to insist on the old Westphalian order, but instead, urges us to think of the world order in terms of trans-governmental networks [Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)].
73. Turning around the proposal that sovereignty has been eroded through the increasing importance of transnational organizations and trans-governmental activities of the sort described by Slaughter in A New World Order, Abram Chayes and Antonia H. Chayes argue that "the only way most states can realize and express their sovereignty is through participation in the regimes that make up the substance of international life" [Abram Chayes and Antonia H. Chayes, The New Sovereignty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 27].
74. Christopher Morris, in a wide-ranging discussion of the modern state, argues that "states ⋯ are legitimate to the extent that they are just and minimally efficient" [Christopher Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 165]. So the concern here is inward-directed (i.e., towards the citizens of the state), rather than outward-directed (i.e., towards those excluded from the state).
75. As opposed to that, Samuel Scheffler gives much room to discussing the concern that we are about to address, and calls it the "distributive objection" [Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)]. The distributive objection is an objection to the existence of so-called associative duties (i.e., duties that arise, in one form or another, through associations) from the point of view of those who are excluded from the group of people among whom these duties apply; that is, it challenges those who defend such a duty to justify it to those who cannot benefit from its existence, and who may in fact be disadvantaged by it. Scheffler contrasts this objection to associative duties with the "voluntarist objection," which arises from the point of view of those who are said to have that kind of duty, but never voluntarily accepted it. The account developed here should also be taken to be a response to the distributive objection. (What is essential for this response is already present in Blake, "Distributive Justice.")
76. See Joseph Carens "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders," Review of Politics 49 (1987), pp. 251-273.
77. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 178-182.
78. Beitz, "Rawls's 'Law of Peoples,"' p. 689, states that the self-interest argument primarily applies to outlaw states. I hope my discussion shows that it also applies to burdened societies.
79. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), Section 7.
80. Well-ordered societies possess institutions in which individuals are at least recognized as citizens entitled to the protection of human rights and to a legal system guided by a "common good idea of justice" (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 66) and have adopted these institutions based on a picture of personhood.
81. The liberal societies among them go further, recognizing "that persons are citizens first and have equal basic rights as equal citizens" (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 66), but decent hierarchical peoples part company here. For the present argument, what wellordered societies have in common suffices.
82. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 112-113.
83. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 24.
84. For the self-determination argument, see Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, "National Self-Determination," The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), pp 440-460.
85. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, Chapter 7.
86. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 11.
87. According to this argument, then, the global original position is constrained by epistemic considerations that are themselves motivated on the grounds that that original position is supposed to generate advice. This immediately triggers the concern that the global original position might not be a good device to use to inquire about global justice, or at any rate, that it cannot be both such a device and a good device to obtain action-guiding advice. This may be true, but the objection I am trying to answer here is that the use of the device of the original position will all by itself entail that a stronger justification of states is required than what we have offered in Section 3 (or put differently, it is the objection that we cannot both use that device to determine the moral foundations of the duties to the poor and continue to support a system of states). But it seems that this objection can indeed be rebutted in the manner sketched here. The following paragraph in the text will give an answer to the question of how the device of the global original position relates to global justice.
88. United Nations Charter, Chapter 1, Article 1, Paragraph 2; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Part 1, Article 1; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Part 1, Article 1.
89. As Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples," points out, individuals do not now generally live in peoples organized by their own governments. Yet that is no objection to the claim that The Law of Peoples is a realistic utopia. The first goal towards realizing global justice is to make sure that appropriate groups of common sympathies are organized by governments. The Law of Peoples allows both for the formulation of that vision and for the formulation of a vision of how peoples should relate to each other. One may also object that Rawls's account has no larger claims to being a realistic utopia than cosmopolitanism. After all, there is a massive disconnect between peoples and existing states: Getting from existing states to a society of peoples would involve breaking up some states and changing the borders of others. So policy makers today may have little use for The Law of Peoples either. However, self-determination is widely acknowledged as a legitimate goal of peoples, with disagreement persisting about the precise circumstances under which it can be brought about against resistance, about the legitimacy of outside help, etc. Cosmopolitan ideals are considerably less well entrenched. The argument presented here, then, is one about how one should set up the global original position. In Section 4.1, I have argued for one addition to the way Rawls sets up that global original position to make sure that duties to burdened societies are properly considered. That addition does not seem to stand in any conflict with the limitations suggested here.
90. Pogge, "An Egalitarian Law of Peoples."