Do transnational economic effects violate human rights?

Ethics and Global Politics

Volumn 2, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 259-276

  Meckled Garcia, Saladin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Causes; Cosmopolitan; Distinctiveness approach; Global justice; Human rights; International justice; Moral concepts; Moral methodology; Poverty; Social justice; Transnational economic effects; Violation

Indexed keywords

EID: 85047685150     PISSN: 16544951     EISSN: 16546369     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i3.2066     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Saladin Meckled-Garcia, 'On the Very Idea of Cosmopolitan Justice: Constructivism and International Agency', The Journal of Political Philosophy 1, no. 3 (2008): 245-71.
2. I have also, in that paper, distinguished the basis of my view from those that claim that the international sphere is not distributive justice apt because there is no unified coercive order, such as Thomas Nagel, 'The Problem of Global Justice', Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 113-47.
3. or views which make the claim on the basis that principles of justice are practice dependent, as in Aaron James, 'Constructing Justice for Existing Practice: Rawls and the Status Quo', Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 4 (2005): 281-316.
4. See, for example, Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (London: Polity, 2002), 59 ff.
5. Simon Caney, 'Global Poverty and Human Rights: The Case for Positive Duties', in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, ed. Thomas Pogge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 276-7.
6. I develop and apply this approach as an interpretation of Rawlsian constructivism and specifically for theories of justice at Meckled-Garcia, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 247 ff. and 252 ff., although the setting out of the full view as an independent moral/political methodology (a theory for the interpretation of moral concepts) is pursued in a number of forthcoming works.
7. 'it's a crime against humanity to convert agricultural productive soil into soil... which will be turned into biofuel... What has to be stopped is... the growing catastrophe of the massacre (by) hunger in the world.' Jean Ziegler, UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food (paper presented at the UN News Conference, UN HQ, New York, October 27, 2007) variously reported, e.g. in Edith Lederer, 'The Production of Biofuels "Is a Crime" ', The Independent, October 27, 2007. Of course, Ziegler may have been using the description metaphorically, but given his position, and the absence of retraction, it appears he meant it.
8. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 64-7.
9. I should add that the problems created by the outcomes view, a form of egalitarian welfareist consequentialism, are not limited to human rights. The view is also ubiquitous in theories of justice, including interpretations of Rawls. See, for example, Liam Murphy, 'Institutions and the Demands of Justice', Philosophy and Public Affairs 27, no. 4 (1998): 251-91, 262 ff.
10. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (Harvard, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 277.
11. James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33 ff.
12. See also, James Nickel, 'How Human Rights Generate Duties to Protect and Provide', Human Rights Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1993): 77-86, 80 ff.
13. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 161.
14. Simon Caney, 'Global Poverty and Human Rights: The Case for Positive Duties', in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, ed. Thomas Pogge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 276-7, the statement at page 277 that 'An adequate account of human rights will include the human right not to suffer from poverty (where this refers to the right to avoid poverty)' wraps this up as an outcomes view given that the author moves, after setting out this rights claim, to try to figure out who is duty bound to fulfill the right in question (277 ff.).
15. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 48 ff. As I have pointed out, Pogge's view is more complicated than standard outcomes views, but only in that he sees human rights obligations as mediated through institutional effects. On his view where an institutional order foreseeably leads to lack of access to certain human goods for persons (i.e. leads to negative outcomes) and where there is an alternative order which would not have that result, then the order is violating the rights of those persons.
16. see Thomas Pogge, The Journal of Ethics 9, nos. 1_2 (2005): 29-53, 43.
17. 'Severe poverty as a human rights violation' in Thomas Pogge, ed., Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, 56. The human rights of persons, on his view, nevertheless impose on everyone a negative duty not to support an institutional order of this negatively impacting kind.
18. see Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 70, 144, 170.
19. Thomas Pogge, 'Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor', Leiden Journal of International Law 18, no. 4 (2005): 717-45, 20.
20. 'Severe poverty as a human rights violation' in Thomas Pogge, Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, 24. Thus we see, the negative duties of persons (infringement of which constitute a contribution to human rights violations) are derived from the idea that there are significant states of affairs (outcomes) that it is valuable to avoid. If he had said the negative duty on persons is not justified by the value of the outcomes but rather by a prior assignment of responsibility based in a regulative value, such as respect, then it would not be an outcomes view. As it stands, however, it is. The mediated part of the view, which assigns responsibility to political institutions for human rights, on the basis of an idea of 'official disrespect' is close to escaping the charge of an outcomes view, see Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 53 ff. However, that part of the view is poorly motivated, and when Pogge moves to claiming persons have a consequent duty (failure in which is correlative to human rights violations), then the attribution of duty on the basis of outcome becomes clear. That duty cannot be derived from the regulative value of official respect, as citizens paying their taxes or cooperating with the law are not acting 'officially,' but must be based in the value of avoiding the negative outcomes only.
21. Meckled-Garcia, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 253 ff.
22. An explicit account of this capacity/cost view is found in Leif Wenar, 'Responsibility and Severe Poverty', in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who owes what to the very poor? ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 255-74.
23. See United Nations Development Programme, Human Development and Human Rights, UNDP Report 2000 (New York: UNDP Reports, 2000), 24 ff.
24. Elizabeth Ashford, 'The Inadequacy of Our Traditional Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights', Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 19, no. 2 (2006): 217-35, 217.
25. 'The Duties Imposed by Human Rights to Basic Necessities', in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 183-218.
26. Note that while relative cost is used by Wenar, Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, 255-74, to identify responsible agents, no limit is placed on absolute cost once that agent is identified.
27. It should be clear here that I am making a distinction between being causally responsible for an effect, in the sense of contributing in some way to that effect coming about, and being morally responsible to the point of being accountable for that effect in some way. I take it that moral accountability is the central form of responsibility for a conception of justice or human rights (that is, for public political moral standards).
28. Thus, on the view I am pursuing, the empirical question as to whether domestic institutions or the global order are more causally to blame for poverty is not a useful question. A myriad of causal factors are involved, in a web of human choices. Singling out a single set of contributions to the causal story, except where other factors are involved such as intention to harm, is neither sound nor useful for the purposes of moral analysis. For this approach see Mathias Risse, 'How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?', Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 4 (2005): 349-76. Risse's work is nevertheless for the argument in this paper in that it alerts us to some of the different causal elements present in global economic effects.
29. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 47.
30. Alan Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 127.
31. In 2002, there were reports that President Robert Mugabe banned Oxfam and Save the Children from distributing food aid in areas of Zimbabwe where opponents of his government had support. Andrew Meldrum, 'Zim Bans Food Aid Charities', Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), October 18, 2002, p. 2.
32. This was the case with Ethiopia which continued exporting agricultural products throughout the time of the famine that gave rise to the 1985 live aid campaign. 22. See Meckled-Garcia, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 269 ff.