Freedom from Poverty As a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor?

by Thomas W. Pogge (Editor)

Collected here in one volume are fifteen cutting-edge essays by leading academics which together clarify and defend the claim that freedom from poverty is a human right with corresponding binding obligations on the more affluent to practice effective poverty avoidance. The nature of human rights and their corresponding duties is examined, as is the theoretical standing of the social, economic and cultural rights. The authors largely agree in concluding that there is a human right to be free from poverty and that this right is massively violated by the present world economy which creates huge unfair imbalances in income and wealth among and within countries. This searing indictment of the status quo is all the more powerful as the authors endorsing it exemplify diverse philosophical methods and moral traditions and also highlight different aspects of poverty and global institutional arrangements.

This volume will be of great interest and value to academics working in the fields of philosophy, political science and international relations, as well as to undergraduate and graduate students in these disciplines. It will also be a crucial aid and challenge to practitioners in international governmental organizations (such as the UN and its agencies) and NGOs who think of their work in human-rights terms. Indeed, in view of the magnitude of the human rights deficit at issue, any moral citizen has reason to engage with the arguments of this book. And the book makes this possible for most in that, throughout, even the most complex aspects of rights theory is discussed in clear, direct language, making the text accessible to specialists and lay readers alike.

This volume is co-published with UNESCO publishing.

Genres: Philosophy, Economics, Poverty, Politics

408 pages, Paperback

First published June 29, 2007

About the author

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and currently Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University and Research Director at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation supervised by John Rawls. Pogge serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs journal, Ethics & International Affairs, and is an Ethics and Debt Project participant.

Pogge has written extensively on political philosophy, especially on Rawls, Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitanism, and, more recently, extreme poverty. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is widely regarded as one of the most important works on global justice. Pogge's work has been, along with that of Charles Beitz, one of the most important in the "first wave" of work on global justice. Yet what makes Pogge's contribution to the debate on global justice and the eradication of world poverty original is his emphasis on negative duties rather than on the positive duties stressed by Beitz. According to Pogge, the global rich have a stringent duty of justice to take decisive steps toward the eradication of global poverty primarily because they have violated the negative duty not to contribute to the imposition of a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably renders the basic socioeconomic rights of other human beings unfulfilled, and not because they must honor a positive duty to help others in need when they can at little cost to themselves. Recently, Pogge's argument has been aggressively critiqued by Joshua Cohen